In time for the fall semester, the ribbon has been cut, and students will soon move into Georgia Tech’s newest traditional residence hall — the Bud and Val Peterson Residence Hall.
Located along Northside Drive between Eighth and Ninth streets, the 191,000-square-foot facility offers approximately 862 beds in double-occupancy rooms. The first traditional residence hall constructed on campus since 1969, Bud and Val Peterson Residence Hall features collaborative learning areas, an esports lounge, a fitness room, community lounges, a kitchen on the first floor of each wing, and a 24/7 cashierless market.
The opening of the new residence hall allows Tech to keep pace with enrollment as the Institute continues to grow. This fall, over 4,100 first-year students will enroll at the Institute, along with 1,400 transfer students in the fall and spring. With growth comes the need for new infrastructure, as Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera said during Thursday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“It turns out that more unbelievable students from every county in Georgia, from every corner of our country and countries around the world, want to have the learning experience here. It’s our duty to figure out creative solutions, not just to house them, but to provide them with a transformative experience,” he said. “The transformation of our students happens right here. It happens in the residence halls. It happens in the friendships that you make, the study groups, the activities, and when you’re learning to be independent and to grow up. This is not just a dorm where you come to sleep.”
The residence hall is named in honor of Georgia Tech’s 11th president and first lady. During Peterson’s tenure from 2009 to 2019, Tech enhanced student programs and grew enrollment; increased collaboration and built strategic partnerships in Atlanta and Georgia; expanded its global reach, with a focus on innovation; executed Campaign Georgia Tech, which raised $1.8 billion for the Institute; and more than doubled new research awards, exceeding $1 billion for the first time in 2019. As president, Peterson launched the Online Master of Science in Computer Science program, which has since become a global model for accessible education.
He has remained involved with the Institute as president emeritus, a Regents’ Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and a member of the steering committee for Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech.
In his remarks, Peterson recounted his first time visiting Tech, the feeling he got when he was on campus, and his path to eventually becoming Tech’s next president, succeeding President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough, who was in attendance at the ceremony.
Becoming a candidate for the job of president was “one of the most important decisions I’ve made in my professional career,” Peterson said. “This is a remarkable place with remarkable people doing remarkable things. Val and I are enormously honored to be recognized in this fashion.”
As first lady, Val Peterson was a dedicated presence on campus and an ardent supporter of students and faculty. She served as the chief spokesperson for the Tech Ends Suicide Together initiative when it launched in 2016 and mentored students and campus organizations. Val Peterson holds two bachelor’s degrees and a teaching certificate from Kansas State University and a master’s degree from Texas A&M. She has been recognized as an honorary alumna by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association for her devotion to the greater good of the Institute. Nicknamed the “Queen Bee” of Georgia Tech, she found it “quite fitting” that the new hall bears the couple’s names, because they lived together in a dorm room at KSU when they were first married.
“That’s where it all began. Those two towers, like us, together forever,” she said. “My hope for the students who live in Peterson Hall is that their experience parallels our paths, not only in school but in life.”
Each space in the new residence hall is designed to encourage students to interact and develop shared experiences, a mindset that Kasey Helton, associate vice president of Campus Services, says was fostered during Peterson’s tenure.
“We weren't trying to create 860 places to sleep. We were trying to create 860 opportunities to belong. That sense of belonging is exactly what Bud and Val spent a decade here building. They championed living-learning communities, expanded opportunities for students to develop global perspectives, strengthened support for student well-being, and helped make a Georgia Tech education accessible to all students. That same spirit is built into this hall,” Helton said.
The opening of the Bud and Val Peterson Residence Hall brings the Institute’s capacity to more than 9,600 bed spaces across nearly 50 residence halls. Move-in for the fall semester begins Aug. 15, including the first group of students who will call Bud and Val Peterson Residence Hall home.
As part of the existing Georgia Traffic Management Center (TMC), those systems notify drivers of changing highway conditions, operate traffic management devices, and help the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) identify and respond to traffic issues requiring immediate attention.
In December 2025, Georgia Tech cybersecurity researchers began working with GDOT to ensure the security of those networked systems and devices. As part of this advanced cybersecurity project, they are applying machine learning (ML), a type of artificial intelligence (AI), to safeguard existing systems and set the stage for future automation.
Read the full article on the Georgia Tech Research Institute news page
Housing and transportation are top priorities for many city mayors, policymakers and public policy researchers—including Brian An, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. But in February 2021, soon after Winter Storm Uri wreaked havoc in Texas, an eight-hour power outage at his Atlanta home became an epiphany.
“While housing stability had long been on my mind, losing power drove home the importance of another piece of urban infrastructure: reliable access to electricity,” says An, an EPIcenter faculty affiliate and co-director of the Center for Urban Research. “It sparked my interest in studying the intersection of energy and urban policy to help make cities and communities not only socially equitable but also resilient to extreme weather.”
Read Full Story on the EPIcenter News Page
]]>Housing and transportation are top priorities for many city mayors, policymakers and public policy researchers—including Brian An, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. But in February 2021, soon after Winter Storm Uri wreaked havoc in Texas, an eight-hour power outage at his Atlanta home became an epiphany.
“While housing stability had long been on my mind, losing power drove home the importance of another piece of urban infrastructure: reliable access to electricity,” says An, an EPIcenter faculty affiliate and co-director of the Center for Urban Research. “It sparked my interest in studying the intersection of energy and urban policy to help make cities and communities not only socially equitable but also resilient to extreme weather.”
]]>News Contact: Priya Devarajan, Research Communications Program Manager
]]>See a curated list of Georgia Tech experts available to comment on the World Cup here.
As Atlanta welcomes the world for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the promises are familiar: millions of visitors, global attention, economic growth, and a chance to showcase the city on one of the biggest stages in sports.
But Georgia Tech experts say the real question is not whether the tournament will generate activity — it is who benefits from it and what remains after the final match is played.
Mega-events have long been sold as catalysts for transformation. The 1996 Olympics reshaped Atlanta’s physical landscape and helped position the city as a global destination. Thirty years later, the World Cup arrives at a very different moment.
“There are similarities,” said Emily Barrett, assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning. “Like the Olympics, the World Cup is an accelerator for infrastructure upgrades and public and private investment alike.”
Atlanta is seeing significant public investment in transportation improvements and billions of dollars in private development downtown. But today’s Atlanta is very different from Atlanta in the 1990s.
“Atlanta is no longer a city seeking recognition on the world stage,” Barrett said. “We are a thriving and growing city.”
That shifts the conversation from visibility to value.
“The open question is whether hosting mega-events makes the city work better for the people who live here,” Barrett added.
Assessing that value becomes more complicated when economic forecasts enter the conversation.
Large projections often dominate headlines, but Declan Abernethy, lecturer in the School of History and Sociology, cautions that economic impact estimates rarely tell the whole story.
“It is far easier to put out an economic impact projection compared to the difficulty of measuring impact,” Abernethy said.
While visitors will spend money on hotels, restaurants, transportation, and entertainment, he notes that much of that spending may not reach the community.
“When we look closely at that spending, we can see that much of the profit will be taken in by large corporations or FIFA in the immediate vicinity of Mercedes-Benz Stadium and not as much by Atlanta residents or small businesses,” he said.
According to Barrett, economic studies often overlook a critical question: What could alternative investments have accomplished?
“Economic studies rarely account for displacement costs, or whether the same public dollars could have generated similar or better outcomes if invested elsewhere,” she said.
The World Cup’s impact extends beyond economics; it will also test Atlanta’s infrastructure at a scale few events can match.
Michael Hunter, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says the biggest challenge may be the volume of people moving through the city.
“There will be a number of pressure points. However, one of the most significant will be just the number of people,” Hunter said. “This event will attract significant crowds.”
Atlanta’s transportation agencies have spent years preparing, drawing on lessons learned from events including the Super Bowl, World Series, and major concerts. Still, capacity limits are unavoidable.
“There is only so much traffic that MARTA or any transit agency can handle,” Hunter said. “People need to understand that there will be congestion and longer wait times. The key is to be patient.”
The concern is whether those investments result in lasting improvements or merely support a few weeks of activity.
Abernethy argues that the World Cup should be viewed as part of a broader vision for Atlanta rather than a standalone catalyst.
“We are seeing the World Cup as a part of a longer-running and more cohesive vision for sport and economic development downtown,” he said. “Atlanta may not be repeating the same cycle nor cracking downtown’s development problem with the World Cup itself.”
Infrastructure challenges extend beyond transportation. Feeding hundreds of thousands of visitors while minimizing waste requires its own network of logistics, coordination, and planning.
Nicole Kennard, a research scientist at Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, views the tournament as an opportunity to strengthen how food moves throughout the city.
“These large events are a really big opportunity for us to coordinate and test our infrastructure,” Kennard said. “We have to think critically about how to improve the infrastructure and ensure its resilience and efficiency.”
Working with organizations such as Second Helpings Atlanta, the official food rescue partner for the World Cup, Georgia Tech researchers are building technologies and tools to improve coordination among food rescue groups. The effort aims to keep surplus food out of landfills by quickly moving it from stadiums and vendors to local food organizations.
“It’s really a logistics problem, a data problem, and a coordination problem,” Kennard said. “The faster you can move food from the point of surplus directly to a pantry, the more likely it is to reach people who need it.”
Ultimately, Atlanta’s World Cup legacy may not be measured by attendance figures or visitor spending alone.
“How we evaluate success depends on what we choose to measure, and too often we focus on headline numbers instead of who actually benefits,” said Abernethy.
Kennard sees the tournament as a chance to build systems that outlast the event itself. “What we build for the World Cup could become critical infrastructure for future emergencies and disasters,” she said.
Atlanta already knows how to host a global event. Whether the investments, partnerships, and infrastructure created for the World Cup leave the city stronger after the crowds leave remains to be seen.
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