Zhang joins a select group of past recipients whose work has shaped modern understanding of energy systems and thermal sciences. The medal is considered one of the most prestigious awards presented by ASME.

“I feel deeply honored to be listed alongside distinguished scholars in the field of thermodynamics research and education, including some of my own teachers and mentors,” Zhang said.

ASME recognized Zhang for his “pioneering study of radiative thermal power generation and electroluminescent refrigeration, especially on the application of second-law analysis to these systems while accounting for photon entropy and chemical potential.”

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The Summer Carbon Management Fellows Program launched with an in-person kickoff at Georgia Tech, giving students an opportunity to connect with one another, learn more about the program, and begin exploring the role of carbon management in energy, sustainability, and industry innovation. The student group included Georgia Tech Graduate Assistants and students from Kentucky State University, Tennessee State University, Florida A&M University, North Carolina A&T State University, Tuskegee University, Southern University Law Center, and Southern University and A&M College.

Read Full Story on the Ben T. Zinn Lab News page

For most, that heart-pounding uncertainty ends the moment the foot finds solid ground. But for many individuals living with conditions like stroke or spinal cord injury (SCI), that sense of disconnect is a permanent reality.

“These conditions of course have a huge effect on our ability to move around and be independent — but the other side of it is the sensory feedback that we lose,” says Matthew Flavin, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Most rehabilitation treatments primarily focus on restoring movement, but “even if you have motor control, if you can’t feel when your foot's touching the ground it can be really hard for you to move around safely.” 

In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Flavin and an interdisciplinary team of researchers introduce a way to bridge this gap: a wearable “sensory substitution” system that translates foot pressure into high-tech patterns of heat and vibration they can feel elsewhere. 

The system uses high-resolution pressure-sensing insoles designed by the team, which are placed inside a user's shoes to record how their weight shifts in real-time. This data is streamed via Bluetooth to a flexible, skin-conformable array of haptic receivers worn on the forearms, a part of the body that often retains sensation in SCI. The receivers give quick pressure feedback through vibration, while also alerting the user to longer-term pressure “hotspots” through heat. 

“One of the limitations of a lot of approaches in haptics is that you're having to map a missing sense onto a completely different sense,” says Flavin. “We’re keeping the type of information that we're missing, which is the distribution of pressure, and we're just basically putting it on a different part of their body.”

Rerouting the lost sensation was key to making the device intuitive to learn. Participants were able to correctly identify the “feel” of the ground through their arms with high accuracy within a mere two-hour session. When tested with a small group of participants with stroke or SCI, the wearable significantly improved standing balance and led to steadier walking.

“What’s encouraging about these early results is that participants appeared to use the feedback in ways that supported balance and walking,” says John Rogers, a materials science and engineering professor at Northwestern University who collaborated on this study. “Our study suggests that providing pressure information through another part of the body could be a practical path for helping people compensate for lost sensation.” 

While vibration provides immediate feedback for walking and balance, the team views the thermal feedback as a tool for long-term health. Heat is a slower, low-frequency signal that could alert patients to pressure hotspots, potentially preventing diabetic foot ulcers or pressure injuries for those who are bedridden or use wheelchairs.

The small, lightweight system is completely untethered, making it suitable for use during daily activities in and outside the clinic. It’s also highly adaptable to different injury types, which is ideal for conditions as variable as stroke, SCI, and diabetic neuropathy. Placement of the haptic receivers can be adjusted based on where a patient has the most sensation, and the sensitivity of the insoles can be tailored to each patient. 

As a member of several of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Institutes — the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society, the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences — Flavin credits the project’s success to an interdisciplinary effort and deep engagement with clinicians and patients.

“This reinforces the importance of really engaging with your stakeholders very early on,” says Flavin. “If you're not continually refining that concept with those stakeholders, you quickly find that they might be looking for something that your device isn't delivering.”

With new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the team is now working to make the technology even smaller and more reconfigurable, moving closer to a standard wearable for daily clinical use.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2536577123

As metro Atlanta becomes a magnet for hyperscale data centers, the region faces a twin challenge: securing enough water to cool these facilities while ensuring that wastewater reuse doesn't introduce new public health risks. At Georgia Tech, Katherine Graham, assistant professor of environmental engineering and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Faculty Fellow, is working at exactly that nexus, using viruses, bacteria, and advanced analytics to understand how water reuse and cooling systems can support data center growth without compromising community health.

"Data centers are important, and so are their cooling needs. I don't think they're going away," she said. "But there needs to be a lot of investigation to develop guidelines for operating these facilities based on how microbes behave so that we can get the economic benefit and protect the communities where they operate."

Tracing Viruses Across Georgia's Water Systems

Through a Sustainability Next Seed Grant project administered by the BBISS, Graham's lab focuses on water reuse safety, particularly in Georgia communities facing water stress. Her team works with municipal reuse facilities, where, she said, “We look at what comes out of wastewater treatment plants, what exists in the natural waters they discharge treated water into, and what comes into downstream drinking water plants at their intake." Her team is especially interested in pathogens such as viruses and phages.

Phages — viruses that infect bacteria rather than humans — pose no direct human hazard. Still, because they travel through water systems similarly to viruses that can harm people, they serve as powerful ecological markers. "They can be good surrogates for human viruses," she said.

This work builds on Graham's wastewater surveillance experience dating to 2018, which became central during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her lab helped develop actionable public health guidelines to show how wastewater can be used to monitor for mpox outbreaks.

From Cooling Towers to Data Centers: A Proactive Public Health Lens

While Graham's Sustainability Next Seed Grant project isn't exclusively about data centers, the connection to their cooling systems is direct. Data centers need to dissipate massive quantities of heat — typically with water-hungry cooling towers — and are increasingly turning to treated wastewater as a supply.

"Reuse can supply more water of sufficient quality for these cooling systems," Graham said. But beyond the quantity issue lies an underexplored dimension: microbial risk.

Cooling towers have long been linked to Legionnaires' disease, with documented outbreaks occurring miles downwind of a source. "For most healthy people, it may not be a problem," Graham noted, "but for the immunocompromised and elderly, it can be a really big problem." What makes this especially concerning is how little is known. "It's not well quantified. It's not well characterized," she said. "There's been no national study collecting cooling-tower waters and looking at the prevalence of these bacteria."

There is currently no systematic, national effort to characterize the prevalence of Legionella and other opportunistic pathogens in any cooling towers — let alone the potential additional risk of building more cooling systems to accommodate the needs of hyperscale data centers.

BBISS has been central to sharpening her focus here. Exposing Graham to colleagues working on energy and water quantity challenges helped her connect the microbiology dots. "A lot of the data center ideas I've started to think about have been generated by BBISS faculty presenting their own work," she said. "Given that cooling towers are already a problem in pre-AI settings, it seems like a good proactive idea to be aware of the problem going into the age of AI."

Graham is now writing proposals to study microbial communities in cooling towers, analyzing water, air, and biofilms under different operating conditions. Her call to industry is direct: Partner early. "I would be extremely happy to collaborate with anyone interested in this problem. Industry buy-in would be critical — and so helpful — to get it done."

Heat Waves, Infrastructure, and Legionella

Graham's lab also examines how climate-driven extreme heat affects drinking water systems. Working with utilities in the Southwest, her team studies how prolonged heat waves warm distribution-system water, accelerate disinfectant loss, and shape the persistence of microorganisms in drinking water distribution systems.

"We were able to see temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit) — with a maximum of 52 (126 degrees Fahrenheit) — which is very warm," she said. "Most of the literature refers to testing conducted at much lower temperatures, like room temperature." Such elevated temperatures, combined with nutrients and stagnation, can allow opportunistic pathogens to thrive.

Teaching and Outreach

Graham teaches undergraduate environmental engineering and graduate courses in quantitative microbial risk assessment and public health microbiology. She serves as associate editor for Water Research and has hosted a microbiology outreach workshop for K-12 students through Georgia Tech’s  Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC).

The through line across her work is consistent: science that anticipates risk and informs action. "As we expand this data center infrastructure, a proactive approach should be taken to understanding concerns that, maybe, haven't been fully addressed yet."

In a region and a world betting big on AI, her research offers a timely reminder: Progress depends not just on computing power, but on ensuring that the water that keeps these systems from melting down remains safe for the communities living alongside them.

The continued recognition highlights Georgia Tech’s research leadership in advancing energy solutions across technology, science, policy, and economics and in delivering technically advanced solutions that is scalable, secure, and sustainable for the future.

“The scale and integration of our energy ecosystem is among Georgia Tech’s great strengths,” said Executive Vice President for Research Tim Lieuwen. “A defining part of that ecosystem is the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), our interdisciplinary research institute that brings together the talents of researchers from across disciplines to accelerate energy innovation and deliver real-world solutions.”

SEI integrates energy activities at Georgia Tech by connecting more than 1,000 researchers across the entire energy value chain and enabling collaboration with industry, government, communities, and nonprofits. SEI is deeply engaged in building community, developing resources, promoting thought leadership, and marshaling the full resources of Georgia Tech around tackling the tough energy and environmental problems and opportunities society faces.

“Georgia Tech’s energy leadership is built on the depth of our research and the breadth of our collaborations,” said Yuanzhi Tang, SEI’s executive director. “By connecting expertise across the full energy value chain, we are advancing solutions that enhance affordability, reliability, security, and sustainability.” 

U.S. News & World Report evaluates the academic research performance of universities in 51 subject areas using indicators such as publications, citations, and global and regional research reputation. Georgia Tech was assessed among 292 institutions in the U.S. and continues its strong standing in the rankings, claiming the No. 32 spot overall in the nation and No. 9 among public universities.

It affects up to one-third of the human population and can create symptoms severe enough to lead to hospitalization, yet much about what causes it remains a mystery. It’s rarely discussed in public, often goes undiagnosed, and remains a consistently underfunded and understudied area of science.  

Jenny McGuire, an associate professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, is building a regional blueprint for safeguarding biodiversity in the southeastern United States while drawing insights from half a world away in Denmark. She is the Harry and Anna Teasley Professor in Ecology and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) faculty fellow. She is currently on faculty development leave in Copenhagen where she is sharpening her work with fresh perspectives from European conservation practice.

McGuire, winner of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award, describes herself as a spatial or landscape ecologist, rather than a traditional wildlife biologist. She currently leads Georgia Tech’s Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab, whose motto is “learning from the past how to conserve the future.” She uses modern, historical, and paleontological specimens to identify how communities of plants and animals move across landscapes over long time scales in response to past climate shifts. Her goal is to identify strategies to conserve as much biodiversity as possible in the face of an increasingly volatile climate.

Twice awarded with Sustainability Next Seed Grants by BBISS, most recently in 2025, McGuire is using that support to knit together scientists, conservation groups, agencies, and students to understand how plants and animals are moving in response to both climate and land-use change.

“I’ve been wanting to pivot to a more regional approach toward this work,” McGuire said. “The Southeast, and especially the Atlanta region, is really critical because we sit at this important geographic point where southern Appalachia and the Piedmont come together.”

As species track cooler temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, many are expected to move upslope into the southern Appalachians, even as Atlanta’s urban and suburban footprint continues to expand northward. “There’s a lot of competing stressors on the regional environment,” she said. 

Building a Regional Conservation Community

One of McGuire’s Sustainability Next Seed Grants, in collaboration with Nicole Kennard, BBISS Assistant Director for Community Engaged Research, supports a partnership with Roots Down, an innovative urban land-use nonprofit working with the cities of Avondale Estates and Atlanta to understand how native plant restoration affects ecosystem health. Georgia Tech students established protocols to survey sites before and after restoration to track changes.

The other seed grant McGuire received enabled her to convene a conference that brought together nonprofit conservation organizations, government agencies such as Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources, and academics from across the Southeast. The group formalized their collaboration as the Wildlife Ecology in the Piedmont and Appalachia (WEPA) coalition. They agreed to survey the resources, such as data,  projects, and people, that would support a regional wildlife conservation effort. Over the past semester, her team compiled those resources and shared results back with partners in a second virtual conference.

Early indications from this survey show a strong focus on mammals in urban Atlanta, including 11 camera-trap projects. Two of these projects follow transects from urban cores to suburbs to see how animals move across the city. This group has conducted extensive studies on how wildlife use roadside drainage structures, such as culverts, to move beneath roadways, and how animals are shifting to more nocturnal activity to avoid traffic.

Making connections among current and ongoing studies reveals knowledge gaps where both contemporary and historical data are sparse. Although historical records are held by regional museums, including the Georgia Museum of Natural History, many collections across the broader region remain undigitized. “Those historic distributions exist somewhere, but they’re really difficult to access,” McGuire said. Identifying these data sets is “critical to establish a baseline of where things lived in the past so we can understand how human landscapes and climate change are affecting things today and into the future.”

She’s also working with Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow (GT²), a new College of Sciences initiative focused on regional impact. The program is hiring a postdoctoral fellow whom McGuire will supervise to jumpstart a collaborative research agenda around biodiversity dynamics.

McGuire’s work is increasingly collaborative, drawing on expertise across Georgia Tech and partner institutions like Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum.

Benjamin Freeman, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, focuses on bird ecology to detect shifts in diversity and species ranges. In a new North Georgia Bird Project, with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, he is resurveying bird communities across 13 mountain ridges, concentrating on about 40 forest bird species. His research tests projections that a rapidly warming climate could leave Georgia with very different plant and animal communities within a few human generations. “There’s no substitute for going out there and seeing what is actually changing,” says Freeman.

In a May 2026 Nature Reviews Biodiversity paper co-authored with McGuire, he combines his field-based bird surveys with her paleo-ecological analysis of fossil and pollen records.  

“We make models that predict how species and biological communities will respond to warming, then we go into nature to test those predictions, and finally refine our models when reality doesn’t match what we expected,” he says.

Another Georgia Tech faculty member, Steve Mussman, assistant professor in the College of Computing, brings a different skill set to the project. “I’m a computer and data scientist. I can help with the technical modeling aspects to make the analyses valid and useful,” he says. 

One of the ways he does this is to identify “sampling bias” in camera-trap and citizen science data, which may not be uniformly sampled from the animal population. “I’m really excited to bring machine learning and statistics to a very practical problem,” he adds.

Together, these collaborations support WEPA’s overarching goal: to integrate past and present data into tools that help decision-makers prioritize conservation actions under climate uncertainty.

Lessons From Denmark

For the past nine months, McGuire has been on faculty development leave in Copenhagen, using the time to think deeply about habitat connectivity and how species move across altered landscapes. There, she found a natural comparison point.

“The entire country of Denmark is about the same geographic size as the region we’re interested in,” she noted. “And population-wise, it’s smaller than the Atlanta metro area.”

What struck her most was how thoroughly human activity has reshaped Denmark. “There’s no part of the entire country that hasn’t been very heavily modified by humans,” she said. “At this point, all conservation is gardening.”

By contrast, she sees the Southeast as having retained a foundation of the historical ecology. Forests in the Appalachians have been heavily affected, “but not nearly for as long, or to the same extent, as in Europe,” she said. “It’s kind of nice to think about how we still have a slightly more natural landscape to start with that we can then maintain moving forward.”

In Denmark, McGuire has been learning from conservation biologists who are developing tiered metrics to assess restoration success, from basic, low-cost measures such as tree diameter and understory volume to more advanced tools like genomic analyses. She hopes to adapt similar frameworks to help southeastern land managers and communities assess ecosystem health under tight budgets.

From Appalachia to Berkeley to Georgia Tech

McGuire grew up in southern Virginia, where her love for biodiversity and the southern Appalachians first took root. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she deepened her focus on how species and ecosystems respond to environmental change over long time scales.

She then completed postdoctoral research at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and at the University of Washington, where she expanded her quantitative and interdisciplinary toolkit — experience that now underpins her work at Georgia Tech, bridging ecology, paleontology, data science, and conservation planning.

“From my perspective, there’s an ethical imperative to maintain the world around us,” she said. “Being in nature and recognizing that we’re being good neighbors and good partners to the other species on the planet is just incredibly rewarding. We must leave the next generation a planet that is at least as healthy as the one we inherited."

Life Beyond the Lab

Beyond research and mentoring, McGuire enjoys hiking and biking. Much of her free time during her Copenhagen sabbatical has revolved around her young daughter, who turns 4 this summer.

McGuire looks forward to the occasion, which follows a cherished Danish school tradition: The child circles a picture of the sun once for each year of their life, holding a small Earth, while a parent holds up photos and tells a story from each year. 

Returning Home

As she prepares to return to Georgia Tech in August after a year away, McGuire will resume her fieldwork and continue her conservation initiatives throughout the Southeast. She hopes to draw in collaborators from all across Georgia Tech to help build a truly regional, interdisciplinary effort around biodiversity and climate resilience.

“Within WEPA, we’re really excited to bring more people into this work. For anyone interested in conservation modeling, sensors and AI, policy, or how nature supports communities,” she said, “there’s a place in this regional effort to understand and protect biodiversity.”

The seed grant program, administered by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), reaches faculty members from a diverse array of disciplines due to the generous support provided by broad-based partnerships in addition to the funds provided by the Sustainability Next committee. This year’s partners are the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the College of Design, BBISS, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, and the Institute for Data Engineering and Science.

The goal of the program is to nurture promising research areas for future large-scale collaborative sustainability research, research translation, and/or high-impact outreach; to provide mid-career faculty with leadership and community-building opportunities; and to broaden and strengthen the Georgia Tech sustainability community as a whole. The call for proposals was modeled after the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research’s Moving Teams Forward and Forming Teams programs.

This year’s seed grant awards align with the four main thematic areas in which BBISS aims to enhance Georgia Tech’s research to address some of our most pressing sustainability challenges:

• AI and Sustainability, and the Sustainability of AI Infrastructure.
• Climate Science, Technology, and Solutions.
• Healthy Environments and Sustainable Resource Use.
• Resilience and Regeneration.

The 2026 Sustainability Next Seed Grant awards are:

Forming Teams:

• Actualize Shallow Geothermal Systems for Decentralized Heating. Principal Investigator (PI): Sheng Dai.
• Building Community University Research Capacity for PFAS Testing and Treatment. PI: Ruth C. Yow. Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs): Joe Bozeman, Yongsheng Chen, and Ahmed Ibrahim Yunus.
• A Global Sustainability Analysis of Places “Urbanizing from Within.” PI: Gregory Randolph. Co‑PIs: Sabina Dewan, Yiyi He, John Taylor, and Celine Vacchiani‑Marcuzzo.
• Creating a Refusal Taxonomy to Explore Alternate Computing Practices. PI: Richmond Wong. Co‑PIs: Heidi Biggs and Carl DiSalvo.
• Demystifying Data Centers: Examining Georgia Tech’s Coda HPCC in the Context of Sustainability and Resilience. PI: Scott Duncan. Co-PIs: Jung-Ho Lewe and David Solano Sarmiento.
• Physical Transport of Sunlight‑Exposed Dissolved Organic Carbon in the New Arctic. PI: Lilian Dove. Co‑PI: Jennifer Bowen.

Moving Teams Forward:

• Agentic AI Digital Twins for Hurricane Resilience in Coastal Georgia. PI: Ali Sarhadi.
• CLEAR‑SE: Co‑Creating a Center‑Scale Network for Advancing Collaborative, Long‑Term Action Research on Community‑Led Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction in the Southeast. PI: Sofía Pérez‑Guzmán. Co‑PI: Jennifer Hirsch.
• Data Center Effects on Communities in Georgia’s Black Belt. PI: Cindy Kaiying Lin. Co‑PIs: Joe Bozeman, Anthony Harding, Allen Hyde, Nicole Kennard, Jung-Ho Lewe, and Ahmed Saeed.
• Reimagining Southern Forests: Enabling Cost‑Effective Sustainable Production of High‑Value Climate‑Ready Southern Pines. PI: Caitlin Petro. Co‑PIs: Lucas Clay, Ulrika Egertsdotter, and Joel Kostka.
• Human‑Technology Collaborations: Towards Sustainable and Inclusive Food Systems. PI: Rosemarie Santa Gonzalez. Co‑PIs: Ashutosh Dhekne, Sylivia Janicki, Nicole Kennard, Yaman Sangar, and Abigale Stangl.
• Guiding Transportation with Community Action through Research, Education, and Service (GT‑CARES). PI: Rounaq Basu. Co-PIs: Sofía Pérez‑Guzmán, Jennifer Hirsch, and Scott Moffat.
• Instability‑Resolved Ocean Mixing for Climate Prediction and Climate Solutions. PI: Suhas S. Jain. Co‑PIs: Mohammad Mohaghar, and Donald Webster.
• Buildings Next: Forming a Transdisciplinary Consortium for Sustainable Building Innovation. PI: Paula Gomez. Co‑PI: Allison Bridges.
• Paper and Natural Dye Living Exhibition. PI: Anna Doll. Co‑PI: Virginia Howell.

It was Ferguson’s own first manufacturing industry job at Glidden Paint in high school that tipped a row of dominoes, clearing his way out of poverty. Following next in the Hall County native’s favor was his receiving the Pell Grant and HOPE Grant, which led to his associate’s degree and first job in education.

Since then, Ferguson has spent the better part of three decades advancing workforce preparation and education access in Georgia, first as chief information officer for the Technical College System of Georgia, and now through his current roles at Tech.

“Access to higher education changed the trajectory of my life. The question now is how we build systems that create those same opportunities for others — whether someone starts their career right out of high school, earns credentials while working, or returns later to pursue advanced technical education or engineering. We need to create flexible pathways that develop talent at every stage of life.”

Steven Ferguson

Forged in Manufacturing

Ferguson was born into a family of “makers,” who got by on odd jobs and money from their small bait and tackle shop on Lake Lanier and later peddling a variety of goods. At a young age, Ferguson learned salesmanship and picked up the tinkering spirit.

“My dad was always entrepreneurial, and I think you might even consider us manufacturers, always making fishing equipment or other things,” said Ferguson. “From a very young age, I was out making jig heads, tying flies, and bagging hooks or sinkers. It was definitely in my blood.”

When he was in 10th grade, a teacher nominated Ferguson for a new youth apprenticeship program. That opportunity ultimately led to his role as an information technology apprentice at Glidden Paint, which became Ferguson’s first job in the manufacturing industry. The job was a perfect fit for Ferguson, who enjoyed learning more about the manufacturing process and the practical outlet for his computing knowledge.

He continued working there until he began studying computer science at North Georgia College and State University. Later, he transferred to Gainesville College (GC) to participate in a joint enrollment program designed to lead to eventual enrollment for a bachelor’s degree at Tech.

However, before Ferguson completed his time at GC, he had an associate’s degree and, more importantly, a job offer. GC wanted him to train others for careers in information technology.

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As data center development accelerates across Georgia and beyond, understanding the relationship between AI infrastructure and water systems is becoming increasingly urgent. The BBISS Demystifying Data Centers Insights Series on March 27 focused on this issue, bringing together perspectives from engineering, utilities, and infrastructure planning. Moderated by Ameet Pinto, BBISS faculty director for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration, the discussion highlighted the water impacts of data centers and the need for systems thinking and collaboration across disciplines.

Why Systems Thinking Matters

A recurring theme was the mismatch between AI infrastructure and water systems. AI services are ubiquitous and scalable, while water resources are local, physically constrained, and managed by regionally fragmented utility systems. Data centers can be deployed rapidly, but water infrastructure evolves slowly. These differences complicate how impacts are measured and managed.

Water usage is more complex than it appears. While discussions often focus on water used directly for cooling, this represents only part of the total footprint. Significant water is used indirectly through electricity generation and the manufacturing of the computing hardware and cooling systems installed in data centers. As noted by Akanksha Menon,  assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, distinguishing between direct, indirect, and embodied water use shows that impacts extend far beyond individual facilities.

These complexities make isolated solutions insufficient. Reducing water use in one location doesn’t necessarily reduce overall demand. For example, Douglas County’s collaboration with Google, as presented by Brian Keel, deputy director of Engineering for Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority, has invested in alternative water sources, such as treating wastewater from the Sweetwater Creek facility for non-potable cooling.

Yet the growing energy and water demands driven by accelerating AI use remain a major challenge. In particular, managing water as a finite resource becomes increasingly important because energy can be generated through different methods, but water cannot simply be created. Such complexity highlights the need for a systems approach to navigate overlapping and conflicting issues.

Why Collaboration Is Essential

The session also underscored that no single discipline or entity can fully address these challenges. Douglas County’s partnership with Google highlights not only collaboration between local agencies and industry, but also the need for coordination beyond individual jurisdictions, as water used for power generation or sourced outside the immediate region can create indirect pressures elsewhere.

John Ikeda, chief mission officer for the Water Environment Federation, discussed governance challenges associated with data center water use. Ikeda underlined the challenges in measurement and governance, noting that water impacts can be counterintuitive. While efforts that appear water-saving, such as avoiding on-site water use, can increase indirect water demand through additional electricity use, water-based cooling may reduce total systemwide demand. These complexities reveal the limits of single metrics and the need for frameworks that account for direct, indirect, and life-cycle impacts. Governance challenges can arise from complex practical issues, including rural communities’ limited experience working with industrial partners and broader social resistance to AI and AI infrastructure, which once again calls for large-scale collaboration.

The broader takeaway is that the challenges linking AI and water are deeply tied to structural mismatches between digital AI infrastructure and physical water systems: ubiquitous AI services versus physically constrained water resources; rapid data center growth versus the slower development of water infrastructure; and global digital demand versus regionally concentrated environmental impacts.

As these gaps complicate measurement, planning, and governance, the discussion highlighted the need for broader, systems-level perspectives and collaboration across disciplines and sectors, including engineering, computing, utilities, policy, and community stakeholders. Sustainable data center development depends on perspectives that consider water, energy, infrastructure, and community resilience together.
 

The Earth and Atmospheric Sciences 2026 Clough Lecture, co-sponsored by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, featured Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and author. Marvel opened a space for conversation about how we understand, feel, and communicate climate change and sustainability.

The evening opened with remarks from Georgia Tech College of Sciences Dean Susan Lozier, who recognized President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough for his support in making the lecture series possible. Alexander Robel, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, then introduced Marvel, describing her work as being at the intersection of climate science and public communication. Robel highlighted Marvel’s “warmth and fearless honesty” in her insistence “that science and feeling are not opposites.”

Based on her recent book Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, Marvel’s lecture questioned a long-standing assumption in science: that objectivity requires emotional distance. She argued instead that climate science is not only about data and models, but also about human experience. Scientific inquiry, she suggested, does not exclude emotion; rather, it can be informed and motivated by it.

Marvel began by reflecting on Earth’s uniqueness as a habitable planet, shaped by a delicate balance of atmosphere, temperature, and position in the solar system. The sense of awe inspired by the planet’s unique position, she noted, is often the starting point for scientific curiosity as well as a sense of commitment to a sustainable Earth. From there, she moved to consider the more difficult emotions, including anger and guilt, that may arise as the stability of that system becomes increasingly uncertain.

To illustrate how understanding of climate evolves, Marvel walked through a range of potential explanations for changes in the Earth’s climate — from orbital shifts and solar variation to volcanic activity and deforestation. What stood out was her skillful interweaving of science and storytelling. For example, she noted how the atmospheric conditions created by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia influenced European artistic expression. Citing the hyper-real intensity of the sky’s color in Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting, The Scream, Marvel highlighted the role of human feeling and imagination in making sense of complex environmental change. 

Next, Marvel also suggested that climate modeling is not simply a technical exercise. It can be deeply intertwined with narratives about the future. Different assumptions about human behavior, policy decisions, and technological development produce different climate outcomes. In this sense, models reflect not only data, but also the stories societies tell about where they are headed and what future they would like to have.

The lecture concluded with Marvel emphasizing the importance of framing climate challenges in ways that connect with lived experience and a sustainable future, suggesting that storytelling can help inspire more meaningful communication and action. She pointed to the “hero’s journey” as one framework for climate storytelling — one in which moments of difficulty and uncertainty are inseparable from growth, purpose, and joy, and where action becomes central to moving toward a better future.

Marvel now works with Project Drawdown, who have developed the Drawdown Explorer, an open-access platform that helps individuals and governments assess everyday decisions and public policies in terms of climate outcomes. The Drawdown Explorer frames daily practices as part of a broader journey toward a more sustainable future.

The lecture offered an engaging and inspiring perspective, encouraging the audience to think more actively about how sustainability is communicated, what stories are told, and how emotional engagement can contribute to meaningful climate action.

As an energy economist, I am often asked about what contributes to gas prices and what different policies can do to affect them.

The price of a retail gallon of gas is the sum of four things: the cost of crude oil, refining, distribution and marketing, and taxes.

In nationwide figures from January 2026, crude oil accounted for about 51% of the pump price, refining roughly 20%, distribution and marketing about 11% and taxes about 18%. That mix shifts with conditions: When crude oil prices spike, that can drive more than 60% of the price; when the price drops, taxes and logistics are larger shares of the cost.

Crude Oil is the Biggest Ingredient

Because the price of crude oil is the largest element, most of the price at the pump is derived from the global oil market.

Usually, big swings in crude prices come mainly from shifts in global demand and expectations – not from supply disruptions, according to widely cited research in 2009 by the economist Lutz Kilian.

But what is happening in early 2026 with the war in Iran is one of the exceptions: a classic supply shock. Severe disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on Middle East oil infrastructure have taken millions of barrels a day off the global market.

Most drivers generally can’t quickly reduce how much they drive or how much gas they use when prices rise, so gasoline demand doesn’t change much in the short run. That means a jump in crude costs tends to result in people paying more rather than driving less.

Refining, Regulations, and the California Puzzle

Refining turns crude into gasoline at industrial scale. The U.S. doesn’t have a single gasoline market, though. Roughly a quarter of U.S. gasoline is a cleaner-burning blend of petroleum-derived chemicals called “reformulated gasoline,” which is required in urban areas across 17 states and the District of Columbia to reduce smog.

California uses an even stricter formulation that few out-of-state refineries make. California is also geographically isolated: No pipelines bring gasoline in from other U.S. refining regions.

California’s gasoline prices have long run above the national average, explained in part by higher state taxes and stricter environmental rules. But since a refinery fire in Torrance, California, in 2015 reduced production capacity, the state’s prices have been about 20 to 30 cents a gallon higher than what those factors would indicate.

Energy economist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Severin Borenstein has called this the “mystery gasoline surcharge” and attributes it to the fact that there isn’t as much competition between refineries or gas stations in California as in other states. California’s own Division of Petroleum Market Oversight says the surcharge cost the state’s drivers about $59 billion from 2015 to 2024. It’s not exactly clear who is getting that money, but it could be gas stations themselves or refineries, through complex contracts with gas stations.

Getting the Gas Into Your Car

The distribution and marketing category covers the costs of everything involved in getting the gasoline from the refinery gate to your tank.

Gasoline moves by pipeline, ship, rail and truck to wholesale terminals, and then by local delivery truck to service stations.

At the retailer’s end, the key factors are station rent and labor, the cost to buy gasoline in bulk to be able to sell it, credit card fees of as much as 6 to 10 cents a gallon at current prices, and franchise fees paid to the national brand, such as Sunoco or ExxonMobil, for permission to put their branding on the gas station.

Most gas station operators net only a few cents per gallon on fuel itself – which is why many gas stations are really convenience stores with pumps out front. Borenstein and some of his collaborators have also documented that retail gas prices rise quickly when wholesale costs climb but fall slowly when wholesale costs drop.

The Question of Gas Tax Holidays

The federal government charges a tax on fuel, of 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.3 cents a gallon for diesel. States charge their own taxes, ranging from 70.9 cents a gallon for gas in California to 8.95 cents in Alaska.

When gas prices rise, many politicians start talking about temporarily suspending their state’s gas tax. That does reduce prices, but not as much as politicians – or consumers – might hope. Research on past gas tax holidays has found that consumers get about 79% of the reduction in gas taxes. That means oil companies and fuel retailers keep about one-fifth of the tax cut for themselves rather than passing that savings to the public.

Gas tax holidays also reduce funding for what the taxes are designed to pay for, typically roads and bridges. That pushes road and bridge upkeep costs onto future drivers and general taxpayers.

There is an additional problem, too: Taxes on gasoline are supposed to charge drivers for some of the costs their driving imposes on everyone else – carbon emissions, local air pollution, congestion and crashes. But Borenstein has found that U.S. fuel tax levels are already far below the true cost to society. Removing the tax on drivers effectively raises the costs for everyone else.

The Jones Act: A Small Number That Adds Up

The 1920 Jones Act is a federal law that requires cargo moving between U.S. ports to travel on vessels built and registered in the U.S., owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed primarily by U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Of the world’s 7,500 oil tankers, only 54 meet this requirement. Only 43 of these can transport refined fuels such as gasoline.

So, despite significant refining capacity on the Gulf Coast, some U.S. gasoline is exported overseas even as the Northeast imports fuel, in part reflecting the relatively high cost of moving fuel between U.S. ports.

Economists Ryan Kellogg and Rich Sweeney estimate that the law raises East Coast gasoline prices by about a penny and a half per gallon on average, costing drivers roughly $770 million a year. In light of the war’s effect on gas prices, the Trump administration has temporarily suspended the Jones Act requirements – an action more commonly taken when hurricanes knock out Gulf Coast refineries and pipeline networks.

What Moves the Number

The result of all these factors is that the price that drivers see at the pump mostly reflects the global price of crude, plus a stack of domestic costs, only some of which are inefficient.

Tax holidays give a partial, short-lived rebate. Jones Act waivers trim pennies, though permanent repeal may cause more fundamental changes, such as reduced rail and truck transport of all goods, which could lower costs, emissions and infrastructure damage associated with cargo transportation. Harmonizing fuel blends across states and seasons may lower prices somewhat, but likely at the expense of increased emissions.

Ultimately, the best protection against oil price shocks is a more efficient gas-burning vehicle, or one that doesn’t burn gasoline at all. In the meantime, the best I can offer as an economist is clarity about what that $4.30 actually buys.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Marta Hatzell to Lead BBISS External Partnership Efforts

Marta Hatzell has been appointed as faculty director for Strategic Engagement and Partnerships. Hatzell is a Woodruff Professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Her research builds the foundation for sustainable food, energy, and water systems through electrified catalysis and separations.

Across institutes, research centers, federal agencies, national laboratories, and industry partnerships, Hatzell’s work has operated at the intersection of research, infrastructure, policy, and implementation. She has worked closely with power utilities, industry partners, and federal sponsors. In this role, Hatzell will help shape BBISS’s external-facing strategy involving federal agencies, national laboratories, and university partners. She will bring her experience and expertise to steward strategic partnerships and strengthen large-scale collaborative research efforts, working closely with Ameet Pinto, faculty director for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration.

Xiao Liu to Advance AI and Resilience Research at BBISS

Xiao Liu has been appointed as faculty director for Resilience and AI. Liu is the David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research advances statistical methods and machine learning, with applications spanning wildfire risk analysis, climate and environmental modeling, infrastructure systems, and data-driven resilience research.

Liu’s appointment is part of BBISS’s growing focus on connecting AI, resilience, and sustainability research across disciplines, particularly in areas related to sustainable AI and AI for climate and sustainability science. His work on wildfire ignition risk quantification for power delivery networks, wildfire spread modeling, and remote-sensing analysis of wildfire aerosols demonstrates a commitment to using machine learning and AI to address complex environmental and infrastructure challenges. In this role, Liu will lead efforts to advance AI-driven approaches to resilience and will co-steward the AI, Sustainability, and Resilience Initiative in partnership with Josiah Hester, faculty director for Civic Innovation and AI.

Matthew Realff to Lead BBISS Education Initiatives

Matthew J. Realff has been appointed as faculty director for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education. Realff is a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he has served on the faculty since 1993. Realff’s decades of research and education leadership center on advancing sustainable systems, with an emphasis on integrating process systems engineering with environmental and economic analysis. He has contributed to the development of sustainability policy, environmentally informed design, recycling systems, and industry standards.

Realff’s appointment supports BBISS’s ongoing efforts to strengthen interdisciplinary graduate education and workforce development aligned with Georgia Tech’s broader sustainability strategy. His commitment to sustainable systems education and his prior leadership roles, including chair of the Sustainability Education and Curriculum Committee, position him to expand interdisciplinary training and pathways for students who want to tackle sustainability challenges across boundaries.

Beril Toktay, BBISS executive director, said, “I’m delighted to welcome Marta, Xiao, and Matthew to the BBISS faculty leadership team. These appointments greatly expand BBISS’s capacity to address sustainability challenges crossing disciplinary, institutional, and sectoral lines.”

The $250,000 funding award, made through GRA’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) program, supports the translational work of Ankur Singh, Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Andrés García, Regents’ Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Executive Director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Singh and García are collaborating to develop functional human antibodies against some of the most difficult-to-treat diseases. While antibody therapies already benefit an estimated 20 million patients worldwide, fewer than 10 percent of discovery efforts ultimately yield candidates suitable for clinical use.

This shortfall spans major disease areas — from oncology and autoimmune disorders to heart and metabolism-related conditions and neurological and infectious diseases — limiting therapeutic options for patients. The challenge lies not only in identifying candidate antibodies, but in engineering them to function reliably in the human body.

“The I&E program exists to bridge the gap between a discovery that works in the lab and one that can anchor a company,” said Justin Burns, Chief Innovation Officer and Vice President for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at GRA. “Singh and García are tackling a problem the field has faced for decades: A significant fraction of drug targets remains inaccessible to antibody-based therapies. Our goal is to help move bold, high-potential science toward real-world impact.”

GRA’s model targets a well-known bottleneck in translation. While university labs generate promising technologies, many stall before reaching the marketplace due to a lack of validation and early-stage development. 

Singh and García aim to overcome this barrier by using a proprietary antibody-engineering framework developed in Singh’s laboratory, and supported by an earlier GRA grant. The objective is straightforward: Increase the success rate of discovery efforts so more antibody candidates can advance toward clinical use.

“The implications extend well beyond our laboratory,” said Singh. “By expanding the pipeline of functional human antibodies, we can begin to address diseases that currently lack durable treatment options. GRA’s support is transformative — not only for advancing the science, but for positioning Georgia as a leader in biotechnology innovation.”

The project is built with real-world use in mind, aiming to turn the research into a new company and eventually a clinical product. By testing the idea early and lowering risk, the team hopes to attract investment and move the technology quickly beyond the Institute. 

García emphasized the translational vision of the work. 

“This is a transformative platform technology that overcomes major bottlenecks in antibody discovery and will accelerate and increase the efficiency of this powerful class of therapeutics,” he said.

“This effort is about rethinking how we design antibodies from the ground up — integrating biological insight with engineering principles to produce molecules that are not just viable, but clinically meaningful,” he said. “With GRA’s support, we can de-risk early discovery and create a clearer path from promising concepts to therapies that reach patients.”

 Tracey Mullen, a seasoned biopharma executive, entrepreneur, and antibody discovery and engineering leader currently serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Mosaic Biosciences, is advising the team on translational strategy, commercial development, and company formation. 

“The ability to rapidly generate functional human antibodies in physiologically relevant systems could meaningfully change how therapeutic discovery is approached,” Mullen said. “By moving beyond largely empirical, animal- or screening-heavy workflows and incorporating human-specific, mechanism-informed evaluation earlier in the process, this platform has the potential to generate more relevant antibody candidates and create a stronger path from discovery concept to translational development.”

As global demand for advanced therapeutics grows, efforts like this reflect a broader shift in how innovation moves from bench to bedside — one driven not only by scientific ingenuity, but by targeted investment at critical early stages.

With more than 150 attendees from industry, academia, and research organizations, the event’s high-level engagement underscored the urgency of critical issues facing the energy sector today, including the surging electricity demand, resiliency of the grid, and evolving supply chains, as well as the value of a dedicated space for candid, solutions-oriented dialogue.

“INTERSECT 2026 demonstrated the power of bringing together leaders who are actively shaping the future of energy,” said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter. “What began as a forum to explore emerging ideas has grown into a critical platform for aligning perspectives and advancing actionable solutions across the Southeast.”

This year’s program focused on real-world implementation challenges, including managing large-scale load growth and coordinating infrastructure investments to meet demand reliably and affordably. Panels featuring leaders from utilities, global energy corporations, and research organizations emphasized the importance of aligning strategy across sectors to ensure that the Southeast remains competitive and resilient.

Chris Womack, chairman, president, and CEO of Southern Company, delivered the keynote address, highlighting the unprecedented scale of current energy demands. 

“Meeting this moment requires us to think differently — serving growth while ensuring reliability, resilience, and long-term value for our customers and communities,” said Womack.

Launched in 2017, the inaugural INTERSECT conference marked the launch of EPIcenter itself and established Georgia Tech’s commitment to connecting research, industry insight, and policy development. It focused on the need to bridge the gap between rapidly advancing technologies and slower-moving regulatory and market frameworks, a theme that continues to shape its mission today. 

As INTERSECT 2026 concluded, participants pointed to a shared takeaway: With its industrial base, growing population, and integrated energy systems, the Southeast is uniquely positioned to lead in the next phase of the energy transition. With AI-driven power demand and grid infrastructure playing a significant role going forward, it is imperative to bring together the right voices to shape policies and strategies that will connect ideas to action.

The highly competitive Laboratory Placement program is a paid opportunity offered through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships. It provides students from a wide range of disciplines an opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge research at leading facilities, including Argonne National Laboratory, Ames National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Laboratory of the Rockies, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Savannah River National Laboratory.

The program’s 2026 cohort includes 16 Georgia Tech students from disciplines such as artificial intelligence, materials science, aerospace engineering, nuclear engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and physics. Their research placements reflect the interdisciplinary nature of today’s scientific challenges, with projects covering bioinformatics, high-energy and condensed matter physics, accelerator science, environmental management, and advanced materials.

Many of the internships are closely aligned with national energy priorities, with students working in research areas including nuclear energy, hydrogen and chemical systems, materials for energy applications, plasma and fusion sciences, and complex engineered systems.

“Georgia Tech’s deep engagement with the national laboratory system creates unparalleled opportunities for our students to contribute to the future of energy,” said Yuanzhi Tang, executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute. “By connecting interdisciplinary talent with world-class research environments, we are not only advancing discovery but also shaping the next generation of leaders who will drive secure, sustainable, and resilient energy systems.”

Working alongside national lab scientists, students will not only gain access to world-class facilities but benefit from mentorship and professional networks, while contributing to research critical to national security, economic competitiveness, and a more sustainable energy future. 

“These internships demonstrate the strength of Georgia Tech’s relationships across the federal research ecosystem,” said Robert Knotts, executive director of Federal Relations in the Office of Institute Relations. “They provide a direct pathway for students to engage in public service through mission-driven research at national laboratories — while strengthening connections that are vital to advancing national priorities in energy, security, and innovation.”

Candidates for the fifth annual CoE Faculty Excellence Awards were nominated by their peers or submitted self-nominations. Materials were reviewed by a committee of academic and research faculty members within the College.

Two of these faculty award winners, Hong Yeo and Omar Inan, are members of the Institute for People and Technology. Read the full CoE article >>

Read more »

The CAREER Award is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Blazeck will receive $647,941 over five years for “Creating and evolving antibodies from scratch in yeast.”

Antibodies are key proteins of the immune system that help fight disease. In people, immune cells called B cells create antibodies and then evolve them. B cells take months to do this, which makes it difficult to study antibody creation and evolution, Blazeck explained.

His CAREER project will design a method to evolve antibodies “from scratch” in yeast, which will open new avenues for exploring antibody creation, evolution, and function. 

Read the full story on the School of Chemistry and Biomolecular Engineering's website. 

Candidates for the fifth annual Faculty Excellence Awards were nominated by their peers or submitted self-nominations. Materials were reviewed by a committee of academic and research faculty members within the College. 

Each honoree receives $2,000. The honorees are:

• Akanksha Menon
• Hong Yeo
• Kinsey Herrin
• Lauren Steimle
• Kevin Haas
• Omer Inan
• Scott Hollister
• Kim L. Paige

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website. 

“Her outstanding research accomplishments and contributions to the School and Georgia Tech led to this selection,” said Professor Christopher W. Jones, the John F. Brock III School Chair in ChBE@GT.

The $20,000 in discretionary funding from this one-year fellowship will support Jamali’s research activities focused on developing new tools for in situ liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy, stochastic thermodynamics, and nanoscience-based platforms.

The Spencers established the endowment from which the term fellowship funding comes in 2017. This endowment will eventually lead to the establishment of a professorship in ChBE@GT.

“Bob Spencer is a successful alumnus who has remained connected to our chemical engineering program,” according to Jones. “His family’s gift will allow ChBE@GT to support an early career professor at a critical stage of their development—the crucial years just before their promotion and tenure review. We are grateful for their support and generosity.”

Read Full Story on the ChBE Newspage

The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) at Georgia Tech has launched the Spatial Omics and Data Analytics (SODA) Center, a new interdisciplinary research hub advancing the next frontier of biomedical discovery. 

As an energy economist and an international trade economist, we field a lot of questions during such episodes, because when oil prices go up, manufacturers, businesses and ultimately consumers pay more.

Some basic economics

Crude oil may be the most important commodity in the global economic system.

It’s a literal fuel for the industrial economy. It powers the engines that drive transportation and paves the roads vehicles drive on. It’s a source for plastics from which the world’s products get made and packaged, and a key ingredient at some point in almost every supply chain. Even fertilizers that boost the food supply are made from it. In short, it is difficult to imagine modern life without oil and its derivatives.

And when its supply changes, its price changes. Economists explain this using a fundamental model of our field: the supply-demand diagram. When there’s less of something to go around, competition among consumers who want it and companies that need it can drive the price up.

Sometimes this process can play out over time, allowing people to adjust their purchasing or activities to dampen price shocks. But when a significant source of the world’s oil is effectively blocked without much advance notice, such as when the the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, prices can rise sharply in a short period of time.

A natural question many people ask when oil prices spike is: Where does all that additional money go, and who benefits from it?

Some people have written entire books dissecting all the places that money goes when it leaves consumers’ pockets. But ultimately, the bulk of the money heads in the direction of the source of the oil itself – the oil companies.

What they do with the money varies widely, depending on where in the world an oil company is operating and who owns it. What also matters is the business environment – the set of laws and regulations – in which the company operates.

Middle East faces danger

Oil producers in the Middle East face significant new risk because of the war in Iran, including threats to production, processing locations and shipping routes. These risks raise their costs for insurance, security and transportation.

But production costs in the region are relatively low, so higher global oil prices typically still translate into strong profits.

For a major exporter such as Saudi Arabia, the government owns and controls nearly all oil production, so high prices generally benefit the government’s finances and investments, even during a war. In Saudi Arabia, oil revenue has historically been used to fund public spending.

West Texas gets a windfall

The Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the U.S., is a long way from the Persian Gulf. When global oil prices rise because of the war in Iran, oil companies operating in West Texas effectively get a windfall gain: Prices rise more quickly than costs, at least in the short run.

The immediate effect is more income from higher prices. The money largely goes to company owners – meaning shareholders – through dividends, debt reduction, company-backed purchases of its own stock, and reinvestment in drilling and production. Over time, companies may decide to spend some of that windfall on building more production capacity or pipelines to get more oil and gas to market.

North Sea boosts government revenue

In the North Sea, between the island of Great Britain and Scandinavia, a mix of multinational and government-owned companies produce most of the oil.

In the U.K., private shareholders are the primary beneficiaries of higher profits from increased oil prices, though an additional tax on oil and gas companies’ profits means the government also collects a significant share of the money, which it uses to help pay public expenses.

In Norway, oil revenues flow into the Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, valued at over $2 trillion. Laws govern how much, and for what purposes, money can be withdrawn from the fund, supporting public spending and preserving wealth for future generations. This is a similar model to Alaska’s state-owned program, funded by oil revenue, that pays for government services and sends an annual dividend to every permanent resident.

Russian oligarchs get rich

Russian oil is subject to stringent economic sanctions imposed by major industrial countries as a response to the Russian invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine. While the U.S. cannot control how much Russia charges for its oil, it can control services needed to move Russian oil around the world. Under current price sanctions, Western shipping, insurance and financing can be used to ship and sell Russian crude oil only if the price is below $60 per barrel.

Russia’s oil industry is dominated by government-controlled companies whose leaders maintain close ties to President Vladimir Putin. The dealings of those shadowy figures are often shrouded in secrecy, but it is likely that they and Putin’s military-industrial complex – not the Russian people – are the main beneficiaries of high oil prices.

What this means for you

Everyday U.S. consumers may not like the idea of their hard-earned cash going into the already deep pockets of any of these groups. But in the short run, there’s not much to do but pay the price. For the long run, however, people around the world are already thinking and talking about, and opting for, sources of energy that don’t depend on fossil fuels.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Eight faculty members received funding for projects that advance Georgia Tech energy research by generating early insights, expanding shared research tools, and exploring solutions related to energy policy, grid reliability, clean energy incentives, and industry‑driven innovation shaping Georgia’s energy future.

By supporting timely, policy-relevant research and engagement that connect Georgia Tech expertise with pressing regional energy challenges, the ACCELERATE program encourages collaboration across the Institute and with external partners, supports graduate student involvement, and amplifies research outputs that inform policy, regulatory, and market decisions. 

“ACCELERATE is designed to help early- and mid-career faculty move quickly on ideas that can shape energy policy and practice,” said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter. “By supporting both early‑stage collaboration and more developed policy research, the program enables Georgia Tech researchers to engage decision‑makers and stakeholders when it matters most.”

Proposals considered for funding were grounded in policy and behavioral research, including studies that examined how past or potential policies and regulations worked, and analyses of current market and behavioral outcomes that revealed management, policy, or regulatory gaps and opportunities.  

Funded projects span a range of disciplines and policy‑focused topics aligned with EPIcenter’s mission, with a strong emphasis on challenges facing Georgia and the Southeast. Collectively, the awards support research development, data creation, stakeholder engagement, and public-facing thought leadership intended to inform energy policy and implementation.

"As electricity demand grows, it is increasingly important to understand how industrial processes could use energy flexibly to enable efficient use of renewable resources like solar and wind,” said Micah Ziegler, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. “Support from the EPIcenter ACCELERATE program enables us to ask fundamental questions about how to design flexible systems and supply chains."

Awards ranged from $5,000 to $75,000. Projects that received ACCELERATE funding include:

Measuring the Alignment Between Legislators’ Energy Bill Votes and Their District Characteristics in the Georgia House of Representatives
Faculty Researcher: Clio Andris, Associate Professor, School of City and Regional Planning and School of Interactive Computing

Strengthening Georgia Tech’s National Energy Modeling of Priority Research Areas
Faculty Researcher: Marilyn Brown, Regents' Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy

Protecting Consumers From Price Volatility: Evidence and Policy Lessons From Georgia's Natural Gas Market
Faculty Researcher: Dylan Brewer, Assistant Professor, School of Economics

Can Place-Based Incentives Accelerate the Energy Transition?
Faculty Researcher: Gaurav Doshi, Assistant Professor, School of Economics

The Revolving Door in Utility Regulation
Faculty Researcher: Michelle Graff, Assistant Professor, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy 

How Do Data Centers Affect Tradeoffs Between Reliability and Decarbonization?
Faculty Researchers: Tony Harding, Assistant Professor, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, and Brian An, Assistant Professor, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy

Calculating the Emissions Cost of the Solar Rebound for the United States
Faculty Researcher: Matt Oliver, Associate Professor, School of Economics

Evaluating Long-Duration Flexibility of Industrial Demand in Electric Power Systems
Faculty Researchers: Micah Ziegler, assistant professor, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, and Constance Crozier, Assistant Professor, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

ACCELERATE is an annual program open to all Georgia Tech faculty, focusing on policy‑ and decision‑relevant research that advances energy affordability, reliability, resilience, and decarbonization in the region.

More information about EPIcenter’s research areas and programs is available at epicenter.energy.gatech.edu.

GT² is a newly established research initiative at Georgia Tech that focuses on discovery science, engineering innovation, and AI-enabled decision tools to address urgent challenges at the intersection of environmental and community resilience in the Southeast. The initiative fosters research in direct service to regional communities through public-private partnerships, and it provides opportunities for graduate student engagement.

The BHIC-GT² research fund and partnership will pursue shared initiatives in the fields of coastal sustainability, ecosystem health, and environmental resilience. By combining BHIC’s applied, field-based conservation work with Georgia Tech’s expertise in technological innovation and data analysis, new opportunities for impactful research will be created through graduate student projects and community engagement.

About the Partnership
Like the GT² initiative, BHIC’s Johnston Center for Coastal Sustainability was created to translate research into real-world impact. BHIC established the Johnston Center as a research partnership and education hub for sustainability initiatives on Bald Head Island, with the broader goal of advancing coastal sustainability across the Southeast. Seed funding for the Center was provided in 2021 by Dick and Pat Johnston, longtime supporters of BHIC. 

Dick, a Georgia Tech IM 1962 alumnus, and Pat Johnston shared their enthusiasm for the BHIC and Georgia Tech collaboration, noting: 

“We are delighted to see our two favorite institutions come together through this partnership. It brings additional resources, expertise, and leadership to our shared focus on keeping the historic tagline ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ in the hearts of future generations.”

Joel Kostka, Faculty Director of GT² who also serves as Tom and Marie Patton Distinguished Professor and associate chair for Research in the School of Biological Sciences with a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech added:

“The Bald Head Island Conservancy and its Johnston Center for Coastal Sustainability exemplify how place‑based conservation and rigorous science can work together to create real impact. The Bald Head Island Conservancy’s long‑term stewardship, research infrastructure, and commitment to translating science into action make it an ideal partner for Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow as we advance collaborative research that strengthens coastal resilience across the Southeast.”

This partnership will focus on Georgia Tech graduate student research projects that use innovative technology and data analyses to directly support the conservation work of BHIC.

Graduate student research already plays an important role in BHIC’s conservation efforts. Gabie Krueger, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student in Ocean Sciences and Engineering and BHIC’s 2025-26 Johnston Graduate Fellow in Coastal Sustainability, has been working with BHIC scientists on a salt marsh ecology project that examined how ribbed mussels and fiddler crabs influence the health of Bald Head Island’s dominant salt marsh grass Spartina alterniflora. These flora-fauna interactions serve as primary indicators of marsh health, so her research is important for understanding the resilience of Bald Head Island’s salt marsh to environmental concerns such as sea-level rise and development.

Through the BHIC-GT² partnership, Georgia Tech student researchers who work with the Conservancy will also gain invaluable experience with local conservation efforts and community engagement.

G. Christopher Shank, Ph.D., Executive Director of BHIC, commented:

“The Bald Head Island Conservancy is thrilled about this opportunity to create a formal research partnership with Georgia Tech, one of the nation’s most esteemed research universities. It is recognition of the quality of conservation studies we are currently pursuing at the Conservancy and it also augments the impact of our work for BHI and beyond because of the technological and data analysis talent that Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow will bring to this partnership.”

Why This Matters
This research fund and partnership represents an important step forward in strengthening connections between academic research and applied conservation institutions. Together, BHIC and GT² aim to inform coastal management decisions, support resilience planning, engage students, and advance research that benefits coastal ecosystems and communities across the southeastern U.S.

Looking Ahead
Additional details about joint initiatives, research priorities, and collaborative opportunities will be shared in the coming months.

Nuclear power currently supplies roughly 20% of U.S. electricity, but because of its reliability compared to wind and solar power and its potential to reduce carbon emissions, the industry is positioned to expand its role in reshaping the future of energy. When Southern Company officially connected Units 3 and 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant to the grid, Georgia became home to the country’s largest nuclear power facility and to the first nuclear units built in the U.S. in more than 30 years. 

With Georgia Tech alumni playing critical roles at the plant, students entering the field, and faculty conducting innovative research, the Institute’s influence can be felt throughout the industry. 

Read more on the Georgia Tech Newscenter Page

In 2018, the company broke ground in Social Circle, a small town an hour east of Atlanta with about 5,000 residents, to build one of its largest U.S. data centers. It opened in 2020.

Local officials called it a win. Shane Short, president and CEO of the Development Authority of Walton County, said the plant generates about $10 million annually in property tax revenue and has led to road improvements and expanded broadband.

Electric vehicle maker Rivian followed Meta’s lead and began construction on a plant near Social Circle in September 2025, adding to the area’s rapid industrial growth.

But for residents, the shift from a largely rural, agricultural economy to an energy-intensive industrial one has put new pressure on power and water systems.

“They’re seeing higher water and power bills, worse air quality, and very few jobs in return for this, while large corporations get tax benefits,” said Ahmed Saeed, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science, describing why residents in some communities push back on new data center development.

Saeed and Josiah Hester, associate professor of interactive computing and computer science and director of the Center for Advancing Responsible AI, have spent the past year studying the energy, water, and financial demands associated with these facilities, and how those costs are distributed.

Betting on Demand

AI data centers run on specialized chips that use large amounts of electricity. That power generates heat, which requires energy- and water-intensive cooling.

The state is adding capacity based on expected demand, not current use.

Last year, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved an estimated $16 billion expansion for Georgia Power to support that growth. It is expected to produce about 10 gigawatts of electricity at a given time. That’s enough energy to power about 7.5 million homes for a year.

If that demand materializes, the electricity is used. If it doesn’t, the cost still has to be paid.

Grid Stability

“Those workloads can put a very large demand on the grid all at once, and then remove it just as quickly,” Saeed said. “That sudden change is difficult for the system to handle.”

That volatility is a separate issue.

Even if data center operators pay for the infrastructure they use, large swings in demand can still strain grid operations, especially during peak periods or extreme weather.

What Comes Next

Back in Walton County, the Meta facility is already attracting additional data centers.

Each new site adds power and water infrastructure designed to operate for decades.

The servers inside need to be upgraded every few years.

Saeed and Hester said if Georgia wants to remain an AI and cloud hub, the state needs to set the terms and companies need to meet them.

That starts with disclosure — how much power data centers draw from the grid, how that demand spikes, and how much water they use. It includes clear expectations for how those facilities respond when the grid is under stress, and protections for the communities where they’re built.

The researchers maintain that “build it and hope” is not a strategy.

The paper, authored by EPIcenter faculty affiliate Constance Crozier (School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology), EPIcenter student affiliate Rina Davila Severiano (School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology) and Mark O’Malley explores how electrifying both industrial manufacturing and freight transportation could allow electricity demand to shift over days or even weeks — far longer than the hours‑long flexibility commonly associated with electric vehicle charging or battery storage.

Using a case study of the cement industry along the U.S. East Coast, the authors model a fully electrified supply chain spanning 20 cities, two manufacturing hubs, electric truck fleets and warehouse storage. Their analysis shows that, by adjusting manufacturing schedules and inventory levels, electrified supply chains could shift tens of gigawatt‑hours of electricity demand to better align with renewable availability, particularly wind power, whose output varies over longer timescales. They find that this flexibility can emerge under relatively modest carbon price signals — below $50 per ton of CO₂ — well before grid‑scale battery storage becomes economically viable.

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To address these limitations, the authors recommend that future evaluations prioritize the construction of appropriate control groups or adopt quasi-experimental approaches, such as propensity score matching, to better isolate causal impacts. They also highlight the value of modern difference-in-difference estimators for strengthening causal identification. In addition, the review emphasizes the importance of leveraging available and emerging technologies, such as smart meters, thermostats, and sensors, to provide timely, precise data for evaluating both energy consumption and savings as well as non-energy impacts, like health and safety.

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To help find answers, researchers at the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS) are using math, data, and AI to unlock the secrets of thought. Together they are helping turn the brain’s raw electrical “noise” into real insights about how people think, move, and perceive the world.

Fair warning: Prepare your neurons for the complexity of this brain research ahead.

Building AI Like a Brain

What if artificial neurons in AI programs were arranged as they are in the brain?

AI programs would then help us understand why the brain is organized the way it is. This neuro-AI synthesis would also work faster, use less energy, and be easier to interpret. Creating such systems is the goal of Apurva Ratan Murty, an assistant professor of Psychology who is creating topographic AI models like the one above of three domains — vision, audition, and language inspired by the brain. In the near future, he predicts doctors might be able to use these patterns to predict the effects of brain lesions and other disorders. “We’re not there yet,” he says. “But our work brings us significantly closer to that future than ever before.”

Computing Thought and Movement

How cats walk keeps Chethan Pandarinath on his toes. This biomedical engineer uses sensors to analyze how two sets of feline leg muscles — flexors and extensors — are controlled by the spinal cord. Understanding how that happens could help patients partially paralyzed from spinal cord injuries, strokes, or progressive neuro-degenerative diseases get back on their feet again. “My lab is using AI tools that allow us to turn complex spinal cord activity data into something we can interpret. It tells us there’s a simple underlying structure behind the complex activity patterns,” says the associate professor.

Revealing the Brain’s Spike Patterns

“The brain is like a symphony conductor,” says Simon Sponberg. “Individual instruments have some independent control, but most of the music comes from the brain’s precise coordination of notes among the different players in the body.” This physics professor studies the fantastically fast-beating wings of the hummingbird-sized hawk moth (Manduca sexta). Its agile flight movement comes as a result of spikes in electrical activity in 10 muscles. Sponberg found something that surprised him — the brain focuses less on creating the number of spikes than in orchestrating their precise patterns over time. To Sponberg, every millisecond matters. “We are just beginning to understand how the nervous system first acquires precisely timed spiking patterns during development,” he says.

Predicting Decisions Through Statistics

Put a mouse in a maze with food far away, and it will learn to find it. But life for mice — and people — isn’t so simple. Sometimes they want to explore, only want water, or just want to go home. What’s more, animals make decisions based on their history, not just on how they feel at the moment. To dig deeper into the decision-making process, Anqi Wu, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, is giving mice more options. By using a new computational framework called SWIRL (Switching Inverse Reinforcement Learning), her findings have outperformed models that fail to take historical behavior into account. “We’re seeking to understand not only animal behavior but also human behavior to gain insight into the human decision-making process over a long period of time,” she says.

Modeling the Mind’s Wiring With Math

Connectivity shapes cognition in the cerebral cortex, a layered structure in the brain. The visual cortex, in particular, processes visual data from the retina relayed through the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) in the thalamus, and directs it to the correct cognitive domain in the brain. How it does this is the mystery that computational neuroscientist Hannah Choi wants to solve. “The big question I’m interested in is how network connectivity patterns in the architecture of the LGN are related to computations,” says this assistant math professor. To find answers, she shows mice repeated image patterns such as flower-cat-dog-house and then disrupts the pattern. The goal? To grasp how the thalamus’s nonlinear dynamical system works. If scientists and doctors better understand how brain regions are wired together, such knowledge could lead to better disease treatment.

This story was originally published through the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. Read the original publication here.

Georgia has become the world’s second-largest data center market, a shift that has brought economic opportunity as well as concerns about water use, energy demand, land development, and impacts on host communities. One recurring theme throughout the event was the tendency for environmental and resource issues to overshadow other important policy questions about community impact, transparency, and long-term governan

Introductory remarks were made by Beril Toktay, executive director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, and Michael Best, executive director of the  Institute for People and Technology.

Verghese Jacob, senior vice president of technology at the DayOne corporation, delivered the keynote address. Jacob discussed how DayOne works with governments in Asia to plan data centers and said early policy development and consistent communication can help communities better understand the impact and manage growth for long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships between governments and communities.

The event also included a BBISS Connect Workshop, led by Kristin Janacek, a senior extension professional with BBISS. The workshop built on BBISS’s Sustainability for Data Centers Insights Series and asked participants to contribute to a collaborative “blue paper” intended to guide future research partnerships and responses to funding opportunities.

Two panel discussions explored the social and political dimensions of data center development. The first, moderated by Cindy Lin, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing, focused on international perspectives. Panelists included Celine Benoit of the Atlanta Regional Commission, Matthew Wesley Williams of Groundswell, Kahlil Bostick of Ryan Companies, and Ding Wang of Google Research. They discussed global examples of community-centered planning and the need for transparency in negotiations.

A second panel, moderated by Allen Hyde, an associate professor in the School of History and Sociology, examined collaboration between communities and government agencies. Panelists were Georgia Public Service Commissioner Peter Hubbard; Donnie Beamer, senior technology advisor for the City of Atlanta; Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Zachary Hansen; and Michael Czajkowski, director of advocacy for Science for Georgia. The group highlighted the importance of proactive regulation and clear communication with residents as data center development accelerates.

Speakers throughout the day emphasized that Atlanta’s continued growth in the data center sector will require coordinated planning and meaningful engagement with affected communities. The event closed with a call for all stakeholders to be proactive about creating policies that balance the technological and economic promise of the data center building boom with environmental and community concerns.

Stebner is the Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. Chair in Manufacturing and a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, with a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. He also serves as a James R. and Sarah R. Borders Faculty Fellow, founding director of Georgia Artificial Intelligence Manufacturing (Georgia AIM), and executive director of Georgia Tech’s Professional Master’s in Manufacturing Leadership program.

In his role as associate director, Stebner will lead operations, engagement and continued growth of the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF), a cornerstone of Georgia Tech’s manufacturing ecosystem. The facility brings together artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, and digital manufacturing to accelerate materials discovery and manufacturing innovation at pilot scale.

The AMPF is evolving into what Georgia Tech leaders describe as a national first: a university-based, self-driving manufacturing facility that allows new technologies to be invented, tested and de-risked before they reach full-scale production. Backed by more than $80 million in federal, state, and private investment, the facility serves as a shared-use platform for industry, startups, researchers, and government partners.

“AMPF is a national user facility and a blended industry-academia, human-AI environment where new manufacturing discoveries are made ready for industry adoption,” Stebner said. “By integrating AI-enabled systems, real-time automation and pilot-scale validation, we’re helping shorten the timeline from discovery to deployment.”

Stebner’s research and leadership sit at the intersection of artificial intelligence, manufacturing, materials, and mechanics, with an emphasis on intelligent and adaptive manufacturing systems. His work spans advanced alloys, additive manufacturing, autonomous experimentation, and data-driven process design, with applications across aerospace, automotive, biomedical, energy and industrial sectors.

Under his leadership, the AMPF is expected to continue expanding as a national collaboration hub for academia, industry, and government. The facility supports pilot-scale testing of emerging technologies, workforce development and applied research aimed at strengthening U.S. manufacturing competitiveness and economic resilience.

Stebner’s appointment also strengthens the alignment between GTMI, Georgia AIM and Georgia Tech’s broader research enterprise, integrating AI-driven research, translational infrastructure, and industry partnerships into a cohesive model for manufacturing innovation.

“With Aaron’s experience building forward-looking manufacturing programs and leading large, interdisciplinary teams, GTMI is well positioned to accelerate the impact of the AMPF and related initiatives,” said Tom Kurfess, executive director of GTMI.

The award was announced March 25, 2026 and is one of six Institute Research Awards given by Georgia Tech’s Office of the Executive Vice President for Research. The portfolio of awards honors achievements in research engagement, innovation, faculty advising, and impact. 

Georgia AIM is a statewide coalition led by the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) and the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) to develop and deploy AI talent and innovation in manufacturing. The Georgia AIM coalition includes dozens of universities, technical colleges, nonprofits, and economic development organizations.

“It is an incredible experience to collaborate with technology and economic development leaders around the state to lead the nation and the world in AI for manufacturing,” said Aaron Stebner, Georgia AIM co-director and the Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. Chair in Manufacturing at Georgia Tech. 

“We are truly honored to receive this recognition from our peers at Georgia Tech,” said Tom Kurfess, GTMI Executive Director and HUSCO/Ramirez Distinguished Chair in Fluid Power and Motion Control. 

Georgia AIM was initiated in 2021 by Stebner, EI2 Vice President David Bridges, Kurfess, Georgia AIM managing director and GTMI deputy director Steven Ferguson, and Georgia Tech executive director for strategic partnerships George White. The coalition received an initial $500,000 planning grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA), which was followed by $65 million in additional grants from EDA and with additional federal, state, and private sector support now totals more than $100 million to enact projects across the state. 

The Georgia AIM coalition counts many achievements on and off campus, including:

• Supporting collaborations for more than thirty-five faculty, fifty research faculty and professionals, ten post docs, eighty graduate research assistants, one hundred and fifty undergraduate research assistants, and dozens of staff at Georgia Tech.
• Transforming the Georgia Tech Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility into a national user facility for research and development to invent, test, derisk, and mature AI manufacturing and materials technologies.
• Building a manufacturing commercialization pipeline that links faculty research, student innovation, startups, and corporate partners to introduce AI manufacturing innovations to regional and national economies.
• Launching workforce development programs that provide new opportunities and career paths thousands of students spanning K-12 engagement, technical apprenticeships and credentials, and professional education.
• Providing STEM experiences including AI coding camps, robotics competitions, and advanced manufacturing competitions to thousands of students across Georgia.
• 21 peer reviewed journal articles, 5 peer reviewed conference proceedings, 5 National Academies workshop presentations, 5 keynote/plenary presentations, more than 200 conference presentations and posters, 13 invention disclosures, 7 provisional patents, 2 full patents filed to date with dozens more in process. 

“Georgia AIM proves that innovation scales when built alongside workforce,” said Ferguson. “We built a seamless pipeline from education to industry, ensuring talent is ready to deploy AI in real manufacturing environments on day one.”

“The impact of Georgia AIM is grounded in collaboration — universities, industry, nonprofits and communities working together to shape the future of advanced manufacturing in Georgia,” said Bridges. “This recognition underscores what a coordinated statewide effort can accomplish.”

Because research covers a range of activities — from research and development to commercialization and public impacts — the annual awards recognize the many facets of work in this area. The peer-driven nomination process emphasizes measurable contributions and leadership across disciplines.

“The strength of Georgia Tech’s research enterprise begins with the talented people who push discovery forward every day,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research. “Congratulations to this year’s honorees, who demonstrate what it means to turn bold ideas into real-world impact, advancing knowledge from fundamental science to commercial and community applications. With these awards, we celebrate their leadership, creativity, and dedication to serving the public good.”

Read more about this year’s Institute Research Award winners. 

The North American hurricane season is, for many on the East Coast and Gulf Coast, six months of vigilance, and among the resources most likely to be consulted during this time are storm tracking maps. If you learn that your home might be in the path of a storm, you probably actively search for the most current version of one of these maps. Bruce Walker, a professor in the schools of Psychology and Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, wants to ensure that storm-tracking maps and other emergency and environmental communication tools convey the most important information in the most understandable manner to the largest number of people possible. “Weather and climate affect every single person on Earth,” he said, “so no one can be left behind when it comes to these critical communications.”

Walker is director of the Center for Inclusive Climate Communication (CICC) at Georgia Tech. CICC is a new and growing consortium of researchers, organizations, agencies, and companies whose goal is to ensure that climate information of all types is widely accessible. The center is housed in the School of Psychology but has affiliated faculty from all around campus, and several universities around the U.S. CICC is expanding internationally as well, developing sub-networks in Europe, Africa, and Australia.

As part of its efforts, the CICC is working with the coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia. Situated about 65 miles northeast of Jacksonville, Florida, Brunswick is no stranger to hurricanes and tropical storms. The city is working to develop a comprehensive Community-Based Emergency Warning System, which will include maps and other emergency communications that ensure language, culture, level of education, or other differences in lived experience are not barriers to residents understanding critical safety information. This work is supported by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) and the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) through the Sustainability Next Seed Grant Program.

Hurricane maps and related information can come from many sources. Government agencies, municipal emergency management agencies, media outlets, and meteorological organizations all may have their own versions, which vary in how they visually display data. The information used to generate the maps is collected and distributed to the public domain by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) every few hours. The maps that the public sees show the important information that one would expect, but they may not do so with an eye for how different people might interpret, or misinterpret, that info.

“Once we determine the best way to present hurricane data to the most people, we will work with content providers to standardize the way they generate these resources,” says Walker. “Reliable data and what we call inclusive communications lead to better decisions by the public.”

The CICC investigators’ process aspires to the philosophy of Universal Design, but since no design can be 100% universal, they refer to what they create as “inclusive designs.” Inclusive design means adapting to the diverse needs of the broadest possible audience. Since the language skills, education, lived experience, and physical ability of the person in the storm’s path can vary, these maps must present information in many alternative ways.

For those who can see the map, for example, improving the visual design (e.g., a better use of symbols and a clearer visual layout) can help. For those with vision impairment, adding audio layers (called “sonification”) to the map can help. For many people, simply comprehending a map can itself be a challenge. In that case, adding more explanations about how to interpret a map, what different terms mean, and what the storm is likely to do can make it more understandable.

All of these strategies provide multiple means of accessing, understanding, and acting on the data represented by the map. When studying how to design inclusive maps, soliciting input and suggestions from as many different potential users as possible helps the CICC team ensure that vital information is understandable and useful to the most people.

One of CICC’s primary goals is to take lessons from their research projects, such as the inclusive hurricane map, and derive general principles for the effective design of emergency communications tools of all types. While every disaster, from floods and wildfires to tsunamis, tornadoes, and ice storms, will require the distribution of unique pieces of data, the CICC researchers and their community partners are identifying design strategies that will make these communications understandable and actionable to everyone.

Walker and other CICC researchers engage students in this work. Isabella Martincic, a Ph.D. student in engineering psychology, shepherds many of the center’s research and design efforts, including AccessCORPS, a team that makes educational materials more inclusive and accessible. Jessica Herring and Ishan Vepa, students in the M.S. program in human-computer interaction, have led the hurricane map project, including overhauling existing maps from recent storms by applying CICC design guidelines to them. And undergraduate student Cal Price has been the lead researcher on the Brunswick collaboration, engaging with both community members and civic officials.

These efforts — adding more features, revamping existing maps, and consulting with weather experts and end users — demonstrate how seemingly simple changes can lead to significantly better interpretations of the data by the target audience. The research behind the inclusive hurricane maps will be presented at the 23rd International Web for All Conference, which takes place later this year.

CICC researchers are also engaging in partnerships with companies that see the potential benefits of this approach. Data visualization company Highcharts, for example, is a supporter and collaborator. Since their business models revolve around distributing such information, they have a keen interest in the lessons learned from CICC research. CICC does not regard its findings as intellectual property; they prefer that good design guidelines proliferate.

“Ultimately, our goal is for anyone to be able to look at a communication tool, quickly grasp critical pieces of information that may impact their lives and well-being, and take appropriate actions,” Walker said, “whether that be for the daily weather or for an impending natural disaster.”

Prausnitz, a Regents’ Professor, Regents’ Entrepreneur, and J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is this year’s recipient of the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award. 

“While I may be the focal point, it’s not a recognition of me as an individual. It’s a recognition of everything the team has done,” Prausnitz said. “I know how to do some things, but there are many things I don’t know how to do. That’s why working with others matters. You bring people together, fill in the gaps, and solve the whole problem.” 

The “some things” Prausnitz knows how to do have led to revolutionary medical innovation over a 30-year career at Georgia Tech, where he has led transformative work in microneedle drug delivery, launching 10 companies in the process. 

During that time, Prausnitz published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, was granted dozens of patents, and advanced his work from early laboratory studies into more than 20 human clinical trials. His research has produced multiple FDA‑approved or clinically tested technologies. 

Understanding Prausnitz’s success starts with his approach to engineering in practice. Science may begin with discovery, but engineering, as he describes it, focuses on taking something uncertain and making it work. 

“One of the things that really distinguishes engineering from science is the work of problem-solving to reach an answer,” he said. “You start with something diffuse and figure out how to put all the pieces together. That to me is a hallmark of engineering.” 

That way of thinking took shape early in his life. 

Read the full story.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not trendy. In fact, it’s downright grubby. But the work that a Georgia Tech researcher and his students are doing is improving campus sustainability, one pound of food waste at a time. 

The Academy recognizes leaders across fields of study who have addressed humanity’s greatest challenges while also gathering knowledge to advance learning and the public good. This year’s class of 252 honorees was elected in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research, and science.  

García is one of nine honorees in the “Engineering and Technology” division. His research — both in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering where he serves as Regents’ Professor and in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience where he is the executive director — aligns with the Academy’s service-minded mission.  

“I am inspired to find engineering solutions to serious health conditions to help people,” he said. “As a kid, I developed a musculoskeletal condition that required biomaterial devices to treat. Although imperfect, this treatment allowed me to lead a normal life.” 

Moved by his personal experience, García’s research centers on cellular and tissue engineering, which integrate biological and engineering principles to restore organ function lost to injury or disease. By studying how cells interact with the materials around them, he and his team have engineered biomaterials for the controlled delivery of therapeutic proteins and cells that enhance tissue regeneration, which could speed the healing process for patients.  

His future work will integrate biomaterials with lab‑grown replicas of human organs, known as organoids, that can be used to identify new therapies for a variety of human diseases. These organoids, though smaller and simpler than true organs, can mimic key functions that may help García and his team to find better ways to repair damaged tissues. 

García has spent the past 27 years at Georgia Tech and carries on the legacy of another Academy member — the Petit Institute’s founding executive director Robert Nerem, who was inducted in 1998. García credits his success to the support of his loved ones and the Yellow Jacket community.  

“I am deeply honored and humbled,” he said. “This award is only possible by the unending love and support of family, friends and mentors, my phenomenal past and present trainees, fantastic collaborators, and awesome ecosystem at Georgia Tech.” 

The Academy was chartered in 1780 during the American Revolution by a group that included John Adams and John Hancock. It was established to recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young republic. 

Membership has broadened over the years to celebrate excellence in a variety of fields. Honorees have included poet Robert Frost, musician John Legend, and chef José Andrés, who was given this year’s Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage.  

García and the rest of this year’s class, which includes actor Jodie Foster, will be inducted in October.  

Students, faculty, and researchers from Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State University gathered on April 8 for a joint workshop between Georgia Tech's NSF Sustainable Development of Smart Medical Devices (SUSMED) program and KSU's Mobility for Everyone (MOVE) Center. The full-day event explored how sustainable design, mobility science, and health technologies are converging to shape the next generation of medical devices.  

In December, The Conversation hosted a webinar on AI’s revolutionary role in drug discovery and development.

Science and technology editor Eric Smalley interviewed Jeffrey Skolnick, eminent scholar in computational systems biology at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Benjamin P. Brown, assistant professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University.

Skolnick has developed AI-based approaches to predict protein structure and function that may help with drug discovery and finding off-label uses of existing drugs. Brown’s lab works on creating new computer models that make drug discovery faster and more reliable. Below is a condensed and edited version of the interview.

Let’s start with the big picture. How is AI changing biomedical research and drug discovery, and what is the potential we are talking about?

Skolnick: The upside, potentially, is very large. One of the frustrating things about drug discovery is that, in spite of the fact that the people doing it are extraordinarily intelligent and have done an extraordinarily good job, the success rate is very low. About 1 in 5 drugs will have negative health effects that outweigh its benefits. Of the ones that pass, roughly half don’t work.

In drug development, there are several key issues: Can you predict which target is driving a particular disease? Once this target is identified, how can you guarantee the drug is going to work and isn’t simultaneously going to kill you?

These are outstanding problems in drug discovery in which AI can play an important, though not 100% guaranteed, role. Unlike us, AI can look at basically all available knowledge. On a good day it makes strong and true connections called “insights,” and on a bad day it does what is called “hallucinating” and sees things that are weak and probably false.

At the end of the day, many diseases do not have a cure. Most diseases are maintained, such as high cholesterol or autoimmune conditions. A treatment for cancer might buy you five years, and now you’re in Stage 4 and you’ve exhausted all the standard care drugs. AI can play a role to suggest alternatives where there are none.

Let’s give some basic definitions here. When we use the word drug, we’re talking about a wide range of therapies. Can you explain the range – we’ve got small molecule drugs, biologics, gene therapies, cell therapies.

Brown: We have fairly large molecules in our bodies called proteins. They are like machines that carry out specific functions and interact with one another. Oftentimes, when we’re trying to treat disease, we’re trying to alter functions of specific proteins. Many drugs, like aspirin and Tylenol, are small molecules that can fit into a protein and change its function. Fundamentally, drugs don’t have to just interact with proteins, but this is a major way in which our current repertoire of medications work.

There are also proteins that act like drugs, such as antibodies. When you receive a vaccine for a virus, your body is basically given instructions on how to develop antibodies. These antibodies will target some part of that virus. Your body is creating these big molecules, much bigger than aspirin, to go and interact with foreign proteins in a different way. Gene therapy is a larger step beyond that.

So these modalities – molecule, protein, antibody or gene – are very different types of molecules. They have different scales and rules, so the way you approach designing and discovering them various widely.

Can you briefly explain artificial neural networks, and what the “deep” in deep learning means?

Skolnick: AlphaFold, developed by DeepMind, involved understanding how neural networks worked. They built a network with a lot of inputs, which are stimuli, and outputs with different weights, similar to how your brain actually works. These simple connections, or neurons, have reinforcement learning.

They also created sophisticated neural networks, such as transformers, which do specific things like a special-purpose tool that can learn, and they added a mechanism called “attention,” which amplifies critical details. Super neural networks with transformers is what we call deep learning. These now have literally billions, if not trillions, of parameters.

Essentially, these machines can learn higher order correlations between events, meaning the patterns of conditional interactions that depend on the properties of multiple things simultaneously. In these higher order correlations, AI has the potential to see previously unknown things that are embedded in petabytes (a unit of data equivalent to half of the contents of all U.S. academic research libraries of biological data.

AlphaFold, which predicts three-dimensional, bioactive forms of a protein, has millions of sequences and a couple of hundred thousand structures. It can tell you, based on a particular pattern, what small molecule to design that sticks to a protein to induce some kind of structural shift.

How is this technology being used in biomedical research to understand molecular dynamics or, essentially, the biological processes involved in health and disease?

Brown: In 2013, there was a Nobel Prize for molecular dynamics simulations, computational tools that help you understand the motions of molecules as they move according to physics. There’s a huge body of scientific research built around those ideas.

AI and deep learning are large right now, but it’s worth mentioning that for the last decade and a half, people have been using much smaller machine learning algorithms to help design drugs. A lot of the ideas, such as [using machine learning for virtual screening], are not new and have been in practice for a while.

With AlphaFold’s technologies to help people design proteins and predict their structure, we’ve changed how we think about a lot of these problems. We have this new repertoire of approaches to build ideas around and to start thinking about drug discovery.

From 20 years ago to now, what has today’s AI technology done in terms of scale of change in this process?

Skolnick: A lot of diseases, like cancers, are caused by a collection of malfunctioning proteins. AI now allows us to start to think conceptually about how these diseases are organized and related to each other.

Diseases tend to co-occur. For example, if you have hyperthyroidism, you’re very likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Kind of weird, right? We can look at pieces, but AI can look at all the information, integrate the collective behavior and then identify common drivers. This allows you to construct disease interrelationships which offer the possibility of broad spectrum treatments that could treat whole collections of diseases rather than narrow-spectrum treatments.

Relatedly, AI also can help us understand disease trajectories. Diseases that tend to co-occur often present themselves consecutively. You have disease 1, it gives you disease 2, then gives you disease 3. This suggests that if you go back to the root with disease 1, you may be able to stop a whole bunch of stuff. You can’t analyze millions of trajectories and millions of data without a tool, so you couldn’t do this before.

This holds a lot of promise, but one also must be careful not to overpromise. It will help, it will accelerate, but it is not a substitute yet for real experiments, real clinical validation and trials.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The two‑day event took place Feb. 4 – 5, coinciding with the Critical Minerals Ministerial hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 4, which brought together more than 50 nations to strengthen and diversify global critical mineral supply chains. During this ministerial, U.K. Minister Seema Malhotra and U.S. Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg signed a Critical Minerals Memorandum of Understanding, strengthening bilateral cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom on critical mineral supply chains. 

These broad efforts are supported by White House Executive Order 14363, which defines the Genesis Mission and aims to accelerate scientific discovery through AI. The order identifies critical minerals supply chain resilience as a national security imperative.

In Atlanta, these themes were brought to life in real time. The GEMs-4 workshop brought together researchers, policymakers, national labs, industry leaders, and workforce organizations from both the U.S. and the U.K. to address shared challenges in technology translation, permitting, investment, and talent development. 

The state of Georgia’s integrated ecosystem, linking research universities, legacy industries, technical colleges, national labs, and public‑private partnerships, served as a case study. Presenters highlighted how existing industrial assets in the Southeast are being incorporated into emerging clean energy and critical minerals supply chains, offering a model for other regions seeking to build capabilities around extraction, processing, and manufacturing.

A U.K. member of Parliament representing Cornwall, where the U.K. has lithium reserves and deep critical mineral expertise, joined the convening, as well as representatives from the U.K. Critical Mineral Association, Camborne School of Mines, and the University of Kent. Together, they explored opportunities and challenges, from a fundamental science to a commercialization perspective grounded in real-world experience. 

The alignment between the ministerial in Washington and the expertise present in Atlanta demonstrated the value of state-level engagement and how national agreements translate into practical collaboration on the ground. 

“The Southeast has the research depth, industrial footprint, and collaborative spirit needed to lead in critical minerals innovation,” said Yuanzhi Tang, Georgia Power Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute, and founding director of the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions at Georgia Tech. “GEMs‑4 showed what’s possible when universities, industry, and government partners align around shared priorities.” 

Day one featured strategic dialogue on critical mineral resources, innovation pathways, and partnership models. A recurring theme was the co-production of critical minerals alongside major mineral commodities. “Many critical minerals are produced as byproducts of larger mining operations, making it essential to integrate recovery strategies into existing mineral industries rather than developing entirely new extraction systems,” noted Crawford Elliott, professor of geosciences at Georgia State University.

Day two transitioned to field‑based learning, led by Paul Schroeder, professor of geology at the University of Georgia. Participants visited active operations to better understand how regional industrial strengths can support national and international supply chain goals. Schroeder said, “Connecting people to the long-standing mineral extraction economy at the mining and plant sites, where the work gets done with an amazingly skilled workforce, underscores the unique role of Georgia’s place‑based capacity in advancing national and transatlantic supply chain goals.”

Organizers emphasized that resilient supply chains rely on regional capabilities built over time through university collaboration, industry partnerships, and community engagement. With three years of inter‑university coordination now underpinning the GEMS platform, the 2026 workshop demonstrated how the Southeast is contributing actionable models for U.S.-U.K. cooperation.

“Ecosystem-building at this scale requires participation from every part of the value chain, and we are encouraged by the model GEMs presents,” said Rachel Galloway, Consul General at British Consulate General Atlanta. “The collaboration across universities, industry, and government is exactly what enables long‑term impact on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Through focused dialogue and partnership-building, the symposium strengthened transatlantic collaboration, highlighted regional strengths, and accelerated innovation and translation across the critical minerals value chain, from resource characterization and processing to recycling, manufacturing, and deployment.

For more information about the GEMS initiative, visit: https://gems.research.gatech.edu/.

“The topic of the Suddath Symposium changes every year, which allows the Georgia Tech research community to annually learn about recent advances on a specific topic from across the immense fields of bioengineering and bioscience,” said Nicholas Hud, Regents’ Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Associate Director of IBB.

The symposium also included presentation of the 2026 Suddath Award, which recognizes outstanding graduate research. This year’s award was presented to Myeongsoo Kim, a Ph.D. candidate in the Bioengineering Graduate Program, for his work at the intersection of cell engineering, cancer treatment, and biomedical imaging. The award is presented each year by members of the Suddath family, including Vincent Suddath, grandson of Bud and a current freshman at Georgia Tech majoring in mathematics.

The symposium and award honor the legacy of F. L. “Bud” Suddath and his lasting contributions to the Institute and the wider Georgia Tech research community.

“Bud was influential in promoting the growth of bioscience research at Georgia Tech, efforts that helped establish IBB in the 1990s,” Hud said. “Bud’s research interests were at the forefront of structural biology, a field that laid the foundation for much of what we know today about biology at the molecular level. It’s fitting that we honor Bud’s contributions by annually providing the Georgia Tech community with the opportunity to learn about research on a timely topic within the biological sciences.”

Symposium co-chairs Tara Deans and Mark Styczynski said that in addition to upholding the legacy of Bud Suddath, the event also provides a unique setting and opportunity for both established researchers and trainees to interact over the course of the two day event. The intimate format of the symposium, which is limited to approximately 100 attendees, and the annual selection of a different interdisciplinary topic sets it apart from other symposia.

“The Suddath Symposium is an amazing opportunity to bring multiple world-class researchers right to our trainees’ front door, to hear about their work and connect with them in a small setting that you can’t really find at most conferences,” said Styczynski, who is a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “We are really grateful to IBB and the Suddath family for supporting this unique event.”

Deans, who is an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, highlighted how this year’s theme reflects a broader shift in the field.

“This year’s focus on biomedical applications of synthetic biology highlights a major inflection point in the field: the transition from proof-of-concept systems to human health-relevant technologies,” she said. “The theme also reflects increasing convergence across disciplines; synthetic biology is no longer operating in isolation, but it is deeply intertwined with immunology, machine learning, diagnostics, and clinical translation. Addressing real-world biomedical problems requires this kind of integration, and the symposium captured that shift very clearly.”

The Suddath Symposium annually serves as a cornerstone event for Georgia Tech’s bioengineering and bioscience community — connecting researchers, honoring scientific legacy, and spotlighting the next generation of scientific innovation.

A team of researchers led by Ankur Singh, the Carl Ring Family Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, has been awarded up to $6 million from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) of the U.S. Department of Defense to accelerate the development of medical countermeasures (MCMs) against deadly biological threats that endanger public health, national security, and warfighters.

DTRA’s mission is to provide solutions that enable the Department of Defense, the U.S. government, and international partners to deter strategic threats. A key priority is advancing new or improved MCMs that can be deployed before or after exposure to biological or chemical agents.

Singh’s multi-year project, Systematic Human Immune Engineering for Lethal Disease (SHIELD) Countermeasures, aims to create a threat-agnostic platform that transforms how respiratory pathogens and toxins are studied. The platform is designed to speed up the discovery, development, and production of immune-based countermeasures.

Singh leads a collaborative team that includes Cornell University’s Matthew DeLisa and Stanford University’s Michael Jewett. Together, they will integrate immune-engineering technologies with advanced cell-free protein synthesis platforms to discover and manufacture protein-based MCMs. Cell-free protein synthesis is a laboratory technique that efficiently produces proteins without relying on living cells, which can be unpredictable and technically demanding when it comes to expressing complex or toxic proteins and scaling production quickly. The team expects the SHIELD Countermeasures platform to reduce the time and cost of MCM development by more than tenfold.

“The foundational science and cutting-edge tools we develop will ignite future discoveries, ensuring a robust pipeline of advanced protein-based MCMs for chemical and biological defense,” said Singh, who also directs the Center for Immunoengineering at Georgia Tech. “This will significantly enhance national security and equip our warfighters with next-generation biodefense capabilities."

Traditional animal models often fail to accurately replicate human immune responses, and standard tissue cultures lack the complexity required to study how immune cells interact with pathogens. In contrast, human immune organoids and immune-competent devices — built from human cells — are emerging as groundbreaking research tools. These systems recreate key immune features, such as lymph nodes and mucosal environments, within three-dimensional or microengineered platforms.

“Many organoid and engineering devices, often called organ-on-chip platforms, lack immune integration,” Singh said. “Because immunity sits at the center of human health, these limitations have broad consequences. Immune-competent organ-on-chip platforms extend this concept by combining human cells with microfluidic engineering that simulates blood flow, tissue barriers, and chemical gradients.”

Singh has previously published studies on a synthetic human immune chip and an immunocompetent lung on a chip, and has also teamed up with DeLisa previously to use synthetic immune organoids for immuno-profiling antibacterial MCMs.

“It’s about being able to test far larger numbers of candidate protein-based MCMs in a single experiment—and to do it much faster,” DeLisa said. “Cell-free systems allow us to produce MCMs at unprecedented speed and scale, but traditional evaluation methods can’t keep up with those numbers. By combining cell-free MCM production with immune organoid technology, we can assess the potency of dozens or even hundreds of candidates at a time and characterize the resulting immune responses within just a few days.”

By integrating immune cells with tissues such as lung, gut, skin, or vascular systems, these devices allow scientists to observe immune responses in real time, including cell migration, inflammation, and interactions with pathogens or therapeutics. As biological threats evolve, the development and deployment of immune-competent platforms will be critical for rapid, effective countermeasures.

DTRA’s investment in Singh’s work highlights the urgent national priority of strengthening U.S. biodefense capabilities. The SHIELD Countermeasures platform and its cutting-edge technologies promise to transform the nation’s response to biological threats and help safeguard communities from biological and chemical attacks.

A philanthropic gift from the family of J.P. Singh is helping researchers at Georgia Tech push the boundaries of biomedical innovation.  

Some of Savannah’s many old buildings are expensive to heat and cool, especially in Georgia’s humid summers. They develop leaks. They need routine maintenance. But how does a building owner know where to begin with renovations or repairs? Enter Lamarr.AI, one of the first companies supported by the Partnership for Innovation’s (PIN) new Community Investment program.

“The Community Investment program is matching up faculty-led, faculty-spinoff startup companies that have technology that could be relevant to a community, a government, or to the civic space,” said Katie O’Connor, PIN’s community investment manager. “The company’s product is something that can help a community in a smart cities kind of way.”

Lamarr.AI fits the bill to a T. Its technology and the company grew out of research at Georgia Tech. Lamarr.AI’s technology uses drones, imaging, and artificial intelligence (AI) to assess a building’s envelope and determine the best ways to make these structures more energy efficient.

“The technology is like giving a building an MRI using drones, infrared and regular images, and our own AI,” said Tarek Rakha, Lamarr.AI’s co-founder and CEO. The drones, he explained, detect missing insulation, water intrusion, air escaping, and physical damage. AI and machine learning translate that information into 3-D models that map the defects.

Read more on EI2 Webpage
 

The paper examines various strategies for enhancing the flexibility of data center energy use. One approach is to use backup power systems, such as uninterruptible power supplies, to support the grid during emergencies. Another method involves rerouting computing jobs to different data centers in other locations to balance energy demand. The authors also discuss implementing smart scheduling techniques that shift workloads to off-peak hours, reducing strain on the grid. Additionally, they highlight adjusting processor speeds by lowering CPU (central processing unit) and GPU (graphics processing unit) clock rates to limit power consumption when needed. Finally, the paper suggests pre-cooling data center equipment to limit the energy required for cooling during peak demand periods. Notably, experimental evidence shows that underclocking GPUs can cut power consumption by 40% with only a 22% performance loss, suggesting technical feasibility for demand-response interventions.

Despite these technical options, the authors find that real-world cost considerations and reliability concerns limit widespread adoption. Data center operators generally do not change their behavior in response to electricity prices, as job revenue far outweighs energy costs under normal conditions. For example, a GPU rented at $2 per hour consumes only $0.04 worth of electricity at average prices, making curtailment unattractive except during extreme price spikes. Surveys indicate that operators are reluctant to compromise reliability or deploy backup systems for ancillary services. Consequently, price-based incentives alone are unlikely to drive meaningful flexibility.

Read more on the EPIcenter Webpage
Listen to a podcast on the research here

Kala Jordan has been promoted to Research Scientist II. With a background spanning biology, health informatics, and STEM education, Jordan brings a multidisciplinary approach to her work. She plays a key role in AI‑CARING, leading studies that support the development of personalized collaborative AI systems designed to improve quality of life for older adults.

Noah Posner has been promoted to Senior Research Scientist. As manager of the Interactive Product Design Lab, Posner focuses on interactive experiences grounded in physical interaction. His research spans CAD‑based prototyping, rapid fabrication, and STEAM education, and he teaches courses in physical prototyping and industrial design.

Peter Presti has been promoted to Principal Research Scientist. Over his 22‑year career at Georgia Tech, Presti has collaborated with major industry partners and federal agencies. His research spans sensor systems, biometrics, wearable computing, signal processing, embedded systems, and integrated hardware‑software prototyping.

Richard Starr has been promoted to Senior Research Scientist. Starr oversees the IPaT Secure Data Enclave, developing and managing the institute’s secure infrastructure for healthcare data. His work ensures campus‑wide compliance with HIPAA, IRB requirements, and partnership agreements.

Andrew Zhao has been promoted to Research Scientist II. Zhao, a Georgia Tech alumnus with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science, specializes in social computing. His work examines how social media facilitates information flow and connection, particularly around mental health and elections. He supports the CANDOR Portal and AI‑CARING projects, contributing full‑stack development, data pipelines, LLM fine‑tuning, and infrastructure management.

“These promotions are wonderful and well deserved. Hearty congratulations to Andrew, Kala, Richard, Noah, and Peter!” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT.

“These promotions are a testament to the outstanding capabilities and contributions of IPaT’s research faculty community,” added Maribeth Gandy Coleman, director of research for IPaT.

As new data centers continue to be built and proposed in Georgia, counties and municipalities across the state are considering how to guide this growth. EPIcenter’s data center dashboard provides policymakers, planners, researchers, and community stakeholders with a centralized resource to better understand how data center regulations are being developed and applied across Georgia and the U.S.

“Our Data Center Hub provides Georgia communities with a one-stop shop to understand how their neighbors are managing land-use regulations for data centers,” said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter. “It brings together clear, accessible information to help jurisdictions plan when data center growth occurs in their area.”

The dashboard is organized around five thematic areas commonly addressed in data center land-use regulations: Site Planning and Building Design, Infrastructure and Utilities, Environmental and Community Protections, Public Safety and Security, and Lifecycle Governance. Within each theme, users can explore specific regulatory topics and access the relevant ordinances enacted by Georgia communities.

To build the dashboard, EPIcenter researchers conducted a comprehensive review of municipal codes across the state.

“We reviewed municipal codes for about 180 cities and counties across Georgia and identified ordinances that specifically address data center development,” said Yang You, EPIcenter’s research associate who developed the project. “In total, we found 19 data center-specific topics that ordinances tend to cover. We analyzed ordinances across jurisdictions and organized their ordinance provisions into topics such as building placement, setbacks, infrastructure, and environmental considerations to make it easier to compare how different jurisdictions regulate data centers.”

You added that the dashboard also incorporates examples from outside of Georgia. By gathering ordinances from other states and pairing them with Georgia-specific examples, EPIcenter aims to provide a clear framework to help communities efficiently address data center land-use regulation.

The Georgia Data Center Ordinance Hub is available through the Energy Policy and Innovation Center website.

The primary aim of the Atlanta Student Community-Engaged Research (CER) Network is to use a peer learning approach to train graduate students with the skills to co-lead community-engaged and locally focused research, while at the same time building relationships with local community organizations. This approach will help address local sustainability and societal challenges, lay the foundation for community-engaged research programs, and enable young researchers interested in this work to thrive in the Atlanta area. Initial funding for the pilot program was provided by the Atlanta Global Studies Center and the Georgia Tech Provost's Excellence in Graduate Studies fund.

The program received a total of 41 applications from graduate students from Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, and Emory University. Thirty-five master’s and Ph.D. students were accepted into the cohort, spanning a wide range of disciplines, from the humanities, sciences, design,  public health, engineering, and computing. The program has additionally engaged eight senior-level undergraduates from Spelman College to learn about graduate school tracks with community-engaged research opportunities.

This program provides a unique opportunity to learn engagement and leadership skills not typically taught in graduate programs. Students are attending one training a month over the course of the Spring 2026 semester. Here, they learn about the diversity of sustainability-focused, community-based organizations in the area, develop skills to engage meaningfully with community partners in research projects, and improve the ways they communicate to the public about research.

The Georgia Tech Provost's Excellence in Graduate Studies fund will provide a $2,500 stipend to five Georgia Tech students who will work on a research project with a community partner organization. These projects will take place over the spring and summer semesters this year, providing opportunities for graduate students to apply their newly acquired community-engagement skills to on-the-ground research, while also opening a new pathway for Georgia Tech’s engagement with community partners.

Fellows and projects include:

• Irene Jacob, M.S., city and regional planning, will work with the Food Well Alliance to update the implementation strategy for their 10-year community garden survey.
• Ethan Zhao, M.S., human-computer interaction, will work with Historic Westside Gardens to integrate new technologies into their community garden spaces and assess the benefits to the communities they serve.
• Virginia Cason, M.S., sustainable energy and environmental management, will work with Science for Georgia to translate data gathering and analysis into community-centered narratives.
• Sharon Rachel, Ph.D., history and sociology of technology and science, will work with the HBCU Green Fund to examine the environmental and community impacts of data center projects in Atlanta.
• Ella Neumann, Ph.D., interactive computing, will work with the South River Watershed Alliance to document and communicate the history and impact of the City of Atlanta's combined sewer consent decree, and assess if the intended results of the decree have been met.

Applicants expressed their passion for community-engaged research projects and working directly with local community members and organizations:

“Lived experience is just as valuable as academic expertise, and meaningful change only occurs when both work together. I think that this takes approaching problems with a lot of humility, care, and a genuine desire to listen to communities and their needs.” -Virginia Cason, M.S., sustainable energy and environmental management

“I want to do research that stems from a theoretical question, but is feasible in reality and benefits the community. One of the most efficient ways to achieve this goal is through doing research WITH the community.” -Keke Li, M.S., analytics

“Community-engaged research is not only a methodology, but a commitment to partnership, humility, and shared power.” -Grace Fraser, M.S., city and regional planning

“To me, community-engaged research means working with people, not just for them. CER is not only a method but also a mindset. True impact comes when research and community experience grow together.” -Bingjie Lu, Ph.D., civil engineering

The community partners involved in the program are equally enthusiastic about community-engaged research. As Fred Conrad of Food Well Alliance put it, “Food Well has been intentional about engaging our constituents since we began, and this is not only a continuation of that effort, but a significant refinement of how we accomplish that. I think all of us have deepened our understanding of the CER process since we began this journey.”

Read the full story >>

A Career Built on Service and Adaptability

Hanson’s journey in higher education began immediately after high school when she joined Purdue University and discovered her passion for supporting students, faculty, and academic communities. She carried that passion across multiple institutions before landing at Tech, building a career grounded in adaptability, resilience, and people-centered service.

Her Georgia Tech chapter began in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), where she supported the Water Resources Engineering group. There, she became a trusted resource for students and faculty alike — a steady presence who celebrated their successes, listened during challenges, and helped build a sense of community. 

Hanson credits Lisa Tuttle in CEE with helping her navigate the Georgia Tech landscape. With Tuttle’s help, she also discovered a talent for event planning and administrative leadership, eventually serving as administration manager and supporting the CEE chair with meetings, alumni engagement, and major departmental initiatives. One of her most memorable experiences was coordinating a trip to NATO headquarters in Belgium, an opportunity that deepened her appreciation for global collaboration and institutional history.

“Crystal was an extraordinary contributor throughout her time in CEE, first in the Water Resources Engineering group and later as the trusted manager of the entire administrative support team,” said Donald Webster, Karen and John Huff School Chair in CEE. “In every role, she brought dedication, professionalism, and genuine care for others. Crystal consistently went above and beyond to support the people of CEE — not only through professional challenges, but also during moments of personal crisis — always with compassion, steadiness, and grace. Her presence made our community stronger, more resilient, and more humane.”

A Trusted Partner in Research Leadership

Hanson later transitioned to the Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR) office, where she worked under leaders including Stephen Cross, Christopher Jones, Giselle Bennett, Raheem Beyah, and Julia Kubanek. Her time in this environment was formative. She absorbed the complexities of research administration, budgeting, and strategic planning, all while contributing to a culture where staff felt valued and included.

“When I joined the EVPR office, and it had only three or four people, it seemed everyone was doing two or three jobs,” said Christopher Jones, who joined the office in 2013 and is now the John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “Crystal was an immediate fit, bringing with her organizational and management skills, a sense of humor, and an appreciation of our mission.  She is someone whom I always look forward to seeing, both then and now.”

After Beyah left the EVPR office to become the dean and Southern Company Chair in the College of Engineering, Kubanek became the new vice president for Interdisciplinary Research (VPIR). Together, Kubanek and Hanson built and expanded the VPIR team, helping to shape its operations and identity.

Among her many contributions, Hanson initiated the Interdisciplinary Research Spotlight Awards, recognizing staff and research faculty who go above and beyond in the Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRIs). She also shepherded the Research Faculty Teaching Fellows program, ensuring that research faculty across Georgia Tech and the Georgia Tech Research Institute had opportunities to develop teaching skills in partnership with the Center for Teaching and Learning.

The Connector at the Heart of the VPIR Office

Crystal describes herself as someone who prefers to work behind the scenes: cleaning up after events, coordinating logistics, and taking on nearly any task that needs to be done. 

“Crystal is the ultimate behind-the-scenes master organizer and people connector,” said Kubanek. “She develops individual relationships that enable her to organize, in short order, a meeting of numerous campus leaders whose calendars should be impossible to align. She comes bearing snacks and a smile and is the heart of our operation.”

Hanson’s deep institutional knowledge and extensive network positioned her to navigate Georgia Tech’s complex landscape. She serves as a bridge between the VPIR office, the IRIs, GTRI, and campus partners, ensuring that communication flows smoothly and people feel supported, informed, and connected.

“Her deep institutional knowledge and strong networks across campus meant she almost always knew the right person to connect with or the best way to move something forward,” said Punya Mardhanan, a former colleague in VPIR and now assistant director of business operations for the Space Research Institute. “Crystal works incredibly efficiently and often completes things before anyone asks. She never seeks recognition for the many ways she supports her team.”

A Colleague, Advisor, and Steady Source of Wisdom

Hanson’s colleagues consistently describe her as someone who not only gets things done but also makes everyone around her better.

“She’s like a mother hen to the VPIR team,” said Rob Kadel, executive director of research program administration. “I can always go to Crystal and say, ‘Who should I talk to about this?’ and she will know exactly who to talk to. She is never afraid to speak her mind. She’s a trusted advisor.”

Her leadership has also extended beyond formal responsibilities. She played a key role in designing the VPIR workspace during renovations, coordinated team retreats and bonding activities, and infused every gathering with energy and warmth.

“She cares so much about the Georgia Tech community,” said Colly Mitchell, director of events and engagement for the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “Crystal is incredibly responsive, helpful, and friendly. She brings a big burst of energy to every gathering.”

“Words that immediately come to mind when I think of Crystal are collaborative, dependable, responsive, and a true breadth of knowledge,” adds Cynthia Moore, director of operations for the Institute for People and Technology, who worked alongside Hanson for nearly a decade. “Crystal will truly be missed, along with her knowledge of all things Georgia Tech and research.”

A Legacy of Generosity and Excellence

After nearly 14 years at Georgia Tech, Hanson will retire on April 1. She will be remembered as someone who connected people, solved problems, and always went above and beyond. 

According to Raheem Beyah, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, “Crystal was simply exceptional. She was a creative thought partner who provided outstanding support and strategic advice, and she became a dear friend. I am a better leader after working with Crystal, and Georgia Tech is a better place because of her. I can’t think of many people who deserve a wonderful retirement more than she does.”

Hanson looks forward to spending more time with her family, including her two daughters and two granddaughters, whose busy schedules she is eager to be part of. She and her husband have plans for travel, concerts — including those of her son-in-law’s band, Grouplove — and perhaps even a cruise around the world.

Georgia Tech extends its deepest gratitude to Crystal Hanson for her years of exceptional service, leadership, and dedication. Her impact will continue to resonate across the VPIR office, the IRIs, and the broader research community.

We wish her joy, adventure, and well-deserved rest in the next chapter of her life.