This scenario becomes more likely for hospitals of all sizes as medical technology advances, adding more devices to constantly growing networks.

With the help of a contract award for up to $12 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) UPGRADE program, a team of researchers led by the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy at Georgia Tech will begin developing an advanced cybersecurity platform to help hospitals proactively identify and fix vulnerabilities in their software, devices, and networks. 

“This is a new area of security research,” said Associate Professor Brendan Saltaformaggio. “We not only have to worry about the cybersecurity aspect, but the physical security as well. Our research must be very accurate to make sure patients are safe from cyberthreats.” 

Starting next month, the team of researchers on the Hospital-Integrated Vulnerability Identification and Proactive Remediation (H-VIPER) project will begin developing a system they are calling the Whole-Hospital Simulation (WHS).

The system maps out the online network for hospitals of all sizes and enables IT teams to test their cyber capabilities before going live. The system can also identify threats, such as missed software updates, and alert the IT department.

“Hospitals have thousands of devices connected to their networks, including medical devices,” said Saltaformaggio. “A hospital like Children’s has a huge attack surface. A smaller hospital might have different challenges, but possible entry points are still there.”

The team has already interviewed IT teams at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Hamilton Health Care System. Their findings have provided them with a better understanding of how to scale the WHS system to meet each hospital’s specific needs.

“Hospitals IT processes are notoriously sensitive to disruption, because essentially any kind of down time for rebooting a system or lack of availability can create chaos in the clinical environment,” said Stoddard Manikin, chief information security officer for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“Our goal is to create very smooth processes and workflow for our patient facing staff and providers to deliver the best care possible. This research opportunity gives us a chance to develop news ways where we can look at these sensitive medical devices and things on the IT network in a healthcare environment and potentially remediate vulnerabilities without taking them out of service.” 

Saltaformaggio and his colleagues found that, regardless of size, security remains retroactive and not proactive. By leveraging their diverse expertise, the research team will ensure that the H-VIPER project addresses vulnerabilities at every layer of hospital technology, from the network to the hardware. 

The School of Cybersecurity and Privacy will lead this initiative, with faculty from the H-VIPER project also representing the College of Computing, the College of Engineering, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the School of Computer Science, and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, along with support from their Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers. 

Around 30 Georgia Tech researchers will partner with Emory University, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Hamilton Health Care System, Tufts University, Iowa State University, and Narf Industries. 

Georgia Tech faculty working on the project are:

• Associate Professor Brendan Saltaformaggio
• Regents’ Professor Wenke Lee
• Professor Taesoo Kim
• Professor Fabian Monrose
• Assistant Professor Frank Li
• Associate Professor Saman Zonouz
• Associate Professor Daniel Genkin
• Research Professor Sukarno Mertoguno
• Senior Research Scientist Trevor Lewis  

Danfei Xu, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, is introducing new models that provide robots with “on-the-job” training.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Xu its CAREER award given to early career faculty. The award will enable Xu to expand his research and refine his models, which could accelerate the process of robot deployment and alleviate manufacturers from the burden of achieving perfection.

“The main problem we’re trying to tackle is how to allow robots to learn on the job,” Xu said. “How should it self-improve based on the performance or the new requirements or new user preferences in each home or working environment? You cannot expect a robot manufacturer to program all of that.

“The challenging thing about robotics is that the robot must get feedback from the physical environment. It must try to solve a problem to understand the limits of its abilities so it can decide how to improve its own performance.”

As with humans, Xu views practice as the most effective way for a robot to improve a skill. His models train the robot to identify the point at which it failed in its task performance.

“It identifies that skill and sets up an environment where it can practice,” he said. “If it needs to improve opening a drawer, it will navigate itself to the drawer and practice opening it.”

The models allow the robot to split tasks into smaller parts and evaluate its own skill level using reward functions. Cooking dinner, for example, can be divided into steps like turning on the stove and opening the fridge, which are necessary to achieve the overall goal.

“Planning is a complex problem because you must predict what’s going to happen in the physical world,” Xu said. “We use machine learning techniques that our group has developed over the past two years, using generated models to generate positive futures. They’re very good at modeling long-horizon phenomena.

“The robot knows when it’s failed because there’s a value that tells it how well it performed the task and whether it received its reward. While we don’t know how to tell the robot why it failed, we have ways for it to improve its skills based on that measurement.” 

One of the biggest barriers that keeps many robots from being made available for public use is the pressure on manufacturers to make the robot as close to perfect as possible at deployment. Xu said it’s more practical to accept that robots will have learning gaps that need to be filled and to implement more efficient real-world learning models.

“We work under the pressure of getting everything correct before deployment,” he said. “We need to meet the basic safety requirements, but in terms of competence, it is difficult to get that perfect at deployment. This takes some of the pressure off because it will be able to self-adapt.”

Virtual Workspace for Data Workers

Yalong Yang, another assistant professor in the School of IC, also received the NSF CAREER Award for a research proposal that will design augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) workspaces for data workers. 

“In 10 years, I envision everyone will use AR/VR in their office, and it will replace their laptop or their monitor,” Yang said.

Yang said he is also working with Google on the project and using Google Gemini to bring conventional applications to immersive space, with data tools being the most complicated systems to re-design for immersive environments.

The immersive workspace and interface will also enable teams of data workers to collaborate and share their data in real-time.

“I want to support the end-to-end process,” Yang said. “We have visualization tools for data, but it’s not enough. Data science is a pipeline — from collecting data to processing, visualizing, modeling and then communicating. If you only support one, people will need to switch to other platforms for the other steps.”

Yang also noted that prior research has shown that VR can enhance cognitive abilities, such as memory and attention and support multitasking. The results of his project could lead to maximizing worker efficiency without them feeling strained.

“We all have a cognitive limit in our working memory. Using AR/VR can increase those limits and process more information. We can expand people’s spatial ability to help them build a better mental model of the data presented to them.”

Yang was also recently named a 2025 Google Research Scholar as he seeks to build a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that converts mobile apps into 3D immersive environments.

Jingye Xu, Fourth-year Ph.D. 
Focus Area: Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization 

How has the Beerman Presidential Fellowship impacted your academic journey or research opportunities?
The Beerman Fellowship provides me with both financial flexibility and academic confidence. It helps me to conduct ambitious research where pursuing some research questions that are high‐risk but potentially high reward. It also signals recognition of my potential and help me to build my confidence.

Could you share more about your research focus area? Is there a problem you hope your research will solve or a system you would like to improve?
My research focuses on integer programming, a core area of operations research that deals with optimization problems involving discrete decisions. Many real-world systems—such as supply chain design, scheduling, and network planning—depend on solving large and complex integer programs efficiently. I hope my work contributes to developing methods that not only improve computational performance but also make optimization more accessible for practical, large-scale decision-making.

Georgia Tech’s ISyE program is consistently ranked No. 1 nationally. In your experience, what makes ISyE such a strong environment for success?
ISyE is unique in both technical depth and breadth. The faculty like Arkadi Nemirovski and Alexander Shapiro are leaders in their optimization. The program’s breadth—spanning optimization, statistics, machine learning, and applied domains—creates an environment where interdisciplinary ideas thrive. Students are constantly exposed to real-world problems, ensuring that research is both theoretically strong and practically relevant.

What factors influenced your decision to continue your education at Georgia Tech?
During my undergraduate studies, I first encountered Arkadi Nemirovski’s textbook on optimization, which deeply shaped how I viewed the field and inspired me to pursue research in integer programming. When I later discovered that Georgia Tech’s ISyE program is home to Professor Nemirovski and other leading scholars in optimization, it became clear that this was the ideal place to continue my education. The chance to learn directly from faculty whose work had already influenced me, combined with ISyE’s unmatched reputation in operations research, made Georgia Tech the natural choice.

How have ISyE faculty or resources shaped your learning or research so far?
My research is shaped by many ISye faculties. For example, taking Professor Arkadi Nemirovski’s convex optimization class was a formative experience for me. His lectures not only deepened my understanding of fundamental optimization theory but also showed me how mathematical rigor can be combined with practical insight. That experience has strongly influenced how I now approach research in integer programming, by focusing on both the theoretical foundations and their real-world relevance. Beyond coursework, ISyE’s research seminars and collaborative environment have further broadened my perspective and sharpened my research skills.

Rui Gong, Third-year Ph.D.
Focus Area: Operations Research 

How has the support of the Beerman Presidential Fellowship enabled you to pursue your research goals and growth at ISyE? The Beerman Fellowship has given me meaningful flexibility in my research. In my first year, it allowed me to serve as a research assistant rather than a teaching assistant, which freed sustained time to develop ideas and build momentum. The support also let me explore collaborations with multiple professors without worrying about their immediate funding, so I could try different topics and ultimately commit to a direction I’m excited about. Just as important, the fellowship reduces financial pressure, so I can focus fully on my studies and research.

How does your research aim to make a difference, whether by solving a problem or improving a system? My work sits at the intersection of combinatorial optimization, dynamic programming, and convex relaxations. I design semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for complex combinatorial and dynamic decision problems. For example, in stochastic scheduling—where customers requested schedules or job characteristics are random—exact solutions are often intractable. Carefully crafted relaxations preserve essential structure while yielding tractable approximations and performance guarantees. My goal is to provide tools that not only solve these problems faster and more reliably in practice but also offer insights other researchers can adapt to related problems.

What do you think makes ISyE such a unique and supportive environment for students? ISyE combines depth in optimization, statistics, machine learning, healthcare and stochastic processes with a collaborative, intellectually open culture. Students benefit from rigorous coursework, active seminars, and mentoring from faculty who span theory and high-impact applications—so you can do first-rate theory while staying close to real systems. I’ve also found the faculty and staff exceptionally professional and responsive; whether it’s research, coursework, or logistics, there’s always someone prepared to help, which keeps projects moving.

What drew you to Georgia Tech when you were considering your next step in education? Fit and focus. My interests align closely with ISyE faculty, offering both strong mathematical training and opportunities to test ideas on meaningful applications. I was also drawn to the program’s support for industry engagement and internships. Finally, the BeermanFellowship was a major factor—it reduces teaching obligations and gives me the time needed to pursue ambitious research early in my PhD.

What role have ISyE faculty played in shaping your experience as a student and researcher? Faculty mentorship has influenced how I pose questions as much as how I answer them. Regular meetings and reading groups refined my problem formulations and helped connect ideas across optimization, probability, and computation. Seminars and visiting speakers have introduced techniques that directly informed my current projects, accelerating both the depth and the scope of my work.

Jyotishka Ray Choudhury, First-year Ph.D.
Focus Area: Machine Learning 

How has the Beerman Presidential Fellowship shaped your journey as a graduate student at ISyE? The Fellowship has been a tremendous support for me. Of course, it eases financial pressures during my Ph.D., but more importantly, it is a great honor that motivates me to pursue ambitious research directions with confidence. This recognition encourages me to push my work in theoretical statistics and machine learning to the highest standards.

How does your research aim to make a difference, whether by solving a problem or improving a system? My research lies in theoretical statistics and machine learning, with a focus on problems in high-dimensional settings. I study two types of problems: statistical inference when data is (a) incomplete and (b) evolving over time. For example, when parts of a dataset are missing completely at random, or when there is an abrupt change in the underlying data distribution (a “change-point”). These situations arise naturally in large-scale applications such as medical monitoring, finance, and modern data science pipelines. A central goal of my work is to design principled methods that are both statistically reliable and computationally efficient, so that practitioners can detect changes or handle missing data, reinforced with strong theoretical guarantees.

ISyE is consistently ranked the top program in the country. What do you feel contributes to that success? What makes ISyE unique is its remarkable scope combined with rigor. If we combine the research interests of all the faculty, the department spans an extraordinary range -- from optimization, statistics, and probability theory to operations management and machine learning. This creates an environment where one can explore both deep theoretical questions and impactful applications. As a first-year student, I’ve already found ISyE to be highly collaborative. I was always encouraged to think broadly, ask difficult questions, and connect ideas across disciplines. The culture is both challenging and supportive, which I think is key to its sustained excellence.

What drew you to Georgia Tech when you were considering your next step in education? I chose Georgia Tech, ISyE in particular, because it offers the right balance between theory and applications. My research is strongly theoretical, but I wanted to be in a place where theory is closely connected to real-world systems and impactful research. The faculty members at ISyE have outstanding research profiles, spanning both rigorous statistical foundations and meaningful applications in data science, engineering, and operations. Combined with a collaborative research culture and Atlanta’s vibrant academic community, this made Georgia Tech the ideal choice for my Ph.D. journey. Discussions with my thesis advisors (both of whom are in ISyE) have been central in shaping my academic direction, encouraging me to approach problems with both rigor and creativity. Weekly seminars, courses taught by faculty members, and talks by invited researchers from leading universities and labs have further broadened my perspective. Together, these opportunities motivate me to frame my work in ways that are both deep and impactful.

A newly released study confirms what many shippers have suspected: Atlanta-bound cargo through Savannah offers shippers lower costs, greater reliability, and similar transit times compared to West Coast ports. 

To find your librarian team, visit our experts page or e-mail us at academicengagement@library.gatech.edu.

“We’re proud to roll out this new model to campus,” said Liz Holdsworth, Head of Academic Engagement at the Georgia Tech Library. “In this past, individual librarians served as liaisons for each of the Institute’s schools. Tech’s recent growth requires a new, more strategic model ensuring researchers find the best resources for their work.” 

Each Georgia Tech college now has in place a team of librarians ready to help with everything from finding an article to navigating open access publishing. This new team model for research assistance makes it easier to connect, get research help, and utilize Library resources.  

Going forward, seven teams of Library experts will serve Georgia Tech colleges: 

• College of Computing
• College of Design
• College of Engineering
• College of Lifetime Learning
• College of Sciences
• Ivan Allen College of the Liberal Arts
• Scheller College of Business

The librarians, archivists, and public associates on those teams have a wide range of knowledge and skills. 

Our teams will answer research questions and instruction and consultation requests related to the disciplines in their college, along with questions about library services or potential collaborations from faculty, staff, and students,” said Holdsworth. 

Congratulations to the following poster competition winners.  

Executive Vice President for Research winners 

Nicole Aiosa, College of Sciences 

Abigail Diering, College of Engineering 

Andrew Cazier, College of Engineering 

Christian Coletti, College of Engineering 

Anamik Jhunjhunwala, College of Engineering 

Kaitlyn Otte, College of Sciences 

Arpit Narechania, College of Computing 

Christina McDonald, College of Engineering 

Nina Sara Fraticelli-Guzman, College of Engineering 

Megan McSweeney, College of Engineering 

College of Engineering winners  

Mariah Schrum 

Tanner Hickman 

Walter Parker 

Adam Garlow 

College of Sciences winners  

Sonia Bhattacharya 

Jessica Zahn 

Iramofu Dominic 

College of Computing winners  

Miuyin Yong Wong 

Jonathan Womack 

Abhinav Gullapalli 

Matthew Landen 

Adam Coscia 

Office of the Provost’s Award 

Jordan Kocher, College of Engineering 

Jennifer Leestma, College of Engineering 

Batin Karahasanoglu, College of Engineering 

Krishma Singal, College of Sciences 

Ivy Chang (Exhibition Competition Winner), College of Engineering 

CRIDC is the product of a collaboration between the Graduate Student Government Association (GSGA) and the Graduate Career Development Team from the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate and Postdoctoral Education. Several years ago, the event was created when the student-led poster competition, then known as the Georgia Tech Research and Innovation Competition (GTRIC) was combined with the Graduate Career Symposium.  

CRIDC also features an Innovation Competition, in which ten graduate student finalists offered three-minute presentations to a panel of judges. All participants met with Tech’s VentureLab to explore grants and programs that can help them pursue startup businesses and technology licensing opportunities.  

Congratulations to the winners of the 2023 CRIDC Innovation Competition:  

1st place: Pradosh Dash 

Runner-up: Simin Nasiri 

Runner-up: Batin Karahasanoglu 

 In addition to the poster competition, this year’s CRIDC also featured an employee networking brunch as well as four career panels. For more information about CRIDC, please visit https://grad.gatech.edu/cridc.

Second place was awarded to Team Sensible, made up of juniors Oluwatooni Alade, computer science; Brandon Parker, computer science; Angela Duodu, computer science; Jesus Sierra Jr., computer science; and Hadley Williams, computer engineering. Sensible is a browser extension that rates the sustainability of products users find online and offers alternative products for items that score low. 

Third place went to Team Onyc, which includes Yasmine Green, a first-year mechanical engineering student. Onyc replaces the computer mouse with a wearable alternative that allows users to control computer navigation with the movement of their fingertips and fingernails.

Dozens of teams competed at the showcase, which is the culmination of I2P, a CREATE-X course focused on supporting students in creating solutions. The course offers research credit (for undergraduates only), up to $500 in reimbursements for physical material expenses, the opportunity to work collaboratively across majors, and faculty mentorship. It is held in the spring, summer, and fall, and it’s open to undergraduate and graduate students from all majors.  

Read our Q&A with the winner and stay tuned for our interviews with the other winning teams.

Team Carchive

Jack Rose, Junior, Computer Science

Why did you pursue your startup? 

Rose: I’ve been into cars my whole life. Trying to track cars is my hobby. There are always edge cases, and how are you planning to attack them? Because I spent so much time, especially working with other people, getting this data, and trying to figure this out, I became very adept at understanding the data. The dealers, collectors especially, were trying to understand the whole story, so they would come to me. But the way I had to do it was spreadsheets all over the place, and I was trying to find a solution to keep it all in one spot. I couldn’t find a way to do it, so I said, “Well, I’ll build it.” And then I got into I2P.

What was challenging about building your prototype over the semester? 

Rose: This semester, it was mainly trying to come up with the schema and how to physically account for the edge cases. It’s not easy; it took a lot of deep thought, discussions with other people who are into these niche cars, and understanding what details we needed. I’m still trying to add more things and figure it out. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough.

What was your favorite part about I2P? 

Rose: Adding features that I was looking for. For example, let’s say I was looking for a car. Filter all the cars over 25 years old and imported to the U.S. — I can easily search my database.

What would you say to students who are interested in entrepreneurship? 

Rose: It’s always, “You should have started sooner.” I’ve always thought about it. My biggest advice is to just start doing it, even if it’s a little bit here, a little bit there. If it doesn’t work out, at least you’ve tried.

A photo gallery from the Spring 2025 I2P Showcase can be viewed on the CREATE-X Flickr page.

Students interested in the I2P program can register for the upcoming summer and fall semesters. The deadline for Summer 2025 is May 14, and the deadline for Fall 2025 is May 16.

CREATE-X's next event, Demo Day, will take place on Aug. 28 at Exhibition Hall, where more than 100 startups will be on display. Attendees can experience the newest batch of founders leveraging the latest technology to solve pressing challenges. The event offers an opportunity to network with entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and passionate enthusiasts, and supports the next generation of innovators. Register for Demo Day today and be a part of these founders’ journeys!  

The weeklong, all-expenses-paid program offers university-affiliated innovators the chance to refine their innovations, engage in customer discovery, and network with industry leaders and peers at SXSW. The annual festival celebrates technology, film, music, education, and culture. Students participated in a competitive application process, which involved submitting applications, meeting specific evaluation criteria, and being selected by a panel of industry experts, mentors, and SXSW organizers.

Yolanda Payne, the students’ Startup Lab instructor, presented the SXSW opportunity in class.

"My goal is to be their biggest cheerleader,” she explained. “I had great teachers who helped me get to where I am today, and I strive to emulate their support. I’m always willing to guide students toward new opportunities."

She learned about the SXSW immersive cohort from Nakia Melecio, director of the National Science Foundation I-Corps Southeast Hub. The $15 million initiative crosses nine major research universities in the southern U.S. and accelerates the translation of deep tech research into commercial ventures. The hub works closely with entrepreneurial faculty, students, and researchers to equip them with the tools, networks, and support to bring their innovations to market.

Melecio plays a central role in identifying and advancing strategic opportunities for university partners and their entrepreneurial teams. “When the opportunity to participate in SXSW arose, I recognized it as an ideal platform to showcase the talent and innovation coming out of our region.”

Melecio added that Startup Lab is ideal for amplifying NSF I-Corps’ goals because of the course’s proven track record of fostering hands-on learning and commercialization readiness. “Startup Lab helps prepare students not just to think entrepreneurially, but to act on their ideas with confidence and a structured path forward. It was a natural fit for this opportunity.”

Payne says the experience students gained in Startup Lab helped prepare them for the immersive cohort. “The knowledge is being solidified by an experience you’re having in my class and the real world.”

Chopra agrees that Startup Lab teaches essential business development fundamentals and customer discovery principles, skills that are relevant to the SXSW program. She recommends the course to other students and emphasizes the value of combining engineering or technical backgrounds with entrepreneurship skills.

“We take a lot of classes that are directly related to our major, and they're very technical. But when it comes to wanting to start something of your own or even understanding how startups work, it's completely different than the rest of our coursework.”

Startup Lab is a three-credit course that focuses on evidence-based entrepreneurship. This hands-on class covers ideation, teamwork, customer discovery, minimum viable products, the business model canvas, and other topics. Students learn how to launch a startup by integrating in-class lectures with practical, out-of-class activities, including interviewing potential customers and refining their startup ideas based on real-world feedback. 

The program provides access to valuable resources, mentorship from seasoned entrepreneurs, and a supportive community to help students develop their startups. Startup Lab and NSF I-Corps are also exploring other industry showcases for student entrepreneurs like SXSW. 

Chen chose Startup Lab to pursue his entrepreneurial interests. “I knew that Georgia Tech had a really good startup culture, so I researched what they had to offer, and Startup Lab was the first step." He also noted Payne's impact as an instructor. "The best part is how much she cares about the topic. She has a lot of background knowledge and is passionate.”

Startup Lab is unique because it "de-risks the business model,” Payne says. Many entrepreneurs first build their products and then talk to potential customers. However, Startup Lab students perform customer discovery, sharing their ideas with potential end users, listening to their needs and feedback, and then building the product. 

Peng recalls a powerful moment of pitching an idea for an app to streamline MARTA operations. “I had a fun time coming up with this idea. We learned a lot about interviewing, coming up with possible solutions, and refining our idea,” she says. "Being surrounded by so many brilliant individuals at Georgia Tech makes it easy to get idea formation or networking connections you need for your idea to succeed."

Aridgides has ambitious post-program goals, envisioning creating change through entrepreneurship. "I want to start a company to change the world for the better and make a big impact. That's my life goal. I think through a company, I can achieve that."

Payne reminds students that they possess something many adults lack: time to explore different ideas. She also says Startup Lab can help students value and see their ideas in new ways. 

“They don't recognize that the product they're working on could be pursued through entrepreneurship or think of themselves as entrepreneurs. And even if they don't pursue it, it helps them in all aspects of life because business and capitalism are part of what we do every day.”

If you’re a student interested in adding entrepreneurship to your course schedule, registration for the summer and fall semesters opens on April 15. In addition to Startup Lab, students also have the opportunity to build a prototype with support through Idea to Prototype and CREATE-X Capstone Design. 

With strengths in Input and Analysis, Cappelli loves discovering new information and often goes “down the rabbit hole” with research. As an Achiever and an Arranger, Alemdar enjoys synthesizing data and getting things done. With their combined strengths they are detail-oriented while also focused on the big picture, and together they catch things the other has missed. Alemdar explains, “With different strengths, people don’t have to be the same, and they don’t have to do everything.” For this reason, they are enthusiastic about the benefits of CliftonStrengths for team dynamics. As Cappelli puts it, “the StrengthsFinder helps avoid and mitigate conflict, because you better understand others, which creates a better team environment.” By appreciating each other’s strengths, team members collaborate instead of competing.

Alemdar and Cappelli are passionate about the benefits of diverse interdisciplinary research teams. “Diverse teams lead to different perspectives,” Cappelli remarks. “Interdisciplinary research moves the field forward and gets beyond narrow perspectives – creating new knowledge that’s not siloed.” Race and gender diversity as well as disciplinary diversity, Alemdar adds, are key to driving innovation in collaborative research: “It’s a modern way of problem-solving.”

For such teams to be effective, thoughtful cross-disciplinary communication is essential – translating unfamiliar terms, asking questions, and actively listening. Cappelli draws upon his Individualization Strength to understand other people’s points of view, and Alemdar draws upon her Communication Strength to synthesize data for researchers across the social sciences and hard sciences. Cappelli’s experiences collaborating with assessment teams in graduate school showed him that “communicating about projects is vital to success on cross-disciplinary teams” because there are so many “different perspectives with different lingo.” For example, he elaborates, “the term ‘assessment’ means something different across fields. In Education, it means testing, whereas, in another field, it might mean evaluating.” To avoid communication pitfalls with key concepts lost in translation, he says, “you need to learn how to talk to someone and ask the right questions.” Alemdar agrees: “Listening leads to better outcomes.”

In addition to their research partnership, Alemdar and Cappelli work in multiple teams on a daily basis. As the Associate Director and Principal Research Scientist at the Georgia Institue of Technology Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC), Alemdar supervises collaborative teams doing data analysis. As a Research Associate at CEISMC as well as a doctoral student in Educational Policy Studies, Cappelli does almost all of his assessment work with teams of cross-disciplinary evaluators. And in their roles doing assessment work (Alemdar as co-PI and Cappelli as a team member) for the NSF-IGE grant-funded project “Integrating Team Science into the STEM Graduate Training Experience,” they collaborate with a cross-disciplinary team of researchers to innovate team science training for graduate students.

With their cutting-edge research in curricular assessment, Alemdar and Cappelli not only bring valuable leadership to the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative but also model harmonious teamwork dynamic in action.

As Alemdar puts it, “Collaboration is a 21st-century skill – you have to collaborate!”

Cappelli agrees: “Practice what you preach – we’re directly using the skills we’re teaching.”

Written By: Effective Team Dynamics (ETD)

This is the first article in a two-part series featuring Meltem Alemdar and Christopher Cappelli. The next post will cover their assessment work on the NSF-IGE grant-funded project Integrating Team Science into the STEM Graduate Training Experience.

The Effective Team Dynamics (ETD) initiative at Georgia Tech was developed with the intention of reshaping team experiences in a positive way through research-driven methods and reflective evaluations of thought and behavior patterns.

Now, Zhigang Peng, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and graduate students Phuc Mach and Chang Ding, alongside researchers at the Scientific and Technological Research Institution of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) and researchers at the University of Missouri, are using small seismic sensors to better understand just how, why, and when these earthquakes are occurring.

Funded by an NSF RAPID grant, the project is unique in that it aims to actively respond to the crisis while it’s still happening. National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grants are used when there is a severe urgency with regard to availability of or access to data, facilities or specialized equipment, including quick-response research on natural or anthropogenic disasters and other similar unanticipated events.

In an effort to better map the aftershocks of the earthquake event — which can occur weeks or months after the main event — the team placed approximately 120 small sensors, called nodes, in the East Anatolian fault region this past May. Their deployment continues through the summer. 

It’s the first time sensors like this have been deployed in Turkey, says Peng.

“These sensors are unique in that they can be placed easily and efficiently," he explains. "With internal batteries that can work up to one month when fully charged, they’re buried in the ground and can be deployed within minutes, while most other seismic sensors need solar panels or other power sources and take much longer time and space to deploy.” Each node is about the size of a 2-liter soda bottle, and can measure ground movement in three directions.

 “The primary reason we’re deploying these sensors quickly following the two mainshocks is to study the physical mechanisms of how earthquakes trigger each,” Peng adds. Mainshocks are the largest earthquake in a sequence. “We’ll use advanced techniques such as machine learning to detect and locate thousands of small aftershocks recorded by this network. These newly identified events can provide new important clues on how aftershocks evolve in space and time, and what drives foreshocks that occur before large events.”

Unearthing fault mechanisms

The team will also use the detected aftershocks to illuminate active faults where three tectonic plates come together — a region known as the Maraş Triple Junction. “We plan to use the aftershock locations and the seismic waves from recorded events to image subsurface structures where large damaging earthquakes occur,” says Mach, the Georgia Tech graduate researcher. This will help scientists better understand why sometimes faults ‘creep’ without any large events, while in other cases faults lock and then violently release elastic energy, creating powerful earthquakes.

Getting high-resolution data of the fault structures is another priority. “The fault line ruptured in the first magnitude 7.8 event has a bend in it, where earthquake activity typically terminates, but the earthquake rupture moved through this bend, which is highly unusual,” Peng says. By deploying additional ultra-dense arrays of sensors in their upcoming trip this summer, the team hopes to help researchers ‘see’ the bend under the Earth’s surface, allowing them to better understand how fault properties control earthquake rupture propagation.  

The team also aims to learn more about the relationship between the two main shocks that recently rocked Turkey, sometimes called doublet events. Doublet events can happen when the initial earthquake triggers a secondary earthquake by adding extra stress loading. While in this instance, the doublet may have taken place only 9 hours after the initial event, these secondary earthquakes have been known to take place days, months, or even years after the initial one — a famous example being the sequence of earthquakes that spanned 60 years in the North Anatolian fault region in Northern Turkey. 

“Clearly the two main shocks in 2023 are related, but it is still not clear how to explain the time delays,” says Peng. The team plans to work with their collaborators at TÜBİTAK to re-analyze seismic and other types of geophysical data right before and after those two main shocks in order to better understand the triggering mechanisms.

“In our most recent trip in southern Türkiye, we saw numerous buildings that were partially damaged during the mainshock, and many people will have to live in temporary shelters for years during the rebuilding process,” Peng adds. “While we cannot stop earthquakes from happening in tectonically active regions, we hope that our seismic deployment and subsequent research on earthquake triggering and fault imaging can improve our ability to predict what will happen next — before and after a big one — and could save countless lives.”

School of Computing Instruction (SCI) Lecturer Pedro Guillermo Feijóo García recently presented research at the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Frontiers in Education conference in Washington, D.C., examining the prevalence and impact of the impostor phenomenon in CS students.

The research team included SCI Chair Olufisayo Omojokun, University of Florida Instructional Assistant Professor Alexandre Gomes de Siqueira, and University of Florida alumnus Tomás Delclaux Rodríguez-Rey. They surveyed more than 500 undergraduate students from both institutions to understand how feelings of self-doubt and fraudulence affect academic performance.

Key Findings 

The study found that over 60% of students reported experiencing impostor feelings, with higher rates among female participants. At Georgia Tech, 63% of students reported these feelings, with 68% of female students affected, compared to 62% of males and 29% of other gender identities.

At the University of Florida, these rates were higher for females (80%) and lower for males (57%), while students of other gender identities experienced impostor phenomenon at 67%.

“More than 60% of participants reported impostor feelings, which is significant,” Feijóo García said. “Computer science students, among STEM populations, are at the highest risk of mental well-being issues.”

Institutional and Demographic Variations

The team analyzed data from CS students at Georgia Tech and the University of Florida to see how institutional background impacts impostor phenomenon scores. 

“Our findings suggest that the institution does play a role, likely influenced by factors such as state policies, diversity initiatives, and community demographics,” Feijóo García said.

Their research revealed differences in impostor feelings based on gender, institutional environment, and race. 

For example, students of other gender identities showed stark institutional differences: 29% at Georgia Tech versus 67% at the University of Florida.

“We found some differences when analyzing the interplay of institutional background and gender, and also some differences from the experiences of Afro-Black American students,” Feijóo García said.

The study revealed differing trends between the two institutions for Afro/Black American participants. At Georgia Tech, only 23% of Afro/Black American students reported experiencing "frequent" or "intense" impostor feelings. In contrast, this rate was predominantly higher at 75% at the University of Florida.

The researchers noted that these differences might stem from the varying representation and socio-cultural dynamics in the states where the institutions are located. These findings underscore the importance of developing targeted interventions to address the unique challenges faced by students from diverse backgrounds.

Building Community and Collaboration

A key theme from the study was the role of community in alleviating impostor feelings. Feijóo García emphasized the importance of supportive academic environments. 

He suggests that fostering more collaboration and community among students early in the curriculum could help address their feelings of impostorhood by allowing them to share experiences with their peers and letting them know they are not alone in their journey.

Future Directions: Expanding Research

Looking ahead, the research team plans to explore the role of “hidden curricula”—the unspoken expectations and norms embedded in academic environments—in contributing to CS students’ mental well-being.

"It’s important to let students know they’re not alone. When two top public institutions show this prevalence, it indicates systemic issues that educators need to address," Feijóo García said.

By highlighting the interplay of gender, race, and institutional context, the study calls for a culturally informed approach to addressing the impostor phenomenon, ensuring all students can excel in an equitable and supportive academic environment.

SCI Lecturer Gerandy Brito served on the scientific committee for this year’s EMALCA program, which took place in Havana, Cuba, from November 4 to 8. The program focused on recent developments in probability theory and aimed to inspire future mathematics scholars by connecting them with leading researchers.

Overcoming Unexpected Challenges

This year’s event faced major disruptions due to a hurricane that delayed the conference by two days. Power outages affected event logistics throughout the week.

"I never thought this would be the experience," Brito said, reflecting on the difficulties.

Despite setbacks, organizers rescheduled sessions and participants adapted to the limited resources. Most local students had to overcome significant obstacles to attend.

"The students in Cuba didn’t have a lot of resources to travel. So, they actually had to make an effort to come. And they did," Brito said.

Brito highlighted the students' and organizers' flexibility and dedication in managing the challenges. "I was lucky. The people around me were very supportive. We shifted stuff around in the calendar and powered through Thursday and Friday," he said.

Expanding Academic Reach

Brito’s involvement in the conference aligns with his mission to strengthen academic ties between Georgia Tech and Latin America.

This initiative is part of a larger program led by the Latin American and Caribbean Mathematical Union (UMALCA), which annually funds four to five mathematics schools across Latin America and the Caribbean. These schools aim to spark interest in advanced studies among undergraduate and first-year master's students.

Focused Curriculum on Probability Theory

This year, Brito and his team developed a curriculum focused on probability theory and its applications.

“We have a probability background, so we wanted to do something along the edges of probability and its interaction with all fields,” Brito said.

The program offered students lectures and opportunities to explore real-world applications of probability theory. However, due to the weather-related disruptions, problem-solving sessions had to be canceled. Instead, students were given problems to work on independently over the following weeks, with the opportunity to reach out to organizers for questions.

Connecting with Researchers and Guiding Academic Growth

Although the problem-solving sessions were canceled, the program still offered students valuable opportunities to connect with researchers from Latin America, France, and the U.S. Through talks and lectures, students explored the intersections of probability and other fields, gaining insights into ongoing research and potential opportunities for collaboration.

“The goal was to connect researchers and students from the region. We tried to open avenues for them to collaborate,” Brito said. “We told the students—if you want to study math and do something beyond your undergrad, these people are working on all these cool problems and ideas. So maybe you want to do a Ph.D. in one of these places.”

Brito reflected on his early academic uncertainties. “I was always so lost in those years. I wasn’t quite sure how to find an advisor, find a project that fit, or where to look.”

This personal experience motivated him to offer guidance to students in Cuba.

Fostering a Globally Inclusive Mathematical Community

Participating in events like EMALCA demonstrates SCI’s commitment to fostering an inclusive global academic community. The program’s focused curriculum, emphasis on accessibility, and commitment to connecting students with international researchers highlight the impact of educational partnerships in advancing mathematics education.

To ensure accessibility, EMALCA conducted the program entirely in Spanish. Brito’s lectures were also recorded and will be available online, ensuring that students in Cuba and beyond can benefit from the content.

“I wanted to reach the people in Cuba,” Brito added, highlighting his desire to connect with students who may have fewer opportunities for international academic experiences.

For more information about the program, visit the EMALCA website here.

Installed recently at Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC), an X-band weather radar purchased two years ago by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Georgia (UGA) is now providing data for a section of north Georgia where information on severe storms such as tornados can be limited by terrain.

The radar will also be used for research into weather and severe storms, and by students at the three institutions for learning about everything from physics and engineering to weather, rainfall, and the effects of changing climate on the migration patterns of birds and insects. The instrument will be one of just a handful of weather radars operated by universities in the United States.

“We are really excited about this partnership with Georgia Tech, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, the University of Georgia, and Georgia Gwinnett College,” said Marshall Shepherd, Associate Dean for Research, Scholarship and Partnership at UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and Director of UGA’s Atmospheric Sciences Program. “The radar will be a real-time component of classes, so it’s creating new instructional and service capabilities. It will also enable researchers at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech to pursue new research opportunities in the areas of severe weather, frozen precipitation – and perhaps even studies of birds and insects.”

The radar will provide a new data source for UGA’s WeatherDawgs service, which provides hyperlocal weather data not only for the Athens community, but also for residents of eastern and northeastern Georgia. The system will also provide a real-time component for the mesoscale meteorology course taught at the university.

For Georgia Tech, the radar will support the work of the Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC), a state-funded initiative that serves as a focal point for severe storms research in the state. The radar will also support research and education at Georgia Tech, including courses on weather radar systems and studies of lightning being done in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“The new radar will help fill some low-level gaps in weather radar coverage in north Georgia, and give higher-resolution data for the Georgia Gwinnett campus, University of Georgia campus, Georgia Tech campus and areas in between,” said John Trostel, director of the SSRC. “This is an area where both UGA and Georgia Tech have interests because it goes from urban to suburban, then back to urban. We might see some very interesting weather phenomena going on in those transition areas.”

The National Weather Service has access to a feed from the radar and will use it to obtain information about low-altitude weather activity that can’t be seen as well from sources such as the NEXRAD radar based in Peachtree City and the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Trostel added.

For Georgia Gwinnett College, the radar will provide real-world examples of how physics and engineering concepts are applied. Data from the radar system, which will be accessible to the college, would also provide students with a new research opportunity that is a required component of the science curriculum.

“Our Physics and Pre-Engineering courses already cover the concepts of electromagnetic waves and the Doppler effect, which are the main principles behind radar,” said Neelam Khan, the Chair of the Physics and Pre-Engineering Department at Georgia Gwinnett College. “Through this radar, students will learn about the applications of Doppler radar to track weather patterns and visualize the data it produces.”

Connections with the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and the Georgia Tech Research Institute will also help broaden the experience of students at Georgia Gwinnett College, a four-year public college that was founded in 2005 and now has more than 11,000 students, Khan said. All three collaborating institutions are part of the University System of Georgia.

The Furuno WR-2100 X-band weather radar was purchased in 2022 using funding from Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. It was initially placed atop a building on GTRI’s Smyrna campus, where it underwent tests while Trostel and Shepherd searched for the best location for a more permanent installation. The researchers have used the device to look at storms, generate data, and practice data analysis.

The Georgia Gwinnett location was selected because the campus location enables coverage for both Atlanta and Athens. The Gwinnett County location also helps fill potential gaps in northeast Georgia and brings a unique resource for GGC’s educational mission. The radar is now fully operational.

Owning and operating a weather radar is unusual for colleges and universities, but not surprising given the impact of severe weather in Georgia, Shepherd noted.

“Weather is a significant threat to our lives and property, particularly in Georgia,” Shepherd said. “While we have an adequate radar network from the National Weather Service and the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar, there are often gaps and needs for higher resolution, more detailed information. Our institutions have entered very rare air in owning and operating a weather radar that will benefit our students, the state, and our research enterprise in the University System of Georgia institutions.”

Because they’ll be able to control the geographic areas covered by the radar and the level of detail in the information gathered, the new weather radar will be a useful tool not only for tracking storms, but also for conducting research, Trostel said. Its ability to provide highly detailed information even allows it to track the movement of insects and birds, for example.

“We can see things at higher resolution, and we have complete control over how we manipulate the radar beam to look at things,” Trostel said. “The radar is much less expensive to purchase and operate than other weather radars, which makes it a budget-friendly tool for university research.”

The instrument cost approximately $150,000 to purchase and was acquired through donations and internal funding at UGA and Georgia Tech. Shepherd and Tom Mote, the founding director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at UGA, contributed funds from institutional research budgets. A significant financial gift was also acquired from Elaine Neal, an alumna of the UGA Department of Geography and longtime donor to the University of Georgia.

At Georgia Tech, funds were provided by GTRI’s Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory, and the Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory, the Georgia Tech Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, and Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering.

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia USA

Their instructor, Associate Professor Saman Zonouz, created this course to teach students to prevent, detect, and respond to common cyberattacks launched against cyber-physical systems. 

According to Zonouz, infrastructure like power grids, water treatment plants, hospitals, and healthcare are all cyber-physical systems, an area of cybersecurity where software and hardware interact with physical processes. These systems are also found in drones, making the course widely applicable to students. 

“This knowledge will be invaluable in their future careers, especially if they work in industries like Tesla, where safeguarding equipment against cybersecurity threats is essential,” Zonouz said. “It’s not feasible to build a power plant in class for students to practice on. Drones are a compact cyber-physical system students can experience firsthand.” 

That day, the students in the park showed just how hands-on the semester had been. Each team had a drone they had spent the semester building, testing, and attacking. Their remote aircraft had open-source auto-pilot software, GPS, altitude sensors, cameras, AI software, and their developed security solutions.

In one exercise, students had to use their AI software to recover from and play as a surrogate controller against a GPS spoofing cyberattack on their drone in mid-flight. 

“Flights need to be safe regardless of potential cyber-attacks,” he said. “This course combines cybersecurity and drones in a way that specifically targets the drone's operation against cybersecurity threats.”

This course is part of Georgia Tech’s Masters of Cybersecurity—Cyber-Physical Systems track and an instantiation of the Department of Energy’s Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) initiative, which Zonouz is a co-PI on. Zonouz wants the course to serve as a model for other universities interested in teaching drone cybersecurity. While there are existing courses on power grid security, the emphasis on hands-on experiences sets it apart. 

His lab's research on drones (CPSec: Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab) has also received federal recognition. Last fall, the lab hosted a United States congressional visit in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building. 

On September 24, his lab will welcome Mary Ellen Callahan, assistant secretary, DHS Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office (CWMD) as a guest lecturer, key note speaker, and panelist. The event will take place in the Coda atrium from 9:30 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Jean Carlos (J.C.) Hernandez-Mejia has been named the interim director of National Electric Energy Testing, Research, & Applications Center (NEETRAC).

Hernandez-Mejia has been a research engineer at NEETRAC since 2017, contributing significantly to research, testing, and applications work in the reliability area. His work specifically focuses on condition assessment, asset management strategies, failure analysis, and optimization of power system performance. In 2022 he was promoted to senior research engineer. 

Researchers from Georgia Tech’s School of Computing Instruction (SCI) recently presented their study on active learning strategies in large computer science (CS) classes at the 29th Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE). 

The annual conference gathers global educators and researchers to discuss advancements and innovations in computing education.

In their paper, SCI Lecturer Pedro Guillermo Feijóo-García, Lecturer Nimisha Roy, and Chair Olufisayo Omojokun explore using student-created instructional videos to foster engagement and improve learning outcomes in large, introductory software design and engineering (SWE) courses. 

Addressing the Challenge of Active Learning in Large Classes

Promoting active learning in large computing courses, often with hundreds of students, poses significant challenges. The larger the class, the harder it is to effectively support students and foster a deep understanding of complex concepts. 

Recognizing these challenges, the researchers proposed a novel pedagogical strategy: leveraging student-created instructional videos as a medium to facilitate learning by teaching.

The Study

Implemented in two large introductory SWE classes during Fall 2023, the strategy engaged 448 college CS students in a unique take-home activity. The researchers integrated the activity into the midterm exam, which included both open-ended questions on SWE concepts and a diagramming question. 

First, students were tasked with creating an instructional video to explain their responses to the exam questions. This process required them to articulate their understanding of SWE concepts clearly and concisely, effectively teaching the material to their peers.

After creating their videos, students participated in an anonymized peer-review process, providing feedback on their classmates' explanations.

“I think the experience helped students reinforce their understanding of the course material and, more importantly, learn how to learn,” Guillermo Feijóo-García said.

“This activity is a perfect opportunity for students to build communication skills and the confidence required to present their ideas. Sometimes, we forget that CS as a discipline goes beyond the computer, especially nowadays when technology actively and organically acts in society.”

Enhanced Perceived Learning and Engagement

Researchers surveyed the students, asking how much they learned from this approach. The results were promising. Most students felt that they learned a lot from making the videos and reviewing their peers’ work. 

Significantly, 80.4% of the students agreed with the statement, "Creating my video helped me learn the course content." These results indicate that the assignment was particularly effective in helping students internalize and understand SWE concepts.

The findings from this study suggest that student-created instructional videos can be a powerful tool in promoting active learning and enhancing student engagement in large computing courses and beyond.

“Students love active learning and gain much from activities that challenge their thought processes and openly reflect on how they think about their solutions,” Guillermo Feijóo-García said.

The strategy allows students to assume the role of teachers, consolidating their knowledge while fostering a collaborative learning environment though the peer review process. 

Guillermo Feijóo-García says this active learning format could be used or adapted in other courses and levels beyond their CS-2340 Objects and Design course. The team has received positive feedback from the broader CS education community and peers from national and international institutions interested in following up with their approach.

“The strategy suggests that educators can better engage with their student audience when dealing with large class formats,” said Guillermo Feijóo-García.

“Also, with large language models nowadays, this kind of strategy can pose exciting learning opportunities that can challenge students to learn significantly and appreciate what they learn during their processes.”

ITiCSE 2024 was held in Milan, Italy, July 8-10.

On Wednesday, April 13th 2022, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) hosted the 16th annual Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium. UROP’s annual symposium is Georgia Tech’s largest undergraduate research colloquium and allows students to present their research and gain valuable skills and presentation experience. Each year the symposium also presents awards to the top poster and oral presentation from each college and honors the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher (OUR) from each college. And with over 40 oral presentations and nearly 90 poster presentations, this year’s symposium proved to be another success for UROP and Georgia Tech.  

This year the symposium was held in Exhibition Hall and opened with an introduction and keynote address to students, faculty, and other non-presenters. Shortly after, the event moved into the poster presentations segment where undergraduate students displayed their research to judges, faculty, and other attendees. The oral presentations followed soon after and gave student researchers the opportunity to go more in-depth with their research and findings and answer any questions the judges and attendees had. To end the event, sponsoring colleges and departments recognized Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers from their respective colleges. Additionally, the symposium judges were tasked with selecting the top student researchers having exceptional poster and oral presentations. 

Any Georgia Tech undergraduate student interested in presenting their research is encouraged to apply for future symposiums and to build on research presentation skills, connect with other undergraduate researchers and faculty, and the chance to be recognized with awards by members of the Georgia Tech research community. UROP also hosts other research-related events and workshops throughout the school year to assist undergraduate students interested in research and build on their passions! 

To view the list of awardees and pictures from the event visit: https://symposium.urop.gatech.edu/awards/ 

To learn more about undergraduate research at Georgia Tech visit: https://urop.gatech.edu/

An underrated component of the GT/GTRI connection is the Georgia Tech Library. The Library aims to “create, maintain and secure for the future an environment where scholars can access the vast digital cloud….”

The arduous task of organizing, sorting and searching through that cloud falls on the savvy staff of the library. A couple of whom have as part of their main job duties providing direct and focused help to GTRI’s researchers.

Raven Davis: A ‘Researcher’s Researcher’ for Data Analytics

Raven Davis, the inaugural Research Scientist in Data Analytics at the Georgia Tech Library, is pioneering a path that intersects technology, data, and education. With a background that moved from English-Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College to journalism, and finally to the realm of data analytics, Raven's journey has been anything but ordinary. Her role at Georgia Tech involves demystifying the complex world of data for faculty as well as students, providing a compass for those navigating the seas of information available.

Raven's journey into data analytics was sparked by her fascination with storytelling and its power to illuminate the human condition. Her academic pursuits, blending creative writing with a keen interest in the narratives data can reveal, led her to explore how information is transformed into actionable insights. This exploration was fueled by a story on a healthcare startup using predictive analytics to combat maternal mortality. 

"After reading that article, I became interested in the possibilities of using data to improve society," said Raven. This epiphany led her to Georgia Tech's online Masters in Analytics program, a decision that has positioned her at the forefront of the library's efforts to integrate data analytics into academic research and learning.

"I provide course-integrated instruction on data visualization and analytics, as well as workshops on Python and R programming," Davis explains. Her approach is hands-on, offering a lifeline to researchers and students who find themselves adrift in the digital age. Whether it’s through email consultation or collaborative sessions, Davis is committed to ensuring that the Georgia Tech community is not just literate, but fluent in the language of data.

Raven's work extends beyond the classroom and consultations; she is actively involved in curating data sets for the library's repository, ensuring that students and faculty have access to high-quality, relevant data for their research projects. Her initiatives in promoting open data and research transparency are critical in fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration at Georgia Tech.

Bette Finn: A Stalwart Guide Through Information’s Evolution

Bette Finn, the GTRI Subject Librarian, has witnessed first-hand the digital transformation of the Georgia Tech Library since 1989. Finn's tenure has seen the library's database offerings explode from a handful to over 700, a testament to the exponential growth of information and the technology used to harness it. Finn's role is multifaceted, offering everything from quick assistance by email to in-depth, personalized research consultations.

"My services include quick assistance by email, in-depth one-on-one customized assistance, and customized group orientations," Finn details. Her expertise in navigating the library's vast array of databases is a critical asset to the GTRI community, ensuring researchers have access to the most relevant and cutting-edge information available.

Finn's dedication to her role is fueled by a deep-seated love of learning and a personal connection to Georgia Tech, where her father taught engineering for 29 years. "Working as a librarian at the Georgia Tech Library has always been my dream job," she says. Her approach to librarianship is informed by a keen awareness of the transformative power of digital resources, which has revolutionized the way academic libraries support research and learning.

The collaborative efforts of Davis and Finn exemplify the library's mission to empower the Georgia Tech community with the tools and knowledge necessary to lead in an increasingly data-driven world. While Davis brings a fresh perspective on data analytics and visualization, Finn offers a bridge to the library's rich reservoir of resources, honed by years of experience and expertise.

Together, they embody the spirit of innovation that defines Georgia Tech, guiding GTRI researchers through the ever-evolving landscape of information and technology.

Databases Available to GTRI Researchers

Bette Finn provided these links to resources that the GT Library has available for GTRI researchers.

• databases 
• Standards

An underrated component of the GT/GTRI connection is the Georgia Tech Library. The Library aims to “create, maintain and secure for the future an environment where scholars can access the vast digital cloud….”

The arduous task of organizing, sorting and searching through that cloud falls on the savvy staff of the library. A couple of whom have as part of their main job duties providing direct and focused help to GTRI’s researchers.

Raven Davis: A ‘Researcher’s Researcher’ for Data Analytics

Raven Davis, the inaugural Research Scientist in Data Analytics at the Georgia Tech Library, is pioneering a path that intersects technology, data, and education. With a background that moved from English-Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College to journalism, and finally to the realm of data analytics, Raven's journey has been anything but ordinary. Her role at Georgia Tech involves demystifying the complex world of data for faculty as well as students, providing a compass for those navigating the seas of information available.

Raven's journey into data analytics was sparked by her fascination with storytelling and its power to illuminate the human condition. Her academic pursuits, blending creative writing with a keen interest in the narratives data can reveal, led her to explore how information is transformed into actionable insights. This exploration was fueled by a story on a healthcare startup using predictive analytics to combat maternal mortality. 

"After reading that article, I became interested in the possibilities of using data to improve society," said Raven. This epiphany led her to Georgia Tech's online Masters in Analytics program, a decision that has positioned her at the forefront of the library's efforts to integrate data analytics into academic research and learning.

"I provide course-integrated instruction on data visualization and analytics, as well as workshops on Python and R programming," Davis explains. Her approach is hands-on, offering a lifeline to researchers and students who find themselves adrift in the digital age. Whether it’s through email consultation or collaborative sessions, Davis is committed to ensuring that the Georgia Tech community is not just literate, but fluent in the language of data.

Raven's work extends beyond the classroom and consultations; she is actively involved in curating data sets for the library's repository, ensuring that students and faculty have access to high-quality, relevant data for their research projects. Her initiatives in promoting open data and research transparency are critical in fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration at Georgia Tech.

Bette Finn: A Stalwart Guide Through Information’s Evolution

Bette Finn, the GTRI Subject Librarian, has witnessed first-hand the digital transformation of the Georgia Tech Library since 1989. Finn's tenure has seen the library's database offerings explode from a handful to over 700, a testament to the exponential growth of information and the technology used to harness it. Finn's role is multifaceted, offering everything from quick assistance by email to in-depth, personalized research consultations.

"My services include quick assistance by email, in-depth one-on-one customized assistance, and customized group orientations," Finn details. Her expertise in navigating the library's vast array of databases is a critical asset to the GTRI community, ensuring researchers have access to the most relevant and cutting-edge information available.

Finn's dedication to her role is fueled by a deep-seated love of learning and a personal connection to Georgia Tech, where her father taught engineering for 29 years. "Working as a librarian at the Georgia Tech Library has always been my dream job," she says. Her approach to librarianship is informed by a keen awareness of the transformative power of digital resources, which has revolutionized the way academic libraries support research and learning.

The collaborative efforts of Davis and Finn exemplify the library's mission to empower the Georgia Tech community with the tools and knowledge necessary to lead in an increasingly data-driven world. While Davis brings a fresh perspective on data analytics and visualization, Finn offers a bridge to the library's rich reservoir of resources, honed by years of experience and expertise.

Together, they embody the spirit of innovation that defines Georgia Tech, guiding GTRI researchers through the ever-evolving landscape of information and technology.

Databases Available to GTRI Researchers

Bette Finn provided these links to resources that the GT Library has available for GTRI researchers.

• databases 
• Standards

But a busy travel schedule is nothing new for Rogers. Diagnosed with hepatoblastoma at the age of 3, he spent over a decade traveling between Augusta, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, with lengthy hospital stays in between, undergoing treatment for the rare childhood liver cancer.  

Given a prognosis with a "one-in-a-million" chance of survival, Rogers had two liver transplants before the cancer spread to his lungs and brain. In total, he endured 50 surgeries before his 13th birthday, and it was during the countless trips to Atlanta that he dreamed of two things — attending Georgia Tech and making a difference for kids facing similar struggles.  

Unlike chemotherapy or other procedures, Rogers found radiation therapy to be a painless experience, in part thanks to the radiation therapists administering the treatment.  

"They may not have thought much of it at the time, but in those moments, by playing with me, making me laugh, making me a Spiderman radiation mask, they helped me forget — even for a second — that I had cancer and helped me enjoy life. I think about that every day. I hope to one day change a child's life like my therapists did for me,” he said.  

Now 18 years cancer-free, Rogers earned a bachelor's degree in radiation therapy from Augusta University. A program director told him about Georgia Tech's medical physics program, and, since arriving at the Institute in 2021, he has sought hands-on experience in the field. Completing the clinical portion of the program through a partnership with the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Rogers learned each role within the rotation.  

"From booting up machines and checking on patients to everything else, I just started wanting to come in every day. I'd go in for free just because I love what I'm doing," he said.  

Rogers wasn't immune to the stresses of everyday college life, but he approached them with a positive perspective.  

"My parents told me that there's always a light at the end of every tunnel, and it's always going to be worth it in the end. So, I will keep telling myself and everybody else that when they're going through a hard time, keep pushing,” he said. “Things may be painful and stressful now, but think about what you will achieve in the future and the people you will help get through battles of their own. That will always keep me motivated." 

Rogers isn't done with medical appointments, but with each yearly checkup, he never tires of hearing the words he hopes to deliver in his career: "All clear." 

She was recently notified of the award for her presentation, “Describing the Analog Resistance Change of HfOx Neuromorphic Synapses,” given at the Materials Research Society’s (MRS) Fall 2023 Meeting in Boston.

The research was recognized for its contributions to future materials and technologies toward sustainable heterogeneous computing and energy-efficient machine learning.

MRS brings together materials researchers from around the world to promote the sharing and communication of interdisciplinary research and technology to improve the quality of life.

Athena, an IBM Ph.D. Fellow, conducted the research with her advisor, Eric M. Vogel, a Hightower Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), with an adjunct appointment in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

She presented a compact model, Compact Series Trap-Assisted Tunneling and Ohmic conduction (C-STAO), which enables the rapid simulation of artificial HfOx synaptic devices. The model provides deep insights into the analog temporal responses and temperature dependency of artificial synaptic devices, which are used to develop brain-inspired circuits.

These brain-inspired circuits are important for the development of AI systems and can help them to meet increasing computational demands while achieving more human-like cognitive capabilities with improved efficiency.

It also furthers Athena’s Ph.D. research, dedicated to the development of adaptive oxide devices for neuromorphic computing, aimed at replicating the human brain's functionality for more intelligent and energy-efficient computing.

Funding Acknowledgement

This project was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research MURI entitled, “Cross-disciplinary Electronic-ionic Research Enabling Biologically Realistic Autonomous Learning (CEREBRAL)” under Award No. FA9550-18-1-0024.

This work was performed in part at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (No. ECCS-1542174). The work was also supported by the Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship and the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award No. 2022-2024.

The award recognizes exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research that aligns with Intel’s mission of creating world-changing technology to improve daily life.

He was recognized for his project “Simulation of Probabilistic Learning Ecosystems (SIMPLE),” with Ian Young and his team at Intel's Components Research Labs.

While most modern computer hardware is primarily based upon determinist zeros and ones, there are some phenomena that create uncertainty that is beyond the capabilities of this binary system.

Yu’s team used conventional and emerging technologies and novel hardware-software co-design for pathfinding of a prototype small-scale accelerator chip. This super energy-efficient probabilistic hardware will be able to quantify this uncertainty and compute with more robustness.

The team now looks to further research and prototype the design into silicon.

Through this industry-academia collaboration, multiple students from Yu’s Laboratory for Emerging Devices and Circuits have interned at Intel and been hired by the company for full-time positions.

He is the first Georgia Tech faculty to receive the honor since Saibal Mukhopadhyay in 2019. More recently, ECE assistant professor Cong (Callie) Hao won an Intel Rising Star Faculty Award in 2023.

Yu’s work has been recognized with a number of recent awards, including the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Inaugural Young Faculty Award in 2019 and the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award 2020. He was named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow in 2023.

Carolina Colón

Carolina is currently working toward her Ph.D. in Bioengineering, focusing on T-cell therapies, at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. She earned her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology in 2022 and holds an A.A. in Engineering from Valencia College, awarded in 2019.

Originally from Puerto Rico, she moved to Florida for her last year of high school.

Research at GTRI, Georgia Tech

Carolina's research work aims to combine aerospace engineering and bioengineering to develop devices that enable the mass production of cell therapies to lower their cost and make them more accessible.

GEM Fellowship

Colón was a participant in GTRI’s GEM Fellowship program in 2022. The national GEM Consortium provides funding for graduate education through corporate sponsorships and a partnership with university partners, such as Georgia Tech. 

The National GEM Consortium is a network of leading corporations, government laboratories, elite universities, and elite research institutions that empowers qualified students from underrepresented communities to pursue a graduate degree in a STEM field. GEM’s mission is to garner a talent pool of African American, Hispanic American, and Native American advanced degree-seekers in STEM fields.

Every year, GEM identifies and recruits close to 2,000 students and working professionals from underrepresented groups to participate in its program, which consists of three graduate fellowship tracks: Master of Science in Engineering, Ph.D. in Science, and Ph.D. in Engineering.

GEM also provides financial support to aspiring graduate students from underrepresented groups, allowing them to pursue their dreams without worrying about money.

Students selected into the GEM Fellowship program must complete a corporate internship during the summer and attend graduate school during the fall and spring semesters. In exchange, students are provided funding for graduate school through an agreement with their home institutions.

In the GEM Fellowship program, one of her advisors was GTRI Principal Research Engineer Jud Ready of the Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory (EOSL).

Ready said that Carolina “increased teamwork and morale while creatively expanding knowledge of her lab mates’ different cultural backgrounds.”

Said Carolina of her GEM experience: "The experience I gained at GTRI will definitely last me a lifetime, and it’s something that has changed my life immensely. Thanks to all at EOSL and GEM."

Other Research Programs

Carolina’s research and professional trajectory has also been aided by her participation in multiple Georgia Tech summer research programs, including the Cell Therapy Manufacturing (CMaT), FOCUS, and SURE programs. Georgia Tech’s FOCUS program is one of the nation’s premier graduate recruitment programs designed to attract highly skilled students who have historically been underrepresented in higher education. The Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering/Sciences (SURE) program is a 10-week summer research program designed to attract qualified under-represented minority and women students into graduate school in the fields of engineering and science.

Woodruff School Honors

Most recently, as a new graduate student at Georgia Tech, she has been selected as the Vice President of the Woodruff School Graduate Women (WSGW) group and has already put into motion her ideas regarding Hispanic heritage, GT PRIDE, community college information sessions, etc.

The School of Mechanical Engineering has recognized her Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. She is an active volunteer with student recruitment panels and represented the school at the Women of Technology Gala. The school also awarded her the Inaugural Women of Woodruff “Rising Star” award for her efforts. 

To cap it off, the Woodruff School also awarded Carolina the inaugural Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship (IRF). This honor recognized Carolina's vision of intertwining the fields of aerospace and bioengineering to create enhanced devices and enable cell therapies in the space environment for astronauts in long-term space missions.

Nada es imposible si lo intentas. (Nothing is impossible if you try.)
 -- Carolina Colón

Beyond Academia

In addition to her studies, Carolina has worked with Marriott Hotels for about ten years. When she is not in the lab, Carolina enjoys activities such as watching anime, learning languages, playing video games, and swimming.

About the Award and SHPE

SHPE is the largest association in the U.S. aimed at supporting Hispanics in STEM fields. The organization’s STAR Awards are annual honors given to individuals, companies, and government agencies that have demonstrated commitment and measurable impact in advancing Hispanics in STEM. The awards are a key feature of the annual SHPE National Convention.

Carolina has been a member of SHPE for three years. A key example of her contribution to SHPE is that, in 2022, she was invited to represent Georgia Tech College of Engineering at the SHPE national conference in North Carolina, and is reprising the same role this year as well.

Leading up to last year’s event, she helped students with graduate school applications, resumes, practice interviews, and pointers on how to land internships. At the event, she talked to many students and told/encouraged them to apply to the many programs that she has participated in, such as Georgia Tech’s FOCUS and SURE programs.

The award received by Carolina Colón reflects GTRI’s and Georgia Tech’s ongoing commitment to creating a diverse academic environment and advancing excellence in STEM fields.

Carolina Colón’s recent accolade serves as a testament to her dedication and contribution to the field of STEM. It also highlights the quality of research and academics within GTRI and Georgia Tech.

We are proud to celebrate her achievements.

Ready said about Carolina: “It seems apparent already that she is destined to be one of those ‘special’ students that go on to make an impact throughout their career in numerous areas.”

We agree—and expect to note many more achievements in the future.

Writer: Christopher Weems 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

Photos: Candler Hobbs
Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Abi-Karam, a Research Engineer I in GTRI's Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) Laboratory, was recognized for his paper titled "GNNBuilder: An Automated Framework for Generic Graph Neural Network Accelerator Generation, Simulation, and Optimization." The paper explores the intersection of hardware acceleration and applied deep learning, and delves into areas such as electronic design automation (EDA), FPGA architecture, and VLSI algorithms.

The FPL Community Award recognizes significant research contributions within the field-programmable logic community. It is awarded based on the impact and potential long-term benefits of open-source research, as assessed by peer reviewers during the conference.

Said Stefan, "I am really happy that there is community recognition for open-source academic hardware research, as this is still not the norm, or the open-source aspect is not seen as valuable in many academic research projects."

Abi-Karam's work, conducted in collaboration with Prof. Cong Hao of Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), stands out for its focus on the pragmatic aspects of engineering, automation, and co-design of high-level-synthesis-based hardware accelerators for computing graph neural networks. Stefan also received his bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech.

Stefan’s research has potential applications in various fields, including high-energy physics, where the deployment of graph neural networks in hardware.

Abi-Karam's dedication to his research and his success in blending his Ph.D. studies with his work at GTRI exemplify GTRI’s Mission's aims of Educating Future Technology Leaders and being a “People-First” environment.

This award not only recognizes Abi-Karam's individual excellence but also underscores GTRI’s and Georgia Tech's role as leaders in the field of cybersecurity and electrical and computer engineering research.

"The award itself was very unexpected since this was my first time at the FPL conference!" said Stefan excitedly and humbly. "It was also the first time I got to meet and talk to many of the other professors and students for the first time who also work in my research area as well as other areas that overlap with my work at GTRI." 

Congratulations, Stefan!

The study, “The core root microbiome of Spartina alterniflora is predominated by sulfur-oxidizing and sulfate-reducing bacteria in Georgia saltmarshes, USA” is published in Microbiome. The research team includes Georgia Tech Ph.D. students Jose Rolando (the study’s lead author) and Tianze Song; Max Kolton, a former postdoctoral researcher, now senior lecturer and principal investigator with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel; and corresponding author Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair for Research in the School of Biological Sciences with a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who is also a member of Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection.

The study shows that diverse and abundant microbes associated with spartina cordgrass help mineralize sediment organic matter and release bioavailable nutrients to the plant, suggesting that the microbes help support plant productivity. 

The work could assist efforts to restore salt marshes that will help to strengthen the coastline to be more resilient in the face of sea level rise and climate change. 

Kostka says about 40% of salt marshes have disappeared in the U.S. over the past 100 years. “So coastal ecosystem restoration has become a huge field, with an important goal to manage or restore marshes so that they continue to provide critical ecosystem services to people,” he explains.

Kostka adds that certain bacteria benefit plants not only by removing potentially toxic sulfide from the root zone, but also by giving the plant nutrients and potentially carbon. “In other words, this is an example of how we think the classic lines might be blurred by what we generally think of as autotrophs (plants that grow via photosynthesis) and heterotrophs (microbes) in ecosystems.”

Sulfur in the roots 

The study was conducted at salt marshes near Sapelo and Skidaway Islands on the Georgia coast in 2018 and 2019. There, ocean water washes over the salt marsh grasses, and that water is rich in sulfate. “Sulfide is a phytotoxin or plant toxin,” Kostka says. “A lot of sulfide will kill plants or at least stress them out, but when you add just a little bit (to Spartina alterniflora), it fuels microbial factories in the plant roots.”

Kostka’s team found that Spartina alterniflora has concentrated sulfur bacteria in its roots, and those bacteria are in two categories: sulfur oxidizers, which use sulfide as an energy source — “then you have sulfate reducers which breathe or respire sulfate from seawater, producing sulfide.”

In this microbial cell factory, bacteria are using sulfide as an energy source to fix nitrogen — and possibly carbon — which then is passed to the grasses. Nitrogen fixation happens when a microbe takes nitrogen gas from air or water and makes usable ammonium out of it. In nature, soil microbes primarily perform this process — occasionally lightning in the atmosphere can also spark it.

The study’s findings suggest that fixation is happening via chemoautotrophy (using chemical reactions for energy) by bacteria living inside the plant roots. 

“The next chapter of this story is to learn how the plant and bacteria exchange nitrogen and the environmental controls of that exchange,” Kostka says. “We also know these bacteria can fix carbon, and could potentially be passing carbon to the plant. The plant may have a cell factory that’s making biomass from chemical energy rather than photosynthesis.”

Finding climate clues in plants

The new study’s research in salty wetlands is similar to climate-related work Kostka leads on peat mosses in freshwater bogs at the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) research facility in northern Minnesota. The facility is managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

A study Kostka and his team published in 2021 showed that warming peat bogs are releasing higher amounts of the greenhouse gas methane that is trapped inside them. Peatlands comprise just about 3% of the Earth’s landmass, but they store around one-third of the planet’s soil carbon. As they warm, bogs may also start releasing more carbon along with their methane into ecosystems, a harmful one-two punch for the environment.

The saltwater marshes that Kostka’s team studies have also been termed “blue carbon” sinks because they act to mitigate climate change by sequestering large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere on a global scale. “Salt marshes or coastal marshes are not only critical as habitat for fish and shellfish that we like to eat — along with other vegetated coastal ecosystems — they store as much or more carbon as the remainder of the seafloor,” Kostka says.

A triumph for omics, and what’s next 

Kostka credits ‘omics’, technologies which allow for the study of microbes in the environment without cultivation, for advances in uncovering microbiomes — all the microorganisms in a specific environment. Metagenomics and metatranscriptomics, the sequencing of all genes or expressed genes in the environment, allows scientists to chart the potential for microbes to carry out important ecosystem functions like nitrogen fixation. This is critical since very few microbes out of the large diversity that is out there can be grown in the lab, Kostka explains.

“The work is another example of how we are uncovering plant microbiomes — the microbes that live inside or on the tissues of environmentally relevant plants that help the plants to grow better,” Kostka adds. “If we can add microbes to the roots when we plant them, and therefore increase the survival of those plants, we can improve restoration efforts.”

This work was supported in part by an institutional grant (NA18OAR4170084) to the Georgia Sea Grant College Program from the National Sea Grant Office, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US Department of Commerce, and by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DEB 1754756).

Citation: Rolando, J.L., Kolton, M., Song, T. et al. The core root microbiome of Spartina alterniflora predominated by sulfur-oxidizing and sulfate-reducing bacteria in Georgia salt marshes, USA. Microbiome 10, 37 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-021-01187-7

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

NASA's Astrobiology program has announced its newest Research Coordination Network (RCN) ‘LIFE: Early Cells to Multicellularity,’  bringing together a collaboration of researchers from around the world that will spend the next five years investigating the earliest biological processes and the evolution of life into more complex organisms.

The new RCN was officially launched today at the 2022 Astrobiology Science Conference, hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The field of astrobiology seeks to understand how life originated and evolved on Earth so we can search for life elsewhere in the universe.

NASA’s RCNs are virtual collaboration structures designed to support groups of investigators to communicate and coordinate their research across disciplinary, organizational, divisional, and geographic boundaries.  

The LIFE RCN is co-led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Betül Kaçar, alongside Georgia Institute of Technology’s Frank Rosenzweig, Arizona State University’s Ariel Anbar, and University of California Riverside’s Mary Droser. 

“LIFE will discern rules of co-evolution (between organisms and their environment) that will enable us to predict how life could evolve on worlds other than our own, and how we might search for it,” said Kaçar. “We know that the journey from single cells to multicellularity relied on critical environmental and biological innovations.”

One of five cross-divisional networks, RCNs are inherently crosscutting and focus on interdisciplinary science questions. LIFE joins:

• Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) focuses on the study and characterization of planets with the greatest potential for signs of life.
• Network for Life Detection (NfoLD) investigates life detection research, including biosignature creation and preservation, as well as related technology development.
• Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environments (PCE3) Consortium strives to transform the origins of life community by breaking down language and ideological barriers and enhancing communication across the disciplinary divide between early earth geoscientists and prebiotic chemists.
• Network for Ocean Worlds advances comparative studies to characterize Earth and other ocean worlds across their interiors, oceans, and cryospheres; to investigate their habitability; to search for biosignatures; and to understand life—in relevant ocean world analogues and beyond.

“Astrobiology has been a part of NASA since its inception and is the focus of a growing number of NASA’s science missions,” said Mary Voytek, senior scientist for NASA’s Astrobiology Program. “We are excited for the important work that members of our LIFE RCN will accomplish in support of NASA’s objective to understand the distribution of life beyond Earth.”

The goal of NASA’s Astrobiology Program is the study of the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe. The Program is central to NASA’s continued exploration of our solar system and beyond and supports research into the origin and early evolution of life, the potential of life to adapt to different environments, and the implications for life elsewhere. NASA, together with the science community, has developed an Astrobiology Strategy that describes the scientific goals and objectives of NASA’s Astrobiology Program.

Learn more: astrobiology.nasa.gov

Celestial mechanics

Bhanu Kumar, a Ph.D. candidate and NASA Space Technology Research Fellow (NSTRF) in the School of Mathematics, has won a fellowship for work in dynamical systems applied to celestial mechanics and applied astrodynamics for space mission design. His Ph.D. is set to be conferred in August. Kumar received his M.S. from the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech last December, and is also an NSTRF visiting technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he works with his mentor and research collaborator Rodney Anderson. Kumar’s adviser at Tech is Rafael de la Llave, professor in the School of Mathematics. 

Microbial dynamics and infection

Elijah (Eli) Mehlferber is slated to receive his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley this summer, before beginning research in the lab of Sam Brown, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI) at Georgia Tech. Mehlferber received his baccalaureate degree from the University of Georgia. Mehlferber’s research seeks to understand how community dynamics in the microbiome can impact susceptibility to pathogen invasion.

“I was aware of CMDI through talking to Sam before deciding to apply for the fellowship in his lab, and it was definitely one of the factors that influenced my decision to join the program,” Mehlferber says. “I liked the idea of having a cross-disciplinary group of like-minded researchers to work and collaborate with — and a program that encourages that kind of work. I think a lot of my best research has taken place through these sorts of collaborations so I’m very excited to continue that with the folks across CMDI.”

Host-microbe symbiosis

Kayla Stoy is set to receive her Ph.D. this summer at Emory University before joining Mehlferber in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech this fall. Stoy will complete her NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship with research in the lab of William Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program at Tech. Ratcliff’s lab focuses on experimental evolution of multicellular complexity. While at Emory, Stoy researched population biology, ecology, and evolution with a focus on mutualism. 

With classes moved online and face-to-face interaction minimized to talking through a screen, students and faculty are searching for creative ways to stay in touch with their colleagues. Since teleportation is not yet feasible, Jennifer Leavey has turned to another channel to connect with her students: YouTube! 

Collaboration and Community 

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is addressing this challenge by developing a Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) platform that standardizes the development and testing of artificial intelligence (AI) and ML models to enhance the speed and efficiency with which these models are utilized during real-time decision-making situations.   

“It’s been difficult for organizations to transition these models from a research environment and turn them into fully-functional products that can be used in real-time,” said Austin Ruth, a GTRI research engineer who is leading this project. “Our goal is to bring AI/ML to the tactical edge where it could be used during active threat situations to heighten the survivability of our warfighters.” 

Rather than treating ML development in isolation, GTRI’s MLOps platform would bridge the gap between data scientists and field operations so that organizations can oversee the entire lifecycle of ML projects from development to deployment at the tactical edge. 

The tactical edge refers to the immediate operational space where decisions are made and actions take place. Bringing AI and ML capabilities closer to the point of action would enhance the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making processes and contribute to more agile and adaptive responses to threats. 

“We want to develop a system where fighter jets or warships don’t have to do any data transfers but could train and label the data right where they are and have the AI/ML models improve in real-time as they’re actively going up against threats,” said Ruth.   

For example, a model could monitor a plane’s altitude and speed, immediately spot potential wing drag issues and alert the pilot about it. In an electronic warfare (EW) situation when facing enemy aircraft or missiles, the models could process vast amounts of incoming data to more quickly identify threats and recommend effective countermeasures in real time. 

AI/ML models need to be trained and tested to ensure their effectiveness in adapting to new, unseen data. However, without having a standardized process in place, training and testing is done in a fragmented manner, which poses several risks, such as overfitting, where the model performs well on the training data but fails to generalize unseen data and makes inaccurate predictions or decisions in real-world situations, security vulnerabilities where bad actors exploit weaknesses in the models, and a general lack of robustness and inefficient resource utilization.

“Throughout this project, we noticed that training and testing are often done in a piecemeal fashion and thus aren’t repeatable,” said Jovan Munroe, a GTRI senior research engineer who is also leading this project. “Our MLOps platform makes the training and testing process more consistent and well-defined so that these models are better equipped to identify and address unknown variables in the battle space.” 

This project has been supported by GTRI’s Independent Research and Development (IRAD) Program, winning an IRAD of the Year award in fiscal year 2023. In fiscal year 2024, the project received funding from a U.S. government sponsor. 

Writer: Anna Akins 
Photos: Sean McNeil 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

She won the award for her research on emerging materials and devices that promote energy-efficient computing. MRS brings together materials researchers from around the world to promote the sharing and communication of interdisciplinary research and technology to improve the quality of life.

She is advised by Eric M. Vogel, Ph.D., ECE adjunct professor and Hightower Professor in the School of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE).

Athena, who is also an IBM Ph.D. Fellow, presented her award-winning research at the meeting, and gave talks about two of her other research projects, “A Novel Electrical Bias Technique to Recover Degraded ReRAM Arrays for Deep Learning” and “Describing the Analog Resistance Change of HfOx Neuromorphic Synapses.”

She was also one of five global finalists for the Arthur Nowick Graduate Student Award for teaching and mentoring.

This is the latest in a growing list of honors for Athena. She’s also been recognized with the ECE Ph.D. Fellowship, Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship, EECS Rising Stars 2023, and Colonel Oscar P. Cleaver Award for the most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation proposal in ECE.

Before her time at Georgia Tech, Athena received her undergraduate degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. She then spent two semesters at Purdue University as a graduate researcher, where she collaborated with Idaho National Lab on nuclear materials for next-generation energy.

Since coming to Georgia Tech, she’s received her M.S. in ECE and has been active in Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering (WECE) and Women in Material Science and Engineering (WiMSE), helping to increase the involvement of women and minorities in STEM.

The Southeastern Cyber Cup is hosted by Georgia Tech’s Office of Information Technology in partnership with Deloitte. The virtual hacking event is open to cybersecurity and IT students and professionals and is held to generate enthusiasm and excitement around cybersecurity careers. 

As part of the annual competitors are challenged to find a "flag": a string of text. The flags for each challenge are submitted online to receive points. Challenge categories include network, web, crypto, miscellaneous, forensics, and reverse engineering.

Why Is the Southeastern Cyber Cup Important for GT/GTRI?

The Southeastern Cup and similar competitions are among the many ways that Georgia Tech and GTRI can showcase the skills of its researchers and aid in their professional development. The team’s Southeastern Cyber Cup win also indicates GTRI's role as a leader in the field of cybersecurity. 

“Historically, CTF (Capture the Flag) competitions are a practical way to sharpen the skills that any cybersecurity researcher/enthusiast may utilize during their career. If you’re interested in cybersecurity, CTFs are a great way to add new tools to your toolbox, as I often find myself picking up new skills during the course of such competitions,” Brown shared.

The Clockcycles team undoubtedly got the opportunity to sharpen their skills during the competition. Hsu shared that he and his team “stayed up for at least 20+ hours straight," participating in each event round. The time commitment and dedication certainly paid off in the end!

GT/GTRI's Impact on CTF Competitions

GTRI routinely has a group of researchers that participate in CTF competitions. In 2021, Petry and his team had an impressive win at the Hack-a-Sat 2 competition. In 2022, Petry and Hsu traveled to an east coast naval facility as part of a GTRI team that competed in person at an invitation-only event held by the US Navy, "Maritime Militia CTF." Their team was awarded a physical flag to bring back to GTRI, which they hung up as a trophy.

GTRI's dedication to these competitions hasn't gone unnoticed. At a CTF in 2022, GTRI received a letter of appreciation from the Naval Surface Warfare Center commending their performance. The Clockcyles' win at the Southeastern Cup is just one example of GTRI's impact as a research organization.

Meet the dedicated team members who brought home second place!

Justin Hsu

Justin Hsu is a Research Scientist in GTRI’S CIPHER (Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research) Lab, Software Assurance Branch. Hsu's work includes looking at and working towards developing tools for software security testing and vulnerability analysis/assessments. He received a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Shorter University, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. Hsu has spent the majority of his professional career in software development. He previously worked at the ELSYS (Electronic Systems Laboratory) and shared that he moved to CIPHER after attending a seminar that rekindled his interest in cybersecurity. 

"I’ve been interested in cybersecurity since I was young, probably watching the movie ‘Hackers’ one too many times, and spent the majority of my career doing software development. But after hearing someone talk at a Friday Morning Seminar about their research work on malware, I was reminded of my interest in cybersecurity and wound up making the move from ELSYS to CIPHER," Hsu shared. 

This was the first year Hsu participated in the Southeastern Cyber Cup, but he has participated in CTFs with fellow CIPHER colleagues since 2021. To date, he's competed in about six different events, including ones sponsored by the U.S. Navy (HACKtheMACHINE, HACKtheMACHINE Unmanned) and the U.S. Air Force/Space Force (Hack-a-Sat, Hack-a-Sat 2, and Hack-a-Sat 3). 

Drew Petry

Drew Petry works as a Research Engineer in the Embedded System Vulnerability Division (ESVD) of CIPHER. Petry’s work focuses on the reverse engineering and security assessment of embedded systems and cyber EW (Electronic Warfare) techniques. He received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2010. In 2014, he also received his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Petry has spent the past fourteen years as a professional research engineer at GTRI, working in the embedded system security and vulnerability field. He shared that he’s always been drawn to embedded systems because he "enjoys interacting with low-level hardware and ‘bare-metal’ code.” Bare metal programming is the process of programming directly on the hardware without using an operating system or middleware.

Outside of the inaugural Southeastern Cyber Cup competition, Petry competes in capture-the-flag competitions yearly. The events he’s competed in while representing GTRI include the annual U.S. Air/Space Force Hack-a-sat CTFs and the U.S. Navy Hack the Machine cybersecurity competitions.

Garrett Brown

Garrett Brown is a Research Scientist in the Embedded Cyber Techniques (ECT) branch of the ESVD at CIPHER. He primarily works on vulnerability discovery and analysis of embedded systems. Brown received his B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. 

Brown shared that he found his passion in this field after participating in the VIP (Vertically Integrated Project) program while at Georgia Tech as an undergraduate student. During this program, he was a part of the Embedded Systems Cyber Security (ESCS) team, which gave him his "first taste of the work [he] would soon come to love."

"I believe cybersecurity practitioners can improve the lives of many around the world, and I'd like to be a part of whatever positive impact we can make," shared Brown when asked why he was passionate about his work.

While this was Brown's first time competing in the Southeastern Cyber Cup, he is not a stranger to competitions. He's previously competed in other CTFs as part of the CIPHER team for competitions such as the Hack-a-Sat and HACKtheMACHINE events.

When asked how he felt about their team's award, he shared, "I felt both relief and disappointment--relief that I could finally go to sleep and disappointment that we got second place instead of first!”

Congratulations Clockcycles team!

Writer: Madison McNair (madison.mcnair@gtri.gatech.edu)  
Photographer: Christopher Moore 
GTRI Communications  
Georgia Tech Research Institute  
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) are exploring how the powerful processing capabilities of quantum computers can expedite CFD’s resource-intensive simulations used in aircraft design, weather prediction, nuclear weapons testing and more.  

“Through a collaboration between GTRI and Georgia Tech, we are developing an application of quantum computing to solve proof-of-principle problems in computational fluid dynamics that could streamline efficiencies and reduce costs across numerous industries,” said Bryan Gard, a GTRI senior research scientist who is leading this project.

Quantum computing offers a new way of doing computations using the principles of quantum mechanics, a science that explores the behavior of tiny particles such as atoms and photons. Computers and software that are built on the theories of quantum mechanics can process a large amount of information simultaneously and much faster than classical computers. That is because unlike classical computers, which use bits that are either 0 or 1, quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits. 

Classical bits are similar to regular on/off switches, which can only exist in one state at a time. Qubits, meanwhile, can exist in multiple states at once thanks to a property in quantum mechanics known as superposition.  

Because CFD involves complex simulations of how fluids, such as air or water, move and interact with different surfaces, classical computers often struggle with the immense number of calculations needed for such detailed simulations. The ability for quantum computers to process information in parallel could significantly speed up these simulations and produce more accurate results. 

“Say you are examining how air flows over a plane wing and you want to identify the large- and small-scale dynamics of that interaction,” explained Gard. “This type of problem would be very hard for a classical computer to handle because it wouldn’t be able to examine those large- and small-scale aspects simultaneously.” 

The team has split its research into two parts. The parts that involve linear differential equations are solved on a quantum computer and the other, non-linear parts are handled conventionally on a classical machine. 

The reason for this division is that as the problem scales up on classical supercomputers, the communication between nodes becomes inefficient, creating a bottleneck. Even though quantum computers are not yet large-scale, they can handle certain parts of the problem without facing the same communication challenges, Gard explained. 

These principles could help organizations strategically allocate resources and avoid costs associated with manufacturing and testing potentially flawed designs. In the defense realm, an example of this can be seen with designing aircraft. 

Instead of the conventional methods of building and testing structures in a wind tunnel, quantum-enhanced CFD would allow engineers to analyze stresses, assess designs and predict performance more efficiently and cost effectively. This becomes particularly relevant at high speeds, where factors such as air flows and turbulence pose additional challenges for running accurate simulations. 

“It all comes down to money, as with everything else,” said Gard. “If you could save yourself a lot of time and money by running this simulation, which you couldn't do before, then it would allow you to allocate your resources more effectively.” 

For this project, GTRI is collaborating with Spencer Bryngelson, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering who has expertise in computational physics, numerical methods, fluid dynamics and high-performance computing. Zhixin Song, a graduate student at Georgia Tech who is researching quantum algorithms for CFD, has also contributed.   

“This project is particularly interesting because although it is challenging, it could have outsize performance gains if one can find the right tools for the job, meaning the right quantum algorithm to solve the right fluid dynamics problem,” Bryngelson said. “GTRI and Georgia Tech have already made progress in this area, and also work well together, so it has been a good experience.” 

The project has been supported by GTRI’s Independent Research and Development (IRAD) Program, winning an IRAD of the Year award in fiscal year 2023, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

Writer: Anna Akins 
Photos: Christopher Moore 
Art Credit: Img2Go.com, Adobe 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

The Aviation Radio Control Manager (ARCM) software will enable the sustainment of enduring fleet aircraft by employing a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) to replace obsolete, out-of-production radio equipment and set the stage for future communications suite enhancements. The reusable and adaptable ARCM software is projected to be employed on additional Army aircraft in the future, providing benefits of software reuse, potentially leveraged for future efforts.

Now in its third round of software development, ARCM is due to be flight-tested next summer and installed on the first group of UH-60M aircraft in 2025. The project, supported by the U.S. Army’s PEO Aviation in Huntsville, Alabama, will comply with the service’s Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Technical Standard, Edition 3.1.

Model-based approaches are being used across the Department of Defense (DoD) to accelerate the development of new platforms and updates to existing ones. Beyond reducing costs and getting new capabilities to warfighters more quickly, the process can streamline procurement by clearly spelling out system specifications and key interfaces.

“Model-based approaches have been a very central part of how we’ve approached ARCM, and the return on investment for ARCM generally and for the MBSEs specifically, is based largely on a business case in which you spend a little more to get the models in place and design the system to interface with multiple components,” said Scott Tompkins, a GTRI senior research engineer who leads the project. “Investments in MBSE can provide huge savings when you reuse the work for other systems and shorten the cycle times to bring new capabilities to aircraft platforms.”

In this first application, the ARCM software will facilitate three major improvements for the UH-60M: (1) replacement of the control head unit (CHU) that aircrews use to operate radio equipment, (2) replacement of an obsolete tactical communications radio, and (3) upgrade of cryptographic systems used for secure communications. The replacement radio hardware, which is being built by multiple vendors, interfaces with the aircraft’s unmodified flight management system (FMS) via the ARCM.

“The aircraft needed a new radio, but the Army doesn’t necessarily desire to change the approved and fielded Black Hawk FMS Operational Flight Program (OFP) to integrate that radio,” Tompkins said. “In this project, we are translating the radio’s interface, so they don’t have to change the main aircraft software. This will address three issues at once through software.”

Two different radios with comparable functionality will be available as options for replacing the existing ARC-201D unit. The ARCM software will make the difference between those two alternatives invisible to aircrews and other systems in the aircraft. The software will also allow transparent substitution of radio equipment on Black Hawks used by foreign nations, and it is designed for future support of alternate radio equipment used by National Guard Black Hawks for collaboration with civil defense and domestic first responder agencies.

“From the models, we generated the vast majority of the code used in the ARCM, and that code meets the FACE Edition 3.1 standard for MOSA software,” Tompkins said. “We have also deployed a development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) pipeline to support our software repository and perform automated testing of the products as part of best practices in software development and acquisition. We are also doing full end-to-end information assurance accreditation.”

Though only the UH-60M work has been performed so far, the work done on ARCM could also be used with CH-47F Chinook and AH-64 Apache helicopters, as well as the Gray Eagle uncrewed aircraft system (UAS). The Army’s Future Vertical Lift (FVL) platforms could also take advantage of the modeling done for ARCM.

“The FACE model provides the ability to unambiguously communicate about interfaces,” Tompkins said. “We have all the contextual meaning for the data so that when we hand this over, there’s no question about what the data is and how to interpret the messages. We have captured all of that in the model.”

Beyond ensuring compatibility with existing Black Hawk systems, GTRI is also making sure the replacement interface – graphics and buttons that control the radio equipment – makes sense to the aircrews that will use it. “We recently completed another round of crew station working group meetings where we had pilots review our graphical user interface (GUI) and the functionality,” said Tompkins. “It was very encouraging, and we continue to get positive user feedback.”

GTRI is scheduled to deliver its full technical data package (TDP) to the Army in January 2024. The ARCM program will submit the software and its associated development artifacts to the Army for an airworthiness qualification to a DO-178C Design Assurance Level ‘C’ level of rigor in Q3 of fiscal year 2024. It will then be reviewed for a first test flight in early summer of that year. Once flight testing is over, ARCM and the new hardware can begin rolling out to Army units in 2025.

GTRI expects to be part of the test flights and then move on to support the development of additional capabilities, including new waveforms being developed by the radio vendors. Discussions are also underway regarding potential applications to other Army rotorcraft.

“Our goal is to have an ARCM release annually that brings new capabilities,” Tompkins said. “With software-defined radios, the vendors are constantly innovating and improving waveforms. We want to get those enhancements out to aircrews as soon as possible.”

The ARCM program has involved multiple labs within GTRI, as well as Tucson Embedded Systems, which is a FACE Verification Authority.

“We have put together a great multidisciplinary team of modelers, software developers, information assurance experts, human factors specialists, and human systems engineers,” Tompkins said. “It’s been a spectacular project – working with a wonderful team – and I’m really excited to see the first test flight.”

DISCLAIMER: This article contains views and opinions that are not official U.S. Army positions.
 

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)  
GTRI Communications  
Georgia Tech Research Institute  
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

In 2022, nearly half of healthcare workers reported feeling burned out, up from 32% in 2018, and the number of healthcare workers who intended to look for a new job increased by 33% over that same time period, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Annual burnout-related turnover costs are estimated to be $9 billion for nurses and $2.6 billion to $6.3 billion for physicians, per the U.S. Surgeon General. 

To address this challenge,­ the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing have conducted a study using wearable sensors to better understand how the interplay of workload, stress, and sleep contribute­­ to an elevated risk of burnout among healthcare workers and how to mitigate those risks going forward. 

The group recently measured real-time movement patterns of physicians and nurses in the cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) at Children’s and collected data on their stress levels, work and sleep cycles, healthcare delivery and perceived workloads. The goal of the study is to develop a methodology that can be used by other healthcare systems across the state to minimize turnover costs by better predicting and addressing factors that trigger burnout. 

“Our ultimate goal with this project is to be able to offer our methodology framework to other healthcare systems throughout Georgia so that they can identify and address the specific challenges they are facing on a more granular level,” said Khatereh Hadi, a senior research scientist at GTRI who is leading this project. 

To measure stress, workload and sleep among the study participants, the team used actigraphy sensors developed by Empatica, a spin-off of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that designs and develops artificial intelligence (AI) systems to monitor human health through wearable sensors. 

“These sensors are among the few on the market that let you directly download the data you collect,” explained GTR Senior Research Scientist Matthew Swarts who led the sensor development aspects of this project. 

The participants also wore tags that were connected to ultra-wideband (UWB) sensor systems installed in the ceiling of the CICU to track their movements throughout their shifts. 

“Because UWB takes up more radio frequency space, it avoids interference issues that affect other technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. This allowed us to have more penetration and better accuracy,” Swarts said. 

The study collected data on 40 total participants, who were evaluated over a four-week time period. The team also used the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX), a widely used assessment tool that rates perceived workload, to gather data on the participants’ workload perceptions. 

Paula Gomez, a GTRI senior research engineer who led the development of the project’s research methodology, said it was rewarding bringing the theoretical aspects of this project into practical application.

“Since GTRI is the applied research arm of Georgia Tech, it is really important for us to have access to a real-world environment to test and validate the theoretical research,” Gomez said. 

GTRI conducted this study with Dr. Michael Fundora, a pediatric cardiologist at Children’s who specializes in congenital heart disease and clinical research, and Christina Calamaro, the Director of Nursing & Allied Health Research and Evidence Based Practice at Children’s and an associate professor at Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. 

Fundora and Calamaro noted that current data collection methods that examine healthcare worker burnout are done retroactively and may miss certain nuances that are crucial for developing a comprehensive understanding of the issue. 

“A lot of the literature that's been done in this area looks at big data sets that, for the most part, aren’t in real time” said Calamaro. “This is one study that’s able to quantify what are the factors that may impact care at the current time and can set the stage, with the use of technology, for giving us a better measurement of what issues nurses and physicians are facing, versus going back and doing a secondary analysis of big data.” 

While burnout is commonly perceived as just affecting those experiencing it, if left unchecked, it could also lead to diminished patient care and higher mortality rates, said Fundora. 

“People talk about burnout in the sense that it's about the individual, and that's certainly important,” Fundora said. “But we conducted this study to understand how burnout also affects our patients because that's the only way I believe that we're going to get to the root of the problem.” 

Now that the data has been the collected, it will be analyzed and interpreted before potential solutions are evaluated. The team agreed that the interdisciplinary nature of the study will help them generate more impactful solutions. 

“As a physician, working on this study opened my eyes to everything I didn’t know about nurses – they are operating very sophisticated, complex equipment and nearly everything they do in the ICU has a life-or-death impact,” said Fundora. “The solution-oriented approach of GTRI also gave me a fresh perspective.” 

Calamaro added: “I think every healthcare study should have an engineer involved in some way because they see things that we as healthcare professionals don’t. It's like, I never thought of that.” 

Writer: Anna Akins 
Photos: Sean McNeil 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Gosden joined Georgia Tech in 2011 and has served in varying roles, including as interim general counsel and vice president for Ethics and Compliance and acting deputy general counsel, roles she held concurrently during 2022. Prior to that, she served as assistant chief counsel and senior attorney in employment and litigation for 10 years. She has practiced law in both private practice and public service roles. Notably, before joining Tech, she served for 12 years at the State of Georgia Attorney General’s Office, where she represented and advised state agencies, including the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.

In the new role, Gosden will advise Chaouki Abdallah, EVPR and the overall EVPR office on administrative and institutional matters and develop actions plans on policies and procedures, operational effectiveness, and communications on issues that advance the Institute’s priorities, goals, and outcomes set forth in the Institute strategic plan. She will serve as a key campus collaborator on executive initiatives, promote research-related matters and objectives, serve as a liaison and representative on campus committees, and provide strategic oversight to administrative staff within the Office of the EVPR.  

“Kathleen’s time at Tech and her mix of private and public experience position her well to serve in this new capacity,” said Abdallah. “She has been a great partner, collaborator, and trusted expert to the Georgia Tech research enterprise, and I look forward to working with her in her new role as we continue to safely grow our research and improve our services to our research personnel.”

During her tenure at Georgia Tech, Gosden has counseled on a range of institutional issues, including Free Speech and the First Amendment, Title IX, research administration and security, compliance, and scholarly misconduct. She has also served on various committees and negotiations and provided advising and training on issues related to Human Resources, Athletics, and Faculty Affairs, among others. 

“In my time at Georgia Tech, I have been extremely impressed by the research enterprise, its leadership, and the tremendous growth and innovation,” said Gosden. “I am thrilled to be joining the EVPR’s Office and to be serving in this new role.”    

Gosden holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in English and a Juris Doctor from the University of Georgia.

STEM@GTRI celebrated its 25th anniversary recently. STEM @GTRI is the Georgia Tech Research Institute's K-12 outreach program. STEM @GTRI strives to inspire, engage, and impact Georgia's students and educators through hands-on experiences, outreach, and professional learning.

STEM@GTRI customizes professional development experiences for educators, connects students and classrooms to Georgia Tech labs and researchers, and brings hands-on, fun, and relevant programming to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) educational outreach events across Georgia. STEM@GTRI leverages State of Georgia funding through grants and partnerships to bring additional STEM programming to K-12 students in Georgia. The program first received State of Georgia funding in 1998.

To commemorate this auspicious occasion, STEM@GTRI hosted a luncheon celebrating 25 years of K-12 STEM outreach at GTRI. During the program, an array of speakers reflected on the STEM @GTRI program over the past 25 years and its impact in Georgia and on the future of students.

STEM @GTRI’s First Champion: Claudia Huff

Claudia Huff, the retired GTRI Principal Research Associate who was the first Director of STEM @GTRI, spoke on its inspirational and aspirational early days. She noted that, in 1998, the U.S. was experiencing a rapid permeation of emphasis on STEM education, fueled by legislation such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996. However, while there was a desire to increase technology education, the actual means lagged.

“Computers were coming to the schools, but they weren't ready. There were computer-using educators that are scattered across the state of the country, but they were really organized together, and they hadn't seen some of the things that we could see coming down the road,” she said. That was, in large part, the impetus for the program, which was then called Foundations for the Future (F3).

She embraced and pioneered the partnership-seeking approach that is now a hallmark of the renamed STEM@GTRI.

Huff started with a small amount of seed funding from GTRI. However, her dogged determination led her to secure $2 million in funding from AT&T to really get the ball rolling. The AT&T funds were leveraged into that all-important funding from the State of Georgia, which continues to the present.

“I think the biggest impact was getting everybody aware, or getting people who needed the resources aware that we have resources, letting them know,” Claudia said.

The principles and practices that she put into place out of necessity became the foundation for what STEM@GTRI is 25 years later.

To honor and thank Claudia Huff, she was presented with STEM @GTRI’s inaugural STEM Champion Award.

Educating Future Technology Leaders

GTRI Director Jim Hudgens said that when he first arrived at GTRI four years ago, STEM @GTRI was one of the first programs he heard about: “I was just blown away by the program,” he said during his opening remarks.

“Educating future technology leaders is one of our core mission areas,” said Hudgens. “A big part of what we do in educating technology leaders is that we take it very seriously. Our people are extremely passionate about this--about their many volunteer hours going out to science fairs, going to high schools across the state, teaching classes in high schools--doing as much as they can.

“It's an amazing community at GTRI that makes this happen.”

That passion and spirit of commitment was noted often during the 25th Anniversary luncheon.

The anniversary event was hosted by Leigh McCook, Director of STEM @GTRI, which she calls “a fun role.” Her passion and commitment to STEM@GTRI was noted by speakers throughout the luncheon program.

“One of the greatest impacts I get to experience is working with our K-12 future STEM workforce. When I see a Georgia Tech/GTRI researcher explain and demonstrate their work to a classroom of elementary, middle, or high school students or experience students of all ages interact with our researchers through questions and discovery — I am thrilled to witness students have that ‘ah ha!’ moment and think ‘This is cool stuff! I want to study to learn to be a (fill in the STEM field here),’ or even ‘Oh, now I know why I’m having to learn this topic in my class — someone really does use this stuff in the real world!’

“When we get to bring diversity to Georgia’s classrooms across the state through our outreach, we open worlds of awareness of possibilities and opportunities for our K-12 students.”

Bringing ‘What If’ to the Real World Through Partnerships

“Real-world” impact, and opening students’ (and teachers’) eyes and minds to possibilities were common themes reiterated by the luncheon speakers.

District 25 State Rep. Todd Jones spoke of several of his “dreams” for the State of Georgia: advancements in daily life, from improved transportation to medical advances—all “dreams” that are dependent on significant advances in technology, which Jones said he believes is incumbent on advancing technology education throughout Georgia, including in rural areas without extensive technology resources or even a large quantity of technology educators. That, he said, is where STEM @GTRI’s outreach is invaluable.

Jones said that his office’s ongoing partnership with GTRI is key to improving the “access and rigor” of STEM education in Georgia.

“I'm going to give all the credit to GTRI. There might have been passion coming out of my office and willingness to find a partner to make this happen, but between Bert (Reeves, Vice President, Institute Relations) and the GTRI team, that is what kind of made this a success.

“We did know that GTRI had the resources to be able to make this work. What they had to deal with for a couple of decades around STEM, around the work, shows a passion and an application. That was what we were looking for.”

McCook noted that Jones’ initiative to improve access and rigor of computer science education across Georgia, as part of the newly funded Rural Computer Science Education Program, shows how committed STEM @GTRI is about fostering and furthering partners. She noted that,  in partnership with Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC), the project is “in 16 (Georgia school) districts right now” and includes contributions from the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM), and others.

“You can't dream it if you've never been exposed to it,” Jones said enthusiastically “Dreams come from ‘what if,’ but ‘what if’ can't be had unless you know what's possible and maybe what could be next.”

Such a commitment to fostering a sense of making “what if” possible was reiterated by Karen Faircloth, Director of School Improvement & Professional Learning for the Northwest Georgia Regional Education Service Agency (RESA), which encompasses school districts in smaller communities such as Cartersville, Dallas, Rome, and Tallapoosa.

STEM@GTRI High School Internship Program

STEM@GTRI thrives today largely because of the indefatigable efforts of High School Summer Internship Program co-directors Therese Boston, a Senior Research Associate in ICL, and ATAS Principal Research Engineer Erick Maxwell. STEM@GTRI’s High School Internship Program is one of its premier initiatives. In the internship program, Georgia high school students who are at least 16 years old may apply for five-week paid summer internships hosted in GTRI labs. Interns work on projects in GTRI laboratories and the GTRI Warner Robins field office with the goal of providing students with real-world experiences in science and engineering research. GTRI researchers mentor students by working with them on projects to engage them in first-hand STEM experiences.

As an example of the first-hand nature of the internship, Maxwell cited a project done by an intern team in conjunction with the 3rd Infantry Division (3ID) at Fort Stewart, Georgia. The high schoolers developed a means to streamline the arduous task of counting ammunition rounds via the use of “smart” gloves. To further emphasize the tangible benefits of the students’ experience, Maxwell noted that the students are included on the project’s application for a full patent on the gloves.

The High School Internship Program and other programs of STEM@GTRI make use of partnerships with GTRI’s laboratories, Georgia Tech, the U.S. military, and businesses in technology-related industries.

Among the industry representatives in attendance was Patrick Govan, Higher Education Account Manager at Cisco. He explained how his company, a leader in digital communications technologies, works in outreach along with STEM@GTRI. “We are starting to work with the STEM outreach program, bringing some of the students and internships into our office--we just built a new office in the Coda building (at Tech Square). So, we're show showcasing how technology is used in everyday life and in office space to inspire the younger kids. [We show them] a day in the life of what a career would look like in the tech space.

“Leigh (McCook) and I are trying to get the [STEM@GTRI] summer internship program incorporated into office visits and things like that.”

Looking ahead to future goals and activities was very much a part of the 25th-anniversary celebration. Here’s to the next 25 years of STEM@GTRI!

Writer: Christopher Weems 
Photos: Christopher J. Moore
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

The APCD was established by the Georgia General Assembly (O.C.G.A. 31-53-40) by Senate Bill 482 in 2020 to address growing concerns over the cost, quality, and access to healthcare across the state. The Office of Health Strategy and Coordination (OHSC) is responsible for creating and implementing the APCD, and the APCD's administrator is GTRI’s Center for Health Analytics and Informatics (CHAI).

When in full operation, the APCD will provide regular reports on Georgia health care issues and accept requests from stakeholders for other customized data. Beyond benefits to researchers and policymakers, the data will help support price transparency and drive consumer-focused tools reporting on such issues as quality, cost, and patient outcomes. The APCD’s information will not include any personally identifiable information about patients.

“The APCD will serve as a platform to help us really understand and improve the quality of health care in Georgia,” said Megan Denham, a GTRI senior research associate who serves as Implementation Project Director for the system. “It will help the citizens of Georgia understand more about their care and know what to expect so they can make informed decisions. Policymakers will use the data to drive funding allocations and make interventions. For our large community of researchers, it will allow them to leverage a really broad view of health data.”

Development of the system will put Georgia among the more than two dozen U.S. states that are able to make critical health care decisions based on data about the specific needs of their citizens, said Jon Duke, director of GTRI’s Health Emerging and Advanced Technologies (HEAT) Division.

“The Georgia APCD will move Georgia into the ranks of states that have a deeper understanding of their population’s health, health care costs and utilization, and opportunities for improvement,” Duke said. “We’ve seen report after report of how all-payer claims databases have led to concrete reductions in cost, improvements in care, and more informed policy-making across a wide range of topics. It will be a huge win for Georgia.”

The system will initially include information for about 5.4 million Georgia citizens – more than half of the state’s population – and is expected to be the largest aggregator of the state’s health data. The information will include data from Medicare, Medicaid, and the state health benefit plan, along with commercial claims payers. 

Data will be provided in aggregate, and maintained without personally identifiable information. “Privacy and security are paramount,” said Duke. “There’s a huge focus on privacy protection, and we have an incredible team of collaborators across the state working to help ensure that we provide only the minimum data necessary for key use cases. The APCD will not analyze or share patient identifiers such as medical record numbers, names, or addresses.”

Beyond data on specific treatment protocols, the system will also provide information on their context. For instance, data on a knee replacement surgery could include information on imaging done, diagnostic testing, and presurgical activities leading up to the procedure, as well as physical therapy afterward – and both cost and outcome measures. 

“It’s much more than just the surgery,” said Denham. “We want to look at it as a whole, and also consider the components. That gives more information about the care that people are receiving and what they can expect.”

Beyond the care itself, the system will provide generalized information about patients receiving it – demographics, the symptoms that led to the diagnosis, relevant medical conditions such as arthritis and diabetes, and other claims made by the patient. 

“All of these things can be brought together to help understand the equation,” said Duke. “People who have had knee replacement surgery can be looked at in the aggregate so we can assess potential risk factors for poor outcomes, or conversely, factors that may support patients recovering more quickly.”

Certain claims-paying entities are required by law to provide data to the APCD, while others are invited to submit information voluntarily. Beyond the value to policymakers and researchers, information about Georgia-based costs will also be helpful in understanding what consumers pay as their share of health care service costs. 

“Price transparency is a key goal for the APCD. While there are many factors affecting what data can be shared, in other APCD states, there are excellent tools designed to support consumer knowledge about the cost of different procedures at different locations where someone might go for a specific procedure,” Duke said. “Some tools provide data on health care quality from Medicare and Medicaid which allows for some integrated perspective on cost and quality measures.”

The APCD plans to regularly provide reports on specific Georgia health care issues, such as the incidence and context of chronic diseases that affect large populations in Georgia. These will include diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and heart failure. The system will also provide data on cancer, as well as maternal and child health, and the median rate for “surprise billing.”

Beyond reports on broad issues important to providing a big picture of health in Georgia, aggregated data on these five million patients can also be made available to state agencies, policymakers, researchers, health care organizations, and others. Requests for standard and customized data sets and reports will be reviewed by a data release and review committee, based on alignment with the APCD objectives, the qualifications of the requesters, and other factors.

Development of the Georgia APCD benefits from the lessons learned from similar projects established in other states, as well as guidance and input from a broad range of industry and academic stakeholders. “We’re taking the best of what other states have learned and put them together to meet the specific needs of our state,” Duke said. “The legislation creating our APCD was well thought-out and reflects the best ideas from APCDs nationally.”

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)  
GTRI Communications  
Georgia Tech Research Institute  
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

A team of scientists at Georgia Tech, Brown University, Nanyang Technological University, and MIT have measured the mechanical stresses that develop in dendrites – solving a long-standing hypothesis that high stresses can be developed around dendrites. Dendrites pierce through solid electrolytes, eventually crossing from one electrode to the other and shorting out the solid-state battery cell.

Georgia Tech Professor Christos Athanasiou and the multidisciplinary team used photoelasticity to measure the stress on batteries caused during the battery cycle. In their paper, Operando Measurements of Dendrite-Induced Stresses in Ceramic Electrolytes using Photoelasticity, they managed to overcome challenges associated with measurements of easy to break, very tiny solid electrolyte samples. The samples thickness was about 10 times smaller than the average diameter of human hair.

The team used an old - and almost forgotten - principle of photoelasticity to directly measure the stress fields during cell operation. Photoelasticity’s contactless nature also allows for the stresses to be directly measured and visualized at the dendrite tips. By shining light through the material under a special photoelastic microscope, it revealed intricate stress fields. In this case, the stress revealed from passing light through the electrolyte appeared at the tip of the propagation dendrite.

This advanced experimental setup has set the stage for profound exploration of stresses developed during battery operation across various electrolytes and conditions, revealing critical data on loading conditions and the dynamics of lithium metal penetration events.

This is just one example where creative, yet simple experimentation, can lead to fundamental discoveries. The Daedalus Lab at Georgia Tech, inspired by the ingenuity of its namesake, the mythical Greek inventor, is dedicated to decarbonizing the future through the development and promotion of sustainable materials and structures, utilizing innovative experimental approaches and artificial intelligence.

WarRoom, part of the U.S. Air Force’s Live Mission Operations Capability (LMOC) program, has now been installed at over 20 different training ranges around the world. It brings together as many as a dozen programs that provide information on potential threats, handle radio communications, analyze aircraft engagements, support mission planning, and display a fused combat operating picture. WarRoom operates on non-proprietary commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) computer systems. 

What WarRoom does is comparable to how modern smartphones brought together separate pagers, cameras, mobile phones, electronic calendars, and other devices, explained Joel Rasmussen, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which developed WarRoom and an allied display application known as Angel for the U.S. Air Force.

“The whole concept of LMOC is to get more competency into the brains of our warfighters in less time,” he said. “More efficient training helps warfighters improve more quickly, allowing the collective capabilities of our Air Force to elevate. We can also replicate and adapt to changing enemy capabilities because this system is designed to be agile.”

Training ranges provide valuable assistance to pilots and aircrews, allowing them to battle “red team” opponents and learn new tactics and techniques in a controlled environment. WarRoom increases the training value of each training mission to help prepare warfighters for combat.

By providing a common hardware/software operating platform for combat training ranges, WarRoom also allows new applications to be quickly installed and updated. Previously, new applications had to be installed individually at the ranges, a time-consuming process. 

“We can host these applications on a single server cluster and give them to everybody who needs them,” Rasmussen said. “The main thing is that every range, no matter the size, can have the best tools available. There are many advantages to having a common platform for the ranges.”

In developing the WarRoom, a team headed by GTRI Systems Research Manager Ed Loeffler virtualized legacy range systems so they could operate on a common architecture. That allows all the applications to run on virtual machines, which reduces maintenance and hardware upgrade costs – and facilitates data sharing. Loeffler’s team is experienced in scalable and interconnected live-synthetic, hybrid, and digital architectures and environments with redundant, fail-safe capabilities that can be rapidly reconfigured between unit-level or large-force test and training events and wargaming exercises.

For ranges that don’t yet have WarRoom, GTRI has developed a scripted deployment process that reduces the overall installation time. “This has turned a months-long integration effort into a couple of days with a pre-approved Authority to Operate (ATO). That really helps with getting a new installation approved and accredited, and also ensures that we have good repeatability at each of the ranges,” Loeffler said.

WarRoom can easily accommodate new applications thanks to the Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA). Additionally, several ranges using WarRoom are now connected using the Live Mission Operations Network (LMON).

“Beyond the existing WarRoom systems, GTRI has several additional installations scheduled, along with multiple updates. A typical new WarRoom install requires the team to be on-site for less than a month for installation, integration, and user training,” Rasmussen said. 

A key component of WarRoom is a new display system known as Angel that supports blended training for the combat air force. Angel is a versatile visualization tool not limited to legacy data formats or architectures, does not use any proprietary data models, and is not tied to any specific ground system.

WarRoom also supports Live Virtual Constructive (LVC), which will allow a live person in a real aircraft to interact with a live person in a simulator – or an artificial intelligence or “constructive” entity on a computer. While this training component hasn’t yet been fully implemented, WarRoom is designed to enable LVC by integrating all the data necessary for it in a single platform.

Based on input from warfighters, WarRoom has been in development since 2019 and has been implemented incrementally over time. This has allowed the research team to respond to the changing needs identified by users – and new threats that have arisen.

Jared Lyon, a GTRI Senior Research Engineer in the Phoenix Field Office, has been involved with the project since its inception. “We frequently solicit and receive feedback from the people using the system so we can make sure it does exactly what they need,” Lyon said. “We recently hosted more than a dozen system users in our Phoenix field office to get input. We were making changes to the product in real-time, trying to understand challenges from the warfighters’ perspective.”

Though developed for the Air Force, WarRoom may expand to other Department of Defense branches that also could benefit by integrating their training range software. Using a common platform could facilitate more interaction between the services, Rasmussen said.

WarRoom is a major project for GTRI involving more than 40 researchers altogether. The work is principally being done in three field offices – Utah, Phoenix, and Orlando – as well as GTRI headquarters in Atlanta. More than a dozen subcontractors have been involved, including Space Dynamics Lab and Raytheon Solipsys.

In addition to the GTRI researchers already mentioned, the project has included Principal Research Engineer Mike “Scratch” Fitzpatrick and Principal Research Associate Mike Naes.

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)  
GTRI Communications  
Georgia Tech Research Institute  
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Haran has been part of EOSL for over 24 years. In 1999, he joined GTRI as a student. He became a full-time research faculty member in 2002 after completing his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech. In 2008, Haran was named a Branch Head and went on to become Associate Division Chief in 2015. He has also served as the Interim Division Chief for the Electro-Optical Systems Innovation Division and, most recently, as Associate Lab Director.

Haran’s research experience includes analyzing, prototyping, and testing integrated optical systems for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and threat warning applications. He has led program development and sponsor engagement in those areas within EOSL and across GTRI. 

His experience also spans into being an advisor for government programs. He served as a trusted technical advisor for several DoD program offices, which provided regular opportunities to represent GTRI in front of senior DoD officials. He also oversaw two major GTRI-wide contract vehicles sponsored by the Army and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).

Don Davis, Deputy Director for Research in Electronics, Optics, and Systems at GTRI, described Haran’s contributions to GTRI. 

“Terence has fostered key collaborations across GTRI, greatly enhancing our mission impact,” Davis said. “He has distinguished himself as a leader in all aspects of the lab’s business, including technical contributions, sponsor engagement, and program development and management. I have confidence that following his vision, EOSL will achieve our goal of being a nationally recognized and preeminent research organization in the fields of optics and microelectronics.”

EOSL is a leader in Electro-Optic (EO) and radio frequency (RF) signal and information processing, with expertise covering materials and devices, system design, algorithm development, and modeling and simulation for signals across the electromagnetic spectrum from RF through UV. Major research areas include optical and photonic systems for ISR, EW, and related applications; optical and electronic materials and devices; aircraft survivability equipment system analysis and optimization; and AI/ML applied to these activities.

Haran said he is looking forward to contributing to the expansion of EOSL’s national impact.

“I am very excited about the opportunity to lead a great team of very talented researchers as we tackle some of the hardest problems in optics and microelectronics,” he said.  “EOSL has incredible potential in an area with significant demand from our research sponsors and I look forward to increasing our impact on the nation.”

GTRI conducts research through eight laboratories located on Georgia Tech’s midtown Atlanta campus, in a research facility near Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Smyrna, Georgia, and in Huntsville, Alabama. GTRI also has more than 20 locations around the nation where it serves the needs of its research sponsors. GTRI’s research spans a variety of disciplines, including autonomous systems, cybersecurity, electromagnetics, electronic warfare, modeling and simulation, sensors, systems engineering, test and evaluation, and threat systems.

Writer: Madison McNair (madison.mcnair@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications  
Georgia Tech Research Institute  
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

The Larry Ritter Book Award recognizes works that demonstrate "original research or analysis, a fresh perspective, compelling thesis, impressive insight, accuracy, and clear, graceful prose." 

War Fever, which the award committee called "meticulously researched and riveting," is a portrait of three men in Boston in 1918 — a symphony conductor, a Harvard law student, and baseball star Babe Ruth — whose lives were changed by the Spanish Flu and World War I. 

"Randy Roberts and I are truly honored to be recognized by the Society for American Baseball Research," Smith said. "Winning the Larry Ritter Book Award means a great deal because it comes from an organization of researchers and writers who truly know baseball history. We are grateful that the award committee found War Fever worthy of this generous award."

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is addressing that challenge through its Defense-University Affiliated Research Traineeship (DART) Program. DART’s main goal is to leverage the pipeline of researchers underrepresented in STEM and accelerate their awareness, knowledge, access, and opportunities in research and development (R&D) contracting for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). GTRI launched DART as a pilot program this summer where it partnered with a faculty member and an undergraduate student at Alabama A&M University (AAMU) in Huntsville, Alabama, to conduct research for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center (AvMC). 

“GTRI has benefitted from almost 90 years of DoD research, which has taught us a lot about how to build out our infrastructure,” said Lee Simonetta, a GTRI principal research engineer who serves as DART’s principal investigator (PI). “Our partnership with Alabama A&M was a mentor-protégé opportunity, where we provided the research facility and capabilities and they contributed their exceptional talent and expertise as we worked together to address a pressing need for one of our sponsors.” 

GTRI hosted AAMU’s Kenneth Sartor, an assistant professor of math, and Malcolm Echols, a fourth-year electrical engineering student, at its research facility in Huntsville. Sartor and Echols worked under the guidance of GTRI Principal Research Engineer Eric Grigorian. Grigorian is also the chief engineer and division chief of GTRI’s Applied Systems Laboratory’s (ASL) Architecture and Systems Development Division. The group’s research project involved using machine learning to improve predictive maintenance for the Army’s helicopters.

In the DoD realm, predictive maintenance is used to predict the failure of the components of weapon and delivery systems so that they can be replaced before they fail. The technique is particularly beneficial for military equipment as its frequent exposure to harsh conditions can make it more prone to wear and tear. 

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that can rapidly learn from data, identify patterns, and make recommendations with minimal human intervention. The technology could optimize predictive maintenance by collecting and analyzing data in a fraction of the time it takes humans and reduce uncertainties around when assets might fail. 

AAMU and GTRI developed and incorporated advanced machine learning algorithms into AvMC’s data repository of helicopter maintenance records to augment its maintenance prediction models. 

“Our group developed a few algorithms that AvMC had not yet considered, which was great progress for an initial study,” said Grigorian. “Ken’s mathematical background and Malcolm’s technical knowledge really enhanced the solutions we developed, and I enjoyed working with them and learning from them.” 

Sartor, who holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Florida Institute of Technology and a master’s and bachelor’s degree – both in electrical engineering – from North Carolina A&T University and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), respectively, called his collaboration with GTRI a full-circle moment. 

“This program gave me a chance to kind of take all those skills I developed in my career since graduating from Georgia Tech and apply them this past summer,” Sartor said.

Before joining AAMU in 2012, Sartor spent his career in private industry, including working for and ultimately retiring from Northrop Grumman as a systems engineer, where he gained expertise in topics such as algorithm development, modeling and simulation, and systems analysis. 

“One of the reasons I went into teaching is because both of my parents were teachers and I have always had a passion for giving back to the next generation, including showing students how to use concepts they learn in the classroom to solve real-world problems.” 

Sartor said Echols’ technical skills, including his coding experience, along with his tenacity and eagerness to learn, made him a great fit for the program. 

Echols said Sartor’s academic and DoD research experience helped him achieve maximum success. He also called DART an eye-opening experience that gave him the confidence to tackle new challenges. Echols will be returning to GTRI to work as a student researcher during the 2023-2024 school year.   

“Throughout the summer, Dr. Sartor kept reminding me to not just limit my thinking to the academic world, but to the actual problem we were looking to solve,” Echols said. “It was a big adjustment, but it also a great experience. I learned a lot.” 

From FY 2010 to FY 2020, about $67 billion in DoD science and technology funding was awarded to 1,183 institutions of higher education, of which 157, or about 13%, were HBCUs or other minority-serving institutions (MSIs), according to a recent study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. But HBCUs and MSIs received only 1.3% of the total DoD research funding awarded to all institutions of higher education, the data found. 

The study identified three areas as crucial for HBCUs and MSIs to build their capacity and compete for DoD funding: One, a strong institutional research and contract base, including appropriate physical research facilities and skilled research support to enable competitiveness; two, research faculty support, including an articulated vision and support for a research climate and culture by institutional leadership, faculty teaching workloads that allow time for research pursuits, and department/college-based research staff and administrative support; and three, ancillary services, including effective human resources processes and legal/contracting assistance, and robust government relations teams. 

“All of these schools share a similar story – they have talented, capable people, but are held back by a lack of infrastructure,” said William H. Robinson, GTRI’s deputy director for research for its Information and Cyber Sciences Directorate (ICSD). “For this pilot, we were able to navigate that challenge and I believe this is an area where GTRI can continue to provide mentorship going forward.” 

Looking ahead, GTRI aims to expand DART to other HBCUs throughout the country.    

“One of our goals from the beginning was to develop champions, both faculty and students, at HBCUs who can advocate for the importance of DoD research,” said GTRI Principal Research Engineer Erick Maxwell, who first developed the idea for the DART Program. “As we think about expanding this program to other HBCUs, we have this example of success through our work with Alabama A&M that we can continue to build on.” 

GTRI’s Huntsville Research Center (HRC) is the development and technology home for Army air defense systems, missile defense systems, and rotary wing aviation technology, among many other projects. GTRI Huntsville provides on-site research and engineering solutions and has a deep reach-back to GTRI’s Atlanta-based laboratories.

Writer: Anna Akins 
Photos: Sean McNeil 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

GTRI’s Latest HOH Cohort is ‘Mission-Ready’

We spoke with members of the “23-3” cohort of GTRI’s Hiring Our Heroes program as they began their fellowships in early September. Their insights show the importance of the HOH program, both for the fellows and for GTRI.

The GTRI HOH Experience

For many warfighters, transitioning from the structured military environment to a research institution can be daunting. But at the heart of this transition is guidance. Each fellow is paired with a sponsor from one of GTRI's eight prestigious laboratories.

The Impact of HOH

It's not just about employment; it's about community, integration, and mutual growth. For those in the military community considering this path, the fellows have some advice.

Below, we present the fellows’ thoughts in their own words.

Meet the GTRI Hiring Our Heroes Fellows in the ‘23-3’ Cohort

Zachary Guyton:

Zach’s sponsor is Jeffrey O’Hara, Principal Research Scientist, ASL

Give an overview of your military career. How long did you serve, and in what capacities?

I have served 12.5 years in the Army as an infantry officer. During this time, I have held the positions of platoon leader, company commander, operations and logistics planner, operations officer, and assistant professor at USMA. I have multiple combat and operational deployments (Afghanistan twice, Kuwait, and Korea) and have been in both light infantry and Armor (Tank) formations. 

How did you first learn about the Hiring Our Heroes (HOH) Fellowship at GTRI?

Prior to joining the 23-3 cohort, I interviewed for a GTRI position that I did not get. I maintained contact with the GTRI Division/Branch leadership, which led to a HOH fellowship. Throughout the process, GTRI was extremely professional and engaged while setting me up for the fellowship and potential post-fellowship employment.

What type of research will you be conducting in your assigned laboratory at GTRI?

I am working in the Human Systems Engineering Branch (Human Centered Engineering Division) within the Applied Systems Laboratory. I will be conducting human factors and human systems integration/engineering research in support of efforts to improve future Army fighting and transportation vehicles. 

How do you think programs like HOH impact the broader military community in transitioning to civilian roles; and what advice would you give to future transitioning service members considering the HOH Fellowship at GTRI?

Hiring our heroes is an outstanding opportunity for transitioning servicemembers to immerse in a civilian job and determine the type of the work they want to do following military life. It also can provide a direct path to employment following the fellowship.

I would tell future GTRI Hiring our Heroes candidates to ask questions, learn as much as possible, and stay proactive as they consider GTRI as an option. There are plenty of opportunities within GTRI and finding the right spot within the organization will help ensure GTRI is a good fit.

Amana Norris:

Amana’s sponsor is Eric Scott, Principal Research Associate, Information and Cybersecurity Department (ICD)

Give me an overview of your military career. How long did you serve, and in what capacities?

I enlisted in February 2003 in the U.S. Army, and will officially retire in March 2024, thereby spanning a 20-year career in Information Technology and Cybersecurity. I began as a 25B--Information Services Specialist, in the Signal Corps, reaching the rank of SSG before applying to become a Warrant Officer as 255A--Information Services Technician. Later, when the Cyber Corps was being established around 2014, I decided to transition as a 170A, where I am now a CW3.

Throughout my career in the Signal and Cyber Corps, I have been stationed and deployed to various organizations in Korea; Germany; Fort Liberty (formerly Bragg), North Carolina; Fort Eisenhower (formerly Gordon), Georgia; Kuwait, and Afghanistan. My various roles included the opportunity to exercise my leadership skills and demonstrate my skillset in Helpdesk Operations, COMSEC security, server technician, and cybersecurity. Within my military career, it has been my passion to increase my technical skills as much as possible since Information Technology and Cybersecurity are translatable into a civilian career. The mission and operations are the only difference between the military and civilian sectors. Tools used and knowledge gained remain the same.

How did you first learn about the Hiring Our Heroes (HOH) Fellowship at GTRI?

I was contacted by email to interview for a position within the Information and Cybersecurity Division (ICD), where I would be able to continue using my technical skillset. I signed up for the HOH fellowship program because I wanted something that would allow me to operate in a civilian setting outside the DoD. I view this fellowship as an opportunity to apply my knowledge, identify areas I may be lacking, and adapt to civilian operations. I was not aware that GTRI had various HOH Fellowships throughout their various labs and was actually referred to ICD when I was conducting an interview for a program management position. Personally, I was not interested in program management and wanted something that fell into IT or Cyber. Luckily, my information was sent to ICD, where I found the work/life balance to be an attractive incentive in accepting the fellowship with GTRI and ICD.

What type of research will you be conducting in your assigned laboratory at GTRI?

As part of ICD, I am part of the support services in threat-hunting cybersecurity incidents. Research will consist of identifying new cybersecurity threats and sharing that information.

How do you think programs like HOH impact the broader military community in transitioning to civilian roles; and what advice would you give to future transitioning service members considering the HOH Fellowship at GTRI?

Programs like HoH provide service members an opportunity to find their strengths and weaknesses outside a military setting. The transition time helps ease a service member’s mindset in letting go of the military while possibly learning a new skillset or applying their current skills to the position they select. There are some organizations that monopolize a service member’s transition time and don’t allow them the opportunity to gradually become a civilian again. When you join the Army, you go through basic training to shed the civilian mentality and become a soldier. Without programs like the HoH, I feel some service members would experience shock in the transition. Those are the ones who would most benefit from a program like the HoH Fellowship.

Brian Trainor:

Brian’s sponsor is Stan Sutphin, Principal Research Engineer, SEAL

Give me an overview of your military career. How long did you serve, and in what capacities?

I was an Electronic Warfare Officer in the USAF for a little over 23 years.

How did you first learn about the Hiring Our Heroes (HOH) Fellowship at GTRI?

I learned about GTRI during the resume release portion of the HoH program.

What type of research will you be conducting in your assigned laboratory at GTRI?

I will be helping research and create a roadmap for the Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations test and training infrastructure at the National Space Test and Training Complex (Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado).

How do you think programs like HOH impact the broader military community in transitioning to civilian roles; and what advice would you give to future transitioning service members considering the HOH Fellowship at GTRI?

I think programs like HOH help expose transitioning service members to follow-on career options that they may not have been aware of or even considered realistic options before entering the fellowship program. My advice to future transitioning service members would be to take as many opportunities to connect, speak, and interview with as many companies as possible during the "interview stage" of the program. I know that getting that exposure to multiple different companies and how they operated helped me narrow down and ultimately decide where I wanted to be--GTRI.

Ric ‘TAC’ Turner:

TAC’s sponsor is John Bennell, Principal Research Associate, Sensors & Intelligent Systems Directorate (SISD)

Give me an overview of your military career. How long did you serve, and in what capacities?

I have over 20 years of experience as a leader, test pilot, fighter pilot and engineer in the United States Air Force.

What type of research will you be conducting in your assigned laboratory at GTRI?

I conduct cutting-edge research and development projects in aerospace engineering. I am passionate about the integration of systems--especially as they cross domains to provide capability, as well as advancing the state-of-the-art in air, space, and cyberspace systems, and look forward to leveraging my expertise, experience, and network.

Cody Waits:

Cody’s sponsor is Clayton Besse, Principal Research Associate, CIPHER

Give me an overview of your military career. How long did you serve, and in what capacities?

I served in the Army for 7.5 years as a Signal Officer, the majority of the time with Special Operations and Airborne community. I deployed in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and managed tactical information network nodes and secure radio communications. As a Signal Officer, I was the IT Operations manager for multiple organizations within my career. I allocated tactical IT assets to mission-based requirements to provide consistent and clear communications to ground forces and higher headquarters.

How did you first learn about the Hiring Our Heroes (HOH) Fellowship at GTRI?

I did not even know about the fellowship opportunity until [CIPHER Senior Research Associate] Steven Bartels reached out to me to set up an interview to talk. I was immediately interested and after interviewing, GTRI was my most interesting opportunity and I accepted the bid to conduct my fellowship with GTRI.

What type of research will you be conducting in your assigned laboratory at GTRI?

I will be conducting cloud integration/migration and cybersecurity research within the CIPHER Laboratory.

How do you think programs like HOH impact the broader military community in transitioning to civilian roles; and what advice would you give to future transitioning service members considering the HOH Fellowship at GTRI?

I think that programs like HoH are an amazing asset to the military community, this allows a unique opportunity where employers will reach out to you instead of applying to multiple applications online without even receiving an initial response. With the current job market climate, HoH proves to be invaluable to separating service members. I would advise future GTRI fellow candidates to highly consider GTRI, I believe this is a work environment that will still give you that sense of purpose and fulfillment that you will miss upon separating from the military.

GTRI’s Hiring Our Heroes Fellowship program is more than just an employment opportunity—it's a bridging of two worlds where skills, dedication, and innovation intersect. Through this program, GTRI not only gains valuable expertise but also reinforces its commitment to giving back to those who've served. For the fellows, it’s a chance to chart new horizons, building on their rich military past. While each HOH Fellowship cohort lasts 12 weeks, the relationships built and the skills acquired have long-lasting implications.

Writer: Christopher Weems

GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have received funding to study the concept of using modified strains of probiotic bacteria – that are already part of the human gut microbiome – to stimulate the formation of antibodies against the flu virus in the body’s mucosal membranes. Respiratory viruses like influenza infect the body through mucosal membranes, and the proof-of-concept project will help evaluate whether snippets of influenza proteins – tiny fragments of the virus – could be added to two common bacterial strains to create the antibody response. Antibodies in the mucosal membranes might then complement those created by traditional intramuscular injections to head off flu infection.

The research, supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), will study whether or not the harmless bacteria can be successfully modified to carry snippets of a viral coat protein that could stimulate the desired response in mucosal membranes lining the gut. Beyond reducing influenza infection in the general population, improved protection against the flu could have a significant impact on the U.S. military, which wants to provide the best possible protection for its warfighters to reduce possible impacts on readiness and training from influenza outbreaks. 

At Georgia Tech, the project is a collaboration between researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences. All of the research at Georgia Tech will be done using BSL-2 facilities designed for this type of study. The award does not include research on animals or humans.

“Ultimately, this could one day make vaccination programs much more effective,” said Michael Farrell, a GTRI principal research scientist. “This isn’t going to be a replacement for flu vaccines as they currently exist, but it could act as an adjuvant – something that’s done in addition to vaccination to increase the overall immune response. To benefit from it, you might take a pill like you do with probiotics now.”

Using Common Probiotic Bacteria as Vehicles

The project will focus on two common probiotic bacteria: Escherichia coli – a gram-negative bacterium better known as E. coli – and Lactococcus lactis, a gram-positive bacterium found in cheese, buttermilk, and other dairy food items. The researchers will attempt to coax the bacteria to express the influenza virus’ Hemagglutinin (HA) receptor protein on their outer cell surface. There, the protein would stimulate an antibody response in the gut mucosal membrane as it passes through the body’s gastrointestinal tract.

“We’re using some well-established probiotic bacteria that have been utilized for dozens of years, are well vetted and safe for humans,” said Brian Hammer, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences who specializes in bacterial genetics. “Ultimately, the idea is to use these bacteria as a chassis to create living vaccines, since the body already tolerates them both well.”

Researchers at AFRL and Georgia Tech envision that a single pill or capsule would carry the bacteria into the gastrointestinal tract to provide the necessary antibody stimulation. The bacteria would be modified so they could not reproduce, preventing them from becoming part of the body’s gut microbiome – a diverse collection of bacteria that live in the body and help carry out specific functions, including metabolizing food and modulating the immune system.

“We know the human microbiome is intimately involved in human health and disease, influencing processes in ways that have both positive and negative outcomes for us,” said Richard Agans, senior research biological scientist at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine (USAFSAM). “Recently, we have started to better understand how the microbiome communicates with our bodies and how we can identify, target, and promote the beneficial aspects. Currently, we are working to determine how to utilize these microbial communities to better protect our warfighters as well as the general public.”

Overcoming Challenges of Manipulating Bacteria

Hammer’s lab specializes in manipulating proteins of organisms such as bacteria and viruses to create novel fusions. Among the techniques available is the new CRISPR-Cas, the gene-editing technology that was the subject of a Nobel Prize in 2020, but other more traditional techniques may also be used to get the influenza surface protein where the researchers want it to be.

Among the challenges ahead is that adding a new component to bacterial organisms can be difficult. 

“In general, bacteria have evolved with the genetic components they need to survive,” Farrell explained. “If you add something else, they may just kick it out. It’s very hard to find a neutral location in the bacterial genome where we can stably add new functionality. This is especially true for this effort, in which there will be no cointroduction of antimicrobial resistance markers.”

In addition, the probiotic bacteria strains that are widely used in research as model organisms, or “lab rats,” are adapted to living in laboratory conditions. This project, however, will use natural commensal strains that co-exist in humans. That approach may make it even more challenging to add the appropriate material for expressing the viral proteins on the bacteria cell surfaces, Hammer said.

“We used to perceive that genes could be shuffled around in the bacteria without much effect on them, but we’re learning now that location really matters,” he said. “One of the concerns is that tools that work on the ‘lab rat’ versions of these bacteria will not be as readily accepted by these commensals.”

As part of the project, the researchers will have to show that the addition of the protein doesn’t cause instability in the bacteria, and that the modified bacteria generate the correct response when exposed to human immune cells in culture. 

Proof of Concept Could Lead to Broader Vaccine Therapies

Beyond its importance to the military, influenza was chosen to study this adjuvant approach because a number of vaccines exist for this virus, and they have been well studied over the years. If this approach works with influenza, the combination of pill and injection might be useful for vaccines against other respiratory viruses.

“If this is ultimately successful, it could be the first foray into showing that these vehicles, these probiotics, could potentially be scaled up for lots of different therapeutic uses,” said Hammer. “By customizing the cargo, this approach could be rapidly adapted to address new and emerging threats that may arise in the future.”

Project Provides Student Opportunity

The two-year project life was chosen because of the expected difficulty – and because another of its goals is to train a master’s degree student in the bacterial modification techniques being utilized.

The Georgia Tech researchers have chosen an underrepresented minority student who holds an undergraduate degree in biology from Kennesaw State University and has worked in a commercial DNA laboratory. Katrina Lancaster will begin work on this project during fall semester, collaborating with both Hammer and Farrell – and the students and other researchers in their labs.

“This student will have excellent opportunities, not only to learn the skills in the lab and take the coursework, but also to develop a rich network of connections, both in the School of Biological Sciences and at GTRI, that will be helpful in moving forward and advancing their career,” Hammer said. “It’s a really beautiful combination of components for this project.”

The project is funded through the AFRL’s Minority Leaders Research Collaboration Program (ML-RCP).

“Partnering with academic institutions, such as GTRI, presents great opportunities for our team to interact and work with top minds in these fields to develop better outcomes for everyone,” Agans said. “We are especially grateful for the opportunity to mentor and provide opportunities for underrepresented students with STEM aspirations. We are excited to work with GTRI in this endeavor and envision this being just the first step.” 

USAFSAM is part of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing. 

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)  
GTRI Communications  
Georgia Tech Research Institute  
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Combining technologies including machine learning, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and a new radio-frequency image processing algorithm, the research has streamlined the modular handling of radar signals to reduce processing time and cost. The improvements – as much as two or three orders of magnitude – could lead to real-time analysis of RF image data from sources ranging from potential enemy targets to speeding automobiles headed toward collisions.

The research, which has been tested on a 16-element digital antenna array, was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Tensors for Reprogrammable Intelligent Array Demonstrations (TRIAD). While the project has so far focused on real-time imaging operations on vast amounts of data, it supports the conventional beamforming operations also done by phased arrays.

“The goal is to push processing up front, to where all the raw data is coming in,” said Ryan Westafer, a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “We work to manage the high-dimensional data there and extract features in real-time. With so many data sources from autonomous vehicles to drones, we can’t be sharing all those raw data feeds. We need to be analyzing the data locally and sharing only the information content – the relevant features.”

With potentially hundreds or even thousands of subarrays generating terabytes of data every second, Westafer says this “edge intelligence” can pull out the desired information in real-time, allowing defense and transportation applications alike to get the important details right away – when they need it – without waiting for processing by backend servers.

“Classical approaches process the data in the analog format, choosing only certain components of the vast information flow for digitizing where needed,” noted Alex Saad-Falcon, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student and former GTRI researcher who co-led the project. Other portions of the data can be stored on a server for later analysis.

“We want to digitize all of the data, then off-load a smaller digital portion to be shared,” he said. “That gives more flexibility to antenna array algorithm designers, because it is much easier to create an algorithm in the digital domain because you can write it in code, versus analog, where you have to design a circuit and get it built. That also facilitates reprogramming when conditions change.”

FPGAs and GPUs are keys to Georgia Tech’s modular TRIAD approach. With low power consumption and high processing speeds, the FPGAs are located adjacent to the analog-to-digital converters on antenna subarrays. With help from graphics processing units (GPUs), they process the data, quickly sending it to a CPU where information from other subarrays is aggregated.

As a key feature of the project, GTRI researchers collaborated with academic researchers in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) to utilize SoloPulse, a new array processing algorithm designed for radio-frequency images generated in synthetic aperture radars (SAR).

“The algorithm provides an estimate of energy coming from different points in the vicinity of the array,” Saad-Falcon explained. “That allows you to form an image, though you have some uncertainty about where the actual source is. The goal was to train the machine learning model to reduce that uncertainty, or learn from it to predict the source location.”

Though SoloPulse was not originally designed for the purpose the GTRI researchers needed, their collaborators – ECE Professor Christopher Barnes and Research Technologist J. Michael McKinney – supported its adaptation to the TRIAD goals.

Programming in the digital domain can utilize tensors, which are multilinear algebraic entities that describe the relationships between objects in terms of scalars and vectors. Utilizing tensor operations also allows data representations to be shared with machine learning algorithms such as deep neural networks, which can learn how to improve their operation every time they receive new data.

“You funnel the data into the new artificial intelligence tensor operations, which you also bundle up, and then at the end you get a detection, some kind of an end result that is human-actionable,” said Saad-Falcon. “The whole idea is that because you frame both the traditional algorithms and the machine learning algorithms in the same format as these tensor operations, you can effectively chain them together and get speedups that you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise.”

Beyond accelerating the data processing, the use of FPGA and GPU chips could help conserve power, which can be critical for mobile applications. “You have a finite compute budget on the array, so you need to intelligently allocate the computation and use an algorithm that extracts the information you want from the signal most effectively,” he said. “This is of interest to a lot of different applications in the industry right now.”

Part of the project’s goal was a demonstration to process radar pulses received by the 16-element array. The researchers used a moving emitter on a turntable in their lab to evaluate TRIAD’s imaging ability. “We could immediately see the result and our total latency from emitter motion to screen update was on the order of about 20 milliseconds – almost faster than the human eye can see.”

The DARPA project concluded in December 2022 and the researchers are now looking at other potential applications for the technologies. Among the possible uses is shared perception, which could have applications in autonomous vehicle networks, both for commercial and defense needs.

In addition to those already mentioned, the research included Jonathan Andreasen and Clayton Kerce from GTRI, and Jonathan Beaudeau from Pareto Frontier LLC, who supported the FPGA digital signal processing (DSP) component of the project.

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

At the event will be teams from the VA from both the Health and Benefits groups as well as the Georgia Department of Veterans Services, all focused on action for you. The event will be held from 10 a.m. - 2 p.m.

Click here to register.

This is not just an information session; it is meant for you to come in and get your claim processed with the VA team from Atlanta.

The PACT Act, signed into law August 10, 2022, expands health care eligibility to several groups of veterans who may not have been eligible before.

The new eligible groups include:

• Veterans who participated in a toxic exposure risk activity (as defined by law) while serving on active duty, active duty for training, or inactive duty training.

• Veterans assigned to a duty station in (including airspace above) certain locations during specific periods of time on or after:
  • August 2, 1990, in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,
  • Saudi Arabia, Somalia, or United Arab Emirates
  • September 11, 2001, in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Egypt,
  • Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Uzbekistan, or Yemen, or
  • Any other country determined relevant by VA.
• Veterans who deployed in support of:
  • Operation Enduring Freedom
  • Operation Iraqi Freedom
  • Operation Freedom’s Sentinel
  • Operation New Dawn
  • Operation Inherent Resolve
  • Resolute Support Mission

The event will take place from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. at GTRI Headquarters (250 14th St, Atlanta), Rooms 119A, 119B, and 119C.

VETLANTA is a club operated exclusively for veteran social and business networking and community service purposes. Its mission is to make Atlanta the premier community in the country for veterans and their families to work and live.

Useful Information About the PACT Act:

PACT Act: FAQ

PACT Act: Gulf War

PACT Act: Scams

PACT Act: Survivor Benefits

Presumptive Disability Benefits

Previously Awarded Benefits: FAQ

Tricare Rate Hikes

Nearly 250 attendees from more than 200 government, academic, and industry organizations convened at the Phoenix Challenge June 20-23 to discuss how misinformation, disinformation, and the propagation of bad information may affect the world – and how organizations across those three sectors can work together to address growing concerns about the effects of what’s happening in this arena. Although AI was among the top concerns, there were many other issues on the agenda.

The conference was organized for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) by GTRI, the University of Maryland Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS), and the Information Professionals Association.

The June Phoenix Challenge conference was part of a series of events designed to promote collaboration on efforts ranging from research and acquisition to operational planning and execution, with goals of reducing enterprise ambiguity in the Department of Defense, promoting awareness, and exchanging information. Recommendations coming out of the meeting’s working groups are being briefed to appropriate offices in the Department of Defense and other agencies.

“The idea for the Phoenix Challenge is to create a watering hole where everyone can participate with equal standing,” said Austin Branch, professor of the practice at ARLIS, which is funded by the OUSDP to convene the Phoenix Challenge events. “By bringing these communities together, government can enjoy additional critical thinking and testing of ideas, offering new concepts, technologies, and methodological approaches in an environment that’s collaborative and includes everyone.”

OIE – a discipline that in years past was known as information warfare – can include such topics as electronic warfare, cyber operations, military deception, and psychological operations in a broad cognitive security space. “The Phoenix Challenge is a recognized platform for collaboration and sharing, in both technical and non-technical areas, and in the hard sciences and soft sciences,” Branch said. “Participants have to be prepared to work because we’re working on solutions, and there is a sense of mutual accountability.”

Beyond the recommendations to the government, participants from industry and academic communities benefit from obtaining a better understanding of the government’s needs, plans, and concerns.

“Here, we can have everybody concentrated and focused, with a great value proposition in being able to reduce ambiguity about what the requirements are and for the government to articulate what the needs are, then allow this broader enterprise to work on those things,” Branch added.

At the Atlanta meeting, there were three panel discussions, including one on generative AI, which has both positive and negative implications for the world’s information environment.

“This technology is going to have an enormous impact on us going forward,” said Theresa Kessler, a GTRI research scientist who was among the Atlanta event’s organizers. “AI and machine learning tools can make the OIE challenges worse, or be used to make them better. There’s also a cybersecurity component and the human element of how people can be so accepting of bad information.”

The goals of the Phoenix Challenge include much more than identifying the issues. Attendees participated in six working groups organized to highlight potential solutions and make recommendations to be considered by the government. And those making the recommendations are expected to play a role in carrying them out.

“Ultimately, the goal is to affect the national defense strategy, with these output products, recommendations that the working groups built,” Kessler explained. “We had a huge representation of industry partners, along with academic participants, including multiple universities, University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs), and Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). Each of our working groups had a representation from industry, government, and academia.”

That broad representation helped provide a perspective not limited to a single constituency, she said. “The working groups were designed and facilitated in a way that everybody’s opinion was pulled in and valued. Involving all these different groups provides a more holistic presentation of the problem and the solution set.”

In addition to a classified working group, the breakout sessions focused on:

• Inputs to the R&D Roadmap for OIE Technologies.
• Detection and Beyond: Implementing Effective Technological Solutions to Emerging OIE Threats.
• Applied Research: Assessments.
• Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment (SOIE) Implementation Plan Framework.
• Resilience to Adversary Disinformation.

Among the conference speakers were:

• Todd Breasseale (Deputy Assistant to the Secretary for Public Affairs, Office of Information Operations Policy).
• LtGen (R) Dennis Crall, USMC.
• Heidi Shyu, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)), who addressed the conference virtually.
• Neill Tipton, Director for Defense Intelligence, Collection and Special Programs.

The June Phoenix Challenge event was the first hosted by GTRI, but the event has a long history, beginning decades ago and including recent meetings in London and Charleston, South Carolina. In 2022, GTRI hosted an Information Warfare Summit on its Atlanta campus, but elected to join forces with the Phoenix Challenge in 2023. The next event is likely to be held in the Washington, D.C., area during 2024.

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

The USG may grant the Regents’ Researcher title to outstanding full-time principal researchers at Georgia Tech and three other University System research institutions. The title may be awarded upon the recommendation of the USG institution President, chief academic officer, and three members of the faculty named by the President, and upon the approval of the Chancellor and the Committee on Academic Affairs.