The Tech Promise Scholarship, founded in 2007, makes it possible for Georgia students with family incomes below $55,500 to earn a debt-free degree from Georgia Tech. Weigel’s appointment as a faculty guide on the eve of the program’s 20th anniversary marks the first time a recipient of the scholarship has returned to the program in a mentorship capacity.

For Weigel, a senior academic professional in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences, the position is a full-circle moment:

Nobody gets to Tech by accident, but I know that for students who come from backgrounds similar to mine that it might not always feel that way. I’ve been keeping an eye out for this opportunity because I truly think it makes all the difference to have a broad support system and people who get where these students are coming.

Read Emily Weigel's story. >>>

Walking down the stairs in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, you might look up to discover a set of letters made out of construction paper. Backlit by blue and red light, it reads, “Plant Library: Fridays 3:30 – 4:30”. This sign has caught the eye of many students, who walk inside to discover a bustling scene. Instead of books lining shelves, plants of all sorts are gathered in the windows, drinking in the sunlight. A group of students browses for a few moments before leaving with a plant of their own to nurture. The majority are gathered around a table, cutting up English ivy to propagate in recycled containers.   

Deciding which candidates deserve scarce laboratory time is itself a hard problem. It requires weighing scientific plausibility against practical constraints — likely impact, expected effectiveness, and eventual manufacturability — considerations that are difficult to apply consistently across thousands of candidates.
 

An artificial intelligence (AI) program developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) could provide a new way to narrow that hypothesis pool down to a rate that robotic laboratories can actually test, and more broadly, to evaluate a wide range of scientific and technical claims that would otherwise overwhelm human assessment.
 

Known as FARSCAPE, the program was developed to support a research project organized by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to evaluate a broad range of feasibility questions. By breaking down challenging questions into smaller components that can be evaluated by a team of independent computer agents, FARSCAPE uses a “chain of thought” approach to provide answers in the form of probabilities. It then helps humans check the rationales for its assessment.
 

Read the full article on the Georgia Tech Research Institute news page

Microbes from space have fueled the plots of science fiction mainstays like “Project Hail Mary” and “The Andromeda Strain.” But with more space missions launching each year, finding extraterrestrial life in a microbial form is becoming more plausible. What will the response be back here on Earth if – or when – scientists discover extraterrestrial microbes? Will the international policy and security communities be prepared for the fallout?

When you hear about extraterrestrial life, your mind may go to intelligent life, like the kind present in a lot of Hollywood science fiction. But even the confirmation of microbial life that originated somewhere other than on Earth – which is much more likely – would be a paradigm-shifting event. Thinking about what these consequences might look like early on can help nations and the international community prepare.

Our team is interested in this question. We’re made up of a full professor of international affairs, who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry, and whose expertise is on how emerging science and technologies could affect global conflict and cooperation, as well as an emerging scholar in space policy and security and an expert on social and political implications of frontier technologies, such as AI, space, quantum and energy sources.

Multiple Mars landers have identified large amounts of frozen and liquid water, essential for life, on the red planet. Samples retrieved by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft from a near-Earth asteroid revealed the presence of uracil, part of RNA, which is a building block of life. Uncrewed space probes like NASA’s Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer are on their way to conduct detailed reconnaissance of the planet’s moons and to investigate whether they have conditions suitable for life.

Along with data from the James Webb Space Telescope and future missions targeting Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, the likelihood of discovering extraterrestrial microbial life has increased substantially.

A Governance Challenge

The discovery of microbial life would expose significant gaps in international governance related to space.

While there are some existing international agreements, including the Outer Space Treaty, that provide space law guidelines, these are ill-equipped to address the complexities posed by extraterrestrial biology.

The Outer Space Treaty, established in 1967, dictates that countries should use outer space peacefully. It also states that no single nation may claim ownership or exert sovereignty over parts of outer space or celestial bodies such as the Moon.

However, it doesn’t have much to say about who can own extraterrestrial organisms or what to do about biosecurity risks. It doesn’t have direction for who can use, preserve or destroy living things, such as bacteria or fungi, that may be discovered in space.

Historical Analogies and Future Pathways

While people have yet to discover extraterrestrial life of any kind, there are some major geopolitical events that can help researchers understand what the consequences might look like.

While the space race of the 1950s and ’60s led to exploration of the Moon, it was driven by a Cold War power struggle between two nations back on Earth. Instead of coming together to explore space, both countries experienced a renewed sense of nationalism. They used the new discoveries that came from the space race to invest in their military capabilities.

On the other hand, researchers can look at how states respond to asteroid threats. Since an asteroid could pose a truly existential threat from space, preventing the worst-case scenario requires cooperation and thinking ahead.

Astronomers have built a global, collaborative network to monitor for and sound the alarm about any potential threats. This network has shown that nations can put aside terrestrial rivalries to work together if they perceive something from space as a truly existential threat.

The International Space Station is another example showing how nations that are competing great powers on Earth work together to cooperate in space. Countries have collaborated to solve issues on the International Space Station that have specific, short-term and clearly identified goals.

These examples show a range of possible reactions to the discovery of space microbes. The situation could renew space races between competing countries and lead to militarization, or it could create unprecedented cooperation.

Potential Outcomes

We’ve identified three main possible outcomes to the discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life.

First, there’s a cooperative outcome, reminiscent of the asteroid threat network or the International Space Station. Here, nations collaborate to regulate research, share data, protect the planet or advance specific interests they share.

This pathway isn’t inherently benign or malignant. It could entail expanding the roles of international organizations or creating new legal instruments.

Second there’s a competitive outcome, characterized by strategic rivalry between countries. Like in the space race, nations could fight to be technologically superior. They might try to monopolize access to the extraterrestrial microbes or to leverage biological discoveries from the microbes for their own economic or military advantage.

Scientific breakthroughs derived from extraterrestrial organisms could lead to innovations in medicine, agriculture, energy and beyond. However, the organisms could also be weaponized, intentionally or otherwise, which would amplify biosecurity risks. In this sense, the discovery of microbial life could create a new form of technological competition, one that merges space exploration with biological research and development.

The increasing role of private companies, such as SpaceX, complicates this dynamic. These companies receive contracts from the government, blurring the lines between commercial civilian and strategic activities.

For example, around 60% of all satellites currently orbiting the Earth belong to SpaceX’s Starlink subsidiary. The company can – and has – chosen to block access selectively, in alignment with its political priorities. When commercial interests and national priorities diverge, who has access versus who is denied access can be uncertain.

Research around biopiracy may come into play. Biopiracy is a term that applies to two primary issues: the patenting of indigenous knowledge or the patenting of natural resources, such as microbes, for profit. The Budapest Treaty prohibits claiming ownership of a naturally occurring microbe on Earth, but there’s no equivalent for microbes in space.

Third is an isolationist outcome, in which states could sever their involvement in international cooperation due to biosecurity concerns or political distrust. The potential for unknown biological risks, however minimal, could trigger precautionary restrictions on data sharing, which limits international collaboration.

Countries may lose or gain allies as they grapple with whether the microbe could cause harm to humans or the environment, or be developed into a biological weapon.

Emerging technologies will also shape these outcomes. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are already integral to scientific research. Scientists use them to process astronomical data and identify potential biosignatures. Nanotechnology and advances in the life sciences and engineering could allow researchers to study, modify or exploit extraterrestrial microbes, if they’re given access to them.

Countries will have to prepare not only for the scientific implications of discovery but also for its societal and political reverberations. The politicization of scientific discoveries from the microbes could complicate or change how countries respond domestically and at the international scale. Misinformation about the microbes could shape policy and public response.

Preparing for the Unprecedented

The discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life would not merely mark a scientific milestone. It would be a geopolitical event.

Rather than attempting to predict a singular outcome, policymakers could adopt scenario-based planning approaches in the meantime to anticipate and prepare for a range of possibilities. In these approaches, participants explore multiple futures through structured activities similar to professional or military wargaming or path games, in which they explore multiple outcomes systematically to test strategies, to plan and to analyze potential outcomes under realistic uncertainty.

In our view, the question is not whether humanity will discover life beyond Earth, but whether it is prepared for the consequences when it does.

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

As Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera delivered his final Institute Address from the Walter G. Ehmer Theater inside the John Lewis Student Center, he emphasized that the end of his tenure is not the end of a race but rather the next leg of a relay. As he prepares to pass the baton to the next president, he outlined Tech’s unprecedented momentum.  

It began with a focus on helping computer systems incorporate human language into their perception of the world. Could a robot tell humans that a heavy object is straining its arm? Does it know that a container makes a sound when it is picked up or dropped?

Now, Thomason’s research has become more human-centered, which is one reason he feels at home as he joins the faculty at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing as an associate professor.

Thomason comes to Georgia Tech after spending five years as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.

He will move his Grounding Language in Actions, Multimodal Observation, and Robots (GLAMOR) lab to Tech. The lab explores methods for connecting natural language processing to robotics.

While pursuing his computer science Ph.D. at the University of Texas, Thomason researched early NLP systems before large-language models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini were introduced.

Thomason then expanded into robotics to explore how roboticists can create new ways to communicate with robots using computational representations of language.

“The idea was you could do something that looked like robot programming without as much engineering work if you used one of these coding modules to create a language-code interface,” Thomason said. 

When OpenAI and Google released their commercial LLMs in 2022, Thomason felt a seismic shift.

“That area of NLP and robotics became more crowded and accessible with the advent of (LLMs),” Thomason said. “It created a huge inroad to roboticists being able to plug and play language technologies in a way they couldn’t before. Robotics hardware has also become much cheaper and more standardized.”

But as LLMs became universal tools accessible to everyone, Thomason said he started thinking more about how he could improve optimization for users.

“I became most interested in how language interfaces, starting in 2022, were suddenly everywhere,” he said. “Everybody had a chatbot on their phone. I wanted to see what we could do as researchers to make the interaction between an AI system like a language model and a person smoother and more beneficial.”

Thomason said he felt he needed a new environment where end users were at the center of the technology design process. He was drawn to the School of Interactive Computing for its reputation in human-computer interaction research.

“That was a big factor in my decision to move to the School of Interactive Computing, where you value that kind of human-centered computing,” he said. 

“With the strong HCI researchers here, I have an opportunity to learn more from my colleagues about how to run high-quality human-subject studies, conduct participatory design, and identify actual users of a potential system and talk to them about what would be helpful.”

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Production activity is expected to take place primarily during the day, starting as early as 7 a.m., and in the early evening hours, with setup, filming, and breakdown occurring throughout the three days. While every effort will be made to minimize disruption, brief holds may be necessary at various times to ensure the safety of the campus community and filming crew.

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Despite decades of research, the chaotic nature of turbulence makes it difficult to predict and control. This challenge impedes more than smoother air travel. Solving the turbulence problem could lead to advances in areas ranging from sustainable energy to training a smarter workforce for the era of artificial intelligence (AI).

To advance understanding of turbulence, the National Science Foundation is establishing a new, $30 million Science and Technology Center (STC) at Michigan State University. Georgia Tech is among eight universities supporting the center.

Assistant Professor Qi Tang will join the STC for Transformative Explorations in Multi-Physics and Engineering of Scientific Turbulence (TEMPEST). TEMPEST, launching on Sept. 1, aims to build trustworthy, predictive models of real-world turbulence. 

Tang will lead TEMPEST’s modeling and scientific machine learning (ML) efforts. NSF will fund Tang and Georgia Tech with over $1 million from the center’s five-year, $30 million award.

By understanding and predicting turbulence, TEMPEST can unlock new applications, with a focus on fusion energy and national security. The center will also generate long-term research projects with applications in air and space flight, manufacturing, chemistry, and broaden science education and AI fluency.

“Turbulence has resisted prediction for a century,” said Tang, a faculty member in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

“STC TEMPEST aims to develop a unified, predictive science that advances fusion energy, improves hypersonic technologies, and deepens our understanding of how stars created the elements that make up our world and ourselves. For everyday people, the center points toward abundant clean energy and faster, more efficient flight."

Turbulence is the motion of a fluid characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and speed. Turbulent flows can occur across all scales, from interactions between subatomic particles to astrophysical scales, including supernovas, black holes, and cosmic rays. 

While turbulent flows are common and occur naturally, scientists still do not fully understand them. Small changes in a turbulent flow can produce dramatically different outcomes. Combined with the countless interactions across multiple scales of time and space, this makes turbulence extraordinarily difficult to predict.

“Rather than studying individual pieces of this enormously complex problem in isolation, we are bringing together theory, experimentation, computation and artificial intelligence to develop a deeper understanding of turbulence across scales,” said Michael Murillo, an MSU professor and the director of TEMPEST. 

“Our goal is not simply to understand turbulence better, but to make it predictable and controllable in ways that will enable new technologies and scientific discoveries.”

The NSF TEMPEST award supports students and researchers at Michigan State University, Auburn University, Baylor University, Georgia Tech, San José State University, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, University of Rochester, and Yale University to combine theory, computation, AI techniques, and experimentation to build trustworthy predictive models of real-world turbulence for high-consequence applications.

Additional partners include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Fusion, and General Atomics.

Together, TEMPEST researchers will build more accurate and reliable physics-grounded models. The center will test new ideas against real-world observations, then use those results to refine the models. 

Tang contributes expertise in ML, scientific computing, and plasma physics to STC TEMPEST. 

Earlier this year, Tang received an Early Career Research award from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. He is using the award to build ML and data science tools that help scientists analyze massive datasets from fusion experiments and simulations.

This interdisciplinary approach is intended to move science from understanding why turbulence behaves as it does to predicting how it will behave. Through prediction and simulation, scientists could eventually engineer solutions to control turbulence in real-world scenarios.

The center will make its data and software broadly available and engage the public through museum exhibitions, immersive media, and educational programs that are expected to reach more than 10,000 K-12 students annually. TEMPEST will also help train an AI-fluent scientific workforce prepared to tackle complex problems across disciplines.

“One reason I am excited to work in TEMPEST is because it aligns perfectly with our School of CSE mission. As a discipline, CSE complements theory and experimentation as a mode of scientific discovery,” Tang said. 

“We build computational models to simulate scientific and engineering concepts, like turbulence in this case, so that we can test theories that are too difficult, expensive, or risky for physical experiments.”

Georgia Tech researchers spent two years helping to answer that question through DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), a competition designed to test whether AI could identify and fix security vulnerabilities in real-world software.

Now, they are sharing what they learned with the cybersecurity community.

Their paper, SoK: DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC): Competition Design, Architectures, and Lessons Learned, was presented at USENIX Security 2026, one of the world's leading cybersecurity conferences. The paper was selected as a runner-up for the conference’s distinguished paper award, placing it among 36 recognized papers from 362 accepted papers out of 3,028 submissions.

The paper examines how the seven finalist teams approached the competition and what the results reveal about the future of AI-powered cybersecurity.

Putting AI to the Test

AIxCC challenged teams to build Cyber Reasoning Systems (CRSs) that could operate with minimal human assistance to identify software vulnerabilities, develop fixes, and determine whether security alerts were real threats.

The teams had 143 hours to analyze 53 software projects during the final competition.

Georgia Tech’s Team Atlanta, which won the competition, used an approach that combined multiple AI agents with traditional security tools. Other teams used different approaches, including applying AI for specific tasks or building highly autonomous AI agents.

The variety of systems provided researchers with a rare opportunity to compare different approaches to AI-powered cybersecurity.

Lesson from the Competition

One of the biggest lessons was that reliability matters as much as intelligence.

Some systems were highly capable but struggled to remain operational while analyzing large, complicated software projects. The strongest systems were often those that could work reliably throughout the competition.

The researchers also found that AI and traditional security tools have different strengths. Traditional tools were still effective at finding common bugs, while AI performed better at reasoning through more complex problems.

However, AI-generated fixes remain a major challenge.

Researchers found that 38% to 46% of AI-generated patches were semantically incorrect. This means a patch might stop a security problem but also break a feature or create another problem.

The results show that AI can play an important role in cybersecurity, but human experts are still needed to verify the safety of AI-generated fixes.

Sharing the Lessons

Cen Zhang, the paper’s first author, said the research offers a unique look at the competition by combining lessons from the finalist teams, organizers, and DARPA’s data.

“This paper provides a unique angle on how AIxCC was designed, the techniques teams used, and what the scores reveal and conceal,” Zhang said.

Jiho Kim presented the paper at USENIX Security 2026. He said the presentation was an opportunity to share lessons from two years of work with the broader cybersecurity community.

“Seeing the strong interest and thoughtful questions from the audience made the experience particularly rewarding,” Kim said.

The researchers say they hope the lessons from AIxCC will help guide the next generation of cybersecurity tools.

The CAREER Award is NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty, recognizing researchers who demonstrate the potential to become leaders in both research and education.

Mahajan received the award for her research on designing energy-efficient, adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) datacenters through a cyber-physical approach that jointly considers AI software, computing hardware, and the physical state of the underlying infrastructure.

As AI models continue to grow in scale and complexity, they place increasing demands on every layer of datacenter infrastructure—from accelerators, memory, and networking to power delivery, cooling, and security. Yet these systems are often designed and optimized one layer at a time, limiting overall efficiency and adaptability.

Mahajan’s research reimagines AI datacenters as cyber-physical systems in which software, hardware, and physical operating conditions continuously inform one another.

“AI infrastructure should be designed around the real-time condition of the hardware, not just its specifications,” Mahajan said. “By making AI systems aware of the physical state of the infrastructure, we can build datacenters that are more efficient, adaptive, and resilient at scale.”

Read Full Story on the ECE News Page

The new fellowship award was announced in 2023 and named after Isbell, who served as dean for the Georgia Tech College of Computing from 2019 to 2023. 

Isbell joined Georgia Tech as a faculty member in 2002. He was instrumental in developing the College’s innovative Threads curriculum and the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program.

The new fellowship is given to graduate students from underrepresented groups.

Francis is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in human-centered computing (HCC) working toward the improvement of black women’s maternal health. She is advised by Associate Professor Andrea Parker.

“I’m humbled and grateful that my body of work was compelling enough to be awarded,” Francis said. “Receiving this fellowship in Dr. Isbell’s name is encouraging, and I want to do my best work in my last semester to honor his legacy.

“This fellowship secures funding to complete my Ph.D. and continue equity-centered work and champion voices of marginalized or under-resourced populations. This fellowship is directly making this work possible.”

Francis’s work drew attention early in her Ph.D. when she started assisting Parker in the Preventing Maternal Mortality Using Mobile Technology (PM3) study led by the Morehouse School of Medicine’s Center for Maternal Health Equity.

The project aimed toward designing an app that reduces maternal mortality among Black postpartum women by getting them care on their phones. The app featured real-time health monitoring, educational resources, social support groups, and personalized care.

Google recognized Francis’s work through its Fitbit Health Equity Research initiative in 2021.

Francis entered the HCC Ph.D. program with a background in public health. She holds a bachelor’s degree in public health education and promotion from Georgia Southern University and master’s degrees in public health and biotechnology from Morehouse.

“I felt overwhelmed at first because I thought I had made the wrong choice pursuing a computing Ph.D. coming from a public health background,” she said. “After steeping myself in the literature and applying myself, I found that I can be a leader and innovator in this space.”

Francis said the fellowship will allow her to continue her research in clinical artificial intelligence (AI) for black women’s health.

Student Enters Ph.D. Program as Stamps Fellow

As Francis gets set for her final semester, Rachel Baker-Ramos is beginning the first semester of her Ph.D. as a recipient of the Stamps Fellowship.

Baker-Ramos is part of the second cohort of the Stamps Fellows, which was implemented by Georgia Tech in 2025. The Stamps Fellowship is the highest merit-based doctoral fellowship offered by Georgia Tech and given to exceptional scholars positioned to advance technology that improves the human condition.

She is the second student from the School of Interactive Computing to be named a Stamps Fellow. Adya Danaditya was a member of the first cohort last year. 

Baker-Ramos completed her master’s in human-computer interaction in 2024 under Georgia Tech’s MSHCI program. 

She spent two years as a research scientist in the Ka Moamoa Lab, led by SIC associate professor Josiah Hester. In 2025, she received the College of Computing’s Outstanding Research Scientist Award. 

She will continue her Ph.D. research with Hester as her advisor.

Baker-Ramos has assisted Hester, a native Hawaiian, on several Hawaii-based projects centered on sustainability and indigenous STEM education.

As a master’s student, Baker-Ramos led the design of Kumu Connect, a STEM lesson plan generator that creates culturally relevant lessons co-designed with Hawaiian immersion language teachers.

Hester and his lab received a Google Academic Research Award for their work on Kumu Connect and recognition from the 2025 MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellowship. Baker-Ramos was also first author on a paper about the project that earned best paper honorable mention recognition at the ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference.

“When I first came to Tech, I was seeking out something with the Hispanic community because we are underrepresented in STEM, but it became this partnership with my advisor,” Baker-Ramos said. “It’s been interesting as a researcher from an underrepresented community working with another community that has some experiences that are parallel and some that are different.”

As she thinks about what her Ph.D. research will look like, she is interested in how AI is impacting indigenous cultures. She plans to start research in that area in Hawaii and then expand to other communities.

“We’re talking with Hawaiian educators about what AI should look like if it were grounded in principles of caring for the land,” she said. “I want to look at what’s appropriate with these tools, and what should be their limitations with data sovereignty, community agency, sustainable impacts, and how they’re localized to each community. 

“Right now, my work is mostly in Hawaiian spaces, but there’s a lot of nuance between different communities. We need to understand what each community wants or doesn’t want out of these systems.”

However, new artificial intelligence (AI) models developed at Georgia Tech may soon weigh in on the debate, providing a richer, more accurate understanding of what classical structures looked like than ever before.

The new AI and machine learning models developed by GT researchers will provide archaeologists and classical architecture experts with better analytical tools for studying temples, theaters, homes, and other structures from ancient Greece.

These models could enable researchers to draw conclusions and make new discoveries in a fraction of the time required to identify and analyze archaeological data using traditional statistical methods.

Kartik Goyal and Myrsini Mamoli received a $225,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities earlier this year to support interdisciplinary collaboration, including the development of the models. 

Goyal is an assistant professor in Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. He researches how natural language processing can benefit humanities scholars, including analyzing historical texts to make new discoveries.

Mamoli, a native of Greece, is an architectural historian and joint lecturer in the School of Architecture and School of History and Sociology . She conducted early research on how computational methods can help reconstruct historical architectural remains while earning her Ph.D. in architecture from Tech.

Mamoli is one of hundreds of researchers who spend their summers each year studying archaeological sites and monuments in Greece or Italy. She is among a select few working at the Ancient Agora in Athens.

“The Agora is where the political buildings of Athens emerged, and democracy was born, so it’s one of the most important sites in the classical world,” said Mamoli.

“Having been excavated by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens for almost 100 years, it’s the most well-funded, systematically explored, and most digitally well-documented site.”

More than 180,000 artifacts have been uncovered at the Ancient Agora.

The physical structures that have survived for thousands of years, along with recorded data and references in ancient texts, are the primary sources scholars rely on to determine what buildings might have looked like in antiquity.

Mamoli said identifying and studying all comparable structures and formulating hypotheses about them takes years. Every discovery made at the Agora since 1933 has a digitized record, leaving a massive amount of data to sort through.

AI can comb through it in a matter of moments and help researchers fill the gaps.

“Anything I want to look at, I can access it online, but the process of going through and connecting the dots and identifying certain design principles like proportions and material is tedious. Imagine if we could feed this data into an AI model that would automatically discover the connections.”

Mamoli said architecture has its own “language” that can be analyzed as a shape grammar. This visual, rule-based mathematical concept is used to generate designs in that language. Each architectural style has its own shape grammar.

Mamoli’s work as a Ph.D. student involved manually computing this information to generate 2D visualizations. Now, she hopes Goyal’s models will enable the instant conversion of data into more subjective and accurate visualizations.

“You encode these design principles and then apply them recursively, and you come up with various possible reconstructions,” she said. “Making these rules is time-consuming, so we hope with AI, a whole fresh approach can happen where AI can discover the rules by looking at the data at scale.”

Goyal has already used similar methods to analyze early modern English printed books and identify their printing origins. When Mamoli approached him about collaborating with her, he believed the same process could be applied to reconstructing classical buildings.

“Ancient texts and historical architecture records can help us fill in the blanks,” Goyal said. 

“These systems can automatically infer patterns from the fragmentary plans described in various texts. To automatically generate a proposed reconstruction, we are deploying machine learning techniques. They make the model not just think about producing tokens or pixels, but also about the aesthetic and geometric features.”

Goyal said he’s aware some humanities scholars have expressed concern that AI could compromise scholarly integrity. Large-language models, for example, can struggle to account for cultural nuances and often inject biased hallucinations into their output.

“This is reflected in many problems in the humanities that I’m working on — the need for AI systems to be more transparent and more easily modifiable,” he said. “If we run these models blindly, we risk incorporating undetected bias.”

Mamoli said it’s important to limit the scope of AI and think of it as a tool. 

“I strongly believe that AI should not replace the human brain,” she said. “I don’t see it replacing the scholarly work that is being done. I see it as assisting it.

For archaeologists, it may be necessary.

With so many sites being excavated, it could be the best way to keep track of hundreds of thousands of artifacts and use them to gain a clearer historical understanding. 

“Right now, I am working in the Section Iota in the Agora of Athens,” said Mamoli.

“This is a disturbed site with artifacts from all over the Agora because people have moved them for secondary uses. What if an AI model could instantly create a map to trace that movement and show exactly where these fragments came from?”

The committee, convened through the National Academies' project Future of Battery Technology Options for Defense Applications, will identify the strengths and weaknesses of future battery technologies, including an examination of performance, safety, and manufacturability across technology and manufacturing readiness levels. The committee will also identify gaps where research investments could potentially improve battery capabilities across technology and manufacturing readiness levels, creating opportunities to leverage commercially available technologies.

With a joint appointment in MSE and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, McDowell is internationally recognized for his research on batteries and energy storage materials. His work focuses on understanding how materials change during battery operation and using that knowledge to develop safer, more efficient, and more sustainable energy storage systems. McDowell is also co-director of the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center. He leads research spanning solid-state batteries, lithium-ion and sodium-ion technologies, and next-generation energy storage materials. “I am very thankful to be selected, and I look forward to working with colleagues on developing recommendations to advance battery technologies in support of our country," said McDowell.

Read Full Story on the MSE Newspage

This award is part of NASA’s Space Technology Research Grants Program, which supports groundbreaking projects with the potential to transform space science and technology.

Through the three-year, $750,000 award, Mazumdar and her research team will develop laser-based methods to simultaneously measure temperature, chemical species, gas velocity, and other properties in the gases surrounding heat shield materials.

“We aim to implement our measurement techniques in arc jet or plasma jet facilities, like the ones at NASA, to assist with the evaluation of thermal protection systems for next-generation spacecraft,” Mazumdar said.

The project uses ultrafast lasers, which produce extremely short, high-intensity pulses. These pulses allow researchers to study the behavior of molecules on extremely short timescales and measure properties that can improve understanding of the gases surrounding a spacecraft during atmospheric entry.

Mazumdar said she and her students are excited about this project and hope it will help NASA develop new heat shields for spacecraft traveling to destinations such as Mars, Venus, and Titan.

Read Full Story on the ME Webpage

Read more.

College of Computing alumna Nova Ahmed (CS Ph.D. 2010) will return to campus on Sept. 14 to discuss her two decades of experience applying technology to address social and humanitarian challenges. 

At the heart of the new lab is the miniTrashpresso, a compact recycling and manufacturing system developed by the sustainability technology company Miniwiz. The machine can take used plastics and other waste materials, process them locally, and transform them into new products in less than five minutes. By bringing manufacturing and recycling together in a single system, the Trash Lab aims to give the Georgia Tech community a way to explore sustainable design, material reuse, and the future of circular manufacturing.

“The launch of IPaT’s new Trash Lab represents an exciting step forward for sustainability at Georgia Tech,” said Jennifer Chirico, associate vice president of Sustainability. “As a living-learning lab, it provides students and researchers with hands-on opportunities to work alongside campus operations, turning used plastics into valuable new products and creating innovative solutions that support a more circular campus.”

A Makerspace Focused on Circular Innovation

The Trash Lab expands Georgia Tech’s growing network of makerspaces and innovation environments by focusing specifically on waste recovery and reuse. Instead of treating used plastics as disposable materials, the lab encourages users to view them as valuable resources that can be transformed into new products.

The miniTrashpresso represents the latest generation of recycling technology developed by Miniwiz. The company originally launched the world’s first mobile recycling line, known as the Trashpresso, to support communities that lacked access to traditional recycling infrastructure. The newer miniTrashpresso is smaller, more energy-efficient, and more portable, making it suitable for campuses and community-based applications.

The modular system uses industrial equipment, including shredders, presses, and heating technologies, to process materials on-site. Advanced heat-induction presses and specialized molds can quickly transform recovered plastics into new objects and components. The system can also be integrated with AI-powered waste-tracking tools and robotic automation technologies that help identify, sort, and process materials more efficiently.

For IPaT leaders, the Trash Lab represents more than the addition of specialized equipment.

“Community resilience and people-centered sustainability are core research areas within IPaT,” said Michael Best, executive director. “Our new Trash Lab will allow the entire Georgia Tech community to not only think about upcycling and plastic reuse but to make and do innovative projects that directly demonstrate sustainable futures.”

Turning Trash Into a Resource

Miniwiz founder Arthur Huang, who developed the miniTrashpresso system, describes upcycling as a practice rooted in centuries of human ingenuity.

“Upcycling is actually recycling old material and turning that into something new,” Huang said.

Throughout history, societies have reused existing materials in construction, manufacturing, and everyday life. According to Huang, modern waste streams, particularly plastic packaging and electronic waste, represent an enormous and often untapped source of raw materials.

The miniTrashpresso was designed around that idea. Rather than transporting waste long distances to centralized facilities, the system enables materials to be processed where they are collected. By reducing transportation needs and creating opportunities for local manufacturing, decentralized recycling systems can help lower the environmental footprint associated with traditional waste management.

Miniwiz estimates that using recycled materials can reduce embedded energy consumption by 60% to 80% compared with using raw materials. The company has developed more than 1,200 upcycled materials and products from everyday waste streams, including plastics, food packaging, coffee cups, and electronic waste.

Since its introduction, Miniwiz technology has been deployed in communities, campuses, and organizations worldwide, including projects in Taiwan, Italy, Singapore, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. According to Huang, Georgia Tech is installing and operating North America’s first miniTrashpresso recycling machine from Miniwiz.

Building a Community Around Sustainability

The new facility is also intended to serve as a gathering place for interdisciplinary collaboration. Students interested in sustainability, materials science, engineering, design, manufacturing, and public policy will have opportunities to experiment with new ideas while working with researchers and campus partners.

“When Michael Best first pitched the idea of the Trash Lab, I expected there to be interest in a space like this given the general momentum toward sustainable practices on campus, but the level of excitement from students, staff, and faculty has been outstanding,” said Tim Trent, IPaT’s lab director for the Trash, Craft, Prototyping, and Usability Labs.

“This is an opportunity to create a gathering point for sustainability initiatives, act as a catalyst for partnerships, and help strengthen the many amazing networks and projects already present on campus,” he said. “The IPaT Innovation Labs have a continuous focus on supporting the overall Georgia Tech research enterprise, and I’m happy we are adding another piece to the portfolio.”

As the Trash Lab opens its doors, members of the Georgia Tech community will be invited to explore how waste materials can be reimagined as resources, prototypes, and products. By combining makerspace culture, advanced recycling technology, and sustainability research, the lab offers a tangible demonstration of how circular economy principles can move from theory into practice.

For Georgia Tech, the Trash Lab is not simply a place to recycle plastic. It is a space where innovation, design, and sustainability intersect, helping transform discarded materials into opportunities for learning, discovery, and impact.
 

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For more information about the Trash Lab, contact the IPaT Innovation Labs at ipat-labs@groups.gatech.edu.

Established in 2014, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program brings together distinguished faculty from across Georgia Tech to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, strengthen the sustainability research community, and advance the Institute's mission of generating real-world impact through research, education, and engagement. Serving three-year terms, fellows act as strategic advisors, community ambassadors, and thought leaders within the broader sustainability ecosystem. Building on this foundational vision, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program has evolved to meet the dynamic needs of modern sustainability leaders. The newly revamped program emphasizes active leadership development, offering tailored networking opportunities, connections with broader sustainability networks, and focused training to help fellows grow as influential voices in their respective fields. Through these enhancements, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program aims to empower early-career researchers to maximize their reach, elevate their research, and innovate transformative sustainability solutions.

The 2026 cohort represents a wide range of expertise spanning AI and sustainability, sustainable finance, computational materials discovery, infrastructure systems, environmental chemistry, urban resilience, and community-engaged research.

The 2026 BBISS Faculty Fellows are:

• Heidi Biggs, Assistant Professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
• Jennifer Bowen, Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, College of Sciences.
• Gaurav Doshi, Assistant Professor, School of Economics, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
• Xindi He, Assistant Professor, Scheller College of Business.
• Guoxiang (Emma) Hu, Assistant Professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering.
• Suhas Jain, Assistant Professor, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering.
• Patrick Kastner, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, College of Design.
• Cindy Kaiying Lin, Assistant Professor, School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing.
• Julia Yang, Assistant Professor, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, College of Engineering.

Collectively, their research addresses the sustainability of interconnected human, natural, and engineered systems, encompassing topics such as watershed resilience, resource stewardship, carbon cycling, circular materials management, and evidence-based environmental decision-making. Their diverse expertise fosters new interdisciplinary collaborations that accelerate the development of practical, scalable solutions for communities, industries, and ecosystems.

“We are delighted to welcome this exceptional group of faculty leaders to the BBISS community,” said BBISS Executive Director Beril Toktay. “Their expertise, creativity, and commitment to sustainability will help expand opportunities for collaboration and accelerate the impact of sustainability research across Georgia Tech and beyond.”

You’ve been planning your dream beach vacation for months, only to arrive and find the shoreline covered in large piles of smelly, brown seaweed, with even more floating offshore. It’s disappointing, for sure – and increasingly common.

Since 2011, summer scenes like this have played out on beaches in South Florida and throughout the Caribbean.

The consequences are even greater for people who live and work along the Caribbean and Gulf coasts and the coasts of the tropical Atlantic. Large masses of sargassum seaweed can clog harbors, interfering with fishing and boating, and in some cases harm marine life. As the seaweed begins to decompose it releases gases, including hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and methane, raising concerns for both public health and the environment.

To reduce the impact of these sargassum blooms, a crucial first step is understanding why the seaweed started growing in the first place and what’s sustaining it now.

We study the oceans, marine life, and algae blooms, such as sargassum. Our research suggests that these vast mats of smelly seaweed may have entered a self-sustaining cycle, effectively feeding their own expansion. It’s creating a chronic disaster for the affected coasts, with little sign of ending.

Columbus and the Great Sargasso Sea

Pelagic sargassum is a type of brown seaweed that floats on the ocean surface and is naturally abundant in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the subtropical North Atlantic.

The seaweed takes its name from sargaço, the Portuguese word for grape. When Portuguese navigators reached the region, they noticed its small, grapelike, air-filled bladders that keep the seaweed afloat. Christopher Columbus later wrote about encountering vast mats of it during his voyage to the Americas.

However, in 2011, people began noticing unusually large mats of sargassum in the tropical Atlantic, between the coasts of Africa and Brazil. In the years since, these blooms have become more frequent, lasted longer, and grown much larger, with vast amounts of sargassum washing ashore across Central America, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

In this new area, now called the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, the amount of sargassum surpassed an estimated 37,500 million tons in 2025. Forecasts suggest summer 2026 could break records again.

Sargassum’s Drivers Changed Over Time

For years, scientists have searched for the causes of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.

They explored changes in ocean nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer and other human activities in the Amazon and Congo river basins, increasing amounts of Saharan dust blowing in the wind, and changes in ocean temperatures, winds and currents. None of the hypotheses could fully explain year-to-year variations in the sargassum belt.

Our research suggests something else is also going on – the main cause has changed.

In the winter of 2010, strong winds brought some sargassum southward from the Sargasso Sea to the tropical Atlantic. For a few years, winds stayed strong in winter and spring, acting like a giant spoon and mixing deeper, nutrient-rich water up to the sunlit surface, giving the algae the resources it needed to bloom and grow.

A floating sargassum mat is much more than just seaweed. It is like a floating city, home to fish, shrimp, crabs and countless tiny living organisms, all food for larger fish. Together, they form an ecosystem that we call the sargassumsphere. It’s much like a mobile reef or forest.

These animals collect food around the floating mats and recycle nutrients through their waste and the breakdown of older sargassum. In this way, nutrients are gathered from a much larger area and concentrated around the seaweed, helping the next bloom to grow.

This process can make sargassum blooms very likely to persist in the years ahead.

To test this theory, we created a mathematical model that accounts for the mechanisms controlling the blooms. With the measurements of nitrogen content and isotopic composition in argassum collected around the U.S. Virgin Islands, our model not only reproduced the blooms from 2011 to 2022 but also predicted ahead of time the size and evolution of blooms that occurred in 2023 and 2024, suggesting the theory is correct.

Better Forecasts, Better Solutions

Our work shows that the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is likely here to stay.

Predicting when blooms will occur, and understanding what drives them, can help create early warning systems that give coastal communities time to prepare for their unwanted arrival. It can also support long-term efforts to turn sargassum from a costly nuisance into a valuable resource.

Sargassum biomass has attracted growing interest as a renewable feedstock for biofuel production. Unlike bioenergy crops grown on land, sargassum does not need land, freshwater or fertilizers, reducing competition with food production. The seaweed is rich in carbohydrates that can be converted into bioethanol, biogas, bio-oil, or hydrogen through processes such as fermentation, anaerobic digestion, hydrothermal liquefaction and gasification.

Scientists at a university in Barbados, for example, developed a way to produce biofuel from a combination of the excessive sargassum on the island’s shores and wastewater from the local rum industry.

The island is also encouraging farms to use sargassum as a fertilizer and soil amendment, providing a sustainable alternative to synthetic fertilizers. Sargassum is rich in organic matter, potassium, calcium, magnesium and trace elements. After careful processing to remove the salt and excessive metals, it can be used to improve soil structure, enhance water retention and stimulate plant growth.

Sargassum is increasingly also being explored as a sustainable construction material, particularly in Mexico and Brazil. The biomass can be incorporated into building products, such as compressed panels similar to drywall that were developed by researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and low-cost bricks developed by entrepreneur Omar Vázquez Sánchez in Mexico using about 40% sargassum with limestone and other organic materials. Using sargassum as a mortar additive also helps reduce dependence on conventional, carbon-intensive materials.

By learning to live with and make use of sargassum, affected regions may be able to transform a growing challenge into a new opportunity.

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

You’ve probably heard artificial intelligence models described as “open” or “closed.” These are not descriptions of the model’s personality. Large language model AIs like the one under the hood of ChatGPT don’t have actual personalities, despite appearances.

The labels refer to whether all of the information about how an AI model works is publicly available and the model can be modified, or whether the model’s developer keeps its inner workings secret and the model itself private property.

Open-Source Software

The concept of open-source software originated in the free software movement of the 1980s and ’90s. The movement’s founders believed that software creators and users had the right to “four freedoms” – to run the program, to study and modify it, to distribute copies of the original, and to distribute copies of subsequently modified versions. The fundamental requirement was that the source code – the basic instructions – for a program should be made available.

In the late 1990s, software developers associated with projects such as the Netscape web browser and the Linux operating system coined and promoted the term “open source” to refer to these ideals.

As part of the evolving movement, certain organizations developed open-source licenses that specified how a particular piece of source code could be used and distributed, including the Gnu General Public License, Apache License, MIT License and the Berkeley Software Distribution. Each type of license also specified any potential restrictions on how software patents applied to the source code.

Open Source or Open Weight?

The open-source idea has risen to prominence again in the past several years as artificial intelligence large language models have surged, notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released in 2022. Developers first train new models on large datasets, then deploy the models for use by other people.

Meta was one of the first large companies to release an open-source large language model, called LLaMa. The company released LLaMa on Feb. 24, 2023, and made available the “inference” source code – the instructions that run the model. And it released the so-called weights, the encoded knowledge the model learned during training. However, open-source organizations such as the Open Source Initiative have stated that the LLaMa licensing guidelines prohibit commercial reuse, which the initiative maintains is not truly open source.

Other companies have released “open weight” models, such as DeepSeek from DeepSeek AI and Qwen from Alibaba. The models have less restrictive terms for reuse, and the AI community has adopted them rapidly. Still, many developers believe that a true open-source AI model must not only include the source code and weights but also the data that is used to train the model.

A Lot to Open Up

The Open Source Initiative’s definition of a fully open-source AI model includes the training data as a key element. Some developers wonder, however, how feasible it is to distribute the enormous datasets required.

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

Across corporate earnings calls, investor presentations and marketing pitches, “artificial intelligence” has become the buzzword of choice. Yet a troubling pattern lies under the hype. Many claims vastly overstate actual AI sophistication, misleading people about true capabilities, future outcomes and potential harms.

A case in point is the recent 600% share price surge of Allbirds, after the once-trendy sustainable footwear business issued a vague announcement in April 2026 that it would pivot to AI. In the coming months, the company plans to rename itself NewBird AI and give up its status as a public benefit corporation.

As a scholar who studies corporate sustainability, I see parallels between this “AI washing” phenomenon – when companies oversell the benefits of AI while glossing over the risks – and the greenwashing trend in the recent past, when companies claimed to commit to sustainability but didn’t enact fundamental change. Widespread deception was rampant, with businesses spending far more on green marketing than on actual sustainability improvements. And those efforts often backfired on both the companies and the communities they served. Even more worrisome: AI washing’s rapid rise and widespread adoption will likely eclipse the greenwashing trends.

How We Got Here

AI washing is thriving because companies and policymakers ignore four important principles. These shortfalls, in the past, also characterized greenwashing.

First, AI guidelines lack standardization. By 2019, 84 sets of AI ethics principles and guidelines had already been published. By 2023, this number had exploded to more than 200 – a mess of voluntary frameworks from companies, research institutions and public organizations.

Making matters worse is that the U.S. currently relies on fragmented AI rules, with most being voluntary. The Trump administration has generally sided with Big Tech to push back efforts at state or federal regulation. At a global level, one of the few exceptions is the European Union AI Act, perhaps one of the most comprehensive frameworks, but its implementation won’t be fully phased in until 2027 or later.

In the early 2000s, corporate sustainability faced a similar credibility crisis. Every company measured sustainability differently, making comparisons impossible and greenwashing easy. The breakthrough came only when standardized, industry-specific metrics allowed meaningful benchmarking. Initiatives such as the Global Reporting Initiative and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board established common metrics for measuring environmental impact, social responsibility and quality of governance, known by the shorthand ESG.

When companies must report carbon emissions using the same methodology, for example, or disclose labor conditions using identical categories, investors can compare performance, identify laggards and allocate capital accordingly. This push made comparisons possible and deception harder, although it still wasn’t foolproof. For example, a 2023 United Nations Environment Programme report on the fast-fashion industry found that many companies continue to make “vague and inflated” sustainability claims.

Second, there are no comprehensive frameworks in the U.S. that require businesses to judge how AI affects them in a material way and publicly disclose those impacts. Examples of AI-driven material impacts include whether algorithmic bias shapes business outcomes, or whether decisions on how to use AI systems carry significance for shareholders and the public.

Instead, AI governance remains dominated by the narrow inner circle of companies that build the AI systems, while affected communities rarely have a say in determining which AI impacts are material enough to warrant public attention. For example, Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA and others adhere to their own AI governance guidelines, with relatively little public input.

The development of sustainability principles offers some examples of how to build these frameworks. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires over 50,000 companies to formally evaluate which sustainability topics are material to their stakeholders, and then disclose that information. These efforts try to ensure that accountability is clear across entire supply chains.

While nowhere nearly as comprehensive, U.S. regulations such as the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform and California’s law requiring reporting on statewide greenhouse gas emissions provide a similar blueprint that U.S. policymakers could build on if they chose.

A third problem is the general lack of third-party verification, making AI washing trivially easy. Effective disclosure means reporting all material impacts – not just cherry-picked successes.

In practice, AI audits can vary dramatically in rigor, scope and methodology. One auditor might conduct extensive testing across demographic groups, analyze decision-making and validate the quality of training data. Another might simply review documentation and accept company explanations at face value. Given the variety of AI auditing models out there, different auditors may use incompatible methodologies, making results impossible to compare. If companies adopted third-party accreditation systems to assess how they use AI, they would help ensure the accountability that self-reported claims cannot match.

By contrast, there was reasonable progress in this respect as companies adopted ESG principles. For example, institutions such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and Global Reporting Initiative have a network of partners that offer independent verification. These providers, certified under international standards, verify corporate sustainability data against rigorous criteria. That way, they provide the assurance that lets companies show the progress needed to unlock sustainable finance and mitigate legal risks. Third-party audits are far from perfect, but they offer a clear path for improvement.

The fourth principle is robust enforcement. Early ESG initiatives relied on reputational pressure and stakeholder goodwill – things that corporations routinely ignored when profits were at stake. When change came, it was because regulations established legal liability and financial penalties.

These consequences changed how corporations assess risk and continue to shape sustainability practices today. Volkswagen’s 2015 ‘Dieselgate’ scandal, for example, cost the company over US$30 billion in fines, settlements and criminal charges after U.S regulators found that the carmaker was cheating emissions tests. BP faced billions in penalties and liabilities for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the biggest oil spill in the history of marine oil drilling operations.

The current enforcement gap in AI creates a predictable dynamic. The expected value of AI washing – like potential investment gains, competitive advantage, and market valuation increases – far exceeds the expected cost in terms of penalties and risk of detection. Until enforcement imposes consequences that exceed benefits, AI washing will persist as a rational business strategy rather than a risk to a business’s reputation.

Fortunately, investors are beginning to step up. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, launched Operation AI Comply in 2024, targeting deceptive AI claims, although this effort has been partially scaled back by the current Trump administration.

New Standards For a New Era

Until businesses address these four principles, AI washing will continue. Without standards and audits, even well-intentioned companies can’t know if their work meets adequate rigor. Without assessments of material impact, some groups of consumers or shareholders will be hurt. And without liability, even thorough auditors won’t be able to identify whether a business’s claims about AI are truthful.

These principles, applied broadly, also help explain why greenwashing persists. For example, the lack of universal reporting standards continues to leave some gaps, with data-quality issues persisting even as reporting frameworks emerged. More fundamentally, political buy-in for ESG has diminished significantly, particularly in the U.S., where over 150 bills were introduced across multiple states by 2023 to disincentivize firms from adopting ESG. Major financial institutions – including JP Morgan, State Street, BlackRock and PIMCO – have retreated from their earlier climate commitments amid political pressure as well as antitrust concerns.

This trend shows that even well designed accountability measures require durable political support to succeed. After all, corporate sustainability took more than 25 years to develop from an initial framework to mandatory standards, and it still remains a work in progress. AI, by contrast, is advancing exponentially in terms of its reach and societal impact. There may not be 25 years to catch up – but at least there are lessons from the recent past.

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

On May 22, 2026, the Pentagon released a second batch of previously classified photos and videos showing what appear to be unexplained flying objects. These file dumps were the culmination of a process that was set in motion back in July 2023, when a group of government whistleblowers testified before Congress that the U.S. government was secretly in possession of extraterrestrial spacecraft and suspected alien body parts.

That congressional hearing marked the beginning of a cultural shift in which UFO reports are increasingly treated as a matter for serious discussion, both within the government and the scientific community.

But is this newfound legitimacy deserved? As an aerospace scientist who studies aircraft and spacecraft design, I approach this question using math, physics and the principles of engineering. To assess the plausibility of alien visitors, it’s necessary to understand the obstacles that an extraterrestrial vessel would need to overcome to reach Earth.

The Tyranny of Distance

There is no evidence of intelligent alien life in our solar system. So any extraterrestrial visitors would likely have to come from another star system within our Milky Way galaxy.

Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our Sun, is located 4.25 light-years (about 25 trillion miles or 40 trillion kilometers) away.

For perspective, if Earth were the size of a pea, the distance to Proxima Centauri would roughly equal the distance between New York and Sydney, Australia.

Since only a fraction of stars are thought to host intelligent life, the nearest alien civilization – if one exists – is surely much farther away than Proxima.

A Need for Speed

Given the scale of interstellar distances, it’s inevitable that any alien voyage to Earth would span many years and possibly several centuries. But as the time spent in transit increases, so does the risk of catastrophic accidents or system malfunctions that could jeopardize the mission. So it’s important to avoid an overly lengthy journey by traveling as fast as possible.

No object can reach or exceed the speed of light (roughly 186,000 miles or 300,000 kilometers per second). But well before approaching that threshold, engineering constraints begin to assert themselves. Limited fuel availability and the potential for structural damage will restrict the spacecraft’s peak velocity.

There is no universally accepted upper limit on interstellar flight speeds, but studies tend to converge around 19,000 miles per second (30,000 km/s) – 10% of the speed of light – as a realistic cruise velocity. At this speed, a journey of 10 light-years will take approximately 100 years to complete.

Fueling the Dream

Finding a way to accelerate the ship to its target cruise speed is the central challenge facing any would-be alien explorers.

Interstellar space is unforgivingly vast, but the emptiness has some advantages. The lack of atmosphere means there is no aerodynamic drag. So when the ship reaches its cruise speed, it can shut down its propulsion system and coast toward the final destination. Unfortunately, the lack of atmosphere also means there is nothing to slow the ship down prior to arrival. So ideally, the propulsion system would be used for both acceleration at the start of the trip and deceleration at the end.

One of the more exotic propulsion strategies employs high-powered laser beams to push the ship through space. The beam is projected from a stationary array near the travelers’ home planet and directed toward a thin reflective sail attached to the ship. The beam’s photons exert radiation pressure on the sail, propelling the ship forward.

This approach has a major advantage in that it requires no onboard fuel. But the amount of energy and infrastructure needed to operate the laser would be staggering. Also, beamed propulsion provides no mechanism for deceleration. At best, this method could be deployed as part of a hybrid strategy that uses a separate system for deceleration.

A more practical approach is to use rocket propulsion. Rockets generate propulsive force, also known as thrust, by expelling high-velocity exhaust in a rearward stream. By reversing the direction of the exhaust, rockets can also be used to slow the ship down.

Their main disadvantage is that rockets must carry their own fuel in addition to carrying the passengers, the habitat and other life-sustaining systems. The extra load necessitates even more fuel. In other words, you need fuel to transport your fuel. The result is a costly snowball effect that can cause the total fuel requirement to balloon to absurd proportions.

Rocket propulsion can be divided into three broad categories.

Chemical propulsion uses chemical reactions – typically combustion – to extract energy from the bonds between atoms. All human space missions thus far have used chemical propulsion. The problem with this method is that it accesses only a tiny fraction of the energy contained within the fuel.

Consequently, using chemical propulsion on a spacecraft with a cruise velocity of 19,000 miles per second (30,000 km/s) would require more fuel than all the mass in the observable universe.

Antimatter propulsion is theoretically the most efficient option. When antimatter comes into contact with ordinary matter, the two undergo mutual annihilation and 100% of their combined mass is converted into energy. This makes it possible to achieve the same cruise velocity – one-tenth the speed of light – with fuel accounting for less than a quarter of the ship’s total mass. This is science fiction-level fuel efficiency, which makes antimatter an attractive option for interstellar propulsion.

The downside is that antimatter is extremely unstable and difficult to make. To date, particle physicists have produced less than 20 billionths of a gram of antimatter. Moreover, these particles had lifespans lasting only fractions of a second and a price tag in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nuclear fusion offers a more viable alternative to antimatter. This approach harvests energy stored inside the nucleus of an atom using the same process that powers the Sun. With current technology, fusion engines remain aspirational, but they could, in theory, produce 10 million times more energy per kilogram than chemical rockets.

Still, a fusion-powered ship with a cruise velocity of 19,000 miles per second (30,000 km/s) would require fuel equivalent to 150 times the mass of the ship itself.

A Delicate Balancing Act

These numbers assume that our extraterrestrial visitors have figured out how to efficiently convert the energy released by their reactor – whether nuclear fusion or antimatter – into thrust.

Just as importantly, they must be able to create optimized fuel tank structures that are ultra lightweight yet highly secure. Designing the structure of the ship, from the fuel tanks to the hull, would be one of the biggest engineering challenges of the entire mission.

Interstellar space contains a sparse smattering of hydrogen atoms and microscopic grains of cosmic dust. At 19,000 miles per second (30,000 km/s), dust particles would smash into the ship’s hull with the energy of a .22-caliber bullet. The bombardment of hydrogen atoms would produce a violent cascade of radiation that could erode even the most resilient engineering materials.

Surviving the onslaught would require no less than a flying fortress with complex magnetic shielding. This would increase the total mass of the ship, which further drives up the demand for fuel.

This example is just one of the hundreds of delicate design trade-offs that would plague any interstellar vessel. Each individual design requirement acts as a filter, reducing the number of feasible solutions.

Finding a single system that simultaneously satisfies all the requirements is analogous to shopping for a car online. With each new filter you apply – four-wheel drive, black exterior, less than 10,000 miles on the odometer – the number of available options dwindles.

When design requirements are in tension with one another – for example, requiring a structure that is lightweight but also supremely durable – the number of feasible solutions can drop to zero.

No single law of physics prohibits an interstellar voyage to Earth. But the combined effects of hundreds of extreme, often conflicting engineering requirements may render it physically infeasible.

It’s also possible that alien civilizations have discovered novel technologies that outperform anything currently known to humans. But like the examples discussed here, any such technology will inevitably encounter its own engineering hurdles.

The Trillion-Dollar Question

Ultimately, engineering challenges are just some of the many barriers to interstellar travel. Any prospective alien visitors must also have sufficient cognitive ability, technological maturity, physical resources, collective desire and proximity to Earth.

That said, if the stars were to align and an alien vessel made it to Earth intact, it would trigger a torrent of burning questions: Where are they from? What do they want? What are they made of?

But the question that would go furthest in shedding light on the deeper mysteries of the universe is, “How on Earth did they get here?”

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

Did you see the landmarks in the distance that make up the city skyline? Did you drive right past the grocery store you promised to stop by at the corner of this Peachtree Street or that Peachtree Street, a struggle Atlanta locals know well?

“Oops! Force of habit,” you might say to yourself as you miss your turn and begin to think about when and where you can turn around.

Relying on familiarity can either facilitate or impede daily navigation. As a researcher studying memory and navigation, I aim to understand how the brain supports spatial navigation and what happens if the cognitive mechanisms for choosing the best route home begin to decline, such as during stress or with aging.

Humans are creatures of habit – at least that’s what people tell themselves when wary of trying something new. But what if a new route is faster or safer than the one you usually take? Would you try it?

Research from my team suggests that people balance between exploration and habit – that is, trying something new or sticking with the familiar – when deciding what route to take. Which navigation strategy someone chooses depends not only on their spatial abilities but on their network of brain regions that support navigation.

A Spatial Blueprint

Spatial navigation refers to the cognitive ability that helps you travel from one location to another. It may sound simple, but it requires using cognitive functions such as memory, attention, decision-making and assessing potential rewards – never mind the ability to simply perceive the environment itself.

Spatial navigation uses memories of things you consciously experienced. Two types of memory relevant to navigation are what scientists call episodic and semantic.

For example, you might retrieve an episodic memory about a specific event: remembering a detour you took a week ago to drop a package off at the post office, including the traffic and weather that day.

You might also retrieve a semantic memory that’s more factual and knowledge-based: remembering how many blocks away the post office is from the park and the turns you need to make to get there.

Together, these kinds of memory inform your spatial memory, which allows you to retrieve location information. This could be where buildings are in relation to each other or where objects are situated in your house. Spatial memories help form your cognitive map, which is essential for getting around in the world.

Often, these different ways of remembering interact, and you can use one type of memory to inform the other. For example, you’ve become accustomed to your commute to work and know it’s relatively short (semantic memory), but over the past three days you’ve been arriving late due to heavy traffic (episodic memory), so you choose to take a different route next time.

Research from my team has found that disagreements in your brain over possible routes can happen. Different types of memory can come up with different solutions for what route you can take, and this conflict is a big factor in how hard your brain needs to work when navigating an environment.

Responding to New and Familiar Memories

Habits stem from what researchers call stimulus-response memories. These include the knee-jerk reaction you might have to familiar landmarks – when you perceive these places, your brain signals you to make a turn along your commute without needing to consciously think about it.

Habits are rigid, but they can also be beneficial: By taking care of the navigation for you, habit frees up your brain to have a conversation with someone or plan what to make for dinner when you get home.

When navigating less familiar routes or environments, where habit doesn’t kick in automatically, you rely on brain regions such as the hippocampus to call on detailed memories from recent experiences to help guide the way.

But let’s say you’re shopping at a new grocery store where most things are where you expect them to be, even though you’ve never been in this particular store before. What happens when your brain experiences both something new and something familiar about an environment?

Researchers have shown that when something about an environment is familiar and aligns with your prior experiences, the prefrontal regions of your brain – those responsible for executive functions such as decision-making – become more active. They can bypass or even inhibit your hippocampus’s ability to form new memories about specific events.

In other words, your brain can weave information about a new experience into your database of existing knowledge, rather than storing it as completely new information with little relation to the past. This process may help fast-track your understanding about new experiences.

Updating Cognitive Maps

Researchers know that cognitive maps of the environment depend on the hippocampus and its database of memories about specific events. However, I and other researchers argue these maps can also function as a schema – a collection of memories made up of associations between environmental details. You can add new information to these collections and use it to infer new relationships.

Say a new pedestrian bridge is built between the park and the post office. Your brain can more easily weave this new route information into your existing memories compared with learning a new environment from scratch. Similarly, if you just moved to a new town and know very little about the spatial layout, you might rely on your past experiences of towns to infer where something is.

Using neuroimaging techniques as well as virtual reality programs designed to test a participant’s ability to navigate different routes, my team found that there is likely an interdependent relationship between the brain areas that store memories of specific events and areas that store related information across memories when planning to navigate less familiar places.

New routes are more difficult to follow when they differ from your prior experiences. Thus, a stronger schema helps integrate your knowledge of the spatial relationships between locations and landmarks (such as the distance between the post office and the park) with more general knowledge (such as prior route difficulty). This all informs how you choose to navigate.

Navigating Daily Life

These memory principles help explain why inconsistencies with your previous experiences can make it so difficult to navigate many aspects of daily life.

Imagine you woke up tomorrow and the GPS on your smartphone was no longer available. How will you plan your route to get to your destination?

You might be used to navigating north from your home to the grocery store – but have you ever tried to navigate to that grocery story from a different location? It’s much harder!

Factors such as stress, aging and general cognitive decline can affect brain function and human behavior. Imagine how much harder that new route to the grocery store is for an older adult.

Relating new information to your prior experiences may help strengthen your schema and make navigation easier. And understanding what processes the brain needs to go through to solve these navigation problems can help you understand why getting around can be challenging.

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

A new study led by Francesca Storici, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and faculty member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, has uncovered an unexpected feature of human DNA linked to gene activity and the physical organization of DNA. The findings, published in Cell, could change how scientists think about DNA organization, transcription, and genome function. 

Not all earthquake faults behave the same. Some stick and snap, causing earthquakes. Others move slowly over time.

For years, the leading explanation for slow-moving faults has been that high-pressure fluids along the fault lubricate it, allowing the slabs to slide steadily rather than building up stress until that stress is eventually released in a large, destructive earthquake.

But in a new study of the Shumagin Gap, a quiet section of the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone – the area where one tectonic plate dives below another – my colleagues and I found that the fault does not contain enough fluid to explain why it slides slowly. Scientists may need to rethink this assumption about subduction zones around the world.

Pinning down why faults creep matters for how scientists build models of the world’s most powerful earthquake zones to assess long-term earthquake and tsunami hazards, from Alaska to Japan to the Pacific Northwest. Knowing how earthquakes are likely to behave is essential for helping communities decide where and how to build homes and other infrastructure so they can withstand an earthquake and tsunami.

How Earthquakes Happen Along Faults

An earthquake fault is a break in Earth’s outer rock layer where two blocks of rock slide past each other. The way they slide determines what kind of shaking, if any, reaches the surface.

Some faults are “locked.” They do not budge until stress builds to a breaking point, then they release it all at once in a sudden rupture. This is what happens during most damaging earthquakes. Other faults “creep.” They glide past each other steadily, releasing stress gradually.

The biggest and most destructive earthquakes on Earth happen along subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another. The Alaska-Aleutian margin, the Japan Trench, the subduction zone off Chile and the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia zone are all examples. When a locked patch of a subduction fault suddenly slips, the seafloor can jolt upward and a tsunami can follow.

A Quiet Fault Challenges a Common Assumption

Deep underground, fault behavior is hard to see directly, especially offshore where faults often sit beneath kilometers of seawater and sediment.

Scientists rely on measurements from GPS stations, seismometers and seafloor sensors, and then build computer models of what must be happening below. For decades, the leading explanation for creeping faults has been that high-pressure fluids along the fault reduce friction, the way a film of water causes tires to hydroplane.

Testing that idea requires seeing the fluids, and that’s where our team came in.

We use marine electromagnetic imaging, a method that maps how easily underground materials conduct electricity. A ship tows an instrument close to the seafloor, sending electromagnetic signals into the rocks below, while other instruments on the seabed record the response. Different materials beneath the seafloor conduct electricity differently, and that shows up in the measurements. Because salty water conducts electricity very well, the method is especially good at mapping where fluids are and where they aren’t.

We surveyed a 75-mile (120-kilometer) stretch of seafloor across the Shumagin Gap, a section of the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone that has been creeping for more than a century. The Shumagin Gap had long been considered a quiet part of the margin, even though neighboring segments have produced magnitude 8 and larger earthquakes.

To our surprise, the fault at the Shumagin Gap was not as fluid-rich as the leading explanation would predict.

Our images show that the shallow part of the fault, closest to the ocean, has little open space in the rock for fluid to occupy. And the fluid that is there is under roughly normal pressure, not the high pressure that the “slippery fluid” model predicts.

The fault surface is bumpy and rugged. The upper plate appears to be a patchwork of stronger and weaker material, and we found possible pathways where fluids may drain into the rock above the fault.

In other words, this quiet fault isn’t quiet because it’s well lubricated. Something else is keeping it stable, most likely a combination of rough fault surface, varying rock strength and, in some places, fluid.

What This Means for Assessing Earthquake Risks

Our findings about this fault have consequences for assessing earthquake and tsunami hazards more broadly.

Many models lean on the idea that fluid pressure helps determine whether a subduction fault slips suddenly or creeps. If fluid isn’t the main control keeping the Shumagin Gap quiet, other quiet faults might similarly lack fluid, raising questions about how stable those faults really are.

Understanding these mechanisms matters for assessing coastal communities’ earthquake and tsunami risks. A shallow slip near a trench is what drives the most destructive tsunamis. Tsunamis from Alaska–Aleutian earthquakes have reached distant coasts before. Large earthquakes in 1946, 1957 and 1964 generated tsunamis that damaged the coasts of Hawaii and California.

As our results show, there isn’t a single, simple story explaining slow-sliding faults. More and better offshore data will help scientists more accurately assess earthquake and tsunami hazards around the world and help communities well beyond Alaska prepare.

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

Now, in what he calls his “fourth quarter,” he and his wife plan to spend time with family, travel the world — and, of course, keep working, if only part-time, as the operations director for the nonprofit ministry connected to his church.

“I don’t think retirement is a biblical term,” he said. “A friend of mine referred to it as being repurposed. I suspect that as long as I have breath, I’ll work within this calling to have an impact for good.”

Holt says his computing education at Georgia Tech prepared him for every phase of his life.

“I love the challenges of problem-solving and figuring out puzzles,” Holt said, “how to make things work and then debugging it to find out things that are wrong. They’re just skills you carry through life.”

The First Quarter: Education

Holt began his college career at the U.S. Air Force Academy. While there, he met the woman who captured his heart. But because cadets weren’t allowed to marry, he dropped out of the academy to marry his wife and enrolled at Georgia Tech in 1981.

Both Holts worked hard, lived in married-student housing, and watched their pennies. That didn’t keep them from making good memories, though.

“We would watch Thursday night movies in the engineering building auditorium,” Holt said. “It was only 25 cents to attend. That theater was a kind of respite for us, something we could afford.”

His other favorite places on campus were the library and the basement of the Information building, which housed the IT department for the then-called School of Information and Computer Science.

“I was just thinking about how far things have come with AI now,” he said. “I actually had a punch card class.” 

The Second Quarter: Computing Industry

Holt graduated from Georgia Tech with highest honors in September 1983 and accepted a position at NCR. He flourished there, rising from programmer to Vice President and General Manager of NCR’s small-business computer division in just 12 years.

In the late 1990s, NCR began divesting its computer business. After 14 years with NCR, Holt took a job at Dell in 1998, a role that came with two challenges. First, he was a software expert, yet Dell put him in charge of a hardware team. Second, he took a step down in rank for the job.

“Within six months, I became the vice president and general manager of their entry-level server division,” he said. “In 2002, I became a member of the executive committee.”

His role expanded to vice president and general manager of the enterprise systems division, covering both servers and storage. The 2002 Network World annual list, "50 Most Powerful People in Networking," included Holt and a Dell colleague, both co-vice presidents and general managers of Dell Computer Corporation’s Enterprise Systems Group.

During this period, Dell significantly accelerated its push into high-density rack servers, networking switches, and enterprise Linux deployments. Rather than listing them individually, Network World grouped them by their collective impact on corporate infrastructure and named them among the final 50.

While at NCR, Russ served as a Georgia Tech contact involved in NCR recruiting. He assumed a similar role after he settled into Dell. Holt was invited to serve on the College’s Advisory Board in 2003 and remained on the board until 2015, serving as the board’s chair for the last two of those years.

His career was flourishing, but around 2002 he felt called to leave it all behind.

The Third Quarter: Ministry

When he was in his early 30s, Holt wrote a mission statement for his life as part of a broader drive to live with purpose.

It is my mission in life to experience sustaining joy by living an abundant life spiritually, socially, industrially, and financially.

Holt had been a devout Christian since childhood, and as he reached new career heights, he began to wonder whether it was time to give back by serving in ministry and living out his faith in practical ways.

“There came a point in my career when my wife asked me, ‘When is enough enough?’” he said. “Was I going to have a life that was all about me and what I could accomplish, or about giving back? We made the decision together to go into ministry.” 

While at NCR, the couple had spent 14 years attending Gateway Church in Columbia, South Carolina, a Southern Baptist Church. In 2006, their pastor was building a leadership team. Twenty-three years after graduating from Tech and after a little over 8 years with Dell, Russ stepped into ministry. Russ Holt jumped in, not as a preacher, but to use his professional skills to help the congregation.

After three years with Gateway Church, he joined Crossroads Church, a non-denominational church that had founded a non-profit organization focused on reaching the city with the gospel – the good news of Christ. The non-profit encourages churches in the city to work together, to collaborate rather than compete, and to mobilize their people where they live, learn, work, and play, so they have the opportunity to love and serve their neighbors and colleagues and to share their faith with those who are far from God but close to them.

He became the church’s executive pastor and served as the operations director for the non-profit. These roles were similar to those of a chief operating officer in industry. He helped select and implement management software as part of the church’s operations. This included designing the system’s workflows to improve processes within the church and the non-profit.

“The software industry is pretty active on the church side as well,” he said.

Crossroads Church later connected with other churches across the U.S. and, together, founded a nonprofit network operating in more than 100 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Rather than serving in traditional pastoral roles, he leaned into the same strengths that had carried his corporate career: administration, finance, staffing, strategic planning, and process design.

For example, he built workflow diagrams for how the church should handle everything from guest follow-up to staff hand-offs, applying engineering discipline to congregational life. At the nonprofit, he held similar roles, including assisting other churches with their operations and strategic planning.

His ordination came later, prompted not by a career milestone but by his youngest son's request that he officiate his wedding. After 15 years on staff, Russ began to sense another transition in his calling and purpose.

The Fourth Quarter: Service

Holt describes his life in roughly twenty-year arcs. The first twenty-two years prepared him for adulthood; the next twenty-three were spent in the computing industry; and the following twenty were devoted to full-time ministry. Now 65, he is “re-purposing” to focus on family and the non-profit ministry.

He and his wife have three adult children, seven grandchildren, and have been married for forty-five years. This year, they are taking a river cruise down the Rhine, and next year, they're headed to the Cotswolds with Georgia Tech Alumni.

He is not stepping down from his mission, however. Holt continues to serve as an elder with Crossroads Church and, in his part-time role as operations director, will continue serving with the non-profit network, which now has 37 active city movements across North America.

“It wasn’t a drastic shift,” he said. “It was more of a, ‘I want to drop the HR, the administration, the business financial side of running the church, and just dedicate half my time, 20 hours a week, to this nonprofit.’”

Although he divides his life into quarters, Holt says there’s been a strong thread running through it.

“My identity is wrapped up in my faith in Christ,” Holt said. “I feel like my time at Tech and in industry was preparing me with skills I could apply to ministry – to helping the church and serving ministry leaders.”

The award is the NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty and supports researchers with the potential to serve as academic role models and to lead advances in their department or organization.  

"Receiving the NSF CAREER Award is a tremendous honor and an opportunity to advance my long-term research agenda,” Saeed said. “It was only made possible by the creativity and dedication of my students and the unwavering support and guidance of my family and mentors.” 

Modern data center servers manage resource allocation and load distribution separately, which can result in conflicting decisions. A key idea behind Saeed’s proposal is to develop an integrated view of these operations to improve efficiency without requiring additional hardware. 

“When performing operations jointly, you can maximize performance and completely eliminate the chances of conflict,” Saeed said.  

Another driver of the project is what Saeed calls the “single queue fallacy.” This occurs when data center load controllers assume that all incoming requests to a server wait in a single queue to be processed. 

In reality, servers are much more complex than this and can handle multiple queues at the same time. Modern workloads have heterogeneous load requirements, meaning that different requests end up landing in different queues. 

“This single queue fallacy can lead to severe underutilization of these servers,” he said.  

Recent research by Saeed shows that a server’s throughput can be doubled by avoiding the single-queue fallacy.  

The potential benefits of this project are wide-ranging and impactful. Maximizing server efficiency would reduce costs and energy use. With fewer resources needed, the project could contribute to more sustainable computing infrastructure. Lower operational costs would benefit companies, application developers, and users. 

“The goal of my proposal is to develop mechanisms and policies that can allow data center operators to easily maximize the utilization of all hardware,” he said.  

As part of the educational component of his proposal, Saeed plans to organize competitions for students to design more efficient load and resource management algorithms using artificial intelligence.  

In addition to this award, Saeed was named a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Faculty Fellow last fall to support his goal of making data centers more sustainable.  

Professor Hyesoon Kim has been named the new chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science (SCS). She assumed the role on Aug. 1.  

Georgia Tech is hosting the 2026 MFEM (Modular Finite Element Methods) Community Workshop, Sept. 22-25. MFEM supports research in computational physics, earth systems modeling, engineering, energy, and other fields. 

The four-day workshop is being held at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center and will focus on improving software for scientific computing and discovery. Participants can also attend online. Registration for the workshop is open through Sept. 11. 

“We're very excited and grateful for the opportunity to have this workshop at Georgia Tech,” said Tzanio Kolev, a computational mathematician at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

“Georgia Tech has a great reputation in our field, and hosting at universities is a great way to connect with students. We see students as our future colleagues who will improve MFEM for generations to come.”

MFEM is an open-source software library for solving equations in computational models. Scientists and engineers use it to build and test virtual designs on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers before creating real-world prototypes.

In fact, MFEM powered a tsunami early-warning model that ran on El Capitan, the world’s second-fastest supercomputer. The framework completed a simulation in a fraction of a second, 10 billion times faster than conventional algorithms. Kolev was part of the team that won the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize for the project.

MFEM’s impact extends beyond its original developers. The AWS Center for Quantum Computing uses the software as the foundation for a tool called Palace. This project runs 3D electromagnetic simulations to aid in the design of quantum computing hardware.

“These workshops have been very beneficial for both the broader user community and also for MFEM developers,” said Kolev.

“Every workshop, we are surprised by the ways people are building on our work, seeing what incredible, interesting, amazing things they do with it.”

Next month’s workshop at Georgia Tech will connect MFEM users and developers from national laboratories, academia, government, and industry. 

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority joins LLNL and Georgia Tech in sponsoring this year’s workshop. Nearly 20 scientists from Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories are attending in person. They represent LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the Naval Nuclear Laboratory.

The workshop’s first day features a free, hybrid tutorial. LLNL’s High Performance Computing Innovation Center will lead the tutorial, helping new users get started with MFEM and learn what the software can do. The tutorial requires separate registration for virtual participants.

The workshop will also host a simulation and visualization contest. Participants can submit images and videos of simulations using MFEM, which will be posted in a gallery. The workshop organizers will select an overall winner.

Further workshop activities include:

• MFEM news and roadmap for future projects
• Talks from application developers
• Student-user lightning talks
• In-person poster sessions
• Office hours with MFEM experts

The MFEM workshop highlights the role open-source software plays in scientific discovery. 

By making tools freely available, researchers can build on each other’s work rather than starting from scratch. This shared approach can accelerate innovation, improve software, and make advanced computing tools accessible to a wider community.

Georgia Tech hosts a Center for Scientific Software Engineering and an Open-Source Program Office. This year’s workshop connects these units with the MFEM community to help put the software into the hands of more researchers across science and engineering.

“The MFEM workshop aims to foster collaboration among all MFEM users and developers,” said Qi Tang, a workshop organizer and assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering.

“Hosting its annual community workshop brings researchers from DOE laboratories, universities, and industry to campus, giving Georgia Tech faculty and students direct access to experts from the field.”

The milestone was driven by startup activity in CREATE-X and Quadrant-i, two cornerstone initiatives of the Office of Commercialization, and reflects the expanding reach of Tech's innovation ecosystem. The programs support students, faculty, researchers, and alumni in transforming ideas into companies within industries ranging from healthcare and robotics to legal technology and accessibility.

"Crossing the 200 startup teams milestone is more than a record. It's a reflection of a commercialization ecosystem that is helping translate ideas into products and companies that solve real problems," said Raghupathy "Siva" Sivakumar, chief commercialization officer. "Building a dense, connected community of founders is essential to our vision of becoming the nation's leading startup campus and maximizing the value of Georgia Tech innovation."

Diverse Paths to Entrepreneurship

The founders behind this year's milestone represent the many paths entrepreneurs can take at Georgia Tech. They come from different disciplines, pursue various industries, and arrive with a wide range of experiences, but all share a desire to solve meaningful problems.

For alumnus Alberto Flores Guerrero, who earned an M.S. in cybersecurity from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts in 2025, and his longtime friend and co-founder, Luis Estala, that journey to CREATE-X began nearly 2,000 miles from Atlanta.

The pair are building Separate, an AI-powered platform designed to help people navigate divorce by simplifying legal processes, organizing paperwork, and connecting users with resources. Drawing on Flores Guerrero's background as a lawyer, the company aims to make one of life's most stressful experiences more manageable.

When they learned about CREATE-X Startup Launch's kickoff just two weeks before it began, they didn't hesitate. Flying wasn't an option, so they packed the car and drove from Mexico to Atlanta.

Four days later, they arrived at Georgia Tech, convinced the opportunity was worth every mile. Inspired by the kickoff experience, Flores Guerrero soon returned to Mexico, packed his belongings, and moved to Atlanta for the summer.

For both of them, Startup Launch became more than a summer program. It gave them the confidence to build their company as part of a community of founders.

"This experience has completely changed the way we think about ourselves and what's possible for our company," Estala said. "This is the chance of our lives."

"I've learned so much just by being around these people," Flores Guerrero said. "Georgia Tech has some of the smartest students in the world, and then you put the most entrepreneurial of them together in one room. Nice things should happen."

Building a Deep-Tech Startup

For Georgia Tech master's student Rohit Gore in the College of Computing and co-founder Patrick Walsh, entrepreneurship began with one idea. But their startup took shape after they pivoted in a new direction.

As they developed a low-cost drone, they kept encountering the same challenge: Robots that performed well in simulations often struggled in real-world environments. After talking with robotics teams across the country, they launched Brio Robotics, a company developing a simulation and automated testing platform for autonomous systems.

CREATE-X Startup Launch helped the team refine its approach to customer discovery, sales, and commercialization.

"We're engineers by trade, and we don't know anything about B2B sales," Gore said, noting that Startup Launch Director Margaret Weniger “has been hugely helpful. It was so valuable to hear her perspective on what good sales metrics look like, what the goal of a customer call should be, and how to approach those conversations."

Today, Brio Robotics is finalizing its first design partnership with a drone company and has five additional robotics companies in its sales pipeline.

Turning Research Into a Startup

While many startups begin with student entrepreneurs, others emerge directly from Georgia Tech's research labs.

For Yue Chen, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, commercialization meant looking beyond the lab. Working with Ph.D. students Yixuan Xia, Yilin Cai, and Samuel Wilcox, Chen launched Fructus, a startup developing robotic harvesting technology to help growers address labor shortages and improve harvesting quality.

The technology began as a USDA-funded blackberry harvesting project. But through Quadrant-i Startup Launch, conversations with growers and industry stakeholders revealed a greater opportunity in Georgia's blueberry industry, prompting the team to pivot toward a larger market and a more pressing need.

"For faculty, we focus on research and developing fundamental science" Chen said. "But there's a gap between the work we do in the lab and the final product." Startup Launch helped bridge that gap through customer discovery. It “gave us the opportunity to get out of the lab, talk to stakeholders, and understand what they really need."  

For Cai, the experience changed the team's perspective. "As researchers, we usually focus on solving a research problem," he said. "Through Startup Launch, we learned to see the problem from the customer's perspective and think about what it really takes to build a product."

Looking Ahead

More than 150 startups will showcase their ventures at CREATE-X Demo Day on Thursday, Sept. 3, at LOOP, Georgia Tech's newest creative arts and performance venue. The event will bring together students, investors, mentors, industry leaders, and the broader community to meet the founders behind this record-breaking cohort and explore the next generation of Georgia Tech innovation.

"This experience has completely changed the way we think about ourselves and what's possible," Estala said. "If you have an idea, just do it. You never know where it might take you.” 

When Chevron reported its highest quarterly profit in six years on July 31, 2026, it was just one detail in a larger picture: Analyst firm Wood Mackenzie estimates the global oil and gas industry is on course for a cash windfall of US$495 billion in 2026. That’s profit above and beyond what the industry expected before the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began.

Three separate bills seeking to tax those profits are now in Congress, and President Donald Trump has even said the oil companies are “making too much money.”

As an applied microeconomist, I am often asked how taxes affect economic activity. Economists have long held a more nuanced view of windfall taxes than either side of the current debate suggests. Advocates often make overly optimistic revenue projections, and opponents often overstate how much such a tax might discourage investment. A 1980s U.S. windfall-tax experiment is instructive on both counts.

Other Nations Have This Type of Tax

In the U.K., a windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas – layered on top of existing levies to produce a combined rate of 78% on profits – is on course to generate an estimated 8 billion pounds in 2026 (about $10.8 billion), roughly double its 2024–25 revenue.

A similar European Union-wide tax imposed as a one-time measure after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine raised 26.15 billion euros ($30 billion). Five EU countries are now calling for a second one in response to the Iran war.

How to Tax a Windfall

Many taxes are deliberately designed to change behavior. But a windfall tax is different: It goes after money that results from a company making the same production decision it was already planning to make before prices rose. The oil was going to be pumped regardless; the war just made each barrel worth more.

A textbook windfall tax would not fall on all profits, but only on the amount exceeding a baseline level. Australia’s Petroleum Resource Rent Tax and Norway’s special petroleum tax are the closest working examples. Under those, companies deduct all costs — including exploration and investment – plus a normal rate of return, before any windfall tax is owed.

In the U.S., the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax, enacted in 1980, was projected to raise $393 billion over its planned 10-year life. It raised about $80 billion before being repealed in 1988 – roughly a fifth of the projection. Prices collapsed after 1986, domestic production was increasingly exempted, and the tax was generating almost nothing by the time it was repealed.

What Congress is Considering

The bills currently in Congress are structured very differently from the textbook design – and from each other.

A proposal by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, both Democrats would levy a 50% excise tax per barrel on the difference between the current average Brent crude price and the 2025 average of $69. With a July 2026 average of $84, a company would owe $7.50 per barrel – regardless of production costs or profitability.

A second bill, the Iran War Oil Crisis Windfall Profits Tax Act by Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman of California, is more aggressive: a 100% tax on the amount by which crude prices exceed $75 per barrel. At the July 2026 average of $84, companies would owe $9 per barrel. That tax would be in effect only until hostilities end and prices fall below that threshold.

Both are triggered by prices, not by any measure of underlying profit. A third proposal, the Taxing Buybacks from Big Oil Windfalls Act by Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden, Chuck Schumer, and Michael Bennet, takes a different approach: raising the excise tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 25% for large oil and gas companies, targeting not the windfall itself but what companies do with it.

Where the Money is Going

The American Petroleum Institute has argued that proposals like these “erode the certainty needed to make investment” decisions. The Tax Foundation has warned that “taxing producers is the opposite of a solution to a supply crisis.” Neither side, however, has put a specific dollar figure on how much investment would actually be deterred.

The data tells a different story. According to Wood Mackenzie, the 49 largest oil and gas companies will pocket about $272 billion of the sector’s windfall – roughly equal to 70% of their combined annual investment budgets. Yet investment spending has barely moved, stock buybacks are on course to fall, and dividends have stayed flat. The cash is simply accumulating on balance sheets.

This is exactly what economic research predicts: When a windfall doesn’t change a firm’s underlying investment opportunities, managers hold the cash and wait. In 2026, the industry is waiting for clarity on how long the war lasts, whether prices have peaked and whether Congress will pass a windfall tax. The argument that such a tax would prevent important economic activity weakens by the day.

What the Current Proposals Would Mean

For oil companies, the direct effect is straightforward: Every dollar paid in tax is a dollar less in earnings. The indirect effect – discouraging investment – is likely weaker than usual because the windfall isn’t being invested now anyway.

For government revenue, the 1980 experience is a cautionary tale: Projections built on current prices tend to overstate what a tax will collect.

For consumers, a tax only on domestic production is largely borne by producers, while a tax that touches imports can raise pump prices.

But the use of the revenue matters too. Both the Whitehouse-Khanna and Sherman bills rebate proceeds directly to households. The Whitehouse-Khanna proposal could give an estimated $216 a year to a single taxpayer at $100-per-barrel oil – helping offset pump prices particularly for lower-income families, who spend a larger share of their budgets on fuel.

Whether the trade-off between taxing companies’ war-driven windfall profits and the risks of market intervention is worth making depends on human values as much as on financial estimates. People differ on how fair it is to let companies keep profits that result from a war, and on the reliability of projections about revenue raised and investment lost. Those are not questions economists alone can settle.

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

The semester may have only just started, but it’s time for a day off. Georgia Tech’s campus will be closed on Monday, Sept. 7, in observance of Labor Day.   

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Angus Wilkinson, associate chair and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected chair of Georgia Tech's Faculty Executive Board. 

The effort will be coordinated through Georgia Tech's Institute for Matter and Systems (IMS), which will serve as the hub for the Institute’s NNME activities. Drawing on Georgia Tech’s research expertise, educational programs, industry partnerships, and shared facilities, IMS will help strengthen the state’s role in the nation's growing microelectronics ecosystem.

Georgia Tech is part of NNME South, a regional node led by The University of Texas at Austin. The consortium brings together higher education institutions, industry collaborators, workforce organizations, and economic development agencies across 10 states to align education and training with industry needs, expand workforce development opportunities, and create clearer pathways into semiconductor careers. 

"Microelectronics are in everything from consumer technologies to national security," said Mikkel Thomas, associate director for education and outreach at IMS. "Through NNME, we have an opportunity to work alongside industry and academic partners to help teach the next generation of the semiconductor workforce."

This initiative comes as demand for domestic semiconductor talent continues to grow. NNME South projects that approximately 29,000 semiconductor-related positions will be added across the region over the next decade, increasing the need for skilled technicians, engineers, and advanced manufacturing professionals.

IMS brings expertise in advanced materials and substrate innovation to support workforce needs across the semiconductor ecosystem. As part of this effort, IMS will help align educational programs with industry-defined knowledge, skills, and abilities, creating clearer pathways from technical training and certificate programs to advanced degrees and careers.

Through NNME, IMS and its regional partners will work to modernize curricula, expand hands-on learning opportunities, strengthen workforce partnerships, and increase awareness of careers in microelectronics and semiconductor manufacturing. These efforts aim to equip students, educators, and employers with the resources and pathways needed to support the future growth of the U.S. semiconductor industry.

In time for the fall semester, the ribbon has been cut, and students will soon move into Georgia Tech’s newest traditional residence hall — the Bud and Val Peterson Residence Hall.  

“Presenting my research at an international conference is always rewarding, but having the opportunity to do so in my home country, where my personal roots and professional journey converge, made the experience especially memorable,” said Lee, director of Research in Education Innovation for the Center for 21st Century Universities in the Georgia Tech College of Lifetime Learning.

The conference gave her the opportunity to share her research paper, co-authored with College of Lifetime Learning Research Scientist Meryem Yilmaz Soylu, Scaling Socratic Dialogue with Generative AI: Understanding Implications for Student Engagement and Learning Outcomes. It also gave Lee the chance to reconnect with Seoul after years away.

“Seoul felt immediately familiar, yet I was also struck by how much the city had evolved,” Lee said. “Its modern skyline, vibrant atmosphere, and remarkably efficient public transportation system reflected both continuity and rapid innovation.”

Those themes of innovation and tradition also appear in the research. The paper examines an artificial intelligence-powered learning tool designed to scale adaptive Socratic dialogue in large undergraduate courses. The study offers practical guidance for creating learning experiences that encourage meaningful student engagement rather than simply increasing AI use.

The presentation sparked conversations about how AI can support deeper, more interactive learning experiences.

“Many attendees were interested in how adaptive Socratic dialogue can encourage deeper reasoning and reflection, how educators can evaluate the quality of students’ engagement with AI beyond usage metrics, and what instructional strategies are needed to implement AI-supported dialogue effectively while maintaining appropriate human oversight,” Lee said.

Outside the conference, Lee noticed how deeply K-pop has become integrated into daily life in South Korea.

“Its global influence was evident everywhere, from public spaces and advertisements to conversations with people from around the world,” she said. “It highlighted Korea’s growing cultural impact.”

She also found time to enjoy a familiar favorite, sagol gomtang (Korean beef bone soup).

“It’s a comforting dish that brought back fond memories from home,” Lee said.

The conference reinforced a central takeaway: The future of AI in education will depend on collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and countries. Advancing AI responsibly requires both technological innovation and a deeper understanding of how people learn.

“It served as a reminder that research can bring people from different cultures together in pursuit of better education,” Lee said. “It also strengthened my commitment to designing and studying AI-powered educational tools grounded in learning science and prioritizing meaningful student engagement over technology for its own sake.”

“The future of computing extends far beyond the tech industry alone, and every sector increasingly relies on computational thinking and digital tools,” Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Olufisayo Omojokun said. 

“Students who double major embody that vision by combining technical skills with expertise in another field. That combination prepares them to solve real-world problems in innovative ways.”

While the national average for double majoring across all undergraduate disciplines sits at roughly 11%, Tech students are charting their own distinct paths. Among recent computer science graduates, 17.5% (596 students) successfully completed at least one minor, and 3.8% (131 students) graduated with a full double major.

“Overall, interdisciplinary interest is high, especially in areas like math, robotics, and economics,” said Bethany Mason, director of computing enrollment.

A Snapshot of Interdisciplinary Paths

While mathematics remains the most common pairing, computing students combine their studies with other fields in a wide range of ways. These combinations reflect individual interests and career goals, shaping how students translate technical skills into different professional contexts.

The top double majors among recent College of Computing graduates are mathematics, applied languages and intercultural studies, and industrial engineering.

Other recent graduates have minored, with Fintech, Mathematics, and Computing and Business being the top choices. 

Students pursue degree combinations for a variety of reasons. Elliot Huang (CS and Psychology, 2026), for example, added psychology after becoming interested in how people think. He now applies both fields in computational cognitive neuroscience research.

For Hunter Richardson (CS and Business Administration, 2026), the connection between computing, accounting, and data systems made business a natural complement to his CS studies. He said the combination also helped him during recruiting and will inform his work in Tech Assurance at KPMG.

Oliver Lee (CS and Electrical Engineering, 2025) was drawn to electrical engineering after developing an interest in embedded systems, computer vision, and physical devices. His CS background now gives him a software foundation to apply to hardware and engineering projects.

For Aaron Huang (CS and Biochemistry, Spring 2027), the path to a second major was influenced in part by his parents, both physicians. He has since combined his interests through research in medical labs, where computational methods are increasingly central to the life sciences.

Looking Ahead

The success of these students highlights a clear mandate for the College of Computing: to support and expand these impactful pathways even further.

“Our role is to support those pathways with curricula and advising that make it feasible for students to meaningfully integrate rigorous computing preparation with study across other fields, so they graduate prepared for a wide range of careers and graduate programs,” Omojokun said.

Moving forward, the College is actively exploring how to broaden and formalize more of these interdisciplinary tracks. 

“We don't want students to just manually piece together a double major; we want to build structured frameworks that seamlessly blend disciplines from day one,” Omojokun said.

“We’ve already proven it can be done. For years, the immense student demand for combining mathematics and computer science led directly to the creation of our formal, joint mathematics and computing major.” 

Looking to the future, the College will use that successful blueprint to design even more formalized joint degrees, helping the next generation of Yellow Jackets change the world through the exponential power of computing.

For Aaron Hung, double majoring in computer science (CS) and biochemistry has enabled him to explore two fields that are increasingly interconnected through technology.  

For Oliver Lee, a passion for software led to a desire to build things he could see and touch. The 2025 computer science (CS) graduate is completing a second major in electrical engineering, where he’s developed an interest in microelectronics, semiconductor physics, and integrated circuits.  

Double majoring in computer science (CS) and psychology offered Elliot Huang complementary perspectives on how people think, solve problems, and make decisions. The 2026 Georgia Tech graduate combined the two fields through his coursework and research in computational cognitive neuroscience. 

For Hunter Richardson, pairing computer science with business administration made sense. Building on his interest in data systems and accounting, the 2026 Georgia Tech alumnus saw double majoring as a solid foundation for understanding how technology can be applied across industries.  

The iGEM students are led by Catherine "Kate" Sharer (Chemistry/Biochemistry 1996), who discovered a passion for research as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech. 

“It's a joy to work with these students on real science. Instead of teaching a class, it feels very much like we're running a research lab that also has this competitive aspect to it,” says Sharer. "It's the perfect job I never knew I wanted."

Georgia Tech Beginnings

Sharer’s path to the classroom began in Tech’s chemistry labs. She initially enrolled as a chemical engineering major, before discovering she preferred chemistry and the lab work that went with it.

“I would listen in class and memorize my notes, but I learned the most when I could put chemical theories into practice in the lab,” says Sharer. ”Today, I try to bring that same learning process to my students.”

Summer research positions with Georgia Tech faculty gave her opportunities for hands-on scientific discovery. “Working in labs as a 19-year-old undergraduate made a huge impact on me,” Sharer says. “I absolutely fell in love with research.”

After graduation, she began a Ph.D. program in biochemistry and molecular biology at Emory University and spent about a decade in research labs. During those years, she mentored undergraduate scientists and found her enthusiasm for teaching matched her passion for research.

Realizing she wanted to make teaching a career, she earned a master's degree in secondary education and became a chemistry teacher. Just two years later, iGEM showed her that she didn't have to choose between the classroom and the lab.

Global Acclaim

The iGEM competition brings together students from more than 65 countries to conduct ambitious research aimed at solving real-world problems, culminating in the annual Global Jamboree in Paris.

The Lambert team is internationally recognized. Over the years, they’ve been profiled on 60 Minutes and Georgia Public Broadcasting and earned several competition awards. The 2022 team won the Grand Prize with their project, CADlock, an accessible, early-diagnosis screening test for coronary artery disease that uses microRNA biomarkers.

Nearly 100 students tried out for 10 openings on this year's team. According to Sharer, families move to the Lambert School District to participate. Despite the accolades, Sharer believes the team’s greatest achievement is the growth she sees in her students.

“They gain a lot of soft skills, like being a good team member and an effective communicator,” says Sharer.

Addressing Challenges

Each year the students choose the global issue they’d like to tackle.

The 2025 team developed a Lyme disease diagnostic platform using gene-editing technology, which led to an invitation for students to present their research at a Lyme disease symposium at Johns Hopkins University.

"This wasn’t a competition, this wasn’t on 60 Minutes, this wasn’t for a gold medal. This was my students being part of an important conversation with Lyme disease researchers across the world,” says Sharer. “It really showed them the power of science.”

This year's team is focusing on deformed wing virus in honey bees. Students are exploring synthetic biology approaches that could help protect bee populations critical to agriculture.

“My students are passionate, competitive, and committed to making the world a better place through the research and outreach that they do,” explains Sharer. “They’re wildly creative and ambitious, without any preconceived notions of what they can’t do.”

Beyond the laboratory, Lambert’s iGEM students host a synthetic biology summer camp for middle school students, conduct outreach in local schools, and even deliver virtual lessons to young women in Afghanistan.

All of the iGEM experiences have reinforced Sharer's belief in what young scientists can achieve:

"High school students are capable of independent research, and the more opportunities we can give them for that, the better."

A Georgia Tech Legacy

Like Sharer, the Lambert iGEM team shares strong ties with Georgia Tech.

The team traces its roots to School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Mark Styczynski, who introduced former Lambert teacher, Janet Standeven, to the competition. Since then, Styczynski has remained a dedicated mentor, supporting Lambert students for more than a decade.

“He treats my high school kids like grad students, asking them great questions that make them think about the research," says Sharer.

Other Georgia Tech professors have also offered research guidance and laboratory space.

This year, the students have been working with Jennifer Leavey, principal academic professional, assistant dean for faculty mentoring, and director of the Georgia Tech Urban Honeybee Project.

“I’ve been very impressed with the Lambert iGEM team members,” says Leavey.  “They are approaching the problem of honey bee health from so many different angles — using molecular biology, protein chemistry, technology, and even education. I hope they all become scientists, but even if they don't, I know they will go on to amazing things!”

Coming Full-Circle 

Sharer sees her own educational experience reflected in the opportunities her students have today.

“Everything I was taught at Georgia Tech, my training at Emory, and all of the pieces of my education, I get to transfer into the classroom,” says Sharer.

Many iGEM students leave Lambert and come to Georgia Tech. Esther Lee, a third-year biomedical engineering major, was a member of the Lambert iGEM team in 2022 and is now a volunteer mentor.

“The endurance built from reading papers, troubleshooting, and collaborating with team members to be creative and solve problems helped me push through challenging courses and team-based projects at Tech,” says Lee. “It also encouraged me to join a research lab and continue experimenting.”

Lee speaks highly of her former advisor:

“Ms. Sharer expertly balances encouraging and pushing students to learn, explore, and ideate challenging topics while also keeping realities and timelines in check,” says Lee.

Sharer’s current iGEM students agree:

“She’s a great teacher,” says Brandon Jimerson, a senior member of Lambert’s iGEM team. “She’s really shaped the way I look at science and how it can positively affect the world.”

SIGGRAPH, however, gave him another reason to return for its 2026 conference in Los Angeles.

Foley accepted the organization’s Distinguished Educator Award, presented annually since 2019. 

“I guess it wasn’t my last one after all,” Foley said. 

The award recognizes SIGGRAPH members who have made impactful contributions to computer graphics in educational environments. Foley has a strong pedigree in this area.

He co-authored the 1982 textbook Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics, which was renamed in its second edition as Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. With over 1,100 pages, it is widely regarded as the foundational text of modern computer graphics and animation.

“Some people called it ‘the bible’ of computer graphics, though I think there were some other good graphics textbooks,” Foley said. “We covered many different aspects of computer graphics, from hardware to algorithms to software systems to user interface and design.

“It stands out as an all-encompassing textbook, whereas current books are targeted at specific aspects of computer graphics rather than a broad introduction.”

Foley co-authored the first edition with Andries Van Dam, a professor who co-founded Brown University’s Department of Computer Science. Van Dam was the first to receive the Distinguished Educator Award in 2019.

“I had people thanking me for the book while I was at the conference and telling me it was the first book they learned computer graphics from,” Foley said. 

Foley came to Georgia Tech in 1991 and founded the Graphics, Visualization, & Usability (GVU) Center, which merged with Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) in 2023. GVU faculty helped establish Georgia Tech’s prestigious reputation in computer graphics, and GVU students became highly sought after by video game and film animation studios, including Disney and Pixar.

Foley and other GVU faculty were also at the forefront of the emerging field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

Foley said he enjoyed teaching in the classroom as much as anything and preferred practical approaches.

“I was always big on learning by doing, so I always had projects in my class that made students apply what I was talking about and not just regurgitate stuff on exams,” he said. “I think students enjoy having that hands-on experience.”

However, teaching was something he had to learn.

“I wasn’t good at it at first, but I think writing the book helped with that,” he said. “When you write a book, you discover how much you don’t know about something because you’re trying to carefully explain it so other people can understand.

“It makes you do more thinking, work through the explanations so that it makes sense to you and the reader.”

Georgia Tech established the James D. Foley Endowment in 2007 to honor his achievements. Since then, annual fellowships in his name have been awarded to outstanding graduate students. 

The 2026 Foley Scholar Awards will be announced in November. 

On Monday, Aug. 31, the Georgia Tech Police Department (GTPD) began increased enforcement of micromobility violations across campus, reinforcing existing state laws and City of Atlanta ordinances that apply to all micromobility devices. 

The effort builds on GTPD's ongoing micromobility education and safety initiatives and is intended to promote safer riding behaviors and reduce conflicts among riders, motorists, and pedestrians. 

Know the Rules of the Road 

Under Georgia law, micromobility devices are considered vehicles, and riders are expected to follow applicable traffic laws while operating them. This includes obeying traffic signals and posted signs, yielding to pedestrians, and following other rules that apply to vehicles operating on public roadways. More information regarding applicable laws can be found here.  

Riders should also remember that the walkways surrounding Tech Green are designated for pedestrians and ADA mobility devices during peak pedestrian traffic, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cyclists, scooter riders, and other micromobility users should dismount and walk their devices through the area during those times. 

Education Remains Essential 

Along with enforcement, GTPD will offer a Micromobility Diversion Class designed to reinforce safe riding behaviors and educate eligible riders about applicable traffic laws and expectations. 

The rider improvement course focuses on safe driving attitudes and behaviors, rules of the road, and responsible micromobility operation. 

The diversion program will be available to eligible Georgia Tech-affiliated micromobility riders who receive a citation from GTPD. To be eligible, you must have a referral from a GTPD officer. Micromobility users determined to be at fault in a collision are not eligible. Additional circumstances may also affect eligibility, and receiving a micromobility citation does not guarantee admission into the diversion program.  

Safety Is a Shared Responsibility 

GTPD has continued to expand micromobility education as bicycles, scooters, and other devices become increasingly common modes of transportation across campus. Riders are encouraged to wear a helmet; remain alert; avoid distractions; use appropriate lighting at night; and be mindful of pedestrians, vehicles, buses, and other micromobility users. 

Whether traveling across campus for class, work, or another activity, the expectation is simple: Know the rules of the road, ride responsibly, and help keep Georgia Tech safe for everyone. 

For additional information about micromobility rules, safety practices, violations, and educational resources, visit the Georgia Tech Police Department's Micromobility webpage. 

The Georgia Institute of Technology has established the Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Institute for Technology and Civic Leadership, a new interdisciplinary institute designed to prepare students to navigate the intersection of technology, civic life, and leadership. The naming was recently approved by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents in recognition of a transformative philanthropic commitment from Georgia Tech industrial engineering alumnus Michael E. Tennenbaum and his family. 

Building on initial seed funding from the State of Georgia and shaped by substantial engagement with Georgia Tech stakeholders, and in alignment with the vision of the Board of Regents, the Governor’s office, and the Georgia General Assembly, the institute will serve as a convening hub for students, faculty, and external partners. Tennenbaum's investment will create a permanent endowment to support the institute's long-term operations and strategic initiatives. It will also expand programming, strengthen faculty and student engagement, and help position Georgia Tech as a national leader in addressing societal challenges through innovation. 

“At Georgia Tech, we believe that technological innovation and civic leadership must go hand in hand,” said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “The Tennenbaum Family Institute will help to ensure that our students grow as productive, open-minded, engaged leaders, ready to work across ideological lines to get the job done. We are grateful to Michael Tennenbaum and his family for making this vision possible.” 

Rooted in Georgia Tech's motto of Progress and Service, the institute will foster open inquiry, civil discourse, and responsible problem-solving through teaching, research, and public engagement. Georgia Tech's strengths in engineering, computing, the liberal arts, entrepreneurship, and interdisciplinary collaboration position it to address important questions arising from rapid technological change. “Given the complexity of modern social life, the Tennenbaum Family Institute will be essential in building the well-rounded, technical leaders we’ll need in the future,” said Amanda Murdie, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech and Ivan Allen Jr. Chair.

“The institute will support new courses and programming that encourage students to grapple with a wide range of perspectives and prepare them to lead in a world shaped by rapidly advancing technology,” said Aaron Levine, interim executive director of the Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Institute for Technology and Civic Leadership and interim chair of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. “We hope this new institute will engage our students and faculty with external partners as they work together to address pressing real-world questions at the intersection of technology and the human condition.” 

Tennenbaum is a distinguished alumnus and business leader whose philanthropy has supported entrepreneurship initiatives, interdisciplinary research, student scholarships, faculty positions, and programs across Georgia Tech. He also played an instrumental role in the growth of CREATE-X, the Institute’s student startup program. In recognition of his achievements, leadership, and service, Georgia Tech awarded an honorary doctorate to Tennenbaum in 2016. 

“The challenges facing society today do not fit neatly within any one discipline,” said Tennenbaum. “Addressing them requires leaders who understand technology, appreciate civic responsibility, and can work across differences to find solutions. My family and I are proud to support Georgia Tech in creating an institute that will encourage the exchange of ideas and will prepare the next generation of thoughtful leaders.”  

Tennenbaum’s commitment is part of Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech, helping advance priorities to expand opportunity, accelerate innovation, and strengthen Georgia Tech's impact in Georgia and beyond. 

Now, as Professor Edmond Chow prepares to teach at Georgia Tech-Europe for the 2026-2027 academic year, Professor Polo Chau is stepping into the role of associate chair to help guide the School’s next phase of growth. 

Their leadership transition comes at a time when demand for expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), data science and analytics, and high-performance computing accelerates across industry, government, and academia.

“On behalf of the students, faculty, and staff of CSE, I extend our heartfelt gratitude to Edmond for his years of dedicated service as associate chair,” said School of CSE Regents’ Professor and Chair Haesun Park.

“Polo is a respected leader, an accomplished scholar, and a passionate advocate for our community. I am confident he will build on Edmond’s strong foundation to guide the School's continued success.”

The School of CSE associate chair helps lead faculty development, academic planning, and new initiatives. These responsibilities include course scheduling, teaching assignments, and reviewing proposals for new courses.

Rapid growth defined Chow’s tenure as associate chair, which started in summer 2021. 

As associate chair, Chow led CSE’s faculty recruiting committee. The School hired 15 new professors during his term, doubling the faculty in that span.

Chow’s relationship with new hires didn’t end with recruiting. Each new professor needed support to onboard smoothly, which he helped facilitate by pairing new hires with faculty mentors in the School. 

Chow helped new and veteran faculty alike design courses centered on their expertise and the field's emerging needs. As a result, he broadened and enriched the CSE curriculum at Georgia Tech. 

Chow led CSE’s effort to secure space in the Coda Building to accommodate so many new faculty and students. With his help, the School added the east wing of the 13th floor and space for four labs on the fifth floor.

While at Georgia Tech-Europe, Chow will teach CS 7545: Machine Learning Theory and CS 1371: Computing for Engineers. 

Chow is a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Like CSE, the professional society recognized Chow’s leadership and administrative talents, selecting him for several roles.

With his associate chair responsibilities concluded, Chow will focus more on his role as SIAM’s vice president for programs. He also co-chairs the organizing committee for the SIAM Conference on CSE, to be held Feb. 22-26, 2027, in Pittsburgh.

Previously, Chow served as vice chair of the SIAM Activity Group on CSE from 2025 to 2026. He co-chaired the organizing committee for SIAM’s 2022 annual meeting. 

"It has been an honor to serve CSE,” Chow said. “I am also inspired to have worked alongside others, including Haesun, who care so much for the School.”

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2012, Chau has distinguished himself as a leading expert in data science and AI.

Chau’s research combines machine learning and visualization to create scalable, interactive tools. His lab has developed applications for studying massive datasets, interpreting complex AI models, and solving real-world problems in cybersecurity, human-centered AI, graph visualization and mining, and social good.

Chau has taught CSE 4242/6242: Data and Visual Analytics since 2013. The course has grown into the world's largest semester-long university class on the subject. More than 19,600 students have taken the course throughout its history.

Alongside his research and teaching, Chau has held several leadership roles at Georgia Tech.

Since 2014, Chau has served as associate director of Georgia Tech’s M.S. Analytics program. The program celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2024, when he received the Innovator Award for his leadership and pioneering approaches to analytics education.

In 2019, Chau accepted roles as director of industry relations for the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) and as associate director of corporate relations for the Machine Learning Center (ML@GT). Chau recently stepped down from his leadership positions with IDEaS and ML@GT to accommodate his responsibilities as CSE’s associate chair.

“I enjoy building deep connections with people, and this role provides a lot of opportunities to do that,” Chau said. “Faculty development helps my colleagues build the careers that they want, and collectively shape CSE’s future. That’s what I look forward to the most.”

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will pay $17.1 billion and implement new protections to reduce the harmful effects of social media on young people, settling a lawsuit alleging that the social media giant violated consumer protection laws and targeted teenagers through its addictive features.  

Karamcheti said there are times when he doesn’t see any humans at all. Those instances reinforce the perception that robots are replacing humans rather than assisting them.

“You have humanoid robots doing things like folding laundry, and you see videos of it on social media,” Karamcheti said. “It bothers me that in all these videos, I see the robot doing these tasks alone without a single person around them. True human-robot collaboration is missing.”

As he joins the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing as an assistant professor, Karamcheti seeks to improve human-robot collaboration and maximize output through his research. 

Karamcheti comes to Tech after earning his Ph.D. in computer science (CS) from Stanford University. He also holds bachelor’s degrees in CS and literary arts from Brown University. 

In addition to human-robot interaction, he has conducted research on fine-tuning vision-language-action (VLA) models. 

VLAs are artificial intelligence (AI) systems typically built by fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) or large language models (LLMs). They use visual perception, natural language, and physical action to perform tasks.

“I have a high-level vision of what I think robotics should be, but there are many winding paths I like to take along the way as I try to understand why something works the way it does,” Karamcheti said.

Karamcheti said his vision was inspired by the movie Iron Man and by how the main character, Tony Stark, interacts with robots in his lab.

“I don’t want a robot that replaces all the work I’m doing in my life,” he said. “I want a robot that’s embedded in my life like my laptop or smartphone.

“They’re making it possible for me to do more things. I also want to make it so that robots start doing more and learning more when I leave the room.”

Karamcheti said the School of IC is a “dream” job for him because of its renowned faculty in human-robot interaction. It’s the ideal place to keep humans at the center of his research.

“We must design models around interaction and the idea that there’s going to be a person in the room. Robots don’t need to be perfect at any one thing. They just need to be able to ask for help when it’s needed and learn from those teaching interactions.”

Karamecheti said many robotics researchers are pursuing robots that are as close to perfect as possible so they can operate without human oversight. However, the amount of money and data needed to get there is substantial.

“I think you see diminishing returns with scale. If a robot performs tasks correctly 90% of the time, the data required to go from 90% to 95% is much less than that required to go from 95% to 99%. Many robotics companies and labs are investing to reach a 99% success rate,” he said.

Karamcheti added that the pursuit of perfection shouldn’t prevent a robot from being deployed. They could be deployed at 95% and increase their success rate by working with and learning from humans.

“Once I have a robot that’s 95% capable, I understand that 5% of failures will occur for a specific task. If I know a human is always going to be near the robot, I can design a system that sequences tasks and anticipates human intervention.”

Karamcheti is recruiting students to join his lab who bring new perspectives to robotics.

“I’m looking for students who aren’t afraid to challenge common assumptions and who enjoy hacking and building,” he said. “I want to work with students who have strong opinions about how robotics should look.”

Georgia Tech’s Itamar Kolvin is aiming to solve that problem using molecular motors powered by tiny chemical reactions, giving researchers a new way to guide how fibers assemble into larger structures in the lab. The work could open the door to advances in wound healing, artificial tissues, and organ repair.

Now, Kolvin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, has been awarded a $747,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support this research.

The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program is a five-year grant designed to help promising researchers establish a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in their field. Known as CAREER awards, the grants are NSF’s most prestigious funding for early-career faculty.

“The CAREER award is a crucial opportunity to push this research forward,” says Kolvin. “NSF plays a critical role in advancing science, and we wouldn’t be able to do our work without their support. I’m incredibly grateful for their commitment to advancing science.”

Microscopic Motorboats

While the body naturally assembles these fibers, their small size makes protein filaments difficult to control in a lab setting. Without guidance, the materials grow randomly, creating weak and disorganized structures. But Kolvin has found that exposing the filaments to controlled fluid flows can help them grow in predictable ways.

That’s where Kolvin’s molecular motors come in. He attaches the motors to rod-shaped particles called microtubules, transforming the otherwise inert particles into microscopic motorboats. Powered by chemical reactions, the microtubules move through the fluid and generate tiny currents. Those currents guide the suspended protein filaments, directing how they align and assemble.

Like sticks in a stream, the current helps the protein filaments align with the flow around them. When millions of filaments interact in this way, they can form bundles, clusters, and large-scale networks. 

“How do these rods align, when do they tangle, and when do they form networks?” Kolvin asks. “I’m interested in learning how we may be able to predict and ultimately control that behavior in order to direct the ways these structures can grow.”

Flexible Filaments

Kolvin’s earlier work has already shown success with actin, the filaments responsible for building muscles. When suspended in fluid, the molecular motors helped actin fibers bundle together and form a membrane-like structure. 

While that work demonstrated that molecular motors could influence assembly, Kolvin now aims to create a more dynamic, tunable system. Actin is limited, he explains, because of its simple rod-like shape, lack of rigidity, and because its bonds become permanent once the fibers bundle together.

He believes the more rigid, helix-shaped flagella in this new work will offer a wider range of opportunities. “The shape and rigidity of flagella expand the variety of patterns they can form,” he explains. “These new structures could have different applications.”

Toward Tunable Materials

Through molecular engineering, the Kolvin Lab creates flagella that are temperature-sensitive, meaning that they can make and unmake bonds at different temperatures. This property might be key in creating a system that could be assembled and disassembled on demand.

“This could make it possible to tune materials in real-time by warming or cooling the system," Kolvin explains.

By combining molecular motors with temperature-sensitive protein fibers, Kolvin aims to create systems that can be predictably shaped, assembled, and disassembled on demand, opening the door to new possibilities for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. 

The work could also help answer long-standing problems in physics about active matter and collective behavior, revealing how flow and shape influence the way millions of microscopic building blocks align, pack, and assemble into complex materials.

“This CAREER award provides an exciting opportunity to pursue new ideas and tackle difficult, far-reaching questions,” Kolvin says. “I’m looking forward to seeing where this research leads in the years ahead.”

On Sept. 3, CREATE-X Demo Day will take place for the first time at LOOP, Georgia Tech’s new creative and cultural hub, where more than 100 startups will give a firsthand look at what Tech founders have spent the summer building and launching. 

Previously known as Velocity Startups, The Venture Arcade serves as a bridge between early-stage startup founders who have participated in Georgia Tech initiatives like CREATE-X, Quadrant-i, and Biolocity and are focused on scaling their businesses and preparing themselves for late-stage accelerators such as the Advanced Technology Development Center, Engage, Fusen, and Atlanta Tech Village. 

Hodgson brings more than two decades of entrepreneurial leadership, capital markets expertise, and global operating experience to the role. As CEO of RoxWrite, she led the development of an industry-leading, AI-powered underwriting, onboarding, and risk-monitoring platform. Hodgson co-founded and led Now Corp from 2010 to 2024, serving as president and CEO of the innovative business-to-business payments company that created NowAccount. Earlier in her career, she co-founded Nourish Inc., served as executive VP of Dunk.net and chief marketing officer and chief operating officer of Dewberry Capital Corporation, and was senior vice president and general manager at iXL, where she built and led the Retail and Consumer Products Practice across 26 global offices serving clients such as The Home Depot, Coca-Cola, and Nike. 

"As a Georgia Tech graduate, serial entrepreneur, and longtime mentor to founders at CREATE-X and Harvard Business School, I've seen what it takes to start and scale a business, and I've seen how much faster and more successful that journey can be with the right resources,” she said. “The Venture Arcade is built to deliver exactly that, with access to Georgia Tech’s unparalleled resources. Bringing capital, capacity, and customers, The Venture Arcade’s flywheel of growth will give Georgia Tech founders and local technology companies, including hard tech and deep tech, an unfair advantage. I'm proud to work with Georgia Tech to bring this program to Atlanta, a city ready to take its place as a top five technology and startup hub in the U.S."

Hodgson is also a nationally recognized thought leader on entrepreneurship and access to capital. She co-authored the award-winning book Level Up: Rise Above the Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back (2022), published by Portfolio Penguin and now widely used in university entrepreneurship courses. She previously served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School, where she continues to mentor founders and judge venture competitions. She has also served as a mentor in Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X 10x program, coaching high-potential founders as they scale and pursue significant market opportunities.

“Lara possesses the capital formation expertise and business acumen to put The Venture Arcade on the map,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, chief commercialization officer at Georgia Tech and president of Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures. “Her experience building, scaling, and financing companies makes her uniquely suited to shape The Venture Arcade into a meaningful pathway for high-potential startups. Lara truly embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of Georgia Tech, and we are thrilled to have her on the leadership team.” 

A proud Georgia Tech alumna, Hodgson earned her bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering with highest honors and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is a trustee of the Georgia Tech Foundation and serves on multiple corporate and nonprofit boards. Her honors include recognition as a 2019 EY Entrepreneurial Winning Woman, a Worthy 100 honoree by Worth magazine, and inclusion in Pathway of Progress, the campus installation celebrating women at Georgia Tech.

About The Venture Arcade

The Venture Arcade is a startup accelerator that propels deep-tech innovation, providing the resources and infrastructure for founders to take their innovations to market. Located in the heart of Tech Square in the historic Biltmore Innovation Center, The Venture Arcade offers mentorship, infrastructure, strategic programming, and funding opportunities. The accelerator is made possible through a partnership with Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures Inc. and the Georgia Tech Foundation. 

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Georgia Tech is introducing a new Academic AI Strategy and launching a new Academic AI Playbook. This marks the next step in the Institute's efforts to prepare students for an AI-enabled future while supporting innovation across teaching and learning.

Georgia Tech is excited to host the University of Colorado for the Yellow Jackets’ football season opener at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 3, at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field. 

How does Atlanta's local food ecosystem function today? How do the people working inside it envision its future? And where are the opportunities for transformation?

Those three questions drive the systems and network mapping research of Nicole Kennard, a research scientist and assistant director for Community-Engaged Research at Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS). Within a systems map, Kennard charts intersecting food challenges and the intervention strategies that could address them. A companion social network map reveals the relationships that already exist across the food ecosystem and who needs to be brought together to create change. Both feed into the Atlanta Food System Research Network, an effort to increase coordination and build teams around the food system's most stubborn, systemic challenges.

The mapping regularly shows one significant gap: One in eight metro Atlantans are struggling to access food. Although more local farmers are growing good food, there is a “missing middle layer” of infrastructure connecting that food to those who need it, according to Atlanta’s 2026 Climate Resilience Action Plan. Food produced by smaller farms often can’t enter traditional supply chains due to small quantities, so new models are needed to move that food in ways that people can access it within their everyday routines. A summer research trip through France, Belgium, and the U.K. provided her with fresh models for closing that gap.

"I learned a lot from these models that I'm trying to bring back to Atlanta for my systems mapping research," Kennard said. "One of the biggest issues is we're missing that middle layer — better ways to distribute local food so it's reaching all neighborhoods equitably, and it's actually accessible."

It's not Kennard's first time working on food systems abroad. After graduating from Georgia Tech with a degree in materials science and engineering and running a student-led hydroponics project that grew food for the Atlanta Community Food Bank, she spent nearly four years in the U.K. as a Fulbright Scholar, earning a master's in sustainable agriculture and food security at Newcastle University before completing a Ph.D. in chemistry and biosciences at the University of Sheffield in 2023. That background, she said, is part of what draws her to the field. "Food is the great connector."

Bringing Ideas Home From Europe

This summer, Kennard split her time between France, Belgium, and a return visit to Sheffield. At Georgia Tech-Europe, the institute's Metz campus, she met with Paul Voss, director of academic programs, to explore future partnerships around sustainable entrepreneurship and research, potentially bringing BBISS-affiliated faculty and coursework to the campus.

In Montpellier, she presented her work to three organizations clustered on a single campus: INRAE (France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment), L'Institut Agro Montpellier, and CIRAD, the country's international agricultural development research arm, along with MOISA, an interdisciplinary CIRAD-affiliated research unit focused on sustainable food systems. There, she encountered a "right-to-food" pilot in which Montpellier residents, half of whom live in poverty, pay a voluntary monthly amount on a sliding scale, from as little as 1 euro to 150 euros, and all receive a flat 100 euros back, redeemable at a handful of partner supermarkets. She also saw "social grocery stores" reaching rural areas through mobile markets, and digital platforms, letting neighbors pool their money to buy directly from local farmers.

Kennard also attended the European Ecological Economics Society Conference in Belgium, where she presented her food systems mapping research and learned about other local food models, specifically farmer-based cooperatives.

In Sheffield, Kennard gave a talk on community-engaged research methods and came away with insights from their local food network, ‘ShefFood,’ which is community-led rather than run by the university or city (though both have seats on its board). Leadership rotates every couple of years to keep it grounded in the community it serves.

From Campus to Community

Kennard's Atlanta work leans heavily on the students and community partners building it with her. This semester, she is working with incoming computer science Ph.D. student Tristan Daniel to automate her network map, scraping newsletters, news articles, and annual tax filings to keep the map's data updated in near-real time. Rhutvi Ahir, a master’s student in city and regional planning, has been working on integrating the systems map into a publicly available and interactive online platform.

Last semester, through a BBISS 2025 Sustainability Next Seed Grant project, Kennard, along with principal investigators Johannes Milz, Ingeborg Rocker, and Carl DiSalvo, professor in the School of Interactive Computing, convened 16 community and civic partners for a participatory design workshop mapping how food moves across metro Atlanta and where better data sharing could prevent waste. Drawing on feedback from that session, DiSalvo’s team is now exploring tools such as digital maps that show where surplus food, refrigerated trucks, and distribution sites are located, as well as a dedicated messaging system to coordinate what is now handled through ad hoc texts and calls.

This fall, DiSalvo’s graduate students in the interdisciplinary M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction program — from computing, design, and social science backgrounds — will turn those concepts into early prototypes to test with partners, giving students experience designing technology for real community needs rather than just commercial products.

DiSalvo says the core issue isn’t only a lack of food, but the difficulty of coordinating people, resources, and logistics at scale. “There’s so much need with food insecurity, and resources as well. It’s a coordination challenge. Most people didn’t get into this because they love logistics; they have a commitment to feeding people,” he said.

He credits Kennard with helping position Georgia Tech as a hub for food systems and community-engaged sustainability research. “Nicole’s work is important — not just her food systems research, but also the oversight she gives to community-based research. It’s amazing we have her as a colleague.”

DiSalvo isn't the only faculty collaborator. Sofía Pérez-Guzmán, an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a BBISS Faculty Fellow, has partnered with Kennard to survey Atlanta residents in West End and citywide about how they access food. Their next step: building a tool based on what they learned.

"We're designing a decision-making tool that helps connect food locally, from producers to distributors and food access points in the community," Pérez-Guzmán said.

Not every connection requires a grant or a formal project. Through the networks she is building and her continued engagement, Kennard has linked a local consulting group with a co-op needing strategic guidance and introduced a farmers market organizer to a food rescue partner. Community partner Fresh Harvest even referenced her food system network map in a recent presentation to WABE radio.[MJ1]  According to Kennard, it generated a lot of buzz, underscoring the appetite that Atlantans have for a shared picture of the food distribution ecosystem.

Two Maps, One Goal

Both of Kennard's maps are expected to go live by the end of the summer. The network map identifies the organizations working in the space and how they connect. The systems map, still being finalized, distills her interviews and engagement work into nine key thematic areas emerging as priorities for the city, along with competing visions of what a more resilient food system could look like.

The maps also anchor the research network Kennard co-leads with Emory University Associate Professor Emily Burchfield and agrifood systems researcher Kate Mundon-Dixon. The network has held two gatherings so far, one at a local hydroponic farm, where attendees added their own connections to the map. The network’s active listserv now includes more than 55 organizations.

For Kennard, the goal was never a single map or tool. It was building the foundation and the infrastructure that let everyone else act together. "I wanted to create this foundational research so that the academics and partners most poised to address specific challenges can create those teams and move forward together," she said.

She added that while most of her work is Atlanta-focused, it has implications for regional food access across Georgia. “A key insight that came from my systems mapping work is the need to connect rural and urban growers to move forward a statewide agenda for a resilient food system,” Kennard said. “My colleague at Emory, Emily Burchfield, is doing a lot more of the rural engagement, and we hope to align our work later.”

Everybody in Atlanta's food space is doing amazing work, she added, noting that, "If we can better align and coordinate under a shared vision and strategy, then we can actually move the needle on systems change, instead of just a few isolated things happening in different neighborhoods.”

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Since becoming the first woman to serve as dean of the College in 2019, Lozier's strategic approach has led to historic growth in enrollment, research activity, philanthropy, and reputational excellence. During her tenure, the College has launched dozens of innovative programs and expanded support and mentoring for more than 3,300 students and 550 faculty across six internationally ranked Schools. 

In fiscal year 2026, the College reached a record $70 million in research expenditures. Undergraduate enrollment is up by more than 60%, with nearly 180,000 undergraduate credit hours taught each year. More than three-quarters of the College's undergraduate students are from Georgia.

“It has been nothing short of an honor and pleasure to serve as dean,” said Lozier. “If my tenure will be remembered as one that fostered an environment where amazingly talented students, faculty, and staff felt supported and encouraged in their work, then I will have accomplished what I set out to do. From year one to year seven, the people in the College of Sciences community have been my top priority.” 

The College has added new minors ranging from astrophysics and quantum science to the science of mental health and well-being. New offerings include bachelor’s degrees in math and computing and environmental science, as well as the interdisciplinary doctoral program in Neuroscience and Neurotechnology. 

Under Lozier’s leadership, the College also achieved reputational highs, with all graduate degrees ranked in the top 10% of their respective U.S. News & World Report program rankings. 

In 2025, Sciences was the first college to surpass its Transforming Tomorrow campaign goal, raising more than $90 million and counting. Philanthropic contributions to the College have created new undergraduate scholarships and set record fellowship and endowment support for graduate students, faculty, and postdoctoral scholars. The College also advanced new initiatives for student support and career education, faculty mentoring and teaching, and alumni engagement, and expanded programming to convene experts in space exploration, health and ecology, and artificial intelligence and brain science. 

Lozier established four new strategic research centers to extend work on critical minerals, artificial intelligence, and spatial processing and navigation. She also led the creation of Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow, a wide-ranging effort to address pressing health and climate challenges across the state, from farms and forests to Georgia’s coastal communities and growing cities. 

“Dean Lozier has set a remarkable example of what it means to lead with purpose, generosity, and deep commitment,” said Raheem Beyah, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “She has left an enduring mark on the College of Sciences and on the many people who have benefited from her guidance, advocacy, and mentorship. She has helped position the College for an exciting future while bringing distinction to Georgia Tech through her leadership and scholarship. We are grateful for all she has given to the Institute, and I look forward to seeing the continued impact of her tenure in the years ahead.” 

Beyond Georgia Tech, Lozier has served in leadership roles in several international scientific organizations, including a recent term as president of the American Geophysical Union, representing more than 62,000 members across 144 countries, and as president of The Oceanography Society. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. 

Recent honors include election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and receipt of the Henry Stommel Research Medal in 2022, the highest honor given to an oceanographer by the American Meteorological Society. In 2025, Lozier was named Faculty of the Year by the Georgia Tech Graduate Student Government Association and, earlier this year, received the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Award. 

An active researcher and one of the world’s foremost physical oceanographers, Lozier remains the international project lead for the $32 million National Science Foundation-funded Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program observing system, known as OSNAP. 

In planning for new leadership, Beyah has named Mitchell Walker, dean of the College of Engineering, to serve as chair of the search committee. Details about interim leadership and the timing of the search process will be announced soon.

Jie Wu, an engineering graduate student, was studying a type of striking white beetle found in Southeast Asia and attempting to figure out how to mimic its brilliant color when an unexpected discovery upended the experiment.

Jie and Carson Meredith had been hoping to identify naturally occurring whitening pigments that could be used in paper and paints. The beetle’s white exoskeleton is made from a compound called chitin, which is a type of carbohydrate – one that is also commonly found in crab and lobster shells.

Read the full article in The Conversation here: https://bit.ly/4uBteYr

Dr. Shi received the award for the paper “Selecting Mediators in a Bayesian Exploratory Mediation Model,” co-authored with Dexin Shi and Amanda Fairchild. The award was presented in connection with the 2026 ISDSA Annual Meeting in Beijing, China.

The award-winning work addresses an important methodological challenge in mediation analysis: identifying which variables help explain the mechanisms through which one variable influences another. The researchers develop a groundbreaking exploratory Bayesian mediation modeling framework that improves the selection of potential mediators for dimensionality reduction and quantifies their effects on a continuous scale, a powerful statistical approach that can help researchers analyze complex relationships in psychological, behavioral, and other data-intensive sciences.

ISDSA brings together researchers, practitioners, and educators from around the world to share advances in data science and analytics and discuss emerging directions for the field.

Shi’s research focuses on the development and application of advanced quantitative methods for psychological and behavioral science. Her work strengthens the School of Psychological and Brain Sciences’ growing expertise at the intersection of psychology, quantitative methodology, and data science.

“I am grateful for being part of the community and having the opportunity to represent Georgia Tech and the School of Psychological and Brain Sciences,” Shi said. “It has been an amazing experience coming to Atlanta.”

Tansu Celikel, chair of the School of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said the recognition reflects both the quality of Shi’s scholarship and the School’s commitment to advancing rigorous, innovative approaches to psychological science.

“Dingjing’s achievement highlights both the excellence of her research and the importance of methodological innovation in our field,” Celikel said. “Her work equips researchers with more powerful ways to understand complex psychological, neural, and behavioral processes. It is wonderful to see her scholarship receive this international recognition, and we are fortunate to have her as part of our Georgia Tech community.”

Learn more: The full list of 2026 ISDSA Best Paper Award recipients is available on the ISDSA Annual Meeting website. https://isdsa.org/meeting/index

Speare plans to use the funding to build on her lab’s previous finding that naturally occurring predatory bacteria can reduce disease severity in threatened staghorn corals by defending them against harmful bacteria. Her new research will move beyond direct predator-prey interactions to better understand how bacterial predators influence the broader microbial communities living on corals.

“We know bacterial predators can alter disease outcomes in corals,” explains Speare. “What we don’t yet comprehend is what predation actually does to a complex microbiome inside a living animal. Does a predator simply remove particular bacteria, or can those interactions ripple through the entire microbiome and ultimately affect the host?”

Understanding those changes could reveal why some corals are better able to resist disease and recover from environmental stress than others.

Next Steps

Speare and researchers from the Speare Marine Microbial Ecology Lab will investigate microbial predation outside the laboratory in a whole-community context.

“Most of what we know about microbial interactions comes from studying one or two populations in a test tube,” says Speare. “But microbes can behave very differently in a living host. We want to understand those interactions where they are actually happening.”

Her research will use staghorn corals as a model for observing these interactions over time. Because corals are made up of colonies of genetically identical animal polyps, scientists can repeatedly sample the same colony and track how its microbial communities change. This approach offers a unique window into how microbiomes evolve within an animal host, something that is much more difficult to study  in many other animals used in research

"One of the really powerful things about corals as a model is that we can repeatedly observe what is happening within the same host," says Speare. "Instead of taking a single snapshot of a microbiome, we can follow how interactions unfold through time and explore how those changes ultimately affect the animal."

Speare hopes the research will uncover how bacteria interact within coral microbiomes and whether those interactions can help corals stay healthy and resist disease. 

“It’s unusual to have a model system where fundamental questions about microbial ecology can have such immediate relevance to conservation,” says Speare. “If we learn something that can improve coral health or restoration efforts, we can communicate those findings directly to the practitioners who are actively working to restore these populations.”

Seed Grant Support

Speare credits two prior grants for providing preliminary data for the MIRA award. A NOAA Ruth D. Gates Coral Restoration Innovation Grant helped her develop disease models and investigate the potential health applications of predatory bacteria in corals. A Georgia Tech Sustainability Next Seed Grant filled a critical knowledge gap in the research by testing how these bacterial predators interact with healthy corals.

“Before we could ask what microbial predation does within a complex microbiome, we needed to establish that these predators could persist within corals without negatively affecting the host,” says Speare. “That work gave us the foundation to start asking much bigger ecological questions.”

The Sustainability Next Seed Grant, administered by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, also supported workshops and collaboration-building efforts that strengthened partnerships with the University of Miami’s Lirman Lab and Rescue a Reef which provide corals and expertise for ongoing restoration-focused research.

Looking Ahead

“The flexibility that comes with this funding is incredibly exciting,” says Speare. “We have five years to follow the biology wherever it leads us. If we discover an unexpected interaction or mechanism, we have the freedom to pursue it rather than being constrained by a single predefined project. That gives us the opportunity to build a much broader understanding of how microbial predation influences coral health.”

Support Acknowledgement

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 1R35GM165598.

A few weeks ago I sat down with a friend who works in the defense industry. His role gives him current visibility into the contractors now being asked to rapidly scale production of munitions and interceptors after a season of heavy use. I knew from his hands-on background he would have a point of view that would validate or challenge my perceptions. What I got instead was a conversation any plant manager would recognize and was quite familiar with my food and beverage experience. In sophisticated and automated operations, it still comes down to having qualified people who are engaged in a process-disciplined culture.

He described operations that depend on specific people more than solely on documented processes. Sequencing steps marked with tape on the tooling. Machine settings carried on a folded sheet of paper in an operator's back pocket. Tools modified by hand over the years, with the changes never finding their way back into the work instructions. He walked through the standard surge playbook familiar to me, adding a third or fourth shift and moving the most experienced operators to nights to anchor it. Then he smiled and said that third shift is where the magic happens. He meant it with affection and a wince at the same time.

None of this was foreign to me. I spent my early career in plant and distribution operations at Frito-Lay and then 25 years in the Coca-Cola system, and I have seen every one of these patterns. So I tested the conversation with several people in my network, most of them Coca-Cola alumni, plant managers and continuous improvement leaders, and one with a deep project management background. They all landed in the same place. The complexity is real. The people dealing with it deserve empathy rather than criticism, because they are being asked to do something genuinely hard: rebuild years of inventory in months, with supply chains built for a different era, often without the contracts that would let them invest.

How We Got Here, Honestly

The defense industrial base did not get fragile through negligence. It got fragile through rational decisions, made year after year, that optimized for a demand pattern that had been reduced across a long timeframe.

Consider the Tomahawk cruise missile. CSIS reports that orders averaged 86 missiles a year over the past decade, so recent production ran under 200 a year even though the manufacturer's capacity goal exceeds 1,000. Nobody sized that production schedule and capacity plan incorrectly. It was sized to the order book. The same logic explains the single sourcing that is common in the defense industry. Peacetime volumes could not sustain two qualified suppliers of anything specialized, so awarding the work to one kept one alive. Lean and just-in-time practices, imported from those of us in commercial industry, minimized carrying costs exactly as designed.

CSIS estimates it will take three or more years to restore inventories of the interceptors and missiles most heavily used in recent operations. When the National Defense Industrial Association surveyed its members about barriers to surging capacity, the top answer was not machines or floor space. Fifty-six percent said they had no contract vehicle to justify expansion, and 41 percent pointed to the technical workforce. Suppliers have been burned before, and the deeper tiers reach into global sources, including China, for materials and components most of us would assume were made here.

Some of the gaps are genuinely surprising. The United States has not produced its own TNT since 1986. The primary explosive fill for artillery shells has come entirely from overseas for nearly four decades. A new plant is finally under construction in Kentucky, fully funded and politically championed, and its estimated completion is early 2029, roughly four and a half years after the contract was signed. Meanwhile, seven of the most heavily consumed missiles trace back to two prime contractors and essentially one solid rocket motor industrial base, with several programs drawing on the same small labor markets in places like Camden, Arkansas.

Reasons for Optimism, and Lessons from Other Ramps

This is a challenging situation, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Since January the Pentagon has signed multiyear framework agreements intended to lift Patriot PAC-3 production from roughly 600 to 2,000 interceptors a year over seven years, THAAD from 96 to 400, and Tomahawk toward more than 1,000. Congress carved out dedicated funding for the solid rocket motor base. And the Army's 155mm artillery ramp, while short of its goal, has proven something useful: spreading production across several smaller facilities has delivered, with new propellant plants opening ahead of schedule, while the single large facility built on untested equipment has struggled. Spreading the wealth to additional producers has started to build resilience.

My friends pushed the conversation toward a question I think holds the real value: where have other industries ramped capacity under pressure, and what did they learn? Three cases stand out to me, and together they carry one message.

You can't build sustainable capacity without committed demand.

The largest domestic surgical mask maker offered in January 2020 to reactivate four mothballed N95 lines, and the federal government showed little interest. They were able to ramp up production a few months later when the Texas National Guard helped staff them to 24-hour operation. Rational suppliers do not build capacity against urgency alone. Operation Warp Speed proved the other side of the same coin: advance purchase agreements signed before vaccine trials even finished, priority ratings on materials, government staff embedded at manufacturing sites, and regulatory steps run in parallel rather than in sequence.

Then there is UPS, a story from our own industry. After the 2013 peak season failure left an estimated two million packages undelivered on Christmas Eve, UPS spent half a billion dollars on trucks, sorting capacity, and people. Delivery performance recovered, and earnings cratered when forecast volumes failed to appear. The lasting fix took years: disciplined demand shaping with retailers, collaborative forecasting, and automated capacity that was still coming online in 2018.

Efficiency won't get you there.

Surge capacity is a different investment from efficient operations, and even a company with money, urgency, and full control of its own network bought it in years, not quarters.

That is the common denominator across every case, and it was the project manager in the group who put a fine point on it. The schedule is set by the slowest constraint, whether that is a chemical plant, a qualification test, a hiring funnel, or a training curve. The solutions that actually work are the ones that buy time back: demand certainty that starts the clock sooner, doing in parallel what tradition does in sequence, and managing demand honestly while capacity catches up.

What We Would Do: It Still Comes Down to People

Underneath the contracts and the chemistry, the constraint I keep coming back to is the one my friend led with that matched our experience at Coca-Cola. These are person-centric operations, and the surge playbook puts them at risk at the worst possible moment. We learned at Coca-Cola that around-the-clock operations do not add capacity in a straight line, especially in less automated environments. The research agrees, showing night shifts running measurably behind days in manual work while highly automated lines show little difference. Moving your best operators to third shift while handing first shift to trainees stretches your thinnest asset, which is experienced judgment, exactly when quality margins are tightest.

So before adding a shift, I would count the operations that only one person can run to spec. Most plants I worked with never thought to do this math. I would treat the ramp itself as the opportunity because your best people are demonstrating everything they know every day while they train others. Put cameras on the setups and build the digital work instructions now, not after the veterans retire. I would open a no-fault “library book amnesty” window for operators to bring the taped sequences and pocket settings into the documented process, because those informal practices are the real process, and punishing their discovery only keeps them hidden.

And I would hold one line firmly: no single person should ever be the sole verifier of safety-critical test results. I have seen what happens when one person's “read” of a gauge becomes the only record that a batch was in spec. The mistake does not surface until the product is already in the market, and by then it is not a documentation problem anymore.

Finally, we as supply chain professionals should give contractors some flexibility. Defense suppliers are heavily audited, and their quality image is deserved, but specs for specs' sake are a genuine bottleneck. The pharmaceutical industry figured this out: classify which parameters actually carry the product's reliability and protect those absolutely, then flex what is merely habit. Do that classification with the senior operators in the room, because they know which settings matter and which ones are folklore.

Requirements that carry reliability are sacred. Requirements that carry only tradition are negotiable, and a surge is the right time to know the difference. That classification should produce something durable, not a conversation everyone forgets by the next shift: a change-controlled, plant-floor document, owned by the senior operators who built it, that travels with the work instructions and gets revisited every time the line changes hands.

The people inside these plants are not the problem. They are the asset, and in many cases they are the process. If we respect that, preserve what they know, and give them the certainty and the flexibility to do their jobs, a rapid ramp-up can succeed.

A final question: Do you understand your process dependencies on key players and single operators? If you aren't comfortable with a single-source supplier, why would you be comfortable with your business continuity hinging on a single individual?

Through a Next Gen STEM (NGS) NASA Aerospace Skilled Technical Workforce Hubs (NAS_Hub) grant award, Georgia Tech will play a central role in addressing a critical labor shortage in the booming aerospace industry and enhance the state’s role as an aerospace industry leader in the global space economy.

Beginning this fall, the three-year, $1.5 million award will establish the Southeast Space Technology & Aerospace Readiness Skills (SE-STARS) Hub. The hub will expand opportunities for training and workforce readiness in high-demand technical careers in aerospace.
The SE-STARS Hub includes the Georgia Space Grant Consortium (GSGC), Georgia Tech’s Space Research Institute (SRI), the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI), the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), Georgia Southern University, Georgia College and Career Academies, Georgia Aerospace & Defense Alliance (GADA), and select Georgia aerospace employers to support the growing aerospace industry and NASA missions.

Aerospace products are Georgia’s No. 1 export and the state has more than 800 companies supporting aviation, manufacturing, research, maintenance, repair, and operations.  Many aerospace and engineering positions rely on skilled technical workers whose training pathways do not require a four-year, or advanced degree. There are significant gaps in technical roles such as machinists, electronics technicians, test operators, and systems integrators. These shortages are driven by an aging workforce and a projected national shortfall of at least one million skilled technical workers by 2030. (National Academics of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, 2025). The gap also stems from the rapid pace of technological advancement, where even current skills can quickly become obsolete if not constantly renewed.  All this combines to create an urgent need for training to support new and sustainable aerospace career pathways. 

Stephen Ruffin, interim chair of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and GSGC director will serve as the principal investigator (PI).  Jud Ready, executive director of SRI; Lori Skillings, GSGC; Hossein Taheri, Georgia Southern University; and Steven Ferguson, GTMI, will serve as co-PIs. Jeffrey McNabb, a research engineer in Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL), will serve as the program manager, leading day-to-day operations and coordinating the project team.

"This initiative strengthens Georgia's position as a leader in aerospace innovation and manufacturing while providing new opportunities for students and industries across the state," said Ruffin.

Coordination between public education systems, industry, and workforce agencies can sometimes be limited. SE-STARS will act as a "hub" to bridge these gaps, connecting Georgia Tech and its specialized research institutes with TCSG’s 22 colleges and 88 campuses to provide statewide access to training.
“Another advantage of the program is the stronger network it creates,” said Ruffin. “Each organization in the SE-STARS team has unique capabilities but together we will strengthen the technical workforce pipeline across Georgia and the broader Southeast.”

The SE-STARS team will collaborate with industry partners to develop curriculum aligned with workforce needs. “The easily ported curricula we develop will be tailored for other institutions to adopt directly, creating a consistent foundation of skills and competencies that employers can universally expect from program graduates across Georgia,” Ready said.

Students will access training through a statewide network of technical colleges serving as regional instructional nodes, which offer flexible online options and hands-on paid apprenticeships to ensure broad geographic reach. 

The program also reaches K-12 and adult learners through career academies and specialized STEM labs, creating a structured, sustainable transition from early education to high-demand aerospace credentials. GTMI will support this work through its Advanced Manufacturing Pathways Program, which connects industry-informed training with pathways into high-demand advanced manufacturing careers.

“Georgia's expanding aerospace and space sectors are creating high-paying jobs and driving economic growth,” said Ruffin. “This program will help develop the skilled workforce needed to support that growth and Georgia’s competitiveness in the space economy.” 

What's Changing

All first-year, transfer, and new graduate students on the Atlanta campus are receiving a digital BuzzCard as their primary credential this year. For most of these students, the digital version is their only BuzzCard. A physical card is issued only in specific circumstances, such as a documented device-compatibility limitation or a religious consideration.

Why You May See Both This Year

Current and returning students will continue using their existing physical BuzzCards until additional campus systems and integrations are ready to support digital credentials more broadly later this semester. More information about system availability can be found on the BuzzCard website.

That means physical and digital BuzzCards will both be in use this year. If a student can't present a physical card, that isn't necessarily a problem — it may simply mean they're an incoming student using their digital credential as intended.

How This Differs From Faculty and Staff Cards

Faculty and staff who activate a digital BuzzCard can continue using both the physical and digital versions; activating one does not deactivate the other. New students do not have that option. Their digital credential replaces the physical card entirely, with exceptions given to those with religious considerations or device compatibility issues.

Questions?

Faculty, staff, or students with questions can contact Swarm Support in person at the Pavilion, by phone at 404.894.2470, or by submitting a support ticket.

In this article:

• Why the relentlessness of change in logistics is a legitimate concern — not a complaint
• Structural shifts reshaping the competitive floor
• Predictions most leaders are still underweighting
• What staying current actually requires of individuals and teams
   

The Weight of Constant Curveballs

A few months ago, I caught up with a former colleague at an industry event. He is a senior leader at a large global company with a well-regarded supply chain organization. His team had been through a lot since we last talked. Port closures. Tariff escalations. Freight volatility. Inventory repositioning. The kinds of disruptions that used to arrive once in a cycle had become an avalanche, and this was before Hormuz!

His people had responded well. They had adapted. But now he was thinking about something harder to solve:  what it would take to keep them in the game longer term. The experience his team had gained came at a cost and he worried some would look for roles that were not on the “firing line”. He also wondered whether he could still attract the best and brightest in the next generation of talent who would be looking at this field and asking whether the complexity was worth it.

That conversation has stayed with me. Supply chain and logistics has always been a field of cycles — demanding, but navigable. What has changed is that the field has moved from cyclical difficulty to something more structural: a persistent state of volatility where the curveballs do not stop coming.

That conversation was in the back of my mind as I developed a recent talk on logistics trends from 2026 to 2030 for GT SCL Industry Partner Manhattan’s annual Momentum conference. The brief was to look ahead and be a bit provocative. What follows builds on that talk, but with a broader point in view: if the curveballs keep coming, leaders need a clearer sense of which shifts matter most and what they should do about them.

The New Operating Environment

Logistics has entered a structurally more volatile era, not a groundbreaking insight given the last four years. Several things changed at roughly the same time, and they have not changed back:

Several shifts hit the industry at once, and none of them have meaningfully reversed. Geopolitics is now a supply chain design variable, not something to catch up on in a podcast. Strategic decoupling between China and the United States, instability in the Middle East, and the long shadow of the Russia-Ukraine conflict have pushed energy, sourcing, and network design into the same conversation. What once sat in the news feed now needs to be in the nominal scenario during business planning.

At the same time, customer expectations have permanently shifted. Amazon reset the standard for visibility, precision, and speed, and that standard now applies even more as Amazon is emerging as an open source 3PL. Labor and energy costs have also changed the economics of physical logistics in ways that will not self-correct. Demographic pressure, wage inflation, and energy volatility have altered the baseline cost structure calling into question existing network locations.

Meanwhile, AI and automation have moved out of the experimental category and into the realm of near-term value creation. The tools are real, and organizations that understand where to apply them are making materially better decisions than those that do not. That matters because networks now have to optimize for two things at once: cost and recovery. Efficiency still matters, but a network that performs well in steady state and fails under disruption no longer meets the standard.

There is also a macro pattern worth calling out: the industry is in a longer-duration rebalancing cycle than many executives expected. We examined the Hormuz disruption and its downstream effects in a recent SCL Spotlight piece. The short version is that energy pass-through effects, freight volatility, and extended planning uncertainty will impact costs and capacity well into 2027. Executives planning around a near-term return to normal are making a strategic error.

The next decade will reward adaptable logistics networks more than simply optimized ones.

The Benchmark Has Changed — For Everyone

Amazon's logistics operation is not just something to amaze us as packages arrive at our doorstep consistently with compressed lead times. It is a capability demonstration that has redefined what customers consider normal — same-day expectations, ETA precision, real-time visibility, low-friction returns. The important implication is not that every organization needs to replicate Amazon's infrastructure. It is that Amazon-shaped expectations are now the standard against which every supply chain is measured, whether or not Amazon is a direct competitor. Amazon’s recent announcement that it is making its capabilities available to all only raises the bar.

Organizations that understand this have shifted their strategic question from "how do we improve our operations" to "where will we compete, where will we leverage others' capabilities, and where will we differentiate on something Amazon cannot replicate." The benchmark is no longer functional excellence alone. It is well oiled end-to-end execution.

The Real Automation Story: Error-Proofing Over Spectacle

There is a version of the automation conversation that focuses on  “wow” demos — autonomous vehicles, lights-out warehouses, robotics showcases. That version makes for compelling conference content. It is also not where most of the real value is being created today.

The highest-value wins tend to be quieter: fewer errors, fewer touches, fewer injuries, fewer claims. Computer vision that catches a loading error before a truck leaves the dock. Sensor verification that eliminates a reconciliation step. An alert from a Machine Learning model that prevents a cascading service failure. These are error-proofing stories, and they are compelling because the ROI is measurable in terms operations leaders understand.

The reason automation is scaling in these areas is not novelty — it is because the math finally works, driven by labor scarcity, safety pressure, and the compounding cost of variability. My own view informed by industry contacts and academic researchers is that computer vision may become one of the most quietly transformative technologies of this decade, not because it is the most advanced, but because it applies to so many high-variability, human-intensive touchpoints across logistics operations.

That said, a high percentage of large-scale automation efforts still fail.  Many of the reasons are well known and tackling this issue is critical for those who do not yet have a model for success.

The next margin pool may come more from consistency and reliability than from flashy robotics demonstrations.

This theme generated significant discussion at the Manhattan Associates' Momentum conference this spring — enough that we are dedicating our July SCL webinar to it directly. If your organization is navigating automation decisions, the session is worth your time.

Autonomy: Watch the Middle Mile Before the Long Haul

Autonomous vehicle technology has generated significant hype and its share of missed timelines. A more realistic view is emerging. Autonomy scales first where variability is lowest, economics are clearest, and environments are most constrained — yard operations, middle-mile freight on repetitive lanes, internal shuttles, port drayage, and warehouse orchestration. This amounts to millions of miles and load counts that are increasing daily.

The organizations watching this most carefully are not asking when full autonomy will arrive. They are asking which specific lanes and operations have the cost structure where autonomy pays out today. One dynamic worth watching: the scaling of urban robotaxi operations is building safety data, insurance frameworks, and regulatory precedent that may indirectly accelerate confidence in middle-mile freight and warehouse applications.

The shift that matters is not from no autonomy to full autonomy. It is from technology demonstrations to lane economics — and that is the transition that creates real operating decisions for logistics leaders.

AI Is Real — But Workflow Discipline Matters More Than Tool Selection

The common reality in most logistics organizations today includes AI copilots, workflow assistance tools, exception management support, improved ETA prediction, and document automation. These are useful. They are also early.
What is still uncommon: autonomous execution, fully integrated AI decisioning across functions, self-optimizing networks, and end-to-end agentic orchestration. Those capabilities exist in pilots and in forward-leaning early adopters. They are not yet standard operating practice in most organizations.

The framing that I keep coming back to is this: start with a broken logistics workflow, then apply the lightest AI capable of clearing a hard ROI threshold. I got a text from a mentee today that showed a picture of a Microsoft Co-pilot Studio agent he built that automates a daily inventory check on a critical SKU. Organizations that start by selecting the most impressive tool and then look for a process to apply it to are making the investment in the wrong order.

There is another structural shift worth highlighting. The industry has moved out of data scarcity and is living in decision overload. The challenge is not access to information — it is building the discipline to convert that information into insight and informed decisions at the right time to impact action.

Logistics first, AI second. Start with the broken workflow. Then apply the lightest tool that clears a hard ROI threshold.

The Rising Value of Human Judgment

Back to the conversation I opened with. The concern was not that my friend’s team lacked technical skills — it was sustaining engagement and attracting talent to a field that had become genuinely exhausting. That challenge is real, and it is connected to something missed in the automation conversation.

As AI automates more routine work — reporting, documentation, tracking, reconciliation — the work that remains becomes more demanding in different ways. The value shifts toward judgment: escalation management, cross-functional orchestration, interpreting second-order consequences, maintaining trust when the data is ambiguous. The organizations that will attract and retain the strongest professionals are not necessarily those with the most advanced tools. They are the ones that create conditions where smart people make consequential decisions and continue to grow.

As AI capabilities become more democratized across the industry, the differentiating capabilities will increasingly be leadership, communication, collaboration, and the kind of critical thinking that no tool can fully replicate.

Predictions Leaders Should Keep an Eye On

These are the shifts I believe deserve more attention than they are getting in most leadership conversations:

1. The Next Major Logistics Disruption May Come From Energy, Not Freight
   Grid strain, electrification demand, AI compute infrastructure buildout, and charging capacity constraints are converging in ways that could reshape logistics economics faster than expected. Power availability is not yet a front-burner strategic issue for most logistics leaders. It should be.
    
2. Amazon, Walmart, and Chinese Platforms May Become Competing Logistics Operating Systems
   Competition is shifting from retailer vs. retailer to ecosystem vs. ecosystem. The organizations that do not think clearly about which ecosystems they are part of, and on what terms, may find themselves structurally disadvantaged.
    
3. Cyber Attacks on Physical Supply Chains Will Become a Defining Executive Risk
   As logistics networks become more connected, more automated, and more AI-dependent, your exposure grows. The distinction between cyber risk and operational risk is collapsing. This belongs on the executive agenda as a strategic issue, not just an IT issue.
    
4. Trusted Operational Data May Become the Most Valuable Logistics Asset
   Organizations with clean, well-governed operational data will be able to move fast on AI adoption. Organizations with fragmented, inconsistent data will face a structural disadvantage that no AI investment can overcome. Data discipline is a strategic investment, not a cleanup project.
    
5. Insurance Companies May Quietly Become Gatekeepers of Automation Adoption
   Scaling autonomy and connected logistics infrastructure depends as much on insurability, liability frameworks, and safety validation as on technical capability. Insurance market dynamics will shape the adoption curve for autonomous operations in ways that are not yet widely discussed in logistics circles.
    
6. The Industry May Shift From "Lowest Cost" to "Fastest Recovery" as the Defining Competitive Dimension
   Pure cost optimization as a primary network design principle may increasingly underperform against resilience and recovery speed as the basis of competition. The organizations that have already internalized this are building different networks than those still optimizing for cost alone.

What Staying Current Actually Requires

I want to close by coming back to my colleague's concern — and to the question he was really asking: how do we help our people process all of this and remain effective?

Here is my honest answer. The field is not going to slow down. What staying current requires is not reading every article or attending every conference. It requires developing a point of view on the shifts that matter most for your specific context, and then actively deciding how you will act and adjust. Passive awareness is not enough. The question is not whether you know what is changing. It is what you have decided to do about it.

For organizations, that means investing in conditions that allow talented people to keep learning. For individuals, it means resisting the temptation to treat busyness as a substitute for development. The professionals who remain most valuable will be those who continue to understand what is changing and develop the judgment to translate that understanding into better decisions.

You cannot sit still. The question is not whether you know what is changing. It is what you have decided to do about it.

The Opportunity on the Other Side

I want to end where I began — with empathy for everyone in this field who is carrying a lot right now. Fatigue is real. The complexity is real. The ongoing intensity is real.

And so is the opportunity.

Logistics is no longer just moving product. It is becoming a resilience system, a customer experience system, a technology system, an energy system, and a real-time decision system simultaneously. The professionals who learn to navigate that complexity — who develop both technical fluency and human judgment — will be among the most valuable people in any organization.

The future arrives not as one dramatic breakthrough, but as a sequence of operational readthroughs: decisions made well, workflows redesigned thoughtfully, capabilities built deliberately. That is hard work. It is also genuinely exciting work. And I believe the best of it is still ahead.

Related Upcoming SCL Webinar 7/2/2026

Why Do So Many Automation Projects Fail?
Automation in logistics is accelerating — but so is the gap between what is promised and what is delivered. Systems get sized on optimistic assumptions. Hidden dependencies become single points of failure. Technology that shines in the demo struggles under real operating conditions.

Leaders from Georgia Tech's Supply Chain and Logistics Institute join industry practitioners to dig into the root causes of automation underperformance — and the design, evaluation, and implementation practices that build more resilient, effective operations.

Register Online to attend via Zoom
Can't attend live? Register anyway, and we'll send you the recording afterward

This barren land isn't Mars or Pluto, but volcanic deserts in Iceland. The environment is so comparable to Mars' arid landscape that researchers can use it as an analog. From Earth, they can extrapolate how planets in our galaxy and beyond could sustain life and what tools humans might need to make homes on these planets.

Georgia Tech researchers explore everywhere from Oregon's mountaintops to Arizona's deserts to better understand space — and life on this planet.

Organized by the Georgia Forestry Foundation (GFF) in partnership with the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, Clemson University, and the University of Georgia (UGA) Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, the trip brought together university researchers, foresters, potential carbon credit buyers, and family landowners. 

Georgia is the number one forestry state in the country, with more than 22 million of its roughly 24 million forested acres held in private hands. According to the Southern Group of State Foresters, forests and the forest products industry in the Southern U.S. provide for more than 18% of the world’s pulpwood for paper and paper-related products and 7% of the world’s industrial roundwood. The timber industry also supports thousands of rural livelihoods and sequesters enormous amounts of carbon. Yet today, Georgia forests are under pressure due to natural disasters and market changes. 

The field tour promoted a Georgia-specific carbon exchange that has the potential to save forests, help companies purchase high quality carbon credits, and provide co-benefits for the entire state. 

Pressure Points: Helene’s Wake and Market Headwinds 

Across pine-forested Southeast Georgia, the devastation left by Hurricane Helene remains impossible to miss. A year and a half later, the cleanup – which is slow, expensive, and disheartening – is still ongoing across thousands of acres. Downed timber, too old to be sold for profit, lies in heaps. Throughout the field tour, landowners and foresters shared personal narratives that made it easy to feel the weight of what has been lost. 

Helene only worsened troubles that were already underway. The markets for timber and pulpwood have been weakening. Demand for paper products has fallen sharply, taking pulpwood prices with it. In the last year alone, three mills have closed in Georgia. 

Do I bother to replant? If I plant, will someone actually buy my timber in 20 years? These are the questions landowners across Georgia are wrestling with. Landowners’ decisions today can lead to a future with fewer forested acres, less healthy forests, and forests converted to development – a loss that is permanent. 

The pressing question throughout the field tour was: What happens next? 

Storytelling Matters: The Power of the Personal 

One of the benefits of a field tour is the chance to hear firsthand, personal accounts from the people whose livelihoods depend on forests. 

The tour began in Emanuel County at the Willie Hodges Family Farm Estate. Herbert Hodges welcomed the group to the 600-acre property his family has stewarded for four generations. Hodges shows his respect for the land through thoughtful stewardship – for which he was honored when he was named 2025 Conservationist of the Year by the Georgia Association of Conservation Districts. However, Hodges worries whether the fifth generation will keep the land, and he wants to demonstrate to his heirs that the land is worth holding onto. He remembers his father telling him, “Never get rid of the land. As long as you keep it, you have somewhere to live, somewhere to go.” 

Matt Hestad, senior vice president of GFF, said, “Mr. Hodges has to identify new opportunities for his property not only to keep his family engaged but also to prove the land is economically valuable, both today and into the future.” 

The carbon exchange, if built well, could be exactly that kind of new opportunity. 

Building a Georgia Carbon Exchange 

The initiative to develop a Georgia Carbon Exchange, launched in 2025, is being led collaboratively by the organizers of the field tour. It’s designed to create a voluntary carbon credit marketplace specifically tailored to Georgia’s forest landscape, Georgia’s landowners, and companies that are interested in purchasing high quality carbon credits. 

David Eady, director of industry engagement at the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, described the vision: “We're looking at creating a marketplace for companies doing business in Georgia or headquartered in Georgia, so they can acquire credits that specifically benefit local communities and ecosystems. We want to make sure that we can continue to manage our valuable forest resources that make up well over half of the land in Georgia.”   

“Companies are concerned about sustainability because their customers are – and one of the things that that's manifested is a market for carbon credits,” said Leslie Boby, director of the UGA Southern Regional Extension Forestry. “Being in forestry, we have the original carbon sequestration system: trees. And we have a lot of trees in Georgia.” 

The foundation for the Georgia Carbon Exchange already exists, waiting to be built on. 

All the Players at the Table 

The January tour was a pilot that can be replicated for other groups of potential carbon buyers, policymakers, and stakeholders who need to understand what is at stake in Georgia’s forests before they can meaningfully invest in their future. 

Hestad described what made this first tour valuable: “We need all the players at the table: academics, buyers, and landowners. I feel like we’ve learned from a variety of people about forest management – from a private family landowner about intergenerational challenges, from a recreation-focused landowner about wildlife management, and from landowners who have been impacted by Hurricane Helene. We’ve been provided with context for how a carbon exchange could serve those different sectors of landowners.” 

For industry representatives on the tour, the experience was eye-opening. They joined the tour to learn more about recovery efforts, community support, and the mechanics of a carbon exchange. At the end of the tour, they said they had a clearer sense of both the urgency and the opportunity. 

Clay said, “Landowners are focused on the economics of forestry, and buyers are looking for quality credits. I think there's a lot of opportunity for both of these things to happen.” 

A successful carbon exchange requires trust, understanding, and shared purpose to be cultivated deliberately. Tours like this one are part of that cultivation. 

A Common Goal in Focus 

Georgia has everything it needs to make a carbon exchange work: the forests, the science, the institutions, and the will. What it needs now is exactly what the field tour was designed to build: awareness, connection, and shared commitment among the people and organizations whose decisions will shape the future of the state’s forests. 

Zach Johnson, procurement manager at Beasley Timber Management, LLC, told the group: “With every one green ton of tree growth, you sequester approximately one metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Let’s find a way to certify this wonderful resource we have and prop up these jobs in Georgia – before it’s too late.” 

Maintaining Georgia’s forests is not only about carbon. Well-managed forests filter water, support native wildlife, improve air quality, protect public health, and provide opportunities for outdoor recreation. These are co-benefits that a carbon credit does not fully capture but that are very much part of the value proposition for maintaining Georgia’s private forests. As stated by Yanshu Li, associate professor of forest economics at UGA: “If we take care of our forests, our forests will take care of us.” 

Among the pines of Southeast Georgia, a common goal came into focus. The forests are worth saving. And the right people are coming together with the right plan to make it happen. 

Few neuroscientists would dispute that the brain relies on prediction. From houseflies evading swatters to humans catching baseballs, living things are constantly anticipating what comes next. Understanding how the brain generates those predictions could help explain one of neuroscience's most enduring questions: how the brain builds internal models of the world that allow us to learn, adapt, and anticipate what comes next.

“Without actively predicting the world, we cannot survive,” says Farzaneh Najafi, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a faculty affiliate of Georgia Tech's Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society. “There is quite some sensory-motor delay in the processing. We can’t just sit there, wait for the brain to process our environment, and then react.”

Part of the puzzle may lie in signals known as neural ramps. Almost like a drumroll leading up to a big reveal, neurons in some areas of the brain have shown gradual increases in activity immediately before a stimulus appears. For decades, researchers have interpreted this ramping activity as a neural signature of prediction, reflecting anticipation of an upcoming event.

Recently published in Science Advances, a new study from Najafi’s lab reveals these signals may not be “predictions” at all, but instead a way neurons track elapsed time.

“Surprisingly,” says Najafi, “the very first study from my lab called the Predictive Processing Lab showed that no, these are not prediction signals.”

The finding challenges a long-standing interpretation of one of neuroscience's most studied signals and reveals that the search for predictive neurons may lead to different circuits — or require different experiments to uncover. 

Annie came to Metz through a different route. A French major from the University of Tennessee Knoxville, she was assigned to Lycée Robert Schuman, a high school near the Technopole. Her days were spent in the classroom teaching English to children, and her evenings were spent grading papers and occasionally visiting local friends. That night, she planned to meet a friend at the CROUS cafeteria, never imagining she would meet her future husband. 

For most, it was just another Tuesday at the CROUS. For Guilhem and Annie Denozière, it was the beginning of a decades-long international love story that started that fateful day in a cafeteria in Metz. After several years of dating in France and then in the United States, the couple married in a 12th-century church near Guilhem’s village (population 150). The international wedding was such a novelty that it made the front page of three local papers. The couple honeymooned in Metz, revisiting the city that had brought them together. It was their last trip there until now. 

Twenty-four years later, their son, Owen, is about to enter the same doors at Georgia Tech-Europe as a student participating in Georgia Tech’s First-Year Semester Abroad (FYSA) program.

Returning to Metz

Owen Denozière chose Georgia Tech over rival UGA after campus tours convinced him it was the right fit. When he learned about the First-Year Semester Abroad (FYSA) program at GTE, the decision to return to Metz, the site where his family’s story began, was straightforward. Georgia Tech’s FYSA program offers students the opportunity to begin their degree programs in a living-learning cohort abroad. This curated learning experience is focused on encouraging independent living while supporting first-year learning and resource needs in an immersive, international environment.

“I have always dreamed of traveling the world. When I heard that I could spend this very first semester abroad, it was just a no-brainer,” Owen says. “It was the same place they found love. I feel like it’s going to be an amazing travel experience. I like the idea of independence, being able to jump around every weekend and let the spontaneity take me where I want to go.”

Owen’s parents share his excitement. “The expression in French is 'les voyages forment la jeunesse,' which translates roughly to ‘travel shapes young minds.’ From my perspective, this is a unique opportunity for him to become an independent young man, to experience different cultures and to seize every chance to explore,” says Guilhem.

Annie’s hopes are in the transformative potential of the learning experience:

“He’s already a wonderful young man, but I’m excited to see the growth that will come. When I studied abroad and came home, I felt like I was a new person. I can’t wait to see who that person is going to be when he comes back and get to know him all over again.”

Beyond personal growth, Owen has his eye on Georgia Tech’s International Plan, a degree designation that demonstrates a graduate has participated in a series of international studies designed to support the development of the intercultural competencies essential for success in a global workplace. Owen is eager to build the kind of international professional network that the intimate GTE environment uniquely enables through smaller class sizes and proximity to European engineering students in the Technopole and student housing. 

This fall, Owen begins his own Metz chapter: his first semester at Georgia Tech, his first time living alone and abroad, and his first chance to explore the city where his family's story started. The family plans to visit Owen in Metz, perhaps even squeezing in a Christmas ski trip in the Grand Est mountains. Annie and Guilhem already know their first stop: the CROUS café. It’s been more than two decades since they first stood in line together, but some moments in life are meant to be lived and enjoyed again, across generations.