A friendship formed during World War II between an American Army doctor and a young Belgian Resistance fighter created a legacy neither could have imagined: learning across borders and generations. More than 80 years later, their friendship gave Georgia Tech-Europe students the opportunity to hear a firsthand account of history from someone who lived it. 

Capt. William J. Hagood Jr. served as a battalion surgeon with the U.S. Army during the Battle of the Bulge. His medical unit established a first-aid station in the cellar of the family home of Jacques Bourgignon in Belgium. Hagood and Bourgignon formed a friendship that continued through letters and postcards after the war. Decades later, Hagood's granddaughter and Georgia Tech professor, Jennifer Orth-Veillon, organized a visit to Belgium for her travel writing class to retrace the steps of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge (also known as the Battle of the Ardennes). As part of the learning experience, Orth-Veillon took the students to meet Bourgignon, now 104, to hear firsthand about his wartime experiences. 

Bourgignon joined the Resistance at 17. He and other young people undertook dangerous missions while Belgium was under German occupation. Students were curious about Bourgignon's decision to join the Resistance, the dangers of his missions, and how the war shaped his life. For students several generations removed from World War II, the conversation with Bourgignon offered the opportunity to ask questions of someone who experienced the war when he was even younger than they are today. After listening intently to Bourgignon's experiences in the war, the students asked about lessons he had drawn from his long life that he could share with their generation.

"Be discreet. Observe carefully. Follow instructions when necessary. And give orders the way you would want to receive them," he told them.

Psychology major Harper Church reflected on the importance of preserving first-hand experiences like Bourgignon's. “History is ordinary people standing in ordinary places,” Church wrote. “Memory will fade; we are only human, but the goal is to make sure it does not disappear completely.” For chemical engineering major Ella Beerensson, the experience offered a more human understanding of war, showing how friendship and acts of kindness could emerge amid tragedy and uncertainty, and shape how these experiences are remembered. “I never considered the positive things that people took from war as I was always inclined to focus on the bounty of tragedies and losses,” Beerensson shared.

This Veterans Day, Hagood's legacy reminds us that military service can have an impact far beyond a lifetime. A friendship formed amid war endured for decades and provided an extraordinary learning opportunity at Georgia Tech-Europe. Learning from Bourgignon encouraged students to see history not simply as a record of battles and casualties, but as the stories of ordinary people whose choices, relationships, and memories continue to shape later generations.

The session began with an update from Jennifer Chirico, associate vice president of Sustainability, on Georgia Tech’s Climate Action Plan, which helped to contextualize resilience in terms of the campus and community. Chirico also talked about Georgia Tech’s zero waste efforts and the Campus Resilience and Adaptation Framework.

Connecting AI and Physical Systems

Ali Sarhadi, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and director of the Climate Risk and Extreme Dynamics Lab, researches and models hurricanes, which generate three main hazards: wind, storm surge, and rainfall. What is less commonly understood is that these hazards can be self-reinforcing to cause a phenomenon known as compound flooding. Understanding and predicting how compound flooding occurs requires models that account for complex interactions in coastal and inland environments.

Because historical records provide limited information that is relevant to compound flooding events, Sarhadi uses physics-based models to generate thousands of simulated hurricanes under current and projected climate conditions. Machine learning can connect those simulations with information about buildings and infrastructure, helping translate modeled hazards into estimates of potential damage. AI can also help evaluate possible adaptations by exploring combinations of engineered and nature-based mitigation strategies to see how they fare under an onslaught of digital hurricanes.

Suhas Jain, assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, studies the underlying physics of how fluids flow and mix. Phenomena such as clouds, breaking waves, ocean mixing, wildfire plumes, and ice-ocean interactions have underlying processes that can be extremely computationally demanding to simulate accurately. Jain uses AI to accelerate such simulations by bridging the gap between the physics of what can be modeled at the microscopic scale, and faster, less detailed models.

By rigorously modeling fluid flow and mixing at the micro-scale, he is able to achieve better and faster results than larger models by using machine learning and AI to identify relationships between experimental and simulation data. Jain emphasized that AI can augment physics, but can’t replace it.

From Reactive to Anticipatory Resilience

Iris Tien, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, extended the discussion from environmental modeling to infrastructure decisions. Water, power, transportation, communications, and other critical systems are interconnected and increasingly exposed to climate hazards. Yet infrastructure is frequently managed reactively, with repairs and investments occurring after problems emerge.

Tien discussed a more anticipatory approach that considers future hazards and changing community needs before failures occur. In research focused on coastal Georgia, she and her collaborators combined sea-level-rise projections, flood risk calculations at the resolution of the building, development’s impact on water demand, and information about water-distribution networks to identify infrastructure systems that would benefit most from an accelerated maintenance schedule.

A related project revealed that community preference for infrastructure solutions is a critical factor in choosing among proposed construction projects. Tien uses digital twin models to show how different design solutions perform under storm conditions. Because different approaches offer different benefits, the preferred solution can depend on what the community stakeholders value. Informing community members in this way leads to better outcomes financially, functionally, and from a policy perspective.

Keeping People and Places at the Center

Abigail Stengel, assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design and director of the Multisense Studio, raises a different question: What do people need in order to live, work, and participate with their communities inside of landscapes being transformed by AI, manufacturing, and the energy transition? Her presentation considered Georgia’s growing electric vehicle and digital infrastructure landscape, where factories, data centers, transmission infrastructure, farms, watersheds, workplaces, and communities increasingly intersect.

Through a BBISS-supported project, Stengel and her collaborators studied workforce experiences in sectors affected by the electric vehicle transition. Georgia Tech students interviewed workers about their experiences entering, participating in, and advancing within changing workplaces. The preliminary research identified challenges involving training, language, safety, belonging, job demands, and access to opportunity.

The work underscored the importance of understanding technological transitions not only through infrastructure and economic development, but also through the experiences of workers and communities living through those changes.

Resilience as an Interdisciplinary Practice

In all of the presentations, it became clear that AI is being used to accelerate resilience research. Georgia Tech researchers are keeping communities at the center of their work and ensuring that people are always involved in formulating and verifying their research processes and outcomes.

This BBISS Insights Series event showed how the nature of resilience research requires interdisciplinarity.  Shocks to the many systems in which we live our daily lives are difficult to predict and plan for and can come in many forms, both natural and human derived. The researchers who presented their work demonstrate how AI can reinforce and accelerate resilience research, but AI’s greatest value may be to help us understand the connections between people, human-made systems, and natural forces at every scale.

Next in the Insights Series

On Wednesday, Nov. 18, BBISS will hold the next Insights Series at the John Lewis Student Center in the Piedmont Meeting Room. The topic will be “AI for Ecosystem Sensing.” Ethan Pickering, from the University of Georgia, will discuss his lab’s purpose-built AI for biological discovery and crop design. Katherine Graham, from Georgia Tech, will show how her lab uses molecular biology, microbiology, and modeling tools to address issues of water, climate, and health domestically and internationally. Longxiang Li, from Emory University, is developing a satellite-based machine learning model to better understand the potential health effects of exposure to environmental pollutants. Registration is required.

This Veterans Month, we're proud to share the stories of six GTRI employees whose service across the military branches exemplifies our core values: integrity, innovation, and dedication to the nation's defense.

Read their stories.

written by Chris Heil

A function g(t) of one variable can be shifted in time by a real number a to form the new function:
T_a g(t) = g(t - a)

A frequency shift of g is:
M_b g(t) = e^(2π i b t) g(t)

A time-frequency shift is a composition of these, such as:
M_b T_a g(t) = e^(2π i b t) g(t - a)

If g is a nice bump function and you used a synthesizer to play the waveform through a speaker, you would hear a “note” around time a with frequency b. Loosely speaking, a single time-frequency shift is like sitting down at a piano and hitting a single key (with frequency b) at time a. Time-frequency shifts are also closely related to coherent states in quantum mechanics, and appear widely in mathematics, physics, and engineering.

Time-frequency shifts have been widely studied. Yet in the early 1990's, Christopher Heil (then a postdoc at MIT), Jay Ramanathan and Pankaj Topiwala (then at The MITRE Corporation) realized that one of the most fundamental questions had never been addressed: Are time-frequency shifts linearly independent? Can a nontrivial linear combination:

∑ c_k M_bk T_ak g(t)

be the zero function? Can you sit down at a piano and, nontrivially, play silence? If we allow any functions g then time-frequency shifts can be dependent. For example, if g is the periodic function sin(t), then g and a single time-shift are identical and hence the collection is linearly dependent. However, what if we impose a reasonable restriction, namely that g has finite energy, meaning that the integral of |g(t)|^2 over the real line is finite? In that case, we say that g belongs to the Lebesgue space L^2(R) and say that g is square-integrable.

At the time, it seemed “obvious” to those three mathematicians that if g is not the zero function and finitely many points are distinct, then the collection of time-frequency shifts must be linearly independent. They worked diligently to prove this and were able to establish that this is indeed true for many special cases, but could not prove independence in general. In 1996, by which time Heil had joined the School of Math at Georgia Tech, the three had published what they were able to prove, and they formally made the conjecture that time-frequency shifts of square-integrable functions must be linearly independent. This conjecture eventually became known as the Heil-Ramanathan-Topiwala (or HRT) Conjecture, and it has since been described as one of the central problems in time–frequency analysis.

Over the 30 years since, many groups have worked on the conjecture, establishing many more partial results that seemed to support the idea that the conjecture was true. For example, the original paper established that the conjecture is true for all functions that are compactly supported (only nonzero for a finite amount of time), or for any function g in L^2(R) when N = 1, 2, or 3. Kasso Okoudjou, a Ph.D. student of Heil who graduated in 2003 (now Chair at Tufts University) made significant progress on the case N = 4, often in joint work with Vignon Oussa (Bridgewater State University). However, some N = 4 corner cases remained open, even with the very strong extra assumption that g is a Schwartz-class function (a class of particularly tame infinitely differentiable functions that decay very rapidly—every function in this class and each of its derivatives tend towards zero faster than the reciprocal of any polynomial).

Heil says that he always believed that the conjecture is true. So it was a great surprise when in August of 2026, Markus Faulhuber, Philipp Petersen, Jordy Timo van Velthoven, and Felix Voigtlaender uploaded a preprint to the math arXiv with a counterexample for the case N = 12! In fact, their function g is Schwartz-class! Those authors disclose that their proof was developed with the assistance of AI (specifically ChatGPT), but it is not a proof “by AI.” A few days after this remarkable announcement, Oussa announced that, using similar techniques, he was able to construct a counterexample for the case N = 4.

There are still many open questions. For example, the known counterexamples are all complex-valued. Indeed, Okoudjou and his Ph.D. student Shuang Guan (now a postdoc in the School of Math at Georgia Tech) recently proved that there are no real-valued counterexamples for N = 4. And while it is known that in some sense counterexamples are “rare,” there are few quantitative formulations of that statement.

On ATDC's Executive Bytes, Cory Sherman, founder of Safety Systems Management, discusses how the company is modernizing emergency communication in construction. 

Moving Beyond the Air Horn 

Air horns remain standard on construction sites, but their limitations become clear on large, noisy projects. Sherman saw those limitations during a fire drill at a 20-story construction project in Atlanta, where it took more than 45 minutes to evacuate the building. 

An air horn may signal danger, but it cannot explain what happened or tell workers whether to evacuate, shelter in place, or stop working. It may also fail to reach everyone across multiple buildings, floors, and active work zones. An effective emergency system must reach every worker, explain what is happening, and provide clear instructions about what to do next. 

A Mobile Scalable Alternative 

Safety Systems Management developed a wireless, tower-based notification system that can be positioned throughout a project site and moved or expanded as the site changes.

Using radio frequencies, the system delivers prerecorded emergency instructions or live voice announcements. Messages can be provided in English and Spanish, helping companies communicate clearly with multilingual workforces.

At the QTS data center project in Fayetteville, Georgia, the company installed more than 70 towers in 10 buildings. At the JFK Airport expansion in New York, 25 towers helped nearly 2,000 workers evacuate in approximately 10 minutes during safety drills. 

Growing With ATDC 

According to Sherman, ATDC's coaching, resources, and community have played an integral role in Safety Systems Management's growth. Feedback Friday helped him refine the pitch deck and clarify what the company does, who it serves, and the problem it solves. What Is SBIR and other ATDC classes have been indispensable to his financial education and understanding of potential funding opportunities and resources. ATDC events and networking have connected him with peers, advisors, and partners who support the company's growth.

Changing an Industry 

Sherman launched Safety Systems Management in 2016 while working full-time and spent three years developing the product before securing his first sale in 2019. Today, he and his brother manage nearly every aspect of the business, from sales and installation to maintenance and customer service. 

\His journey shows that meaningful innovation rarely happens overnight. It also leaves construction leaders with an important question: Is your emergency communication system designed for the way construction works today? 

For large, noisy, multilingual job sites, faster and clearer communication can mean the difference between confusion and coordinated action when every second counts.

Listen here.

The center was intentionally placed in a rural area to bring specialized cancer care closer to patients who might otherwise struggle to reach it.  

While staying in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, Sapirstein prepared to make the roughly 60-mile trip north to Butaro. Before leaving, he received unexpected advice: Get there before it rains.  

The journey from Kigali to Butaro takes about two hours in good conditions. But heavy rains often wash out roads along the way, making the journey far less predictable, and in many cases, impossible.  

For Sapirstein, the travel advice raised a more fundamental question about healthcare access: What good is care if patients can't reach it?  

Sapirstein, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), would eventually turn that question into an optimization problem. Working with ISyE faculty Lauren Steimle, the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and assistant professor, and Mathieu Dahan, associate professor, he developed a model to help health systems decide how to invest limited resources in cancer facilities and roads while accounting for shortages of oncologists and unpredictable weather.  

The model showed that improving roads can complement investments in new treatment facilities, expanding access even in areas where building additional facilities may not be viable. The work was recently published in Health Care Management Science.  

“Geographic access is a very neat concept, because there’s a whole lot of other dimensions to access, such as, can people afford treatment or do they even want treatment?” Sapirstein said. “But if it’s not geographically accessible, those other dimensions are kind of moot.”  

After graduating from Harvey Mudd College in 2021, Sapirstein received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which supports a year of independent exploration abroad for graduating seniors from participating liberal arts colleges. He centered his fellowship on health equity, examining how different countries structure and deliver healthcare.  

Rwanda wasn’t originally part of his plan. After a visa issue disrupted his itinerary, Sapirstein reached out to people working in global health and eventually connected with Partners In Health, an international nonprofit that works to expand healthcare access in underserved communities.  

He spent about four months in Rwanda learning about the country’s health system and the challenges of expanding access to care.  

Those challenges are particularly acute for cancer care.  

Even during Rwanda’s dry seasons, which generally run from June to September and December to February, 70% of Rwandans travel more than two hours for care.  

Only 35% of estimated cancer cases are diagnosed, and 75% of diagnosed cases are caught at severe stages, when prognoses are worse. This is estimated to contribute to 10% of premature deaths.  

Sapirstein boiled the optimization problem down to a simple tradeoff.  

“Basically, you have a fixed pot of money, and that money can either be used to build more cancer hospitals or it can be used to pave your roads,” he said. “In parallel to that fixed pot of money, there’s also a fixed number of oncologists.”  

Building more cancer facilities might seem like the obvious solution, but each new facility also requires trained oncologists to staff it. Improving roads offers another lever, making existing care easier to reach without requiring another medical team.  

To evaluate those tradeoffs, Sapirstein, Steimle and Dahan built a model of Rwanda’s cancer-care network using roughly 7,500 road segments, 1,066 population centers and 48 potential facility locations. The model evaluates investments in both roads and cancer facilities over five years while accounting for limited budgets, oncologist availability, and changing weather conditions.  

The results reinforced what Sapirstein had encountered on the road to Butaro.  

In one scenario with a $5 million budget and four oncologic teams, average travel time during the rainy season fell from six hours to three. The model also showed that road improvements could meaningfully improve access in areas where additional cancer facilities could not be built.  

For Sapirstein, however, the model is not necessarily a prescription for solving cancer access in Rwanda.  

“I don’t want the narrative to be there’s this big problem, we solved it,” he said. “It’s still a big problem.”  

His research is instead intended to add another consideration to discussions about expanding cancer care: healthcare infrastructure doesn’t start at the hospital door, so investments in improving access shouldn’t either.  Roads, staffing and the conditions patients encounter on their way to care play an enormous role. This modeling work could help decision-makers explore potential solutions and their anticipated costs and impacts on access.  

“A big part of what I’m trying to do is show how systems engineering and systems thinking is useful in addressing problems like these and how engineers can approach these solutions responsibly," he said.   

“I'm honored to be recognized among CDO Magazine's Top 30 Higher Education Data & AI Influencers for 2026,” Joyner wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Joyner was recognized for his contributions to Georgia Tech's academic AI strategy, including his leadership in advancing the 2026 Academic AI Playbook. The publication brings together 67 faculty contributions representing every College at Georgia Tech, along with 20 practical lessons drawn from classroom experiences. It provides educators with examples and insights for thoughtfully integrating AI into teaching, redesigning assignments and preparing students for an increasingly AI-enabled world.

As interim vice provost, Joyner leads implementation of Georgia Tech's Academic AI Strategy, coordinating efforts across Colleges and administrative units. The strategy centers on three goals: advancing AI-driven teaching and learning, equipping faculty and students to build and integrate AI tools effectively and responsibly, and strengthening Georgia Tech's leadership through responsible AI innovation and engagement.

A central part of this work is ensuring faculty expertise and academic freedom remain at the forefront of how AI is introduced into the classroom. Rather than prescribing a single approach, Georgia Tech's strategy supports faculty-led experimentation, expands access to AI resources and encourages the sharing of effective practices across disciplines.

Joyner also serves as executive director of Online Education and the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program in the College of Computing. His work in online education, educational technology and learning at scale has helped shape how Georgia Tech delivers accessible, technology-enhanced learning experiences to students around the world.

The recognition reflects Joyner's contributions at a time when higher education institutions are working to understand and respond to AI's growing influence on teaching, learning and institutional operations.

CDO Magazine's annual list recognizes 30 leaders across North American higher education for their work advancing AI innovation, institutional strategy, responsible technology adoption and data-informed decision-making.

Learn more: Explore the CDO Magazine 2026 Top 30 Higher Education Data & AI Influencers.

Beginning in fall 2027, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering will offer the 30-credit-hour program jointly. The degree brings together Georgia Tech’s No. 1-ranked graduate program in industrial and systems engineering and No. 2-ranked graduate program in aerospace engineering, according to U.S. News & World Report. ISyE has held the No. 1 ranking for 36 consecutive years.  

Students will learn to solve complex challenges across industries, from aircraft and space systems to manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare.

“Our industry partners design and operate systems that no single discipline can handle alone," said Mitchell Walker, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “By bringing together two of the nation’s top-ranked engineering schools in one degree program, Georgia Tech is providing working engineers the full set of skills those systems require.” 

Addressing Growing Systems Complexity

As systems become more interconnected, engineers increasingly need to understand how decisions made in one part of a system affect the whole. Yet in many organizations, the teams responsible for designing system architecture and analyzing performance work separately, often using tools and models that do not connect. That disconnect can lead to inconsistent assumptions, duplicated work, and design choices made without a complete picture.

The new degree will bridge that gap. Graduates will have both the systems-level perspective and quantitative skills to evaluate, operate, and improve complex systems over time, working across disciplines.

“Today’s most consequential challenges arise in complex, engineered, organizational, and societal settings,” said Pinar Keskinocak, the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in the Stewart School. “Addressing them requires us to understand the interdependencies involved, anticipate how decisions in one area influence outcomes elsewhere, and make better decisions overall. This program brings together systems thinking and analytical tools to design, improve, and transform complex systems.” 

A Curriculum Focused on Systems Thinking and Analytics

The program curriculum centers on three core areas of systems engineering: quantitative methods and tools, systems applications, and system qualities and capabilities. Coursework includes systems design and integration, model-based systems engineering, data science and statistics, operations research, optimization, and emerging technologies.  

The curriculum also integrates artificial intelligence for decision-making and machine learning, giving students the skills to use advanced analytics and emerging tools to evaluate complex problems, make informed decisions, and design effective systems.

“Aerospace engineers have long relied on systems engineering to manage the complexity of aircraft and spacecraft,” said Stephen M. Ruffin, interim chair of the School of Aerospace Engineering. “This program brings that systems perspective together with the analytical tools engineers need to evaluate design decisions, with applications extending well beyond aerospace.”

Georgia Tech faculty, who bring the same expertise to the online program as to the Institute’s on-campus graduate offerings, will teach the courses. The 10-class program culminates in a capstone project that gives students the opportunity to apply what they have learned to a complex, real-world systems engineering challenge.

The standard application deadline is March 1, 2027, with a final application deadline of April 15, 2027. Classes begin in August 2027.

For more information about the Master of Science in Systems Engineering Online, including curriculum, admissions requirements, and application details, visit the program’s webpage. 

Held Nov. 1-4, the annual meeting brought together members of the operations research and analytics community from academia and industry. ISyE faculty, students, postdocs, and alumni participated throughout the conference, presenting research, contributing to panels and sessions, and serving in leadership roles across the profession.

Among this year’s honors, Oktay Günlük was named to the 2026 INFORMS Fellows Class. Nikolaos “Nick” Sahinidis received the INFORMS Optimization Society Khachiyan Prize, recognizing lifetime achievement in optimization, while Guanghui (George) Lan received the society’s Farkas Prize for outstanding contributions to optimization. Ashwin Pananjady, with Liwei Jiang of Purdue University, won first place in the INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group Paper Competition.

Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics program also received the 2026 INFORMS UPS George D. Smith Prize, with Joel Sokol presenting a reprise of the prize-winning work at the meeting.

Beyond the awards, the meeting offered an opportunity for the ISyE community to reconnect. The school’s booth served as a gathering place throughout the conference, and faculty, students, alumni, friends, and collaborators came together at ISyE’s annual evening reception.

It’s different than the military, where failure often isn’t an option. Georgia Tech civil engineer Lauren Stewart learned about that difference early in her career. 

She recalls an experiment with her first two graduate students, who were Army officers. After months of preparation, nothing in the tests worked the way they had expected. It was a setback, and one student took it hard. 

“I wasn’t a big deal to me at all. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.’ And he said, ‘In my world, if I fail, people die,’” Stewart said. 

“It’s stuck with me ever since. I have taken it to heart with every other student because it made me understand how different his experience was. And that’s part of how I advise and mentor students now: to warn them about what can happen and show it’s not failure.”

Active-duty military members and veterans have become a hallmark of Stewart’s lab in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). Her team has one of the highest concentrations of veterans and military members at Georgia Tech. Since those first two Ph.D. students, about half of her graduate students at any given time have served in the armed forces or are currently commissioned.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Every year, Georgia Tech’s Center for Research into Novel Computing Hierarchies (CRNCH) selects a cohort of Ph.D. student projects that exemplify the cross-stack mission of the center.  

Held Nov. 2 and hosted by Georgia Tech’s Institute for Matter and Systems (IMS), the event brought together researchers working across the microelectronics field, from materials and fabrication to devices and integrated systems. 

“The next major breakthrough in microelectronics may begin with research in a laboratory, but often it begins with an initial conversation,” said George White, Georgia Tech senior director for strategic partnerships. “This is what today is all about, bringing together people, bringing together ideas, capabilities and partnerships that will shape the future of microelectronics.”

Georgia Tech’s microelectronics research spans the full innovation chain, including materials and fabrication, devices, advanced packaging, integrated circuits and systems, with applications in computing, health, energy and quantum technologies. 

The day’s presentations reflected the breadth of microelectronics research, including next-generation memory, advanced packaging, quantum computing, microscopic robotics, wearable bioelectronics, thermal management, and energy-efficient sensing. Researchers shared work ranging from autonomous robots smaller than a millimeter and wearable systems designed to bring health monitoring into the home to new approaches for managing heat, engineering materials, and improving the performance of future electronic devices.

Eric Vogel, executive director of IMS, provided a broader look at the infrastructure supporting this work. IMS operates more than 300 shared research instruments with full-time staff across facilities supporting micro- and nanofabrication, materials characterization, and other research capabilities. 

“IMS is really Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary microelectronics engine,” Vogel said. “We provide world-class infrastructure, have a broad, integrated research portfolio bringing faculty together from across Georgia Tech, and help with talent, access and partnerships.”

The program also included the Oliver Brand Memorial Lectureship, which honors Oliver Brand, former executive director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a predecessor to IMS. The lectureship recognizes Brand’s contributions to research and education and his role in building interdisciplinary collaborations at Georgia Tech.

Microelectronics Day concluded with a student poster session featuring more than 20 research presentations and recognizing three students for excellence:

First place: Sagnik Dasgupta — “Microscopic Insights into the Formation of Copper Contact on n-TOPCon Solar Cells”

Finalist: Ashita Victor — “Chiplet Reconstitution Technology for High-density Heterogeneous Integration”

Finalist: Oscar Eraso Toro — “Infrared Photodetection Using Narrow Bandgap Conjugated Polymers”

Sustainability at Georgia Tech is built into the standards that guide how the Institute designs, constructs, renovates, and operates its campus facilities. 

Before developing an interest in nanotechnology, Taylor lived in New Hampshire. When she attended a Georgia Tech summer camp in 2021, she had never heard of the cleanrooms in Marcus, and did not know what a cleanroom was. However, when she peered in through the windows of the inorganic cleanroom during a camp tour, Taylor wanted to learn more.

“I remember having a lot of questions, like, what is this yellow room? What's going on in there? What is a bunny suit?” Taylor said. “And then I had the opportunity to answer a lot of those questions as a high school intern.”

As an intern, Taylor trained on a variety of tools and eventually learned to train others on those tools. 

“There was a need for improvement on the training, so I was tasked with making around 14 YouTube videos on how to use different tools in the biocleanroom, as well as start guides next to the tools,” Taylor said. “The experience was really rewarding because it forced me to go deeper into the tools and learn how to use them, but also answer the question, ‘If I learn how to use them, how can I effectively communicate to have other people use them as well?’”

Her experience as an intern ultimately led her to choose Georgia Tech’s electrical engineering program. As she transitioned from an intern to a student researcher and employee, Taylor wanted to educate others on the critical research she once knew little about. Since then, she has worked to increase access to STEM knowledge and opportunities by making lab-centered social media content, working with Georgia Tech summer camps, and leading tours of the Marcus Nanotechnology Building. 

“I started my social media account a few years ago, and I just really wanted to expand the reach of STEM,” Taylor said. “I wanted to give a general audience transparency on what research is, what happens in a cleanroom, and more of an inside look on the devices that they interact with every day.”

Through her content, Taylor shares what it’s like to work in a cleanroom, who some of the most historical scientists are, and how cleanroom technologies impact the world around us. Although Taylor has stepped back from content creation to focus on her research, she continues to educate people from K-12 students to industry professionals on the processes, technologies, and applications of the cleanroom through short courses. 

Now a fourth-year electrical engineering student, Taylor reflects on how her experiences at IMS have shaped her approach to research.

“In addition to being involved in outreach, IMS has helped me develop a research mindset. Through working on process development and tool optimization, I've learned how to overcome challenges in research and find creative solutions,” Taylor said. “Fostering a research mindset at IMS has directly contributed to my success in undergraduate research and in a research internship.”

As she prepares for graduation, Taylor is applying to doctoral programs across the country so she can continue her research in microelectronic devices. She hopes to pursue a career in research and development for the advancement of sensing technology and betterment of humanity, where one day, nobody will have to wonder, “What really happens in a cleanroom?”

Karthikeyan Sundaresan is tackling that challenge through Project OMNISCIENT, a three-year effort supported by a $4.8 million award through the National Science Foundation’s Verticals-enabling Intelligent Network Systems (VINES) program.  

The project will develop an intelligent wireless network that can adapt as drones move, gather information, and take on different roles. 

“The goal is to move beyond thinking about one pilot and one drone,” Sundaresan, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said. “We want the focus to be on the mission while the drones and the network figure out how to work together.”

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“I see our value as academics wrapped up in what we produce, and I see that wrapped up in the creation of wisdom, which is incredibly linked to how we critique, how we understand each other, and how we refine our work through an iterative process,” Murdie said at the event, which focused on the impact of AI on research.

At the event, held at Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center on Nov. 4, 2026, Murdie  was joined by Sebastian Porsdam Mann, assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen Center for Advanced Studies in Bioscience Innovation Law; Sarah Salter, president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journal and professor and director of the Writing Program at Emory University; and Dan Reiter, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory and co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Political Science.

Richard Utz, IAC senior associate dean, opened the evening’s discussion and said he deals with these issues every day.

"Personally, I must say when we decided on this topic for this evening, I immediately thought about all the things that I'm dealing with on a daily basis with my students and in my classes. What is the kind of research, what is the kind of scholarship that we're going to produce in the future?” he said.

The panelists said that while AI holds promise for academic researchers, higher education leaders must establish clear disclosure standards and protect space for human experience and discovery.

“The biggest issue I see right now is the devaluing of the time that it takes humans to do things well,” Salter said. “I worry that we are ceding a lot of the ground of human value to arguments about speed and how fast this makes things possible.”

Reiter agreed, saying that while AI can be a powerful tool for data analysis, for instance, it cannot and should not replace human inquisitiveness.

"The biggest challenge is that AI destroys the joy of discovery,” he said. “The challenge of AI is if it starts to do everything for you, you do less and less, and that saps the joy out of doing what we do."

Porsdam Mann suggested researchers consider AI more as a tool to raise the bar for research quality, using it to prototype ideas and provide rigorous fact-checking.

“One of the ways I like to think about scholarship produced with or by AI is by analogy to engineering a prototype,” he said. “It gives a roughly shaped, fully developed version of the idea.”

“AI can also be used to enforce rigor,” he said. “I use AI tools to cross-reference every citation and statement in my papers against source literature.”

Porsdam Mann said that, for instance, up to 25% of human-written citations in biomedical papers contain errors or misrepresentations.

“AI verification tools can help eliminate these errors, and journals would benefit from providing automated fact-checking services using internal, secure models,” he said.

Ultimately, Salter said, it’s up to higher education to ensure the sense of urgency toward AI adoption so prevalent in business does not creep into every corner of academia, too.

“Universities are distinct from commercial industry,” she said. “Higher education leadership has a responsibility to protect space for non-AI inquiry, allowing scholars to evaluate knowledge-making values and maintain diverse approaches to research without forcing commercial AI adoption."

The next AI & Society event, “AI, Human Empathy, and Relationships: Is AI a Better Partner?,” is scheduled for Feb. 10. The event, at the Historic Academy of Medicine, will explore how AI conversation and companionship are affecting human connection, empathy, intimacy, and relationships.

Mark Losego, a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, is one of just five AVS members elected as Fellows in 2026. The honor recognizes his contributions to understanding inorganic vapor infiltration of polymers, a process used to create novel hybrid materials, and his leadership within the vapor-phase processing research community.

Over more than a decade at Georgia Tech, Mark D. Losego has advanced research in vapor-phase materials processing while training students in vapor deposition techniques and vacuum equipment. His work has explored unconventional applications involving plastics, textiles, and lumber, while uncovering fundamental insights relevant across materials research and manufacturing.

Read the full story by the School of Materials Science and Engineering.

Lauren Garten, an assistant professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, will use the award to investigate how asymmetric, or polar, materials can separate photo-generated charge for energy applications. The research could provide fundamental insights for developing new energy-harvesting and sensing technologies.

The award will also support Lauren Garten’s educational outreach, including virtual reality experiences designed to give the public an immersive look at how researchers synthesize materials, take electrical measurements, and build devices.

Read the full story by the School of Materials Science and Engineering.

Faisal Alamgir challenges students to look beyond equations and investigate the discoveries, debates, and experiments that produced them. Student teams research the history behind a scientific equation and transform what they learn into short theatrical productions, with support from DramaTech in developing and refining their scripts.

The approach is designed to move students beyond memorization and help them see science as an evolving, human process. Through research, storytelling, and performance, students develop a deeper connection to technical concepts while learning to question how scientific knowledge is created.

Read the full story by the School of Materials Science and Engineering.

Anju Toor, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering, is developing soft functional materials that could enable a new generation of flexible electronics, sensors, and energy storage devices. Her research combines materials design with device fabrication to create technologies that can bend, conform, and operate in environments where traditional rigid electronics fall short.

Her group’s work includes flexible lithium-ion batteries, printed sensors for monitoring soil nutrients, organic electronics, and materials designed to better interface with biological systems. The research could support applications ranging from precision agriculture and distributed sensors to bioelectronics and sustainable energy storage.

Poetry@Tech’s new Carolyn Ann Dimsdale Phillips Creative Writing Award is open to all currently enrolled Georgia Tech students. Students are encouraged to submit writing in multiple creative genres, including poetry, fiction, or nonfiction.

Four winners, each of whom will receive $1,000, will be announced in the Spring.

“People don’t always recognize the connection between the arts and engineering. I thought this might let some people realize their creativity may go farther than just the technical,” said Phillips, a 1975 Mechanical Engineering graduate who spent 35 years with Pratt & Whitney as a performance analysis engineer.

Victoria Chang, the Margart T. and Henry C. Bourne Chair in Poetry in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts announced the awards at the Kenneth and Amy Knoespel Family Reading on Nov. 5.

“I’m so excited about this gift because I have been hoping to launch a campuswide creative writing award that incudes multiple genres since I arrived at Georgia Tech,” she said. “Joe Phillips’s gift comes at the perfect time and enables us to expand our reach to the whole campus and more genres beyond poetry.”

The awards are named in memory of Phillips’ late wife, a teacher at St. Anthony’s Catholic School whose writing long inspired Phillips.

She wrote often, mostly for personal reflection and creative therapy, but rarely finished her works, Phillips said.

“I always bugged her to finish them because I wanted to know how they ended,” Phillips said.

Her works include a children’s fairy tale, an 8-chapter story about a mouse living in a WWI helmet stored in an attic, and historical fiction about a tarot reader facing church persecution.

“I think Ann’s writing is lovely,” Chang said. “What I enjoy about them is the whimsical quality which appears in her prose, especially,” Chang said.

She agrees with Phillips about the need for students from across Georgia Tech to explore creativity in writing.

“They, like everyone else, have rich inner lives and life experiences. They experience passion, love, loss, and human connection, and exploring those themes in writing can help us all better understand what it means to be human and live in a challenging time.”

Philips previously created a similar writing competition at Appalachian State University, where Carolyn was an English major, before bringing the concept to Georgia Tech to help expand technical students' creative horizons. 

The creative writing award joins the Thomas Lux Poetry Award in showcasing the talent of Georgia Tech student writers. That prize, offered annually since 2017, honors Georgia Tech student poets whose work demonstrates the dedication to craft and strong commitment to studying poetry, its techniques, and its traditions, as exemplified by Lux — the first Bourne Chair.

The reading at which the award was announced is the second named for Kenneth Knoespel, former LMC chair who retired in 2017, and his wife Amy, in honor of their continued support and a generous estate provision for Poetry@Tech.

For more information about the awards, including how to submit your work, visit the Poetry@Tech website.

A temporary planned power outage is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 12, from 1 to 4 p.m. to support construction at the Baptist Ministry site, a privately operated project that is not managed by Georgia Tech.

The outage is required to energize a new transformer at the site and is expected to affect Greek housing and Georgia Tech residence halls within the area outlined in yellow on the map below.

While power may be restored before 4 p.m., the full three-hour window has been reserved to allow crews to safely complete the work and address any unforeseen conditions.

Please plan accordingly for the temporary loss of power during this period. We appreciate your patience and understanding as this third-party utility work is completed.

"Touch grass" is a common phrase to hear on campus as we get into the weeds of the semester. The Plant Library at Georgia Tech takes this phrase quite literally and gives students an opportunity to learn about sustainable practices, propagate plants, and even take some for themselves! Overseen by Dr. Liana Boop within the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), the Plant Library is a student-led collaboration between the John H. Martinson Honors Program at Georgia Tech and EAS that is dedicated to fostering community and giving students a break from the hustle of campus life.  

Here’s a bit of a riddle for you: What has the consistency of both toothpaste and dough, can absorb twice its weight in water and still remain sticky, was used by medieval artists as a binder in paint and has been hypothesized by physicians to repel insects?

It’s earwax.

The medical term for earwax is cerumen, based on keros, the Greek word for beeswax. People have been pondering earwax since ancient times. Ancient hygiene kits including picks and spoons to remove earwax have been found in archaeological sites worldwide.

Even today, it remains a perpetual question: to remove or not to remove your earwax? The answer: Don’t do it. The general medical belief is that ears are self-cleaning, and earwax brings benefits such as lubricating the ear canal, fighting infection and acting like a sticky net to trap debris before it reaches the eardrum. By poking in there you can accidentally make matters worse, pushing wax deeper or scratching your delicate ear canal.

Cerumen impaction – or blocked earwax – affects about a fifth of the American population, leading to 12 million patient visits per year. Blockages are worsened by daily activities such as wearing earbuds or hearing aids.

Another common problem with ears is wedged debris. For children, much of this is self-inflicted, in the form of items such as Legos or erasers. But for many adults who have something stuck in their ear, the debris is insects, such as ants, beetles, flies or cockroaches.

While rare for the average person, insects in the ear occurred with such frequency over the years that physicians began to wonder whether earwax evolved as a natural barrier for insects. But how would such a barrier work?

To answer this question, my Ph.D. student David Ancalle led experiments with earwax and insects. We teamed up with Yuhang Hu and her student Donjing He, experts in the behavior of soft solids such as hydrogels. As mechanical engineers, we wanted to focus on the physics rather than the chemistry of earwax.

Our research, published in the journal Soft Matter, shows that earwax can, in fact, stop insects without the use of dangerous chemicals.

Watching Ants Encounter Earwax

To do experiments, we needed voluminous amounts of earwax.

Initially we obtained earwax from deceased mammals such as pigs, sheep and rabbits. Eventually we turned to our friends and family. A person has only a grain of rice’s worth of earwax in each ear. Due to a mutation in a single gene, East Asians have dry, flaky earwax, while people of African or European descent have wet, squishy earwax.

To simulate an ant climbing into an ear canal, we used a glass beaker with its rim coated in earwax. Ants, like many insects, are climbing specialists, capable of traveling across many kinds of surfaces. To climb rough surfaces, ants have spikes on their feet, like mountain climbers do, that helps them grasp onto ridges and cracks. For smooth surfaces, ants unfurl wet suction cups, which can support 60 times their body weight on smooth glass.

Watching ants trying to climb earwax showed us how strange a substance it really is. Rough earwax slowed them down, but with their claws they made progress.

But as soon as ants tried to climb smooth earwax, they fell immediately.

From these experiments, we concluded that earwax had anti-stick properties when in contact with the insects’ feet.

We next conducted experiments with ants crawling through an earwax-coated tunnel, more similar in size to a human ear canal. As the ants attempted to travel through the tunnel, earwax stuck to them. Once coated, they groomed furiously, unwilling to walk until they had removed as much as possible. Even after several minutes of effort, the ants still had earwax sticking to hard-to-reach places.

So, earwax is a paradoxical material: It is simultaneously slippery, thanks to the lipids it contains, but also sticky. Similar to many materials – including ketchup, paint and shampoo – it thins out when it is physically deformed, what physicists call shear-thinning.

Figuring out earwax’s physical properties

The dual qualities of earwax have to do with its unique composition. Earwax is made up of flakes of skin cells held together with a binder. This blend forms a kind of sponge with microscopic holes. When a body overproduces earwax, it heaps up in boulders that ants can easily climb over.

When the substance is smooth, however, ants rely on their wet suction cups. The holes in the earwax absorb the drops produced by the ants, preventing them from attaching. Absorbency makes earwax fundamentally different from commonly used forms of pest control.

In your local store, you will find sticky surfaces such as fly paper or chemicals that kill the insects. Some researchers look to nature to find bio-friendly alternatives to using chemicals; for example, plants have properties that prevent insects from climbing.

From this study, we learned that the ear is also a model for insect repellency. Earwax is made of natural materials but has a structure that prevents ants from sticking to it.

The porosity of earwax also gives it unique properties. We showed it can absorb twice its weight in water yet still cling to the walls of the ear. This water-absorbing ability may help prevent water from accumulating on the delicate eardrum and fend off infections such as swimmer’s ear.

Scientists don’t yet understand the complex relationship between earwax, water and bacteria. Some studies show that earwax kills bacteria, but other studies find that earwax harbors bacteria.

Our experiments showed that earwax is most challenging to insects when similar to the thin layer of earwax maintained by a healthy human body. Wax would accumulate more in human ears if not for two self-cleaning mechanisms. The skin in the ear canal grows outward like a conveyor belt. Over 8-10 weeks, this process – called epithelial migration – pushes the oldest earwax out of the ear.

Simultaneously, earwax dries over time, transforming from a gooey state to a brittle one that readily cracks. Every time you talk or chew, your ear canal deforms, and physicians found that this movement helps to dislodge the drier, older earwax.

As a test of our concept, a member of our team, chemical engineer Rafeen Rahaman, designed an artificial earwax based on the physical structure rather than the chemistry of the earwax. Ants struggled when they touched it, just like when they interacted with natural earwax.

The cost of harvesting natural earwax and our recipe for artificial earwax are not cheap. We don’t foresee our methods replacing insect repellents produced at large scale. But perhaps the concept might inspire new ways to prevent earwax from coating our earbuds or lead to the manufacture of insect control methods using safe formulations.

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

DeMillo became dean of the College of Computing in 2002. In seven years, he launched three new schools, seven new degree programs, three international programs, and two new research centers. Georgia Tech’s graduate computer science ranking rose from 14th to 9th nationally. Annual expenditures doubled. He oversaw the groundbreaking and construction of the 200,000-square-foot, $80 million Christopher Klaus Advanced Computing Building.

After leaving the dean’s office, he founded the Center for 21st Century Universities, which helped catalyze the launch of the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS). He then served as the founding chair for the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. 

Remarkably, DeMillo’s work at Georgia Tech is only a fraction of his incredible achievements. To learn more, read this profile.

The highlight of the retirement celebration was a talk by DeMillo himself, titled The Questions that Find Us.

He was introduced by Thomas E. Noonan (ME 1983)83, who served on the GT Computing Advisory Board under DeMillo and other College of Computing deans. 

During the talk, DeMillo highlighted the research questions he addressed throughout his expansive career. Unlike some researchers who go out searching for questions to answer, DeMillo’s work found him. Often, he would walk into a room, identify a problem, and work to solve it. 

Using the Threads curriculum as an example, DeMillo showed the crowd a graph of declining enrollment that began after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. As Dean, he saw that the students enrolled in the course were picking and choosing classes to customize their computer science degrees. 

“They were weaving ‘threads’ through our curriculum,” he said. 

By working with the college faculty, DeMillo created the Threads program, which reinvigorated the computer science undergraduate degree and gave Georgia Tech a something new to offer enrolling students. 

From his groundbreaking paper, Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, which he co-wrote with Richard Lipton and Alan Perlis, to how artificial intelligence is shaping the current higher education landscape, DeMillo walked the audience through the questions that shaped his career and how he changed the landscape of computing.

Before DeMillo spoke, a panel of computer science higher education experts discussed the impact of Rich’s contributions:

• Alessandro Orso, Dean, College of Engineering, University of Georgia 
• Charles Isbell, Chancellor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 
• Jeff Offutt, Chair, Department of Computer Science, University at Albany 
• Eugene Spafford, Distinguished Professor, Purdue University 
• Aaron Bobick, Dean, McKelvey School of Engineering, Washington University

The panel shared anecdotes about DeMillo, from visiting retro video game arcades to the printer-centered job talk he gave when he became dean, and everything in between.

The day ended with toasts and tributes from DeMillo’s friends and colleagues, including a few who had flown in from other countries to attend.

Ann Claycombe of the College of Computing contributed to this report. 

Photos by Terence Rushin and Kevin Beasley/ College of Computing

Tech AI’s Research Software Engineers Jeremy Garcia and Austin Weeks, who work under Dave Brownell, Tech AI’s head of engineering, are creating AI-driven platforms designed to turn complexity into clarity while keeping ease of use at the forefront. Their goal is simple: Displaying a dataset should require minimal effort, whether the data represents a local model or global infrastructure.

Both projects, Garcia’s 3D Visualization Platform and Weeks’ Armada, a logistics platform operating at global, national, state, and city levels, reflects Tech AI’s commitment to practical, research-backed solutions that are ready to be deployed across industry and academia.

Both researchers picture a future where their platforms work together in a seamless way. A user could begin with Armada’s nationwide or international perspective, tracking supply chain flows and warehouse networks, and then zoom into a specific warehouse or plant to explore its internal operations through Garcia’s 3D Visualization Platform.

Seeing Systems from Every Angle

Garcia’s platform transforms static data into a fully explorable 3D space. With the Visualization Platform, users can interact with complex systems, from chemical manufacturing lines to energy grids, and uncover insights that would otherwise remain hidden in spreadsheets or charts.

“You can zoom in on a single manufacturing plant or warehouse and watch its internal operations come alive,” Garcia said. “Once you can visualize it, you can innovate on it.”

This micro-level view helps researchers, engineers, and students understand intricate processes that are often too complex to grasp otherwise and bridges academic study with real-world application.

A Bird’s-Eye Perspective for Logistics

While Garcia’s platform focuses on internal operations, Weeks’ Armada provides a macro view of logistics systems at almost any scale. Armada can visualize scenarios internationally, nationally, statewide, and down to individual cities. It maps warehouses, distribution centers, and trucking routes to create a dynamic and interactive model of large-scale supply chains.

Armada enables organizations to simulate scenarios, identify bottlenecks, and optimize operations from a high-level perspective with minimal setup time.

“You can see the entire network at once, and then drill into whatever matters most,” Weeks said. “It is powerful because organizations rarely get that kind of clarity.”

Macro Meets Micro

This integration would provide a new level of insight for industries such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, and robotics. It would allow organizations to understand and optimize complex systems from the broadest scale down to the smallest operational details.

These platforms also reflect Georgia Tech’s identity as an AI-forward institution, where research is paired with practical and deployable solutions. Both tools are already supporting student learning, exploratory research, and experimental modeling.

“These tools can be used in both industry and academia,” Brownell said. “They help visualize and identify bottlenecks in large workflows, and they showcase optimizations achieved through targeted research. With them, complex systems become much easier to understand, and the value produced by the underlying processes is more apparent. Platforms like these are often difficult or time-consuming to build from scratch, but ours remove most of that burden and make powerful visualization capabilities accessible to everyone.”

Two papers co-authored by Georgia Tech researchers have received the 2026 ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) Test of Time Award, recognizing research with a lasting impact on the field. Among them is The Matter of Heartbleed, a 2014 study co-authored by SCP Professor Michael Bailey and Associate Professor Frank Li.

The paper examined how the internet responded to the Heartbleed vulnerability, one of the most serious security flaws of its time. But its impact extended beyond documenting the incident. A collaboration between researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan produced a broad analysis of the security crisis and helped shape a line of research that would influence Li's academic career.

In April 2014, Heartbleed took the internet by surprise. The flaw in OpenSSL, a widely used software library for securing internet communications, allowed attackers to trick vulnerable servers into revealing portions of their memory, potentially exposing passwords, session tokens, and private cryptographic keys.

With just one month before the IMC paper deadline, researchers at Berkeley and Michigan began investigating the vulnerability. They initially pursued separate efforts before learning about each other's work and deciding to combine forces.

Li, then a first-year Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley working with his advisor Vern Paxson, led the Berkeley team. Zakir Durumeric, now at Stanford University, led the Michigan team.

Joining forces enabled the researchers to examine the vulnerability from several angles. They tracked vulnerable servers across the internet, studied the replacement of digital certificates that might have been compromised, and investigated attempts to exploit the flaw.

“We heard about each other’s efforts, talked, and decided to join forces,” Li said. “As a result, our final work was far more comprehensive than what any of us could have done individually.”

One part of the study produced a particularly surprising result. The researchers wanted to know whether directly notifying system operators about vulnerable servers would encourage them to fix the problem. Because Heartbleed had received widespread media attention, the team initially expected the notifications to have little effect.

Instead, operators who received notifications patched vulnerable systems at a rate 47% higher than those who had not yet been notified. Many operators already knew about Heartbleed but had overlooked some servers or had not completed remediation correctly. The researchers found that specific, actionable information could make a difference.

The experiment also led Li down an unexpected research path. He continued studying how security notifications could help organizations address vulnerabilities, including web misconfigurations and compromised websites. He also investigated whether security patches introduced new bugs and examined the human and organizational factors that affect how system administrators handle security updates.

Together, that work formed the foundation of his doctoral thesis and faculty job talk, both focused on internet-scale vulnerability remediation.

“Research paths are highly dynamic, especially for early researchers,” Li said. “Jump on opportunities when they present themselves.”

That lesson has stayed with Li throughout his career. At Georgia Tech, he continues to study how internet operators handle security and privacy, while expanding into areas such as online authentication and AI agent abuse.

For Li, the award is a reminder that an unexpected opportunity early in his career helped shape his research and his career path.

“It’s an honor to get this recognition for the work, which goes all the way back to the start of my academic career,” he said. “I feel fortunate to have been involved in such a fun, interesting, and ultimately impactful project, especially early in my career.”

The Heartbleed paper was not the only Georgia Tech-connected research recognized this year. The conference also honored Analysis of Country-wide Internet Outages Caused by Censorship, a 2011 paper co-authored by Alberto Dainotti, a Georgia Tech professor in the School of Computer Science and adjunct professor at SCP.

The paper examined internet disruptions in Egypt and Libya in 2011, using large-scale internet measurements to understand how governments can disrupt communications across entire countries.

Photos of Frank Li, Michael Bailey, and Alberto Dainotti by Terence Rushin and Kevin Beasley/College of Computing

The Marcus Center of Excellence for Cell Biomanufacturing recently hosted its inaugural Marcus Center Distinguished Lecture, welcoming more than 160 attendees in person and virtually.   

The collaboration centers on an enterprise AI knowledge platform that allows users to interact with information through natural language queries. The platform brings together information from documents, websites, databases and other organizational sources, giving users a more intuitive way to search for and work with institutional knowledge.

The project has moved from Phase 1, which established the platform’s technical foundation, into Phase 2, which will focus on scalability, operational maturity and the capabilities needed to support broader enterprise use.

Enterprise AI Knowledge Platform

During Phase 1, the Tech AI team developed a working platform that combines retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search and citation-backed responses.

Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, allows an AI system to retrieve relevant information from a collection of sources before generating a response. Combined with semantic search, this approach helps the platform identify information based on meaning and context rather than relying solely on exact keywords.

The platform also provides citations with its responses, allowing users to trace information back to its original sources.

Together, these capabilities establish the foundation for the broader Tech AI Knowledge Engine vision: using AI to make organizational knowledge easier to access, understand and apply.

“This collaboration shows how Georgia Tech can work with industry partners to move an AI concept from development toward practical application,” said Ajay Upadhyaya, associate director of research administration at Tech AI. “Phase 1 gave us the opportunity to develop and test the technical foundation, while Phase 2 allows us to focus on the systems and processes needed to support broader enterprise use.”

From Prototype to Practical Application

Phase 2 will build on the capabilities developed during the initial phase, with an emphasis on the requirements for broader enterprise adoption.

The team will focus on scalability, governance, monitoring, analytics and administrative capabilities. These additions are intended to help organizations manage the platform more effectively while providing greater visibility into system performance and user activity.

The transition also reflects a broader challenge in applied AI: moving technologies from working prototypes into systems that can operate reliably in real-world environments.

“Most organizations don’t have a knowledge problem. They have an access problem. The answers are already in their documents and systems, but they’re hard to find and harder to trust,” said Nicholas Velastegui, head of operations at Velastegui Ventures. “Phase 1 showed that AI can give people grounded, cited answers. Phase 2 is about making that dependable enough for an organization to run on.”

Team Behind Project

The project brings together researchers, engineers and program leadership from Tech AI.

Alex Djalali, senior research software engineer, serves as the project’s principal investigator and technical lead. Dave Brownell, head of engineering at Tech AI, provides engineering leadership and project oversight.

Research software engineers Austin Weeks and Jeremy Garcia contribute to the platform’s development, engineering and implementation. Upadhyaya supports project coordination, contract management, sponsor engagement and overall program activities. Tim Brown, managing director of Tech AI, serves as the executive sponsor.

As the collaboration moves into Phase 2, the team will continue strengthening the platform’s technical and operational capabilities while identifying additional opportunities to apply AI to complex organizational knowledge.

Read more »

This year’s lecture, the first featuring two speakers, was presented by Adharsh Rajagopal of Micron Technology, and Michael Hamilton of Auburn University and Google Quantum AI. Their talks explored two rapidly evolving areas of computing: next-generation memory technologies and the engineering challenges of scaling quantum computers. 

Established in Brand’s memory, the annual lectureship recognizes his lasting impact on Georgia Tech as a researcher, educator, mentor, and leader. During more than two decades at Georgia Tech, Brand helped strengthen connections across disciplines and advance the Institute’s research community in electronics and nanotechnology. 

“Oliver Brand had a remarkable ability to bring people together, build bridges across disciplines, institutions, and perspectives,” said Eric Vogel, executive director of IMS. “He helped shape not only Georgia Tech’s research enterprise, but also the culture of collaboration that continues to define it today.”

Brand’s interdisciplinary spirit was reflected throughout both presentations. 

Rajagopal focused on one of the challenges of rapid artificial intelligence growth: How can memory technology keep pace with computing systems?

“As AI increases the amount of compute, memory innovations need to take advantage of the increase in compute,” said Rajagopal.

Meeting computing demands requires more than simple hardware changes. Rajagopal discussed innovations in materials, devices, wafer bonding, advanced metrology, and three-dimensional dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) architectures. DRAM is a type of random-access memory that can provide higher density storage at a lower cost. As traditional scaling approaches become more difficult, moving into three dimensions could provide a pathway for increasing memory density, but it would require advances across the entire stack.

“Improvement and breakthrough in memory needs to be a co-optimization of material, device, process, equipment and architecture across the scale,” said Rajagopal. “This is what makes it very challenging, but it also makes working in memory one of the most exciting things at this point in time.”

Hamilton brought a similar interdisciplinary perspective to a different challenge: scaling quantum systems.

Quantum computers have the potential to address complex problems that are difficult to solve using classical computing systems, including questions in materials and chemistry. Turning that potential into large-scale systems, however, involves challenges that extend beyond quantum physics. Future computers could require millions of qubits, the basic units of information in quantum computing, operating at extremely low temperatures. Scaling these systems creates challenges involving electrical engineering, materials science, nanofabrication, packaging, interconnects, thermal management, and testing. 

For Hamilton, one of the most important challenges is also the most familiar one: wiring.

“This whole thing is just wires, which is cool if you like wires,” said Hamilton while showing an image of Google’s quantum computing system. “But it doesn’t scale.”

Solving the scalability problem requires researchers to look beyond individual components and consider the entire system, an approach that creates opportunities for experts across numerous disciplines to contribute to the future of quantum computing.

“Some people probably look at this and say, ‘Wow, there’s no way I’ll be able to do that,’” said Hamilton. “I look at it as a challenge.”

Although the two lectures examined different technologies, they arrived at a similar conclusion. Whether the goal is building memory capable of supporting increasingly powerful AI systems or developing quantum computers that can operate at meaningful scale, innovation depends on expertise that crosses materials, devices, fabrication, packaging, and systems.

Brand, who passed away in 2023, left a legacy that lives on through interdisciplinary research at Georgia Tech. For more than 20 years, he served on the Institute’s faculty and led the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, which later evolved into the Institute for Matter and Systems, for nine years. He was a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, director of the Coordinating Office for the National Science Foundation-funded National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), and director of the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor, one of the 16 NNCI sites.

Brand united researchers in electronics and nanotechnology, fostering collaboration and expanding the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology to include more than 200 faculty members. In addition to his respected work in microelectromechanical systems, he is remembered for his kindness, dedication, and unwavering support for all who knew him.

Now, the Georgia Tech alumnus and former research faculty member is bringing his experience to Washington as one of 11 "exceptional Americans" selected for the 2026-27 class of White House Fellows.

Saleeby has been assigned to the National Security Council, where his work will focus on advanced manufacturing and the supply chains that support it.

The White House describes its nonpartisan fellowship as an opportunity for “gifted and highly motivated young Americans” to gain firsthand experience in government and national leadership.

“Georgia Tech has both the opportunity and the responsibility to serve our nation by bringing our expertise to bear on consequential decisions facing our leaders,” said Tim Lieuwen, interim president of Georgia Tech. “Given the critical importance of manufacturing and strengthening our domestic industrial base for our nation's economic prosperity and national security, Kyle's expertise and experience will be invaluable. We are tremendously proud of his selection as a White House Fellow and the opportunity he has to serve our country.”

Saleeby earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech and later joined the research faculty at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute. There, he worked with industry partners to solve manufacturing problems using advanced machining, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence.

One of those problems came from the U.S. Navy, which for decades relied on a single specialist to repair critical components of the system used to launch aircraft from carriers. Saleeby was part of a Georgia Tech team that developed an automated approach to those repairs, reducing the Navy's dependence on one person's specialized knowledge.

“One of the biggest challenges in American manufacturing is getting new technology out of the laboratory and onto the factory floor,” said Tom Kurfess, executive director, Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute “Kyle has spent his career working at that intersection. He understands what it takes to move from a promising idea to something manufacturers can actually use. This is what ensures that American manufacturing operations are always at the leading edge.”

Steven Ferguson, GTMI deputy director, has worked closely with Saleeby on research projects and educational outreach. What impresses him most about his former colleague goes beyond his technical abilities.

“He's a gifted individual who is incredibly technical but is able to distill that information and convey it in a way an industry executive, a ninth-grader, a high school teacher, and a Ph.D. scientist and engineer can all understand,” Ferguson said.

Saleeby and Ferguson also co-founded Advanced Manufacturing Pathways, a Georgia Tech program that brings manufacturing engineering into high school classrooms. Students design, 3D-print, and race pinewood derby cars, learning how digital designs become physical products. The program now includes eight Georgia high schools, with plans to expand further.

Ferguson said Saleeby routinely invited colleagues into research projects, even when he didn't need their help. He wanted others to have opportunities they might not otherwise get.

“He is a consummate collaborator,” Ferguson said.

About the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI)

The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) convenes industry leaders, government partners, and top researchers to collaborate on the grand challenges facing manufacturing today: accelerating technology development and deployment; creating, maintaining, and filling quality jobs; ensuring global competitiveness; and advancing economic and environmental stability.

Our vision is to ensure rapid innovation that secures U.S. dominance in advanced manufacturing. Through the design and development of artificial intelligence systems, secure digital manufacturing, additive and subtractive processes, and large-scale production enterprises, GTMI stands at the forefront of manufacturing innovation — leveraging state-of-the-art facilities, including the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility, to turn research breakthroughs into market-ready solutions.

Registration for the undergraduate Student Government Association’s Home for the Holidays initiative is open through Thursday, Nov. 19.  

When giant pandas Ping Ping and Fu Shuang meet the public at Zoo Atlanta on Nov. 6, it will mark a new chapter in panda diplomacy between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.  

“The High is committed to being a place where diverse perspectives and voices come together to exchange ideas, foster growth, encourage creativity and help build a better future — a mission that aligns so closely with the goals of a stellar university like Georgia Tech,” said the High’s Director Rand Suffolk. “We’ve enjoyed wonderful relationships with their faculty and students for research and resource sharing, including our current Paper Trees exhibition and a visitor experience study, but this program takes our collaboration to a whole new level. We’re thrilled to bring them on board for our centennial year and look forward to our work together for years to come.”

“The arts are an essential part of the Georgia Tech experience, bringing new perspectives to how we learn, create and collaborate,” said Jason Freeman, associate vice provost for the arts at Georgia Tech. “Our collaboration with the High Museum of Art expands access to world-class arts experiences for our entire campus community while creating new opportunities to connect the museum’s collections and expertise with teaching, research and creative practice across disciplines. It’s another way we’re building stronger connections between the arts and the work happening across Georgia Tech.”

The Academic Affiliate program provides benefits for Georgia Tech’s students, faculty, and staff, including:

• Free general, walk-up admission during daytime hours.
• Free admission to select public conversations.
• Discounted memberships.
• Opportunity for student art exhibition in the High’s Greene Family Education Center.
• Exclusive access to exhibition planning resources and exhibition catalogues for classroom use.
• Up to four lectures or conversations led by High staff at Georgia Tech.
• Access to Hub @ the High, a dedicated meeting and event space for Academic Affiliate partners.

“The Affiliate program opens new pathways for personal and professional growth for Georgia Tech students,” said Andrew Westover, the High’s Eleanor McDonald Storza deputy director, learning and civic engagement. “We look forward to opening the museum doors even wider to Georgia Tech’s students, staff and faculty for more opportunities to study and engage with our world-class collection and exhibitions.”

For more information about the Academic Affiliate program, visit high.org/academic-affiliates/.  

About the High Museum of Art
The High is Atlanta’s art museum. For over a century we’ve been a source of inspiration for the city and a model for how museums can connect with people. Home to a world-class collection, engaging exhibitions, and events for every age, background and interest, we champion the arts as an essential part of our community. Today, we’re internationally recognized yet firmly rooted in Atlanta. We’re located on Peachtree Street, where Harriet “Hattie” High donated the land that would become the High’s home. Our award-winning architecture by Richard Meier and Renzo Piano houses a collection of over 20,000 works spanning centuries, continents and media. Throughout the year we curate exhibitions that recover overlooked histories, challenge conventions and expand the boundaries of art. Our events and ongoing series set us apart, offering our community new ways to connect with art. From lively events on Friday nights to programs specially designed for families, we ensure that art enthusiasts and newcomers alike have something to enjoy. Our aim is simple: bringing art and people together. For more information about the High, visit www.high.org.

Alexandra Rodríguez Dalmau, a community-engaged sustainability project manager with SCoRE, focuses on ensuring that communities have a meaningful role in shaping emerging energy transition technologies (EETTs) from the earliest stages of research through design and deployment. Her work sits at the intersection of research and practice, connecting technical expertise with community priorities related to energy, climate, and sustainability.

"Our main objective is to create a platform and process based on trust, where communities and technical experts can learn from one another," Rodríguez Dalmau said. "The goal is not to convince communities to support a particular technology, but rather to help everyone better understand the opportunities, tradeoffs, impacts, and questions that come with these technologies."

One of these projects is a regional community engagement program connected to the Southeast Direct Air Capture Hub (SEDAC), a U.S. Department of Energy-funded initiative led by the Southern States Energy Board. As conversations unfolded around direct air capture, a technology that removes carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, it became clear that many of the same questions and concerns can apply to the broader set of EETTs. Scaling low-carbon energy sources and systems that manage carbon after energy is produced — like hydrogen production, renewable energy systems, battery technologies, and energy infrastructure upgrades — may be considered an unqualified good thing. The SEDAC program brought to light that communities where such projects are built have a different perspective.

In the Fall of 2025, that SEDAC platform grew into the Southeast Community Energy Futures Academy (SCEFA), a training program and community of practice that brings together communities, technology researchers, and project developers to explore both the promises and challenges of EETTs.

"Communities are often asked to host facilities or infrastructure projects that serve broader resilience or climate goals," Rodríguez Dalmau said. "The benefits can feel distant while the risks and disruptions are immediate and local. Engaging communities early in the process is critical to ensuring that EETTs align with local priorities and support communities' own visions for a sustainable future."

Rather than positioning researchers as the sole experts, the program facilitates collaborative learning and centers the knowledge of community partners as experts who possess deep understanding of local history, priorities, and concerns. Participants engage in presentations, working sessions, mapping exercises, and laboratory tours. But one of the most significant elements of the program takes place outside of these sessions.

Community site visits bring participants directly into industrial and research facilities as well as neighborhoods affected by existing industrial development. Participants see schools, residential areas, power plants, natural amenities, research facilities, and community gathering spaces and hear from site managers and community leaders.

"Engaging with communities through experiential learning activities like site visits begins the process of rooting abstract technology into a place with all its history and memories of previous encounters with industrial plants. This enables conversations instead of silence or skepticism,” says Matthew Realff, professor and David I.J. Wang Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and faculty director for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education at the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

The SCEFA effort is a culmination of SCoRE’s relationship and project-building work over the past 11 years. Community partners who participated in the SEDAC Hub and SCEFA discussions have become key contributors to a broader regional effort that now encompasses teams from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The initiative brings together leaders of nonprofits and community-based organizations, researchers, student interns, and project developers to learn from each other and develop education and outreach materials related to EETTs.

Over the course of one year, participants engaged in multiple online workshops, two in-person workshops — in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, hosted by Louisiana State University, and in Mobile, Alabama, hosted by the University of South Alabama — and developed education and outreach materials to be used by community-based organizations.

The program also encourages the formation of what SCoRE describes as "unlikely coalitions" among community organizations, universities, and industry professionals. The Georgia team, spearheaded by a researcher at Georgia College and State University, is exploring how nature-based sequestration and biomass energy may be used to enhance the land and other natural amenities that residents in their rural communities see as their legacy. The Alabama team focused on carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), which is the key EETT focus in their geography. The lead organization for that team, Iyai+ (Introducing Youth to American Infrastructure), developed a role-playing game that helps participants explore the opportunities and challenges associated with CCUS, identify key stakeholders, and practice asking critical questions about proposed projects.

Jennifer Hirsch, senior director of SCoRE, who is a cultural anthropologist and serves as project lead, explained, “SCEFA prioritizes building relationships over time, with a core focus on experiencing and learning together, rather than trying to get one side to see the other’s point of view. It is only when community perspectives are taken into account that truly innovative solutions will emerge that benefit both people and climate.”

The emphasis is on process rather than predetermined outcomes. Participants spend time learning how to ask better questions, evaluate evidence, and recognize uncertainties. By investing in a shared process, participants are often better able to navigate disagreement without becoming defensive.

The approach is already producing results. Technologists involved in the program have expressed greater interest in engaging with communities earlier in their research and development process. Researchers are exploring new ways to communicate findings more clearly and transparently. Community partners are gaining knowledge, tools, and resources that allow them to engage on their own terms when new projects are proposed.

“Lasting solutions emerge when researchers and communities work together from the beginning, asking the right questions and considering both the opportunities and tradeoffs,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research. “SCEFA offers a powerful model for developing energy solutions with communities, not simply for them. This collaborative approach reflects how Georgia Tech can help address complex challenges that no institution or community can solve alone.”

Typically, that’s a positive. It becomes an issue when medicine needs to get in.

Swallow a pill to treat a skin condition, and the medicine enters your stomach, moves into your bloodstream, and travels throughout your body — all to reach a problem in your skin.

Applying the drug directly seems simpler. But the skin’s outer layer blocks most medicines meant to treat it.

Mark Prausnitz, a Regents’ Professor, Regents’ Entrepreneur, and J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has spent years trying to get medication through that barrier. He says his solution looks a little like a tiny spiny creature or a centuries-old weapon.

“Like the ball and chain of medieval times, with all those spikes sticking out of the ball,” Prausnitz said. “Or like a porcupine.”

Only much, much smaller.

Prausnitz calls them STAR particles because tiny microneedles project from each particle like the points of a star. Mix them into a cream or gel, rub them across the skin, and they create microscopic openings that give medicine a way through.

Ditching the Patch

The idea grew out of  microneedle patches, which are already used to help drugs penetrate the skin. But patches are best suited to small areas. But conditions such as eczema and psoriasis can affect broad or irregular parts of the body where Prausnitz said patches would be impractical.

STAR particles ditch the patch. Mixed into a cream or gel, they can be rubbed wherever they’re needed. Their microscopic points puncture the skin’s outer barrier, creating openings that help drugs get in.

“Just that rubbing action on your skin causes these particles to roll and slide around and poke little holes in the skin,” Prausnitz said.

Those openings allow the medicine in the cream or gel to be absorbed over time. In one small human study, earlier ceramic STAR particles helped a topical anesthetic take effect faster and reduce sensation more than the anesthetic used alone.

Separate tests focused on tolerability. The particles caused mild redness, but it faded. Participants described tingling rather than pain or discomfort.

“You can barely even tell,” Prausnitz said of the earlier particles. “If you look very closely, you can see just faint redness on the skin. But if you look from a distance, you can’t even tell it’s there.”

But those particles were made from titania, a material that is safe but isn’t biodegradable. Once they have done their job to deliver drugs into the skin, they have an uncertain fate afterwards. 

No one has found evidence they cause harm. Still, Prausnitz wondered where they might end up after use. In an eye? On a child? Somehow impacting the environment?  Those questions drove the redesign.

Designed to Disappear

Prausnitz and his team created new STAR particles with three materials that break down after use. One is the same substance used in dissolvable stitches, which is a biodegradable plastic that can be made from corn. Another is based on cellulose, which is a major component of essentially all plants. The final is an additive often used in candy and other foods. All three made the tiny openings needed to help compounds pass through the skin.

The strongest result involved copper tripeptide-1, a skincare ingredient. Prausnitz reported good results with methotrexate, which is used to treat psoriasis, and with tacrolimus, which is used to treat eczema. 

With STAR particles, nearly 37 times as much entered the skin as without the particles That doesn’t mean it was 37 times more effective. The study measured drug delivery into the skin, not treatment results. And the biodegradable particles haven’t been tested in people yet.

Prausnitz said some drugs that might otherwise be useful for skin disease have been “thrown in the trash or stuck on the shelf” because of the side effects caused when they circulate throughout the body. Drug delivery directly to the skin using STAR particles could reduce those side effects. 

He has also said STAR particles might one day deliver anti-aging treatments without injections or harsher procedures. Those cosmetic uses, however, were not evaluated in this study.

For patients, using STAR particles could feel much like applying an ordinary cream or lotion: Rub it on. Feel a little tingle.

“Users don’t really know or care that STAR particles are in there,” Prausnitz said. “Your experience is a familiar one.” 

The study was published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.


Mark Prausnitz is affiliated with two of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Institutes: The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and The Institute for Matter and Systems.

Prausnitz and Dr. Andrew Tadros are inventors of the STAR particle technology used in this study and have ownership interests in Aldena Therapeutics Ltd. and Microstar Biotech LLC, which are developing technologies related to this study. They are eligible to receive royalties from the company’s future commercialization of products associated with this research.
These interests have been disclosed and are subject to oversight and management by the Institute’s Conflict of Interest Office.  Management plans are in place to mitigate actual, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest and commitment.

Ronald L. Johnson, senior vice president of strategic initiatives and chief of staff at Georgia Tech, will leave the Institute to serve as chief of staff to the president of Morehouse College, effective Jan. 4, 2027. 

The center is co-directed by Martin Mourigal, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, and Robert Wyllie, division chief of the Quantum System Division in the Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) lab at GTRI. 

“Quantum technologies are rapidly moving from scientific theory toward practical application,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president of Interdisciplinary Research. “This center builds on Georgia Tech’s expertise to help lead that transition by connecting research with industry, government, and societal needs.” 

Building on Georgia Tech’s strengths in atomic physics, materials science, engineering, computing, photonics, sensing, and advanced manufacturing, GT QuARC will serve as a hub for quantum research and collaboration across Georgia Tech and GTRI. The center will help bridge fundamental discovery and practical application, creating new opportunities in quantum technologies while strengthening Georgia Tech’s leadership in areas such as computing, sensing, communications, and national security.

Quantum technologies use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform tasks that are difficult or impossible with conventional technologies. As federal agencies and industry partners continue to increase investments in quantum research and development, Georgia Tech is positioned to contribute to advances in quantum materials, devices, systems, algorithms, and applications.

“Quantum breakthroughs happen at the intersection of disciplines,” said Wyllie. “By connecting the researchers and resources across Georgia Tech and GTRI, we’re building a stronger foundation for quantum innovation.”

GT QuARC will strengthen these efforts by providing a unified identity for Georgia Tech’s quantum community and creating new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers, students, industry partners, government agencies, and national laboratories.

“One goal for the center is to identify meaningful applications for emerging quantum technologies,” said Mourigal. “Another is to build connections among researchers, industry, and government. Those conversations are essential to discovering where quantum technologies can have the greatest impact. For that to happen, we must coordinate and optimize efforts across campus.”

“A core part of IMS’s mission is creating opportunities that enable breakthrough discoveries and accelerate emerging areas of research," said Eric Vogel, executive director of IMS. “GT QuARC, provides a framework for bringing together Georgia Tech’s quantum expertise and building the partnerships needed to advance both scientific discovery and real-world impact.”

The center will initially focus on three research thrusts: 

Quantum Building Blocks and Enabling Technologies will advance the materials, devices, fabrication methods, control technologies, and characterization capabilities needed to create and manipulate quantum states.

Quantum Systems and Manufacturing Testbeds will integrate the building blocks into scalable quantum sensing, computing, communication, and simulation platforms, supported by shared research infrastructure and manufacturing capabilities.

Quantum Computing, Algorithms, and Applications will develop quantum and hybrid quantum-classical approaches to challenges in scientific discovery, industry, national security, and other areas of societal importance.

These efforts will help move quantum technologies from the laboratory toward practical use while creating new opportunities for collaboration across disciplines.

In addition to advancing research, GT QuARC will support education and workforce development by expanding hands-on learning opportunities, strengthening industry engagement, and connecting students with emerging careers in quantum science and engineering.

The center will also help Georgia Tech pursue strategic investments in quantum infrastructure, including advanced characterization capabilities, micro- and nanofabrication resources, sensing platforms, and access to leading quantum computing systems.

By bringing together expertise from across Georgia Tech’s colleges, research centers, and GTRI, GT QuARC will help position the Institute as a leader in translating quantum discoveries into technologies that address national priorities and societal challenges.

To learn more about Georgia Tech’s quantum ecosystem, visit quantum.gatech.edu. 

From AI literacy initiatives to AI-assisted course development, Georgia Tech is exploring new ways to help learners understand and benefit from emerging technologies. Recent projects in the College of Lifetime Learning show how these efforts are taking shape across the Institute. The first Georgia Tech Academic AI Playbook highlights them in four featured articles. 

Two Georgia Tech projects explore those distinct possibilities. College of Lifetime Learning researchers Meryem Yilmaz Soylu and Jeonghyun “Jonna” Lee collaborated with School of Biological Sciences lecturer Lesley Baradel to study AI-facilitated Socratic dialogue in large courses. In a separate project, Karen Peterson, a principal lecturer in the College of Lifetime Learning, used AI to develop clinical scenarios, pronunciation feedback, and vocabulary exercises for healthcare communication courses.

Both projects are featured in Georgia Tech’s first Academic AI Playbook, which shares practical examples of how faculty are using AI to support specific learning goals.

Encouraging Students to Think More Deeply

“One of the things that interested me most was the opportunity to extend meaningful academic conversations beyond the time and space available in a classroom,” Baradel said. “Using Socratic Mind in my classroom showed me how AI can facilitate reflection and discussion at a scale difficult to achieve through one-on-one interactions alone.”

Socratic Mind is an AI-powered conversational assessment tool developed by researchers in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing and College of Lifetime Learning. The team piloted the tool with more than 700 students in online and in-person courses. Their research examined whether AI could help students engage more deeply with course concepts by prompting them to explain their reasoning, apply their knowledge, and identify gaps in their understanding.

In Using AI-Facilitated Socratic Dialogue for Formative Learning in Large Undergraduate Courses, Baradel, Yilmaz Soylu, and Lee document the long-term collaboration among the instructor, researchers, and students to better understand how the tool may influence learning at cognitive and behavioral levels.

“Being part of the AI Playbook is especially meaningful because it allows us to share the idea behind the project and what we learned from putting it into practice with colleagues across Tech,” Yilmaz Soylu said. “Readers will see outcomes from research guided by student feedback and interaction data, which continually refined the activity and helped us better understand what makes AI-supported dialogue significant for learning.”

Building Communication Skills by Practice

In AI-Supported Healthcare Communication Training, Peters describes how she used AI to provide healthcare professionals and nurses with opportunities to develop communication skills through learning activities. Those skills include AIDET (Acknowledge, Introduce, Duration, Explanation, and Thank You) and SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation). She used generative AI to identify relevant healthcare vocabulary, develop instructional materials, create realistic clinical scenarios, and design activities tailored to students’ vocabulary gaps.

“One of the most important lessons from this work is that AI should be used to support a specific learning objective, not simply because the technology is available,” Peterson said. “When implemented intentionally, AI can help create more personalized opportunities for practice and feedback while supporting the learning goals that matter most.”

Keeping Learning at the Center

Results from the Socratic Mind pilot indicated that AI could promote greater engagement when it challenges students to think through and revise their ideas rather than simply providing answers. Peterson’s work expanded access to authentic healthcare communication experiences, giving learners opportunities to engage in workplace interactions that are difficult to replicate with traditional instructional materials. 

“Beyond the classroom outcomes, the Socratic Mind project generated valuable insights into how students engage with AI-guided educational experiences,” Lee said. “Those findings contribute to a growing body of research that helps educators better understand when and how generative AI can support meaningful learning and inform its thoughtful use in higher education.”

Together, these projects demonstrate that AI’s value in education goes beyond efficiency or automation. Whether prompting students to reflect more deeply on course concepts or helping healthcare professionals practice high-stakes communication, the most effective applications are grounded in clear learning goals. AI can enrich teaching and learning when intentionally designed to support meaningful engagement, practice, and feedback. 

“Rather than replacing existing teaching practices, AI prompted me to reconsider which aspects of the learning experience benefit most from human expertise and which can be enhanced by technology,” Peterson said. “It also opened new possibilities for designing learning experiences that are both responsive and scalable.”

Interim Vice Provost for AI in Education David A. Joyner and Nimisha Roy, a lecturer in the School of Computing Instruction, edited the 2026 edition of the Georgia Tech Academic AI Playbook. The authors of the featured articles, Peterson, Baradel, Yilmaz Soylu, and Lee, hope their work will inspire new ideas for using AI thoughtfully and purposefully to support teaching and learning.

This month, the Georgia Tech College of Computing will bring together students, alumni, founders, and members of Atlanta’s startup community to explore those possibilities during its inaugural Entrepreneurship Week, Nov. 10–13.

The week will feature three events that introduce students to different aspects of entrepreneurship. Students will also have the opportunity to connect with experienced founders and learn how computing and technology can help build new ventures.

“Entrepreneurship is about more than starting a company. It’s about recognizing opportunities, solving problems, and having the confidence to turn ideas into tangible outcomes,” said Tamar Wilkins, GT Computing academic program manager for entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives.

“We want students to see how their computing backgrounds can open doors to entrepreneurial opportunities and to give them the tools, connections, and inspiration to pursue their own ideas.”

The inaugural GT Computing Entrepreneurship Week kicks off Nov. 10 with a fireside chat featuring Candace Mitchell.

A College of Computing alumna and founder and CEO of Myavana–a hair care service that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to provide personalized solutions–Mitchell will speak at 6 p.m. in Klaus 1116 East/West about her entrepreneurial journey, how she is transforming the beauty industry, and lessons learned while building her company. She will also discuss her new book.

On Nov. 12, the Startup Meetup will bring together Georgia Tech students and alumni, startup founders, investors, and members of Atlanta’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The event, scheduled for 6–9 p.m. at the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center in Ballroom Salons 4, 5, and 6, will provide students with opportunities to exchange ideas, expand their professional networks, and connect with people across the startup community.

Entrepreneurship Week concludes Nov. 13, with Founders Friday featuring VinoBarrel.

From 3–4:30 p.m. in the Klaus Atrium, students can hear from VinoBarrel Founder Seth Lytle and Vice President of Technology Christian Doetsch. They will share the company's story, discuss the technology powering its wine-dispensing system, and offer insights into the challenges and opportunities of bringing a hardware-and-software startup to market.

[RELATED: From Coding to Cabernet: An Alumnus’ Journey From Corporate Tech to Startup Life]

College of Computing students can register for Entrepreneurship Week events through Handshake.

Entrepreneurship Week is the latest facet of the College’s ongoing commitment to providing students with a dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem. Other resources include:

• John P. Imlay Series on Entrepreneurship: Launched in 2019, this series features profiles of GT Computing students, alumni, and faculty shaping the College's entrepreneurial culture.
• Klaus Startup Challenge: Named in honor of Christopher W. Klaus, the Klaus Startup Challenge is an annual entry-level pitch competition designed to prepare beginner entrepreneurs for future competitions and funding opportunities.

• CREATE-X Capstone: Launched in 2018, CREATE-X Capstone is the Institute's first multi-college capstone section.

  Generative AI was used to assist with an initial draft of this article. The author reviewed, revised, and fact-checked the content and is responsible for the final version.

The Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) is pleased to recognize the 2026 Foley Scholar winners and finalists for their innovative research and contributions to their fields.

“This year’s winners exemplify the creativity, rigor, and human-centered thinking that define Foley Scholar research. Their work addresses complex challenges at the intersection of people and technology, and we are proud to recognize both their accomplishments and their potential for growing impact,” said Michael Best, executive director of the Institute for People and Technology.

Professor Emeritus Jim Foley, for whom the scholarship is named, closed the event with remarks encouraging all of the finalists to build relationships, help others, and seek to make a difference through their research and research communities. 

Congratulations to the 2026 Foley Scholar winners:

• Mansi Saini, a master's student in human-computer interaction, was awarded $2,000.
• Mohit Chandra, a Ph.D. student in computer science, was awarded $7,500.
• Grace Barkhuff, a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing, was awarded $7,500.
• Cynthia Baseman, a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing, was awarded $7,500.
• Debbie Hsu, a Ph.D. student in engineering psychology, was awarded $7,500.

2026 Foley Scholar Finalists:

A short description of each finalist's research, along with their Georgia Tech faculty advisor, is listed below:

Grace Barkhuff is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing advised by Ellen Zegura. Her research focuses on improving computing ethics instruction, encouraging students to consider how technology can be designed and used to improve the human experience without causing harm.

Cynthia M. Baseman is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing advised by Rosa Arriaga. They conduct community-engaged research with Black older adults with low income to center their perspectives and experiences with diabetes self-management technologies.

Mohit Chandra is a Ph.D. student in computer science advised by Munmun De Choudhury. His research focuses on establishing methodologies and frameworks for assessing, operationalizing, and integrating dimensions of lived human experiences within generative AI systems for high-stakes domains such as clinical mental healthcare and social and emotional uses of AI.

Amy Zhenlu Chen is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing advised by Michael Best. Her research explores community-centered approaches to working with digital platforms, including social media and AI, for public health communication. Her current project features a culturally tailored, AI conversation simulator designed to help diabetes prevention coaches build their communication skills.

Debbie Hsu is a Ph.D. student in engineering psychology advised by Mengyao Li. Her research investigates how trust spreads in teams in which multiple people collaborate with multiple AI systems. Such configurations are increasingly common in safety-critical settings but are largely missing from existing research, which has typically focused on a single human paired with a single AI system.

Muhammad Faraz Karim is a Ph.D. student in cybersecurity and privacy advised by Sukarno Mertoguo. His research vision is to secure complex computational systems at the point of human interaction and ensure that systemic vulnerabilities do not exploit end-user trust.

Lara Karki is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing advised by Betsy DiSalvo Her research focuses on community-driven problem solving, working alongside affected communities to define real-world challenges and co-design meaningful solutions. A core part of her work involves developing and supporting DataWorks, a Georgia Tech program that provides data services, such as cleaning and annotation, to organizations while offering computing education and non-traditional career pathways to local community members.

Soonho Kwon is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing advised by Shaowen Bardzell. His research examines how technology intersects with the experiences of LGBTQ+ communities in South Korea and explores how technologies might be better designed to serve them.

Medhavi Sabherwal is a master's student in human-computer interaction advised by Rosemaria Santa González. Her research includes the in-home deployment of a conversational AI assistant, including setup, configuration, and contextual onboarding interviews designed to reveal residents' expectations, concerns, and mental models of AI. She also supports the deployment and troubleshooting of additional technologies to help ensure the systems are responsive to older adults' needs.

Mansi Saini is a master's student in human-computer interaction advised by Brian Magerko, Yixiao Wang, and Andrea Parker. Her broader research vision centers on creating safe and ethical interactive systems through a human-computer interaction lens.

Arya Thiruvillakkat is a master's student in human-computer interaction advised by Rosemaria Santa González. Her long-term goal is to contribute to the development of technologies that empower individuals and improve quality of life while ensuring that innovation remains grounded in human values and shaped by the communities it is intended to serve.
 

Photo album of the 2026 Foley Scholars event.

Now, Nick Housley is exploring whether another bodily system could be recruited in the fight against cancer: the nervous system.

“From first principles, the nervous system is involved in every aspect of normal development and bodily maintenance,” says Housley, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and faculty director of Innovation for the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society. “When these normal processes go awry, the nervous system is not just a bystander. It is actively driving changes and/or responding to disease.”

With a new five-year, $3 million Stephen I. Katz Award from the National Institutes of Health, Housley aims to uncover how cancer interacts with the body’s neural circuitry and whether those connections could ultimately reveal new ways to fight the disease.

The idea that cancer and the nervous system interact isn’t entirely new. Scientists have known for more than a century that many solid tumors are connected to nerves. More recently, studies of brain cancer have revealed that tumors can form circuits with neurons that affect cancer growth, invasion, and resistance to treatment. But exactly how cancers elsewhere in the body connect with and potentially exploit the nervous system is largely a mystery.

Housley is starting with the ovary, an organ especially reliant on cues from the nervous system for normal function. Ovarian cancer is also one of the leading causes of cancer death among women, making the need for new approaches especially urgent.

“Ovarian cancer is tricky because it disproportionately lacks clear early symptoms,” says Housley. Without reliable symptoms or an effective early screening method, the disease is often not detected until later stages, when it is more difficult to treat. “We are very interested in understanding how the tumor innervates and integrates into the host nervous system to modulate activity patterns and remain hidden.”

Yet even the baseline for understanding those connections is missing. Scientists don’t yet have a complete map of the neural circuitry of a healthy ovary, much less an understanding of how that circuitry changes when cancer develops.

That kind of knowledge gap is precisely what the National Institutes of Health’s Stephen I. Katz Award is designed to address. It empowers early-career scientists like Housley to make bold research pivots into new scientific fields without requiring preliminary data.

With the Katz Award, Housley will start by creating the missing neural map of the ovarian system, comparing neural connections in healthy and cancerous ovaries and tracing them from local networks to the spinal cord and brain.

“We’re trying to figure out who’s connected to whom and whether those structural connections are functional,” he said.

From there, his team will examine how ovarian cancer cells and neurons communicate and how those interactions affect both cell types. Finally, they will manipulate specific populations of neurons to test how neural activity affects tumor development, progression, and response to cancer treatments.

“Where we are right now with cancer neuroscience is very similar to where immunotherapy was several decades ago,” Housley said. “Our blue-sky goal is to develop enough foundational knowledge about how the nervous system interfaces with ovarian cancer that we can exploit it — suppressing pro-tumoral signals and enhancing tumor suppressors to improve patient outcomes.”
 

“Throughout their inspiring careers, these eight alumni have demonstrated the values of excellence, innovation, integrity, and service that define our College of Sciences community,” said Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair.

The semi-formal event kicked off the College of Sciences’ Homecoming festivities, bringing together the honorees and their guests, along with College of Sciences students, faculty, alumni, and members of the Advisory Board and Young Alumni Board.

Georgia Tech Provost Raheem Beyah welcomed everyone and congratulated the honorees:

“Each of you took what you gained here and used it to create opportunities, solve problems, serve others, and make a difference in your professions and communities. That speaks directly to our mission to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.”

The Impact Award

Jeffrey Leddy, B.S. Physics 1978, received the Impact Award, the College of Sciences’ highest recognition, given to alumni whose extraordinary engagement, leadership, and generosity are shaping the future of the College. A successful telecommunications and satellite technology leader, Leddy is a long-time member of the College of Sciences Advisory Board.

During his introduction, Dean Susan Lozier thanked him for this board service and for the seven Leddy Family endowments he and his wife, Pamela, created to offer meaningful opportunities for students and faculty. 

Several student recipients of the Leddy Family Scholarship attended.

“The Leddy Family Scholarship means hope,” said Ian Morgan, a second-year math major. “My scholarship is extremely motivating. Knowing they are investing in me makes me want to be the best I can be.”

In his acceptance speech, Leddy said it was an honor to help students committed to going the extra mile.

The Distinguished Young Scientist Excellence Award

Austin Hope, B.S. Psychology 2014, received the Distinguished Young Scientist Excellence Award. Hope has served on the College of Sciences Young Alumni Board, regularly attends career and networking panels, and recently joined the College of Sciences Advisory Board. In her introduction, Dean Lozier called him one of the College of Sciences’ most active volunteers. “Whenever Georgia Tech asks, Austin says yes,” said Lozier.

In his acceptance speech, Hope said Georgia Tech saved him and he especially appreciated the faculty and staff who “said yes when it didn’t make sense to do so,” enabling him to “find his groove as a student and leader.” Currently a people leader at Google, Hope ended his remarks by thanking the College of Sciences for the “opportunity to serve.”            

Distinguished Alumni Awards

School of Biological Sciences

Fred Levin, M.D., B.S. Applied Biology 1972, a prominent physician who operates two endoscopy centers, was honored for his contributions to medicine in southeast Atlanta and his philanthropy at Georgia Tech. In his speech, he named challenges at Tech that helped form his work ethic, including mandatory drown proofing and a 1,130-page organic chemistry textbook.

He said he gives back because he appreciates the strong educational foundation he received at Georgia Tech.

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Belma Erdogan-Haug , Ph.D. Chemistry 2003, is a strategic business and innovation leader, accomplished inventor, and thought leader. Currently the head of Global Application Engineering and Digital Transformation of the Industrials Business Unit at Henkel Corporation, she has served on the College of Sciences Advisory Board since 2020. Erdogan-Haug said Georgia Tech played an important role in shaping her as a scientist and leader and spoke about her passion for mentoring women students in STEM.

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Tia Williams , B.S. Earth and Atmospheric Sciences 1996, is an executive leader at Microsoft’s Azure Data and early-stage venture investor. She is the vice chair of the College of Sciences Advisory Board and a board member of the new AI4Sciences Center.  In her speech, she called her time at Georgia Tech “magical” and said she is most thankful for the “unique privilege of learning computer science in the context of the science she loves, earth and atmospheric sciences.”

School of Mathematics

Clemmie Whatley, Ph.D., M.S. Applied Mathematics 1973, was the first African American woman to graduate from Georgia Tech. A corporate leader turned educator, nonprofit founder, and author, she said the challenges she faced at Tech helped build her tenacity and character.

“Clemmie has used her talent and experience in mathematics to lift people up,” said School of Mathematics Chair Michael Wolf in his introduction.

Whatley thanked her family, teachers, and friends and recognized Grace Hammond, who shares the distinction of being the first African American woman to graduate from Georgia Tech. The two trailblazers have remained friends over the years.

School of Physics

Gilbert “Gil” Amelio, Ph.D., Physics 1965, M.S. Physics 1967, Ph.D. Physics 1969, is an internationally recognized tech leader, who served as the CEO and chairman of Apple Computer; the president, CEO, and chairman of National Semiconductor; and the president of Rockwell Communication Systems. His son, Anthony Amelio, Industrial Management 1987, accepted the award on his behalf and spoke of his father’s love for Tech and the College of Sciences.

School of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Tara Stoinski, Ph.D., Ph.D. Psychology 2000, is the president, CEO, and chief scientific officer of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. An internationally recognized conservationist, she leads global efforts to study and protect mountain gorillas and the ecosystems they call home. When accepting the award, Stoinkski recalled that while other universities relied on mice and rats for psychological research, Georgia Tech’s partnership with Zoo Atlanta, allowed her to study lions, tigers, lemurs, elephants, and gorillas.

Honoring Dean Lozier

The evening concluded with a floral presentation to Lozier, who is stepping down as dean after seven years leading the College of Sciences. John Sutherland, the 2025 College of Sciences’ Impact Award winner, whose endowment established the Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair held by Lozier, praised her transformational tenure and thanked her for the impact she made on the College.

“We will really miss you,” he said.

In his remarks, Provost Beyah also recognized Lozier’s leadership, concluding:

“You leave the College of Sciences stronger than you found it.”

To view images from the event, visit 2026 Distinguished Alumni photos.

One of the world’s largest tech companies has recognized three faculty members from the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science (SCS) for their research on scalable, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) and computing systems. 

Artificial intelligence may operate in the digital world, but it leaves a massive and very real physical and societal footprint. What does AI’s rapid growth mean for the future of humanity? How can it be steered towards a more prosperous future for all? 

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

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

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

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

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

Read Full Story on the ChBE Newspage

From artificial intelligence to industry partnerships, Suyoung Park is helping manufacturers rethink how they choose suppliers, solve problems, and adapt to change. 

For 15 years, Georgia Tech's Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) has connected researchers, students, and partners from across disciplines to explore a fundamental question: How can technology better serve people and communities?

On Oct. 28, the IPaT community came together to celebrate that legacy during the 15th anniversary celebration at George Tower | Scheller Tower. Colleagues, collaborators, partners, and friends gathered for an afternoon highlighting the people and ideas that have helped define IPaT.

The celebration featured a distinguished lecture, a panel discussion, the presentation of IPaT Impact Awards, and a reception.

"The 15th anniversary celebration has allowed us to pause and reflect on IPaT's many achievements," said Michael Best, IPaT’s executive director. "For me, the event was a perfect example of what we call ‘The IPaT Way,’ an approach full of substance, community, and just plain fun."

15 Years of Putting People First

Created in 2011, IPaT is an interdisciplinary research institute at Georgia Tech dedicated to a people-first approach to research and innovation. It connects academia with industry, government, civil society, and other partners to develop people-centered approaches to some of society's most complex challenges.

Over the past 15 years, IPaT researchers and collaborators have contributed to work spanning health, aging, usability, sustainability, smart cities, and other areas. A defining part of that mission has been translating research beyond the laboratory and into people's lives through products, applications, community education, and outreach.

Today, the interdisciplinary community includes more than 30 research faculty and more than 125 affiliated faculty, supported by programs, research infrastructure, engineering and research translation, events, and staff that connect expertise from across Georgia Tech.

"For 15 years, the Institute for People and Technology has demonstrated the power of interdisciplinary research to address society's most complex challenges," said Julia Kubanek, Georgia Tech's vice president for interdisciplinary research. "By bringing together diverse experts and partnering with communities, industry, and government, IPaT has created a model for people-centered innovation that delivers meaningful impact."

Looking Back, Looking Forward

The anniversary program featured a distinguished lecture by Elizabeth Mynatt, dean of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and the founding executive director of IPaT. Mynatt joined Northeastern in 2022 after a 23-year career at Georgia Tech, where she served as a Regents' and Distinguished Professor in the College of Computing in addition to leading IPaT.

The program also featured a panel discussion titled "Looking Back, Looking Forward." Moderated by Michael Best, the panel included Laurie Dean Baird, managing director of Ladarium Media Group; Maribeth Gandy Coleman, director of research for IPaT; Keith Edwards, professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing and former director of the GVU Center; and Caroline Wood, executive director of Georgia Tech's Office of Corporate Engagement.

Together, they provided an opportunity to reflect on the relationships among people, technology, and society that have been at the heart of IPaT's work while also looking ahead to new opportunities for interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

15 Years, 15 Impact Awards

A centerpiece of the anniversary celebration was the presentation of the 2026 IPaT Impact Awards recognizing 15 individuals whose work and support have made a lasting contribution to IPaT.

The honorees were recognized for their vision, commitment, and generosity. Collectively, their contributions represent many of the characteristics that have defined IPaT over its first 15 years, from interdisciplinary research and organizational leadership to community building, technological innovation, and partnerships.

The 2026 IPaT Impact Award recipients are:

• Keith Edwards, Professor, School of Interactive Computing.
• Sherry Farrugia, Senior Vice President, Veranex.
• Brian Jones, Principal Research Engineer, IPaT.
• Debra Lam, Founding Executive Director, Partnership for Innovation.
• Leigh McCook, Deputy Director, IPaT, and Principal Research Associate, GTRI.
• Cynthia Moore, Assistant Director of Business Operations, IPaT.
• Jessica Pater, Senior Research Scientist, Parkview Research Center.
• Nicoleta Serban, Professor, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
• Richard Starr, Senior Research Scientist, IPaT.
• Faith Sumpter, Program Manager, IPaT.
• Tim Trent, Research Technologist, IPaT.
• Bruce Walker, Professor, School of Psychology and School of Interactive Computing.
• Caroline Wood, Executive Director, Office of Corporate Engagement.
• Ellen Zegura, Fleming Chair and Professor, School of Computer Science.
• Craig Zimring, Founding Director, SimTigrate Design Center, and Professor Emeritus, School of Architecture.

The awards build on a tradition established by Georgia Tech's GVU Center (now merged with IPaT), whose Impact Awards recognized members of its community during major anniversary milestones in 2007, 2012, 2017, and 2022. Previous GVU Impact Awardees were not eligible for the IPaT 15th anniversary prize.

More information about the honorees is available on the 2026 IPaT Impact Award winners page.

New Advisory Board Announced

At the anniversary celebration, Best also announced the members of IPaT’s newly formed advisory board. Inaugural members are:

• Jill Savitt – President and CEO, National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
• Barbara Smith – Vice President, Peace Programs, The Carter Center.
• Phil Breedlove – Distinguished Professor of the Practice and CETS Senior Fellow, U.S. Air Force (retired).
• Bruce McEvoy – Director of Regenerative Design, Perkins and Will.
• Donnie Beamer – Chief Technology Officer, City of Atlanta.
• Robert Kinyanjui – Research Partnerships Manager, John Deere.
• Alison Cernich – Director, Shriners Children’s Research Institute. 
• Laura Moody – CMO and Co-Founder, Purpose Possible.
• Kevin Perry – Head of Industry, International Growth Agency Team, Google.
• Mohammed K. Ali, M.D.  – Co-Director, Emory Global Diabetes Research Center, and the William H. Foege Distinguished Professor of Global Health at Emory University. Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine in the Emory School of Medicine.

The Next 15 Years

The milestone also offered an opportunity to consider what comes next.

"Since its inception, IPaT's focus on people-centered technology has only grown in relevance and reach," Best said. "Looking ahead to the next 15 years, ensuring that people and their passions sit at the very center of technical innovation will be more vital than ever."

That emphasis on people has remained a thread connecting IPaT's research, partnerships, and community throughout its first decade and a half. It is also central to its vision of an inclusive, equitable, and just future supported by people-centered technologies.

As Georgia Tech researchers confront emerging challenges and opportunities, IPaT's interdisciplinary model provides a way to bring technical expertise together with the experiences, needs, and aspirations of people and communities.

"As we celebrate this milestone, we also look ahead to the next generation of discoveries and collaborations that will improve lives, strengthen communities, and help shape a better tomorrow," Kubanek said.

The 15th anniversary offered a moment to recognize how far IPaT has come, celebrate the people who helped build its community, and look toward what it can accomplish in the years ahead. And as IPaT begins its next chapter, the principle that has helped guide its work remains unchanged: Meaningful technological innovation starts with people.

A picture album of IPaT’s 15th anniversary celebration. 

Refresh your knowledge of campus safety resources and practices with tips from the Georgia Tech Police Department.  

As an associate professor jointly appointed in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and School of City & Regional Planning, Andris relies on government data for her research, so slowdowns like this can be more than inconvenient. They can also hinder scientific discovery.

The problem is that many government websites that host the data aren’t user-friendly. These data sources are complex and voluminous, and the search engines are inefficient at narrowing down what users are seeking.

“It kind of has a ‘last mile’ problem,” Andris said. “Government workers and geospatial data workers have spent so much time and money creating these data sources. They’ve kept such great records year after year, but then that last mile is, how do we get it to people?”

Andris advised the federal government on this challenge while serving on the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC). The committee was formed by the Department of the Interior under the Geospatial Data Act of 2018, which established a new system for how the federal government collects, manages, and shares geospatial data.

Andris rotated off the committee in 2025 but led a report released in March 2026 titled Improving the Digital Experience for Users of National Geospatial Data. In the report, Andris and her collaborators outline recommendations for making geospatial data easy to retrieve and download. 

These recommendations were intended for government agencies with websites that feature maps and segment data by geographic region. These agencies included the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and NASA. 

“The NGAC hadn’t focused yet on the way that users are interfacing with these sites, but it’s in our best interest to study it,” Andris said.

Andris and her co-authors on the report focused on five key areas for improvement:

• Provide clear navigation signposts that allow users to access data in as few clicks as possible
• Display key statistics so users know how large a file is and how many times it’s been downloaded
• Provide thumbnail previews of the data files
• Add forums for comments, discussion, and engagement
• Create user typologies to understand who is accessing the data

One glaring crack in the system Andris found was the frequency with which drop-down menus didn’t immediately take the user to the data or let them download it.

“When users click on something that says data, they should be able to get data,” she said. “It’s like going to a vending machine and having it ask if you’d like to learn more about vending machines instead of giving you what you want.” 

Andris said users should also be able to know as much as possible about a file before downloading it.

“People are used to seeing reviews and ratings on sites like Amazon to get a sense of how many people are using a product,” she said. “In that respect, we think people should be given more metrics on how many downloads the data they are seeking has. 

“They should be able to see the metadata—including the file size so they can know how much space it will take up before downloading. They should also know the file type and whether they can open it in their software.”

Andris said there’s wisdom in emulating how private companies design their websites.

“Retail sites have conditioned people to expect things to be easy. They get what they want in one click. If they don’t find what they’re looking for almost immediately, they might give up. Adopting some of these practices from industry would probably be a good idea.”

For more information about the NGAC, visit https://www.fgdc.gov/ngac/. For the full report written by Andris, click here.

A sidewalk improvement project along Power Plant Drive will begin Nov. 9, resulting in temporary changes to traffic and pedestrian access in the area. Crews will demolish and replace the sidewalk on the west side of Power Plant Drive.

Throughout construction, the roadway will remain accessible to motorists traveling to the E44 parking area, but Power Plant Drive will temporarily become one-way. Members of the Georgia Tech community traveling through the area should be attentive to construction activity and follow posted signage and traffic directions. Each phase of the project is expected to last two weeks.

Please see the attached graphic for additional information about the affected area. We appreciate the campus community's patience and cooperation while this work is underway.

Hosted by the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), the event brought together stakeholders from across the hydrogen value chain to address opportunities and challenges related to infrastructure, market development, technology deployment, and regional collaboration.

The program began Oct. 7 with a networking reception and hydrogen research poster session, sponsored by the Southeast Hydrogen Energy Alliance (SHEA). Researchers, industry leaders, policymakers, and students gathered for collaboration and discussion. 

On Oct. 8, Yuanzhi Tang, SEI’s executive director and Georgia Power Professor, delivered opening remarks, followed by Tricia Chastain, executive vice president for administration and finance and chief business officer at Georgia Tech, who offered an institutional perspective.

“Georgia Tech is uniquely positioned to help advance hydrogen because we bring together expertise across engineering, transportation, manufacturing, policy, economics, and sustainability,” Chastain said. “Our strength lies not only in those disciplines, but in our ability to connect them, collaborate with partners, and move innovations from research into real-world applications.”

Frank Wolak, president and CEO of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association, delivered a keynote address on the state of hydrogen in the United States. He discussed national trends, policy developments, and market opportunities that could influence hydrogen adoption and create opportunities for the Southeast.

“Convening this forum on World Hydrogen Day highlights both the growing global momentum behind hydrogen technologies and the Southeast’s unique opportunity to help shape their development, deployment, and long-term impact,” Wolak said.

A leadership panel brought together Quinta Warren, airport senior director of sustainability at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport; Dan Raudebaugh, executive director of the Center for Transportation and the Environment; Erin Lane, vice president of public affairs at Plug Power; Costas Simoglou, director of Energy Technology at the Georgia Center of Innovation; and John Knox Porter Jr., CEO of Capital Development Partners.

Panelists discussed hydrogen's potential to strengthen industrial competitiveness and energy security, support transportation decarbonization, and contribute to regional economic growth.

“One of the most important questions facing the hydrogen sector is how we work together to address the challenges ahead,” said Tang. “At Georgia Tech and the Strategic Energy Institute, our role is to bring the ecosystem together. We not only advance research and innovation, but also connect people, technologies, and partnerships that can turn ideas into real-world solutions.” 

Developing a Regional Hydrogen Road Map

The event’s centerpiece was the Southeast Hydrogen Roadmapping Forum, organized and led by Scott McWhorter, director of the National Laboratory Partnership Program and Federal Energy Initiatives at the Strategic Energy Institute. McWhorter also serves as chairman of the SHEA Board of Directors. 

Participants worked through facilitated discussions across three strategic focus areas: 

• Hydrogen freight and multimodal logistics corridors 
• Hydrogen for critical-power resilience and long-duration energy storage 
• Clean hydrogen and hydrogen-derived molecules for industry, fertilizer, and fuels 

The discussions identified technology gaps, infrastructure priorities, workforce needs, demonstration opportunities, and pathways for future investment.

"The goal of this forum was to move beyond discussion and identify tangible opportunities for collaboration,” said McWhorter. “By bringing together leaders from transportation, energy, industry, economic development, and research, we are able to develop a road map that highlights priority projects, infrastructure needs, and next steps for growing a hydrogen economy that serves the Southeast."

The road-mapping sessions concluded with a cross-track synthesis focused on identifying priority projects and defining next steps toward a coordinated regional hydrogen strategy.

Showcasing Georgia Tech Hydrogen Research

Attendees also connected with Georgia Tech researchers through a hydrogen research showcase organized by Comas Haynes, Georgia Tech's hydrogen initiative lead and a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. The showcase included guided tours of the North Avenue Research Area and the Ben T. Zinn Combustion Laboratory. Participants got an up-close look at hydrogen research underway across the Institute.

The tour highlighted Georgia Tech's growing hydrogen research portfolio and the Institute's capacity to support industry, federal agencies, and regional partners working to advance next-generation energy technologies.

“By convening the forum on World Hydrogen Day, Georgia Tech underscored both the global momentum behind hydrogen technologies and the region's opportunity to shape their future deployment,” said Haynes.

The event’s outcomes will inform a regional hydrogen road map and white paper intended to support future collaboration, investment, and deployment efforts across the Southeast.

“This is only the beginning,” said McWhorter. “The road map will help guide the partnerships and projects needed to advance hydrogen infrastructure and strengthen the region's energy future.”

Saxena, who currently serves as executive director of Georgia Tech's CREATE-X program, brings more than two decades of experience spanning entrepreneurship, venture capital, technology development, and research. His background includes leadership roles as a startup CEO and investor, providing a combination of technical expertise and business experience that will help guide Georgia Tech's commercialization efforts.

As executive director of CREATE-X, Saxena has played a key role in advancing student entrepreneurship and strengthening Georgia Tech's innovation ecosystem. Over the past five years, CREATE-X has launched more than 800 startups, and in FY26 alone, more than 6,000 students on campus engaged with its programs.  

Saxena's appointment provides continuity for the Office as Georgia Tech advances its commercialization priorities and strengthens connections among research, industry, and entrepreneurship.

About 160 people gathered for the formal evening event. During the ceremony, honorees received one of three awards: Rising Stars, Distinguished Impact, and Hall of Fame.

“Their accomplishments remind us that the success of our College is ultimately about people,” said Vivek Sarkar, John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of Computing. “People who teach, mentor, and support our students, those who advance the frontiers of research, those who build companies and organizations, and those who give back to strengthen the community that helped shape them.”

The first awards of the evening recognized the contributions and achievements of recent GT Computing alumni who are already making an impact. The 2026 Rising Stars recipients are:

• Ali Foreman (CM 2017) – Based in Los Angeles, Foreman is a features writer for IndieWire covering media, entertainment, and accountability. She is known for sensitive, data-driven investigations that make complex issues accessible.
• Rushad Kaizad Heerjee (CS 2014; MS QCF 2017) – As head of international growth at Brain Co., Heerjee brings AI to governments and enterprises. He spent seven years at Palantir working across seven countries and holds seven patents.
• Tamer Shaaban (CS 2011) – Shaaban is a writer and award-winning director working at the intersection of computing and cinema; he directs global campaigns for Audi, Samsung, and the United Nations.

[PHOTO GALLERY: 2026 GT Computing Hall of Fame Celebration, Oct. 23]

The College’s inaugural Distinguished Impact Awards went to members of our community who have left a lasting mark on the College, including alumni, friends, faculty, and staff:

• Bill Leahy (MS CS 1999) – Senior Lecturer Emeritus: Corning engineer turned computer scientist who became a beloved Georgia Tech teacher; the College’s best lecturer award bears his name.
• Mojgan LeFebvre (CS 1990) – EVP and Chief Technology & Operations Officer, Travelers: Travelers executive leading technology, AI, and operations; drove its award-winning AI strategy and serves on Georgia Tech’s President’s Advisory Board.
• David Bright Leonard – Director Emeritus of Academic and Research Technologies: Built the College’s computing services after founding Dean Peter Freeman recruited him in 1991; later led research technologies at OIT.
• Joshua Silver (CS 2001) – Founder and CEO, Rainforest: Serial payments entrepreneur who co-founded healthcare payments startup Patientco, now part of Waystar, and leads Rainforest, a payments-as-a-service company for software platforms.
• Sheetal Wrzesien (CS 1994) – in memoriam, Former Senior Director of Digital Platforms, GoTo Foods: Technology leader at The Home Depot, Google, and GoTo Foods; College Advisory Board member and advocate for women in technology.

The highlight of the evening was the induction of the new Hall of Famers, who have significantly contributed to computing and computing education over the years. The GT Computing 2026 Hall of Fame inductees are:

• Gregory Abowd – Former Regents’ Professor and J.Z. Liang Endowed Professor in the School of Interactive Computing; former Dean of the College of Engineering at Northeastern University: HCI pioneer who launched Classroom 2000 and the Aware Home, advanced autism technology research, and founded the Atlanta Autism Consortium.
• Richard DeMillo (PhD ICS 1972) – Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair in Computing, Georgia Tech: Former Dean of the College of Computing, Hewlett-Packard CTO, founder of the Center for 21st Century Universities, and founding interim chair of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy.
• Paul Judge (MS CS 2001; PhD CS 2002) – Managing Partner, Open Opportunity Fund: Computer scientist turned entrepreneur who co-founded Purewire, Luma, and Pindrop, holds more than 30 patents, and has backed more than 100 startups.
• Elizabeth Mynatt (MS ICS 1989; PhD CS 1995) – Dean, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University: Human-centered computing pioneer and 23-year Georgia Tech faculty member who led the Institute for People and Technology; an ACM Fellow.
• Andy Ozment (CS 2000) – EVP and Chief Technology Risk Officer, Capital One: Cybersecurity leader and Marshall Scholar; former DHS Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity, White House cyber policy lead, and Goldman Sachs CISO.

2024 Hall of Fame class member Eugene Spafford attended the ceremony and was also honored. Spafford is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University; Founder and Executive Director Emeritus of CERIAS, a cybersecurity pioneer who originated digital forensics and introduced the modern security meaning of “firewall.”

“This year’s honorees are incredible trailblazers who have built remarkable careers, demonstrated exceptional leadership, and continue to inspire those who follow in their footsteps,” says Susan Lozier, dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair of the College of Sciences and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “It is a privilege to recognize these extraordinary individuals and celebrate the many ways they reflect the strength and spirit of the College of Sciences.”

Honorees will be recognized at the second annual Distinguished Alumni Awards Celebration on Thursday, Oct. 22, from 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel.

Recognition categories include the Distinguished Alumni Awards, honoring one graduate from each school; the Distinguished Young Scientist Award, recognizing early-career excellence; and the College of Sciences Impact Award, honoring transformative contributions to the College’s mission and future.

“The large response to our call for nominations was a powerful reminder of how deeply our alumni contribute to their fields and communities,” says Director of Alumni Relations Leslie Roberts. “We are excited to recognize this year’s amazing honorees and celebrate the lasting influence they have had both within and beyond Georgia Tech.”

2026 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipients

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Tia Williams

B.S. Earth and Atmospheric Sciences 1996

School of Biological Sciences

Fred Levin, M.D.

B.S. Applied Biology 1972

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Belma Erdogan-Haug, Ph.D.

Ph.D. Chemistry 2003

School of Mathematics

Clemmie Whatley, Ph.D.

M.S. Applied Mathematics 1973

School of Physics

Gilbert (Gil) Amelio, Ph.D.

B.S. Physics 1965, M.S. Physics 1967, Ph.D. Physics 1969

School of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Tara Stoinski, Ph.D.

Ph.D. Psychology 2000

Distinguished Young Scientist Award Recipient

Austin Hope

B.S. Psychology 2014 

College of Sciences Impact Award Recipient

Jeffrey Leddy

B.S. Physics 1978

The Georgia Tech Archives is pleased to announce the recent arrival of the personal papers and collection of John W. Young, a 1952 Georgia Tech graduate and NASA’s longest-serving astronaut. Young was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo, and space shuttle programs. Georgia Tech has described Young as “the most experienced astronaut of all time.”

Susy Young, John Young’s wife, is donating significant materials from his career in accordance with his wishes, helping ensure the materials are preserved and made accessible for research.

The John W. Young collection includes materials related to the U.S. space program, with a strong focus on the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs. The collection includes binders, technical manuals, memoranda, mission reports, training materials, and published scientific volumes, many directly connected to Young’s work as an astronaut.

A large portion of the collection consists of mission-related binders and technical materials from the Apollo program, including flight plans, operational handbooks, and engineering documentation. Several items show signs of use, including annotations, signatures, and other markings. The collection also includes Gemini-era training and simulation materials, along with Space Shuttle documents focused on safety, operations, and program development.

The donation strengthens the Georgia Tech Library’s space history holdings with materials documenting Young’s work across three major NASA programs. The collection will support research, teaching, and public engagement related to NASA history, aerospace engineering, and Georgia Tech’s connections to the space program.

Watch an interview with Archives and Special Collections Manager Alex McGee during the collection’s delivery to the Library Records Center.

The John W. Young collection is currently being processed and will be featured in an upcoming space exhibit planned for Fall 2027.

Through a donation from IBM, Georgia Tech’s Center for Scientific Software Engineering (CSSE) and Open Source Program Office (OSPO) held a fellowship competition for students to work with mentors at CSSE and OSPO to create the tool. Master’s students Adrian Lozada and Di Wu were selected as fellows to work on the project.  

The Mellea Legal Requirements Checker (Mellea-LRC) can quickly identify and accurately verify case law citations, specifically checking for citations that are hallucinated by artificial intelligence (AI). One fellowship goal was to give lawyers and others in the legal field a tool to easily verify legal citations. Mella-LRC does this by using both LLMs and IBM’s Mellea open-source framework to verify and repair LLM prompts.  

The team tested the tool on 26 public court-filing documents containing falsified citations. Mellea-LRC can process a document in about eight minutes. The tool first extracts the case law citations from the legal document. It then verifies that each citation is authentic and supports the document's content.  

“IBM’s Mellea framework was the foundation we built it on. Mellea’s job is to make model calls predictable: you write the rules the output must satisfy as ordinary code, and the framework retries until LLM output meets them. Our job was to leverage the framework to build the legal application from end to end,” Wu said.  

An important aspect of the project was ensuring the tool’s code was open source. The team supported this goal by also creating and releasing a new test and validation dataset on Hugging Face – a popular open-source AI development community – for future benchmarking studies. 

“Agentic AI is growing quickly, and much of the growth happens in open-source projects, where anyone can read, use, and improve the work,” Lozada said.  

OSPO Director and Principal Research Scientist Jeff Young noted that IBM’s Mellea framework was critical to this work in that its “instruct, verify, repair” paradigm allows for the creation of reliable LLM loops as well as the use of small language models (SLMs), such as IBM’s Granite, which can be run on a laptop. 

“This project demonstrates the power of open-source models like IBM Granite as well as the importance of using novel software engineering and algorithmic techniques from the Mellea project to improve the reliability of our existing LLMs and SLMs.  

“Mellea-LRC provides a compelling example of AI’s potential to evolve from a source of error in the legal profession into a trusted ally by helping lawyers work faster and cite precedents more accurately,” Young said.  

by Leonardo Abbrescia, Gong Chen, Ronghua Pan, Andrzej Święch, Tobias Ried, and Chongchun Zeng

From collective decision-making and quantum materials to atmospheric instability, shock waves, and solitary waves, researchers use partial differential equations to uncover the mechanisms behind stability, singularity, and change.

Why does a fluid at rest suddenly begin to overturn? How can a smooth sound wave sharpen into a shock? Why can some nonlinear waves travel long distances without changing shape, while others slowly radiate away? And how can the decisions of millions of interacting individuals be captured mathematically? These questions come from very different parts of science, but they share a common language: partial differential equations, or PDEs.

PDEs appear throughout physics, probability, optimization, geometry, materials science, and engineering. That breadth is reflected in the work of PDE researchers in Georgia Tech's School of Mathematics, whose interests range from optimal control and transport to fluid dynamics and nonlinear waves. What connects this research is not one particular equation or technique. The same fundamental questions appear again and again: What remains stable or becomes unstable? How do local interactions produce large-scale behavior? What happens when smoothness breaks down? And what is the long-time fate of a nonlinear system?

When Classical Solutions are Not Enough

Many nonlinear PDEs can develop solutions that are not smooth enough for the usual definition of a derivative to apply. Andrzej Święch studies equations where this difficulty is central. An important tool in his work is the theory of viscosity solutions, which makes it possible to define and analyze solutions even when classical differentiability is unavailable. Instead of differentiating a nonsmooth solution directly, the theory compares it locally with smooth test functions.

Viscosity solutions have become particularly important in optimal control, where one asks how a system should be steered to minimize a cost or maximize a reward. Święch helped develop the theory of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations in infinite-dimensional spaces associated with optimal control of stochastic PDEs. He also contributed to the theory of L^p-viscosity solutions for equations with merely measurable terms, establishing maximum principles and regularity estimates that extend the theory to much rougher settings, and has worked on nonlocal equations in finite and infinite dimensions.

More recently, his research has focused on Mean Field Games and Mean Field Control, which describe systems containing very large numbers of interacting decision-makers, such as investors, pedestrians, energy consumers, or agents in learning systems. Rather than tracking every agent separately, mean field theory studies the problem for a representative agent, together with the evolution of the entire population distribution based on optimal strategies.

With Wilfrid Gangbo, Święch gave one of the early existence results for the master equation of first-order Mean Field Games. With other collaborators, he established existence and uniqueness of solutions for broad classes of mean field game systems in Hilbert spaces and convergence from finite-particle control problems to limiting equations on spaces of probability measures. Earlier work with Gangbo on multimarginal optimal transport provides a direct bridge to the next theme.

Finding Structure by Zooming In

Optimal transport asks for the most efficient way to transform one distribution of mass into another. One can picture reshaping a pile of sand while paying for every grain moved and every distance traveled. Today this idea connects PDEs with probability, geometry, materials science, statistics, and machine learning. But the optimal transport rule need not be smooth: neighboring particles can sometimes be sent in very different directions, producing singularities in the transport map.

Tobias Ried studies where such spatial singularities can occur. Together with collaborators, Ried uses a scale-by-scale approach: a complicated transport map is compared locally with a simpler harmonic approximation, and then one zooms in. If the approximation improves at smaller scales, the map is smooth there; where it fails, singular behavior may remain. With Gero Friesecke, this led to the first partial regularity result for transport governed by repulsive Coulomb forces, motivated by strongly correlated electrons. Related work studies Wasserstein barycenters - nonlinear averages of probability distributions.

Ried's work also connects with spectral theory, where eigenvalues of Schrödinger operators describe quantum bound states. Ried and collaborators developed a harmonic-analysis method that improved a bound on quantum bound states that had stood for more than forty years, with later work sharpening related estimates. In materials, he has studied magnetic-domain branching and how microscopic disorder influences large-scale patterns.

Across these different problems, the same philosophy appears: complex global structures can sometimes be understood by identifying mechanisms that repeat from scale to scale.

The same search for structure extends from space to evolution in time. In fluid dynamics, for example, one asks how an apparently quiet state becomes unstable - or even singular.

When a Quiet Fluid Becomes Unstable

Warm air rises and dense material sinks, but determining exactly how a fluid becomes unstable can be surprisingly difficult. One of Ronghua Pan's recent research directions is convective instability, the study of how fluids under gravity begin to move vertically. A classical example is the Rayleigh-Taylor instability: if a heavier fluid lies above a lighter one, dense fluid moves downward while lighter fluid rises, eventually producing mixing.

Real fluids and atmospheres, however, also involve temperature and heat diffusion. Once these effects are included, the simple rule "heavy fluid above light fluid is unstable" is no longer enough. This leads to instability criteria involving entropy. In recent work, Pan and Qin gave a nonlinear mathematical justification of such a criterion in a regime without heat diffusion. When diffusion is included, the problem becomes harder; Pan and collaborators have shown that when heat diffusion is sufficiently small, a strengthened entropy condition guarantees instability.

The broader question is one that appears throughout nonlinear PDE: Which mechanism determines the transition from stability to instability? Sometimes instability produces growing motion while the solution remains smooth. In other systems, it continues until smoothness itself breaks down.

When Smooth Waves Become Shocks

The equations of compressible fluids can produce shock waves, rarefactions, and implosions. One of the remarkable facts of fluid dynamics is that a shock - a sudden jump in pressure and density - can emerge from completely smooth initial conditions. In the nineteenth century, Bernhard Riemann showed in one dimension that sound waves can compress until their gradients become infinite. Understanding how a smooth solution reaches this singular state, and how a shock subsequently forms and propagates, is known as the shock development problem.

In multiple spatial dimensions, the problem becomes much more difficult. A major breakthrough came from Demetrios Christodoulou, who gave a geometric description of shock formation for fluids with zero vorticity and constant entropy. Leonardo Abbrescia's work also addresses the more general situation, where vorticity and changing entropy are present. These quantities propagate differently from sound and interact strongly with it near a forming shock.

Abbrescia and Jared Speck developed a framework that controls this nonlinear coupling and tracks the interaction of sound, vorticity, and entropy up to shock formation, substantially broadening the mathematical theory of multidimensional shocks. An important challenge remains: after the first singularity forms, how does a genuine discontinuous shock emerge and continue to propagate? In full generality, this is still open.

Fluid equations therefore illustrate one possible fate of nonlinear waves: gradients grow, energy concentrates, and smoothness fails. Dispersive equations often display the opposite tendency - waves spread apart. Yet even there, nonlinear effects can create remarkably persistent structures.

Waves that Refuse to Disappear

In dispersive wave equations, different frequencies travel at different speeds, so a generic wave tends to spread and weaken in amplitude. Yet many nonlinear dispersive equations also support solitons - localized waves that can travel while largely retaining their shape. One of Gong Chen's research themes is the interaction between dispersion and these coherent structures.

His research combines harmonic analysis, spectral theory, and dynamical systems to investigate whether solitons are stable, how they interact, and what remains after a nonlinear wave evolves for a very long time. A central issue is soliton resolution: the conjecture predicts that a general solution eventually separates into a finite collection of solitons together with radiation that disperses toward infinity.

An important model is the sine-Gordon equation, which has applications ranging from crystal dislocations and Josephson junctions to field theory. In work with Liu and Lu, Chen established soliton resolution for the sine-Gordon equation using its special integrable structure. Later, with Jonas Lührmann, he developed a different approach to studying kink stability based on Fourier analysis and spectral theory, designed to apply beyond integrable models.

A particularly interesting feature of sine-Gordon is the existence of breathers - localized waves that oscillate periodically rather than simply traveling away. Their presence shows that nonlinear waves can store energy in unexpectedly persistent forms. Current work with students and postdoctoral researchers extends these ideas to systems with internal oscillations and to configurations involving multiple solitons and kinks. This leads to a natural question: in more general nonlinear wave systems, are there localized nonlinear waves that can oscillate forever?

When Almost Eternal is Not Eternal

Exact breathers exist in special integrable equations such as sine-Gordon and in some nonlinear Schrödinger models. In more general nonlinear wave equations, however, physicists and mathematicians expect them to be exceptional. The reason is radiation: a localized oscillation can interact weakly with extended wave modes and gradually lose energy. The leakage may be so small that ordinary perturbation theory cannot detect it, yet over very long times an exponentially small effect can determine whether an exact breather exists at all.

Chongchun Zeng's recent work studies precisely these beyond-all-orders effects. The problem can be reformulated in a spatial-dynamics framework. An exact breather corresponds to a so-called homoclinic orbit, an intersection between stable and unstable manifolds in an infinite-dimensional phase space. Even an exponentially small splitting between those manifolds can destroy the breather.

The analysis identifies a Stokes constant that detects this splitting. For generic nonlinearities, it is nonzero, ruling out small exact breathers except possibly in special resonant regimes. The result helps explain why many numerically observed breather-like structures may persist for extremely long times without being truly permanent. Similar exponentially small mechanisms also appear in quantum tunneling, celestial mechanics, and other systems where tiny effects ultimately determine the outcome.

Different Equations, Recurring Questions

There is no single equation that defines this PDE research group. Its members study collective decision-making, optimal transport, quantum bound states, fluid instability, shock formation, solitary waves, and extremely long-lived oscillations. The works above also illustrate the range of mathematical tools involved, from viscosity solutions and harmonic approximation to geometric methods, spectral theory, Fourier analysis, and dynamical systems.

What connects the group is not one equation and not one technique, but a recurring set of mathematical themes. Seen this way, the breadth of PDE is not a collection of unrelated applications: structure, stability, scale, singularity, and long-time dynamics recur across very different parts of science. From populations and probability distributions to electrons, fluids, shocks, and solitary waves, partial differential equations provide a common framework for understanding how complex systems change.

Originally Published October 26, 2026

Summary

Highlights of John's pedagogical approach:
1) Very thoughtful design of lecture content that leads students where they need to go
2) Modeling thought processes necessary to succeed in the class and future
3) Sharing the joy he finds in math
4) Making time for students
5) Providing rapid feedback on assessment
6) Just-in-time review in place of "front-loaded" review

Our October spotlight is on John Etnyre, a Professor in the School of Mathematics who has taught at Georgia Tech for over 20 years. While teaching a range of mathematics courses, he usually teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in geometry and topology. In the past, he has won the Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award and the College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Award. 

Excellence In Design

When I first took on the assistant dean for teaching and learning role, School of Mathematics chair Michael Wolf suggested that I sit in on classes taught by math faculty members to get a better feel for what mathematics education entails. I still recall how much I enjoyed sitting in on John’s class a few years ago, and how excited I was to be able to follow along in a graduate level math course.  This was due solely to John’s excellent design and organization of the lecture. Our conversation after class highlighted how intentional he is in structuring his course, and I am thrilled to pass along his insights in our latest Spotlight

Paying It Forward

I asked John about the impact he hopes his teaching has on students, both during his course and after they leave Georgia Tech.  His response began with recognition of the many great professors he has had and particular emphasis on those who most influenced his approach to teaching, Professors Reed and Gordon.  Reed, John noted, “had an infectious joy for math and life” while Gordon “gave carefully planned lectures that really prepared [him] for [his] career beyond classes”.  John wrote that he aspires to both approaches to teaching, and I attest that he has achieved them. John continued:

I hope students in my course learn (at least) two things that should help them in their future courses and future careers: the course content and the joy of mathematical thinking. Most undergraduate classes are really focused on material needed for future classes in math, science, and engineering. So the most critical thing is making sure that they know the course content when they leave the class and are able to use it in their future classes and careers. The second thing is mathematical thinking, which is also sometimes called mathematical maturity. This can take many forms, but the key is really understanding a problem and understanding whether you have a rigorous solution, an approximate solution, or an intuition about a solution. It is really important that one does not confuse those! To sum it up, I aim to inspire students with the joy of math and the technical skills needed to succeed in their careers.  

To sum it up, I aim to inspire students with the joy of math and the technical skills needed to succeed in their careers.  

Socratic Monologues and Thoughtful Lecture Design

John’s approach to teaching supports student success in many ways.  He noted, “I care a lot about my students and try to develop practices that set them up to succeed, not only in the class, but beyond.” He indicated that there are several very important aspects to student success.  Based on my observation from several years ago, I was unsurprised when John pointed to “carefully prepared lectures to make the material as accessible as possible” as the first of these.  John noted: 

I would love to have a Socratic dialogue in the classroom, but due to the constraints of our system, that is usually not possible. So I like to think of my lectures as a “Socratic monologue.” I spend a lot of time trying to think about the issues a student might have with the material and build that into my lectures. So while I encourage questions and dialogue in my classes, I prepare the lectures so that many of the issues that might come up are dealt with in a natural way. This keeps students engaged and allows the class to cover a good amount of material. 

Making Time for Students and Providing Timely Feedback

John also highlighted the importance of ensuring that students can ask questions and to get timely feedback.  “So I try to make myself available whenever a student needs my help, whether it be through email, office hours, or scheduled meetings,” John wrote. “More generally, making time for students and finding out what their goals in the class and the future are allows me to support them on their journey.

John also tries to grade all his own exams (even for very large courses) so that he can give feedback to students within a day or two while they still recall what they were thinking during the exam.  John shared that he has had many students tell him how much this helped them, and he also uses the approach as a means of understanding what the class is “getting” and what they are struggling with. 

More generally, making time for students and finding out what their goals in the class and the future are allows me to support them on their journey.

Just-in-time review

I asked John how he supports students arriving in his classes with different levels of preparation, and he noted that students in Georgia Tech math classes are much more diverse than those at other universities and their backgrounds can be “wildly different.”  Rather than spending weeks at the start of the term reviewing material from past courses, he builds 15-20 minute mini-reviews into lectures when they are needed in a lecture.  This helps John balance providing review to students who really need it exactly when they can apply the information with keeping students who already are familiar with the content from getting bored.  He notes that he has found that even students with really good backgrounds for the course appreciate the reviews to get focused immediately before application of the content.   

John also writes up some of the background material and posts it to Canvas, noting, “This helps get all the students ready for the material in the class and can help students understand if they are ready for the course, since if the background material is really foreign to a student, then it is clear they should take another class to prepare so that they can succeed.” 

On Soliciting Student Feedback

I asked John what feedback from students has most influenced his teaching.  He responded: 

There is a huge variety of students taking advanced math courses at Georgia Tech; much more so than at most universities. This is due to the incredible engineering and science programs we have. While I find this really improves the classroom experience for everyone, it can sometimes be challenging to keep everyone engaged with the material. Given this, I have started to use carefully structured term papers instead of final exams. 

Noting that this approach is not appropriate for every class, John described how “through a lot of trial and error and student feedback,” he arrived at the current assignment structure, the most important aspect of which, he feels, is a draft turned in a month or so before the final paper that is evaluated by others in the class.  Not only do students receive good feedback on their work, but he also asks them to reflect on their own papers after reading a couple of their classmates’.  “Whether the papers were great or needed improvement, this approach actively engages students and makes them think about their own work in new ways.”  John stated that the papers help students truly engage with the course material and apply it to areas that impact their future success.  

“I am always happy to get student feedback, and this is just one of the ways it has influenced my approach in the classroom.” 

Thank you, John!

NSF has awarded $20 million to renew the National AI Institute for Advances in Optimization (NSF AI4OPT) through 2031 and $18.4 million to renew the National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (NSF AI-ALOE) for a new five-year period. The awards will support research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and optimization, as well as the development of AI technologies for adult learning, higher education, and workforce development. A third Georgia Tech-led National AI Institute, the AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), will continue its research under a one-year no-cost extension.

Together, the institutes represent a broad range of AI research at Georgia Tech, with work spanning energy systems, advanced manufacturing, education, reskilling, and workforce development.

The renewed investments come as NSF continues to prioritize artificial intelligence, advanced research infrastructure, and development of the nation’s STEM workforce.

“Georgia Tech has built a nationally recognized ecosystem for artificial intelligence research, education, and application,” said Tim Lieuwen, interim president and executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. “These NSF investments recognize the strength of our researchers and the importance of advancing AI in ways that address real-world challenges. The continued support for NSF AI4OPT and NSF AI-ALOE will allow Georgia Tech researchers to push the boundaries of what AI can accomplish while preparing students, educators, and the workforce for an increasingly AI-enabled future.”

Advancing AI-Powered Decision-Making

The $20 million renewal of NSF AI4OPT builds on five years of research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and mathematical optimization.

Led by Pascal Van Hentenryck, the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, NSF AI4OPT develops AI and optimization technologies for complex systems where decisions must be made quickly, efficiently, and under uncertainty.

In its next phase, the institute will place greater emphasis on real-time and interactive optimization, advancing scalable, efficient, and trustworthy approaches to decision-making. Research will continue to address challenges in areas such as energy, supply chains, transportation, and advanced manufacturing.

“NSF AI4OPT’s first five years demonstrated the power of bringing AI and optimization together to address some of the most challenging decision-making problems facing society,” said Van Hentenryck. “This renewal gives us the opportunity to build on that foundation and develop AI systems that can reason, optimize, and make decisions in real time. We are especially excited about advancing trustworthy AI for complex systems in energy, supply chains, and manufacturing, while continuing to educate the next generation of AI researchers and practitioners, starting with middle and high schoolers.”

NSF AI4OPT combines artificial intelligence, mathematical optimization, and computing to create systems that support decisions in complex and dynamic environments. Its research includes applications in critical infrastructure and industry, where decisions often involve competing objectives, uncertainty, and rapidly changing conditions.

The institute also has an education and workforce development mission, introducing AI and optimization concepts to students and educators while preparing learners for an AI-enabled workforce.

“NSF AI4OPT represents exactly the kind of interdisciplinary research that Georgia Tech is positioned to lead,” said Raheem Beyah, provost and executive vice president of Academic Affairs at Georgia Tech and former dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “The institute connects foundational advances in artificial intelligence and optimization with engineering challenges that have direct implications for our economy and society. Its continued investment in research and education strengthens Georgia Tech’s ability to prepare students to lead in a rapidly changing technological landscape.”

Advancing Adaptive Expertise Through AI

NSF AI-ALOE’s renewed $18.4 million award launches the institute’s next five years of research into how artificial intelligence can transform adult learning and online education.

The renewal builds on NSF AI-ALOE’s previous work, including the development of seven AI agents and a data architecture for AI-augmented learning. Its next phase will focus on adaptive expertise, or the ability to apply and transfer learned skills to new situations.

AI-ALOE’s research in Phase 2 will expand beyond traditional educational settings into workplace and vocational training, with a focus on occupational skills in areas including advanced manufacturing and data science.

NSF AI-ALOE will also build on advances in generative and agentic AI to develop AI agents that support the acquisition of complex skills across higher education and workplace environments.

“NSF AI-ALOE’s renewal reflects an important shift in how we think about AI and learning,” said Ashok Goel, director of NSF AI-ALOE and professor of computer science and human-centered computing in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. “Our goal is not simply to use AI to deliver more content or automate instruction. We are exploring how AI can help people develop adaptive expertise, so they can transfer what they learn to new and changing situations. That has enormous implications for higher education, workforce development, and lifelong learning.”

The institute’s research will examine four dimensions of AI-supported learning: scalability, personalization, transfer of learned skills, and whole-person learning. It will also advance foundational AI research in machine teaching, metacognition in AI agents, and mutual theory of mind between humans and AI agents.

NSF AI-ALOE will use the data architecture developed in Phase 1 that is capable of ingesting, standardizing, analyzing, and visualizing information generated through interactions with AI tools, learning management systems, and student information systems. Researchers will use that data to better understand how learners and instructors interact with AI and improve AI-powered learning technologies.

The institute is also expanding partnerships with higher education institutions and industry. Its research network includes five colleges and universities and six industry partners in advanced manufacturing and related fields, creating opportunities to reach as many as 370,000 learners nationally through skilling, reskilling, and upskilling efforts.

“AI is changing both what people need to learn and how they can learn it,” said David Joyner, Zvi Galil PEACE Chair in the College of Computing and interim vice provost for AI in Education at Georgia Tech. “NSF AI-ALOE is uniquely positioned to study that transformation at scale. Its work can help us understand how AI can support learners without replacing the human elements of education, while giving people new ways to build and apply skills throughout their lives and careers.”

Continuing AI-CARING’s Research

The renewed support for NSF AI4OPT and NSF AI-ALOE builds on Georgia Tech’s broader participation in the National AI Institutes program.

Georgia Tech’s AI-CARING Institute will continue its research under a one-year no-cost extension, allowing the institute to carry forward its research objectives and partnerships.

The continued work of AI-CARING, alongside the renewed investments in NSF AI4OPT and NSF AI-ALOE, reflects the breadth of Georgia Tech’s AI research community and its work across disciplines.

From AI Research to Real-World Impact

The renewed NSF investments build on Georgia Tech’s broader efforts to advance AI research, education, and application through Georgia Tech AI and Tech AI.

Georgia Tech AI connects Tech’s AI community across research, education, and impact. Tech AI complements this work by serving as Georgia Tech’s engineering and delivery arm, bringing together researchers, engineers, research software engineers, students, and technical expertise to move AI projects from early-stage concepts toward operational systems.

This connection helps create a pathway from foundational research to technologies that can be developed, tested, and deployed in real-world settings.

For NSF AI4OPT, that work includes AI systems that support complex decisions in critical systems and industries, from energy and manufacturing to supply chains and transportation. For NSF AI-ALOE, it includes AI technologies that help people acquire, apply, and transfer skills across classrooms, workplaces, and lifelong learning environments.

Tech AI works at the application and deployment stage, partnering with researchers, industry, and public-sector organizations to develop and implement scalable AI solutions. Its work spans AI engineering and solution delivery, applied research, industry and government partnerships, workforce development, and responsible and trustworthy AI.

“Georgia Tech’s strength in AI comes from the connections between research, talent, and application,” said Timothy M. Brown, managing director of Tech AI. “Our NSF AI Institutes advance research across critical areas, while Tech AI serves as Georgia Tech’s engineering and delivery arm, working with industry and public-sector partners to turn AI expertise and research into deployable solutions. Together, these efforts create a pathway from AI innovation to real-world impact.”

Together with AI-CARING and Georgia Tech’s broader AI research community, the institutes contribute to a universitywide effort to advance AI that is technically innovative, human-centered, and designed for meaningful impact.

“AI is transforming virtually every sector, and Georgia Tech has a responsibility to help shape that transformation,” Lieuwen said. “These institutes bring together some of Tech’s strongest capabilities in research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Their renewed support gives us an opportunity not only to advance the science of AI, but also to ensure that the benefits of these technologies reach the people, organizations, and communities that will rely on them.”

About the Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees, as well as professional development and K-12 programs for fostering success at every stage of life. Its more than 56,000 undergraduate and graduate students represent 54 U.S. states and territories and more than 146 countries. They study at the main campus in Atlanta, at instructional sites around the world, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry and society.

About the National Science Foundation

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports science and technology in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. For more than 75 years, NSF has advanced the frontiers of STEM research and innovation. To keep the United States at the leading edge of discovery, NSF funds basic and solutions-oriented research that generates new knowledge to fuel industries of the future, create world-leading technologies, and improve the lives of the American people.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said, “Hurricane Helene left Georgia growers with damaged timber and exposed weaknesses in their supply chains. With this federal funding, backed by $24 million in private investment, Georgia Tech is exploring how to turn that timber into valuable ag-nutrients and testing ways to keep supply chains moving even when storms hit.” 

The ReGEN Ag project funding is part of a larger initiative, the EDA Fiscal Year 2025 Disaster Supplemental Grant Program. The ReGEN Ag award supports two initiatives that will be implemented over an 18-month period.  

Resilient Routes, headed by SCL, will incorporate modeling with live mapping of critical infrastructure and routes to create cooperative logistics hubs. “For decades, SCL has led applied supply chain research that solves real problems for industry,” said SCL Managing Director Chris Gaffney. “Partnering with RBI on ReGEN Ag lets us put that experience to work for Georgia's forestry sector, building cooperative logistics that connect South Georgia's timber to new, higher-value products and markets.” 

ReWOOD, led by the RBI-associated Center for a Renewables-Based Economy From Wood (ReWOOD) aims to turn low-grade timber and wood waste into value-added chemicals and bioproducts. “The ReWOOD initiative builds on RBI’s tremendous strength in wood-based products to create additional revenue sources for Georgia’s forestry industry by developing processes and products to benefit human and animal health and well-being, including new materials, animal feed, care products, and many other applications,” said Andreas Bommarius, ReWOOD co-director.

Timber and its related industries play a significant role in Georgia’s economy. According to the Georgia Forestry Association, the sector contributes $41.3 billion a year to the state’s economy and supports nearly 144,000 direct and indirect jobs.  

EI² Vice President David Bridges said the ReGEN Ag project complements the unit’s broader commitment to supporting socioeconomic development across the entirety of Georgia.  

“When EI² conducted a listening tour of the state, we heard specifically from timber industry owners and companies in South Georgia about the need for finding and developing value-added products,” Bridges said. “This funding provides a chance to explore some of those pathways, while building resilience and boosting prosperity in the southern part of the state.” 

The award also allows Georgia Tech to work closely with two of its educational partners, South Georgia State College and Wiregrass Georgia Technical College, to build workforce opportunities in forestry, agriculture, biomanufacturing, and supply chain management. 

“EDA’s investment, along with significant private industry and local partner commitments, gives us a real opportunity to help rural communities recover from storms and grow stronger,” said Betsy McGriff, EI² program manager. “We’re grateful to EDA and to the partners across South Georgia who came together to make this possible, and we’re excited to get started.”

Centuries later, Jewish texts can still be found inside book covers in Catalonia. But intact volumes remain much more difficult to investigate without damaging them. Researchers are exploring terahertz imaging, a nonionizing technique that uses electromagnetic radiation between the microwave and infrared regions of the spectrum, to detect writing beneath the surface without taking the binding apart.

A National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research planning award with the Binational Science Foundation supports this research. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor David Citrin and collaborator Leor Jacobi, senior lecturer in Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Jewish Art, will build partnerships with archives in Catalonia and test the technology on historical materials.

Hidden History

The project grew from Citrin’s nearly 10 years of work using terahertz imaging to examine art and archaeological objects, including paper, glass, and ceramics.

Citrin’s team has already tested whether terahertz imaging can distinguish text buried within layers of paper. Previous experiments distinguished iron-gall-ink characters written on opposite sides of a single sheet and on two stacked sheets without separating them. But medieval pasteboard bindings can contain up to 20 recycled sheets, so the researchers still need to determine how well the technique will perform on thicker stacks and on aged, varied historical materials.

“If we could find new texts inside materials, this opens up all kinds of possibilities,” he said.

Imaging the interior is only part of the challenge. Researchers also need to determine which ink traces belong to which surface or layer of paper. That’s where machine learning can help. The team records terahertz measurements across a sample, producing depth-sensitive data. In recent experiments, a convolutional neural network classified whether ink appeared on the front, back, both sides, or neither side of a sheet. Extending that approach to multilayer historical bindings is one of the next steps.

“It’s those two things together, the measurement and the machine learning, that have made this work,” Citrin said.

The researchers don’t necessarily need to decipher every word buried within a binding to determine if it is valuable for further research. Citrin said identifying Hebrew characters, for example, could help researchers flag promising book covers for closer study. Ultimately, the goal is to develop an approach that could be applied across large collections. 

“These bindings are archives within archives,” Jacobi said. “If terahertz imaging lets us identify hidden manuscript fragments without dismantling the binding, we can search collections on a scale that was previously impossible.”

The potential extends beyond these texts. The same approach could also reveal Arabic, Latin, Catalan, and other centuries-old texts preserved in reused materials. Identifying where fragments originated geographically could help historians understand how manuscripts and books traveled, offering insights into mediaeval and early modern intellectual life and trade. Studying the construction of the bindings themselves can also provide useful information for art history and conservation.

For Citrin, that intersection between engineering and history is part of the appeal. He has a longstanding interest in art history and believes projects like this one extend scientific research beyond the laboratory.

“I think it’s important to bridge the gap between the humanities and STEM,” he said. “Humanities questions can push imaging technology toward problems it would not otherwise encounter, while engineering can give scholars access to evidence that has been inaccessible for centuries.”

If the technique ultimately works on historical materials, it could let scholars search for hidden texts without sacrificing the binding relics that preserved them.

In this role, Österholm will provide strategic leadership for IMS faculty engagement, strengthening connections among faculty, IMS-supported centers, programs and initiatives, and partners across Georgia Tech. She will help identify opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, support the development of research initiatives, and ensure faculty perspectives help shape IMS programs and priorities.

Österholm is a principal research scientist with IMS and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She also serves as coordinator of the IMS Graduate Apprenticeship Program. Her research focuses on the structure-property relationships of conjugated organic molecules and polymers, organic electronics, electrochromism, solution processing of polymers, and conjugated polymer electrochemistry.

Österholm has been at Georgia Tech since 2012. She earned a doctorate in analytical electrochemistry from Åbo Akademi University in Finland and has worked in the field of electroactive polymers for two decades. She has contributed to more than 70 research articles, authored two book chapters on electrochromism, and is a co-inventor on six patents involving electrochromic polymers and small molecules.

Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the launch of Foundry School, a national advanced manufacturing education initiative led by Stanford University in partnership with Georgia Tech and six other universities. At Tech, the program will bring industry experts and leaders from advanced manufacturing companies to campus for talks with students about what it takes to build and operate world-class manufacturing enterprises.

The initiative comes as the United States works to expand domestic manufacturing capacity and address a growing need for skilled workers. The State Department estimates American manufacturers will need to fill 3.8 million jobs by 2033 across industries including semiconductors, defense, and energy.

For Tech, that national effort builds on work already underway across the Institute.

Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) recently expanded to 60,000 square feet, creating a next-generation environment where industry, researchers, and students develop, test, and scale advanced manufacturing technologies. The facility is incorporating artificial intelligence, robotics, and connected equipment to accelerate the path from research to production.

“The launch of Foundry School recognizes something we have seen here at Georgia Tech for years: Rebuilding American manufacturing requires more than building factories,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. “It requires the talent, technology, research, and industry partnerships to make those factories successful. Georgia Tech is already bringing those pieces together — helping move technologies from the lab toward production while preparing the people who will drive the next generation of American manufacturing.”

The AMPF is part of a broader Georgia Tech ecosystem that connects research and education with industry and workforce partners, including the Technical College System of Georgia. Georgia Tech also has longstanding relationships with nations participating in the State Department’s Pax Silica initiative.

As manufacturing investment grows in Georgia and across the country, Georgia Tech is helping develop the technology, talent, and partnerships needed to support that growth.

The Georgia Tech community should anticipate increased traffic and temporary road closures near McCamish Pavilion on Monday, Nov. 2, and Friday, Nov. 13. 

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Hip-hop has long used remixing to transform existing sounds, ideas, and cultural influences into something new. At Georgia Tech, that creative practice provides a framework for thinking about innovation across design, education, and technology.

The next CTRL+CM Speaker Series event, Remixing Innovation: How Hip-Hop Shapes Creativity, Design, and Technology, will bring together two Georgia Tech faculty members to explore these connections. The conversation will feature Joycelyn Wilson, an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC), and will be moderated by Professor Susana Morris, also with LMC.

The event will be held Tuesday, Nov. 10, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Scholars Event Theater. It is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided. Registration is required.

Drawing on her book, Hacking Hip Hop: Design Remix Logic in Research, Method, and Practice, Wilson will examine how hip-hop's remix logic can inform creative technology and innovation. The discussion will explore how cultural practices can inspire new approaches to problem-solving, creative expression, and technological development.

Wilson, an educational anthropologist, documentary film producer, and hip-hop scholar, studies the intersections of hip-hop, media, culture, design, technology, and education. Her work examines how community, storytelling, and remix culture can shape how people learn, create, and develop new technologies.

Morris will moderate the conversation, drawing on her scholarship in Black feminism, culture, storytelling, media, and Afrofuturism. She is the author of Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler and a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective. Her work examines how race, gender, literature, and cultural expression shape how people imagine and engage with the future.

Together, Wilson and Morris will explore how cultural knowledge and creative practices can drive innovation and challenge conventional boundaries among the humanities, design, and technology. Their conversation will highlight how understanding the cultural contexts behind creative work can open new possibilities for technological development and problem-solving.

The event is part of the CTRL+CM Speaker Series, an initiative of the Collective Impact of Creative Technology (CICT) program. The series brings perspectives on culture, creativity, and technology into conversation, highlighting the ways interdisciplinary thinking can inform contemporary questions in innovation and design.

Funding from the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation supports the CICT program. Generative AI was used to assist with an initial draft of this article. The author reviewed, revised, and fact-checked the content and is responsible for the final version.

Unlike traditional AI backdoors, which manipulate a model's learned parameters, architectural backdoors hide malicious instructions directly in the code that defines how the model operates.

However, everyday image-processing operations, such as cropping, adjusting contrast, or adding noise, can change a trigger pattern and prevent an attack from working, according to new research from Georgia Tech.

The findings challenge assumptions about how practical these attacks are. Although previous research showed that architectural backdoors could work under controlled conditions, the Georgia Tech team found that existing approaches struggle to remain effective and difficult to detect when AI systems process images under realistic conditions.

“The biggest misconception is that demonstrating an architectural backdoor under controlled conditions means it will actually work in the real world,” said David Oygenblik, Ph.D. student and lead author of the study.

The study details the development of FAULT, a framework for evaluating architectural backdoors under realistic conditions.

The findings reveal a tradeoff. Attackers can make a backdoor more sensitive, so it recognizes its trigger after an image has been changed. But that also increases the chance that ordinary images will accidentally activate the backdoor, potentially hurting the AI system’s performance.

“For the architectural backdoors we study, this tradeoff is fundamental,” Oygenblik said.

The team found that this problem persisted across five methods of implementing architectural backdoors. Even when attackers knew how the system would process images, they struggled to make their attacks both reliable and difficult to detect.

The research did not test attacks against real vehicles or other production systems, nor did it demonstrate outcomes such as crashes or ransomware. Instead, it examined whether existing architectural backdoors could reliably activate under different image-processing conditions.

However, the findings highlight a potential risk in the AI software supply chain. If an attacker inserted malicious code into an AI model used in a real system, the backdoor could potentially cause incorrect predictions when its trigger was detected. The consequences would depend on how the system used the model’s output.

Because architectural backdoors hide in code, examining a model’s learned parameters or retraining it may not be enough to uncover or remove the threat.

Oygenblik said developers should test AI systems under realistic conditions, watch for unexpected drops in accuracy, and examine model code for suspicious trigger-detection logic.

Finding FAULTs in Architectural Backdoors: Why Trigger Detection Fails Under Real-World Conditions, was accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. The authors will present the paper in The Hague in November.

Oygenblik conducted the research with undergraduate students Teja Akella and Tanmay Gupta, Ph.D. student Yizhi Huang, and Associate Professor Brendan Saltaformaggio of Georgia Tech’s Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory. The lab is a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

The conference had three goals: to showcase research by ML@GT's PhD students, to show students what's happening in other labs and fields, and to build more collaboration across the Center.

The program included 12 student presentations across four research themes. More than 20 posters were on display during the poster session. Topics ranged from efficient prediction and protein modeling to brain-computer interfaces, seizure detection, and acoustic perception.

Attendees, including Georgia Tech faculty and students, voted for their favorite presentations and posters. Prizes went to the top three in each category.

Presentation Awards

• 1st Place: Hangyu Zhou, "Learning Computational Structure for Sample-Efficient Prediction" - School of Computer Science, advised by Steve Mussmann
• 2nd Place: Darin Tsui, "Protein Circuit Tracing via Cross-layer Transcoders" - School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, advised by Amirali Aghazadeh
• 3rd Place: Pranav Deevi, "FETTUCCINE: Fast and efficient brain-to-text decoding on mobile devices" - School of Biomedical Engineering, advised by Chethan Pandarinath

Poster Awards

• 1st Place: Hyunju Kim, "Spatiotemporal Hyperedges for EEG Seizure Detection and Prediction" - School of Computational Science and Engineering, advised by Nabil Imam
• 2nd Place: Benjamin Burns, "When, why, and how do diffusion posterior samplers fail? A finite-sample lens" - School of Electiral and Computer Engineering, advised by Sara Fridovich-Keil
• 3rd Place: Tianwei Jiang, "Intelligent Acoustic Perception: From Sound Recognition to Multimodal Spatial Understanding" - School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, advised by David Anderson

The winning projects show the range of machine learning research at Georgia Tech. They include basic work on sample efficiency and generative models as well as applications in neuroscience, healthcare, biology, and audio.

The ML@GT Student Conference gives students a chance to share their research and make connections across the Center. ML@GT congratulates all of this year's presenters and award winners.

This article was drafted with the help of Microsoft Copilot.