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

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

Building AI like a Brain

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

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

Computing Thought & Movement

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

Revealing the Brain’s Spike Patterns

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

Predicting Decisions Through Statistics

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

Modeling the Mind’s Wiring with Math

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

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

“Attending the 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting is both an honor and a responsibility: a chance to represent my academic community which focuses on the study of elusive particles called neutrinos while learning from those who have shaped the field,” says Papadopoulou, who will join Georgia Tech as a School of Physics assistant professor in August 2026. “I hope to come away with a deeper understanding of how transformative ideas emerge and how to cultivate the kind of leadership and vision needed to guide future large-scale scientific efforts that will unravel some of the mysteries of the universe.”

Papadopoulou obtained her Ph.D. in experimental physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As part of her research, she analyzed neutrino data collected by the MicroBooNE detector at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and electron scattering data from the Jefferson Lab in Virginia. 

In 2022, she joined Argonne National Laboratory as a Maria Goeppert Mayer Fellow, continuing her research as a member of the MicroBooNE, Short-Baseline Near Detector, Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, and Jefferson Lab’s Electrons-For-Neutrinos collaborations. Her work focuses on testing the performance of simulation predictions against existing and new neutrino and electron data sets. 

Papadopoulou currently serves as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she is working to better understand neutrino interactions.

Published today in the journal Nature Communications, the paper “Trivalent Titanium in High-Titanium Lunar Ilmenite” confirms titanium in a reduced, trivalent state in a black, metal-rich lunar mineral called ilmenite. It’s a state only possible in low-oxygen environments, conditions researchers refer to as “reducing.”

“Models have suggested that these reducing conditions may have varied at different locations and times across the surface of the Moon,” says lead author Advik Vira, a graduate student in the School of Physics who recently earned his doctoral degree. “We hope our microscopy technique can be a valuable step in mapping and understanding the Moon’s 4.5-billion-year history.”

The team anticipates that their technique could be used on many of the lunar samples collected more than 50 years ago by the Apollo missions in addition to the Apollo Next Generation Samples — a group of lunar samples that have been stored under pristine conditions — and new samples from the planned Artemis missions, with Artemis II slated for launch this spring. The technique might also be applicable to samples collected from the far side of the Moon and returned in 2024 by the Chang’e-6 mission.

“The Moon holds clues not only to its own past, but also to the earliest eras of Earth’s evolution — history that has long since been erased from our planet,” Vira says. “This study is a step toward understanding the history of both and a reminder that there is still so much left to learn from the lunar rocks we’ve brought back to Earth.”

The School of Physics research team included corresponding authors Vira and Professor Phillip First; in addition to graduate student Roshan Trivedi; undergraduate students Gabriella Dotson, Keyes Eames, Dean Kim, and Emma Livernois; and Professor Zhigang Jiang, along with Institute for Matter and Systems Materials Characterization Facility Senior Research Scientist Mengkun Tian; School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Senior Research Scientist Brant Jones and Thom Orlando, Regents' Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry with a joint appointment in the School of Physics. 

The Georgia Tech team was joined by Addis Energy Senior Geochemist Katherine Burgess; Macalester College Assistant Professor of Geology Emily First; along with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Research Scientist Harrison Lisabeth, Senior Scientist Nobumichi Tamura, and Postdoctoral Fellow Tyler Farr, who recently earned a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

CLEVER research

The investigation began with a dark gray rock called a lunar basalt. Formed when ancient magma erupted on the Moon’s surface, minerals crystallized as it cooled — preserving key information in their structures. Billions of years later, the rock was brought to Earth by the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, where a small piece is now stored at Georgia Tech’s Center for Lunar Environment and Volatile Exploration Research (CLEVER), a NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) center led by Orlando.

As a NASA virtual institute, CLEVER supports researchers exploring lunar conditions and developing tools for the upcoming crewed Artemis missions, and provided the lunar samples for this research. The SSERVI also plays a critical role in training the next generation of planetary researchers: both Vira and Farr earned their Ph.D.s while on the CLEVER team.

“At CLEVER, we are very interested in understanding the impacts of space weathering,” Vira says. “We implemented modern sample preparation and advanced microscopy techniques to image samples at the atomic level, and were curious to apply it more broadly to the collection of Apollo rocks in the Orlando Lab. This sample caught our attention.”

“When we imaged an ilmenite crystal from the lunar basalt, what struck us first was how uniform and perfect the crystal structure was,” he recalls. “We found no defects from space weathering and instead saw an undamaged, pristine crystal — undisturbed for 3.8 billion years.”

To investigate further, the team analyzed small chips of the rock with Burgess, a member of the RISE2 SSERVI team and then a geologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Using state-of-the-art electron microscopy and spectroscopy techniques, Vira determined the oxidation state of the elements in the ilmenite present. 

In spectroscopy measurements, each element leaves a distinct ‘signature,’ Vira explains. “When we brought our results back to Georgia Tech’s Materials Characterization Facility, Mengkun (Tian) noticed something unusual: the signature showed titanium might be present in the trivalent state.”

The presence of trivalent titanium had long been suspected in this lunar mineral. The team was intrigued. 

A new window into old rocks

With funding from Georgia Tech’s Center for Space Technology and Research (CSTAR), Vira returned to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to analyze additional samples. The results confirmed that more titanium was present than the mineral’s formula (FeTiO₃) predicts — indicating a portion of the titanium present was trivalent.

“That led me to place our measurements in terms of the broader geological context,” Vira shares. Working with First, Vira explored how ilmenite with trivalent titanium could help reconstruct the nature of ancient magmas from the Moon, especially the chemical availability of oxygen.

“Because its location on the Moon was noted during the Apollo mission, we know exactly where this rock is from, and we can determine how old the rock is,” he explains. “When coupled with our trivalent titanium measurements, we can use that information to estimate the reducing conditions for this specific region at the specific time our rock formed.”

If the upcoming Artemis missions return samples suitable for the team’s technique, these rocks could provide a new window into ancient lunar geology. The research also highlights that many lunar samples already on Earth could be reexamined to look for trivalent titanium.

“There is still so much to learn from the lunar samples we have already brought to Earth,” Vira says. “It’s a testament to the long-term value of each sample return mission. As technology continues to advance, this type of work will continue to give us critical insights into our planet and our place in the universe for years to come.”

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-69770-w

Funding: This work was directly supported by the NASA SSERVI under CLEVER. Researchers were also supported by the NASA RISE2 SSERVI and the Heising-Simons Foundation. Funding for collaborations between the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Georgia Tech for the investigation of lunar minerals was provided by the Georgia Tech Center for Space Technology and Research. Sample preparation was performed at the Georgia Tech Institute for Matter and Systems, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. This work utilized the resources of the Advanced Light Source, a user facility supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, and was supported in part by previous breakthroughs obtained through the Laboratory Direct.

Applying the Scheimpflug technique, the researchers are developing inexpensive rangefinder camera technology, advanced sensors and computational techniques to both complement and provide an alternative to established light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology in certain applications. The technique works best in short- and medium-distance metrology, and can be used passively or in collaboration with laser-based techniques.
 

“The Scheimpflug technique is a complete alternative to time-of-flight (ToF) LiDAR, and we’re looking for everything we can do with it,” said Nathan Meraz, a GTRI senior research scientist who has been refining the new applications for several years. “It measures things differently, and since it’s a camera sensor, there’s a lot more information to process compared to a LiDAR signal. And there are also data fusion aspects.”
 

A paper on the technique and its potential remote sensing applications was presented during 2025 at the SPIE Defense + Commercial Systems (DCS) Conference. The research was supported by GTRI’s Independent Research and Development (IRAD) program and also has been advanced by teams of student researchers from the GTRI Research Internship Program (GRIP).

See the complete article on the GTRI news site
 

“Since I was a student, APS has been my professional home  — hosting my first conference talk and networking opportunity, publishing my first paper, and offering me mentoring over the years,” says Cadonati, who is a member of Georgia Tech’s Center for Relativistic Astrophysics. “Serving on the APS Board of Directors now is a privilege and an opportunity to amplify the voices of physicists at every career stage.”

Cadonati’s primary research interests include gravitational wave and particle astrophysics. Since 2002, she has been a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration. Cadonati has held several leadership roles with LIGO, including heading its data analysis and astrophysics division during the discovery of gravitational waves — a breakthrough which led to the project's founders receiving the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

Previously, she was a member of the Borexino Collaboration, focused on solar neutrino detection, and the DarkSide Collaboration, centered on the direct detection of dark matter.

Cadonati earned her Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University and completed postdoctoral research at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining Georgia Tech in 2015, she was an associate professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her honors include an APS Fellowship, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Atlantic Coast Conference Academic Consortium Distinguished Lecturer Award, Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Faculty Research Author Award, and the Technische Universität München Institute for Advanced Study Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship, which was awarded in 2025.

The Department of Energy Office of Science recently released two reports through its Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program. The reports were produced by workshops that brought together researchers from universities, national labs, government, and industry to set priorities for scientific computing.

Professor Felix Herrmann served on the organizing committee for the Workshop on Inverse Methods for Complex Systems under Uncertainty. Assistant Professor Peng Chen joined Herrmann as a workshop participant, contributing expertise in data science and machine learning.

Inverse methods work backward from outcomes to find their causes. Scientists use these tools to study complex systems, like designing new materials with targeted properties and using past wildfires to map vulnerable areas and behavior of future fires.

The ASCR report highlighted Herrmann’s work on seismic exploration and monitoring through digital twins. Founded on inverse methods, digital twins upgrade from static models to virtual systems that accurately mirror their physical counterparts. 

Digital twins integrate real-time data sources, including fluid flows, monitoring and control systems, risk assessments, and human decisions. These models also account for uncertainty and address data gaps or limitations. 

The DOE organized the workshop to support the growing role of inverse modeling. The group identified four priority research directions (PRDs) to guide future work. The PRDs are:

• PRD 1: Discovering, exploiting, and preserving structure
• PRD 2: Identifying and overcoming model limitations
• PRD 3: Integrating disparate multimodal and/or dynamic data
• PRD 4: Solving goal-oriented inverse problems for downstream tasks

“A digital twin is a system you can control, like to optimize operations or to minimize risk,” said Herrmann, who holds joint appointments in the Schools of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computational Science and Engineering.

“Digital twins give you a principled way to consider uncertainties, which there are a lot in subsurface monitoring. If you inject carbon dioxide too fast, you will will increase the pressure and may fracture the rock. If you inject too slow, then the process may become too costly. Digital twins help us make balanced decisions under uncertainty.”

Supercomputers, algorithms, and artificial intelligence now power modern science. However, these tools consume enormous amounts of energy. This raises concerns about how to sustain computing and scientific research as we know them in the decades ahead.

Professors Rich Vuduc and Hyesoon Kim co-authored the report from the Workshop on Energy-Efficient Computing for Science. At the three-day ASCR workshop, participants identified five key research directions:

• PRD 1: Co-design energy-efficient hardware devices and architectures for important workloads
• PRD 2: Define the algorithmic foundations of energy-efficient scientific computing
• PRD 3: Reconceptualize software ecosystems for energy efficiency
• PRD 4: Enable energy-efficient data management for data centers, instruments, and users
• PRD 5: Develop integrated, scalable energy measurement and modeling capabilities for next-generation computing systems

“I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of energy-efficient computing. The ASCR report says, from a technological point of view, there are things we can do,” said Vuduc.

“The report lays out paths for how we might design better apps, hardware systems, and algorithms that will use less energy. This is recognition that we should think about how architectures and software work together to drive down energy usage for systems.”

“This year’s class is a truly impressive cohort,” said Paul R. Sanberg, FNAI, president of NAI. “I commend them on their incredible pursuits, and I’m honored to welcome them to the Academy.”

Recognizing NAI Senior Member Chandra S. Raman

Raman is a physicist, inventor, and technology entrepreneur whose work is helping shape the future of quantum sensing. As the Dunn Family Professor of Physics, he studies how atoms behave at extremely low temperatures and uses that knowledge to build new kinds of ultra-precise measurement devices.

Best known for the co-invention of chip‑scale atomic beam technology — a breakthrough that makes it possible to build tiny quantum sensors for navigation and timing — Raman and his team’s patented devices can operate where GPS fails. These inventions form the foundation for a new generation of manufactured quantum hardware, offering new capabilities for autonomous vehicles, aerospace systems, and national security.

To bring these technologies from the lab to real-world use, he founded 8Seven8, Inc.:

“By launching 8Seven8 as the first quantum hardware company in Georgia, we are creating high-tech jobs, building a skilled workforce pipeline, and seeding a quantum ecosystem in the Southeast that will see lasting economic benefits,” explains Raman. “We seek to establish the region as a player in the rapidly expanding quantum technology economy.”

He is the principal investigator for the Raman Lab, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a frequent invited speaker at international conferences, and an advisor to national and space-based quantum initiatives. Raman holds six patents, including three issued U.S. patents and two licensed patents. Through his research, mentorship, and entrepreneurial leadership, he is working to advance scientific discovery and the development of practical technologies with lasting impact.

“This award is the culmination of years of effort in developing innovative approaches to bringing quantum sensing out of the lab,” says Raman. “The NAI is chock-full of wonderful inventors, and I am privileged to be among them. Through this award, I hope to bring useful inventions out of the lab and promote Georgia as a great place to be an entrepreneur.”

Recognizing NAI Senior Member Jason Azoulay

Azoulay is the Georgia Research Alliance Vasser-Woolley Distinguished Investigator in Optoelectronics and the principal investigator for the Azoulay Group. His research has pioneered the development of new classes of functional materials and made field-leading advancements in core areas spanning:

· Homogeneous catalysis applied to polymer synthesis

· Electronic, photonic, spin, magnetic, and quantum materials

· Device fabrication and engineering

· Chemical sensing for environmental monitoring

· Synthesis, application, and engineering of high-performance polymers across multiple technology platforms.

Azoulay has demonstrated new classes of organic semiconductors with infrared functionality by exploiting new light-matter interactions, analyzing emergent transport phenomena, and understanding device physics, functionality, and engineering considerations. His work has resulted in nine issued patents and many additional applications.

Additionally, he is the principal investigator for two multi-million-dollar National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. The first grant harnesses an underused part of the electromagnetic spectrum for energy sensing, manufacturing, and more. His team creates organic polymers that can efficiently convert infrared radiation into electrical signals and develop the materials into functional devices. The initiative is the NSF’s principal vehicle to continue the momentum of the decade-long Materials Genome Initiative and takes advantage of the power of machine learning and chemical synthesis to develop new functional materials.

The second NSF-funded program develops CP-based optical and electrical sensing platforms that operate in complex aqueous environments and enable the detection and discrimination of challenging analytes known to negatively impact human, biota, and ecosystem health.

Azoulay holds a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and leads Georgia Tech’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics (COPE). COPE-affiliated faculty create flexible organic photonic and electronic materials and devices that serve the information technology, telecommunications, energy, and defense sectors.

Historically, most engineers believed the former, using heterogeneities, or differences, in materials to make materials stronger and more resilient. However, research from Georgia Tech is showing that, in some cases, heterogeneities make materials weaker and can even accelerate cracks. 

Led by School of Physics Assistant Professor Itamar Kolvin, the study, “Dual Role for Heterogeneity in Dynamic Fracture,” was published in Physical Review Letters this fall. 

While Kolvin’s work is theoretical, the results of the research are widely applicable. “Predicting this type of toughening effect helps engineers decide how much reinforcement to add to a material, and the best way to do so,” he says. “Cracks are complex — they interact with the material, change shape, and respond dynamically. All of this affects the overall toughness, which impacts safety.”

Building Strong Materials

The study found that the key to crack behavior starts at the microscopic level where the material’s microscopic structure influences how it resists cracks running at different speeds.

“Cracks propagate by breaking bonds, and that costs energy,” he explains. “On top of this, materials experience extreme deformations close to where the crack runs, which costs additional energy. In some materials, the amount of this energy cost can depend on the crack’s speed because of microscopic friction between molecules.”

Other materials, like window glass, are mostly indifferent to the crack speed. These materials are made of simple molecules, allowing a crack to propagate slowly or quickly using the same amount of energy. The researchers found that including heterogeneities can help strengthen these materials.

Materials made of more complex molecules, like polymer plastics and gels, on the other hand, are velocity dependent: it takes more energy for a crack to propagate faster. In these materials, heterogeneities are less effective at toughening, and if the crack is fast enough, heterogeneities could help it advance. “That’s something we didn’t expect when we started,” Kolvin says.

Disorder Versus Design

After discovering which types of materials can benefit from heterogeneities, Kolvin wanted to investigate the best way to add them. “Natural materials like rocks are usually very messy and disordered,” he explains, “but in engineering, heterogenous materials tend to be patterned.” For example, imagine a manufactured material: heterogeneities may be added in a grid-like or other patterned way. Now, contrast that with the irregular freckles and inclusions you might see in a rock found in a streambed.

Kolvin’s question was simple: which material was stronger? The results, again, were surprising. The disordered case — similar to what is found in nature — created the toughest material. 

Among the patterned materials the team tested, only one was as tough as the disordered case — and every other pattern tested made the material weaker.

From Lab to Landscape

At Georgia Tech, Kolvin’s lab focuses on the mechanics of materials — both solid and fluid. “We are using our expertise in physics to explore questions across different fields,” he says. “A common concept is treating materials as continua — zooming out from molecular detail to look at how materials deform and flow at the large scale.”

This current research follows suit with applications ranging from investigating the smallest material microstructures to predicting earthquake fractures. “Earthquake faults are highly disordered, and simulating these ruptures is a major challenge, usually requiring supercomputers to solve crack propagation in three dimensions,” Kolvin says. “But with the tools our study has developed, we can simulate similar conditions and large systems using just a desktop computer.”

“This opens the doors for scientists, engineers, physicists, and geologists to explore problems right from their own computer, allowing more researchers access to more tools,” he adds. “And new tools often lead to new discoveries.”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/j4vb-y1ng

"The IOP has a long and distinguished history as the primary learned society and professional body for physicists in the U.K., Ireland, and beyond,” says Kamerlin, who completed both a Master of Natural Sciences and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Organic Chemistry from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. “As a society, it plays an important role in building community, promoting science, advancing advocacy for our discipline, and supporting the next generation of physicists.”

Kamerlin joins a list of distinguished Fellows that includes legendary physicists such as Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a preeminent astrophysicist responsible for the discovery of pulsars (a previously unknown type of star) and the first female president of the IOP.

“It is a great honor to be awarded Fellowship of the IOP, particularly as women more broadly remain vastly underrepresented in physics,” Kamerlin says. “I look forward to giving back to the physics community, supporting the mission of the society, and working to remind the next generation that physics is for everyone."

About Lynn Kamerlin

Kamerlin’s research in computational biophysics is at the intersection of chemistry and biology, where she focuses on investigating fundamental physical chemistry and using computational tools to understand complex biomolecular problems. Currently, she is interested in leveraging machine learning tools to design new enzymes and in predicting protein structures and behaviors using large language models.

In addition to her roles at Georgia Tech, Kamerlin is a senior editor of Protein Science, the editor-in-chief of Electronic Structure, and was named a 2025-27 visiting professor at Lund University. She was also named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, received the 2026 Inspiration and Resilience Award from the Biochemical Society, and was the 2023 Biophysical Society Theory & Computation Subgroup Mid-Career Award Winner.

“The Sloan Research Fellows are among the most promising early-career researchers in the U.S. and Canada, already driving meaningful progress in their respective disciplines,” says Stacie Bloom, president and chief executive officer of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how these exceptional scholars continue to unlock new scientific advancements, redefine their fields, and foster the wellbeing and knowledge of all.”

"This is a wonderful and welcome surprise that will support my ongoing research on mountains across the globe,” says Freeman. “It's a vote of confidence and will let me get out there and get to work."

Freeman is one of 126 scientists selected this year for the honor and will receive a two-year $75,000 grant of flexible funding to support his research.

He joins the ranks of nearly 50 faculty from Georgia Tech who have received Sloan Research Fellowships, including School of Mathematics’ Alex Blumenthal in 2024, Hannah Choi in 2022, Yao Yao in 2020, Konstantin Tikhomirov in 2019, Lutz Warnke in 2018, Zaher Hani in 2016, Jen Hom in 2015, and Greg Blekherman in 2012; School of Chemistry and Biochemistry's Vinayak Agarwal in 2018; School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences' Christopher Reinhard in 2015; and School of Physics’ Chunhui (Rita) Du in 2024 and Tamara Bogdanović in 2013. 

Freeman joined the Institute in 2023 and was also recently named a 2024 Packard Fellow by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and 2025 Early Career Fellow by the Ecological Society of America.

Understanding the ‘escalator to extinction’

Known for his groundbreaking research in climate change and bird ecology, Freeman studies birds worldwide from Appalachia to Ecuador. He specializes in tropical populations where his work is centered on understanding how mountain species respond to a changing climate — and how to facilitate their survival. 

“Tropical mountains are some of Earth’s largest biodiversity hotspots; they harbor an extraordinary number of species,” shares Freeman. “Additionally, tropical mountain birds are particularly sensitive to environmental change, so they can serve as an early warning system for global conservation efforts.”

Previously, his research has shown that some species are on an ‘escalator to extinction’ with vulnerable groups moving to higher elevations to escape warming temperatures. At the top of the escalator, some summit-dwelling species are disappearing. 

“We know that many species are on this escalator,” Freeman says. “The next step is to figure out which species are most vulnerable and why. In order to direct conservation efforts, we need to know who is vulnerable, why small increases in temperature have dramatic effects, and what can be done to help.”

A worldwide early warning system

To uncover those answers, Freeman is taking two approaches: mapping global patterns with big picture data and conducting on-the-ground research in the tropics.

To target the former, he created the Mountain Bird Network, which supports community scientists in conducting bird surveys on their local mountains. The goal is to create a system that allows researchers to diagnose vulnerable species before they are too sparse to save.

“When a species is in trouble, we need to know as soon as possible,” Freeman says. “Once a population is small enough to be at risk of extinction, it’s very hard to reverse that process. The Mountain Bird Network collects data on mountain bird abundances and distributions across the globe, which, when used with data from a global citizen science program called eBird, can be leveraged to build models to identify which species might be vulnerable before those populations become critically small.”

A living lab on Tech Mountain

Freeman’s other avenue of research involves building an ambitious living laboratory in Pinchincha, Ecuador. The research site will span thousands of meters along the flanks of a local mountain, spanning lowland rainforest, foothill rainforest, and cloud forest ecosystems.

“The mountain is home to thousands of birds from hundreds of species,” Freeman says. “My goal is to track and understand their daily lives — and how climate changes impact them.”

Using cutting-edge tracking technology, he will tag and monitor their daily movements, mapping those against microclimate sensors placed at different elevations along the mountain’s slopes. The challenge of placing and maintaining thousands of tiny sensors in rugged conditions means that it has never been done before.

“We’ll track these birds for at least five years –- but hopefully for decades,” Freeman says. “The data we gather at Tech Mountain will be the first of its kind, and my hope is that it makes a real difference in conservation efforts worldwide.”

 “What is happening within the field is revolutionary,” says School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Associate Chair and Professor Annalisa Bracco, adding that because many climate-related processes — from ocean currents to melting glaciers and weather patterns — can be described with physical equations, these advancements have the potential to help us understand and predict climate in critically important ways. 

Bracco is the lead author of a new review paper providing a comprehensive look at the intersection of AI and climate physics.

The result of an international collaboration between Georgia Tech’s Bracco, Julien Brajard (Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center), Henk A. Dijkstra (Utrecht University), Pedram Hassanzadeh (University of Chicago), Christian Lessig (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts), and Claire Monteleoni (University of Colorado Boulder), the paper, ‘Machine learning for the physics of climate,’ was recently published in Nature Reviews Physics. 

“One of our team’s goals was to help people think deeply on how climate science and AI intersect,” Bracco shares. “Machine learning is allowing us to study the physics of climate in a way that was previously impossible. Coupled with increasing amounts of data and observations, we can now investigate climate at scales and resolutions we’ve never been able to before.”

Connecting hidden dots

The team showed that ML is driving change in three key areas: accounting for missing observational data, creating more robust climate models, and enhancing predictions, especially in weather forecasting. However, the research also underscores the limits of AI — and how researchers can work to fill those gaps.

“Machine learning has been fantastic in allowing us to expand the time and the spatial scales for which we have measurements,” says Bracco, explaining that ML could help fill in missing data points — creating a more robust record for researchers to reference. However, like patching a hole in a shirt, this works best when the rest of the material is intact.

“Machine learning can extrapolate from past conditions when observations are abundant, but it can’t yet predict future trends or collect the data we need,” Bracco adds. “To keep advancing, we need scientists who can determine what data we need, collect that data, and solve problems.”

Modeling climate, predicting weather

Machine learning is often used when improving climate models that can simulate changing systems like our atmosphere, oceans, land, biochemistry, and ice. “These models are limited because of our computing power, and are run on a three-dimensional grid,” Bracco explains: below the grid resolution, researchers need to approximate complex physics with simpler equations that computers can solve quickly, a process called ‘parameterization’.

Machine learning is changing that, offering new ways to improve parameterizations, she says. “We can run a model at extremely high resolutions for a short time, so that we don’t need to parameterize as many physical processes — using machine learning to derive the equations that best approximate what is happening at small scales,” she explains. “Then we can use those equations in a coarser model that we can run for hundreds of years.”

While a full climate model based solely on machine learning may remain out of reach, the team found that ML is advancing our ability to accurately predict weather systems and some climate phenomena like El Niño. 

Previously, weather prediction was based on knowing the starting conditions — like temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure — and running a model based on physics equations to predict what might happen next. Now, machine learning is giving researchers the opportunity to learn from the past. “We can use information on what has happened when there were similar starting conditions in previous situations to predict the future without solving the underlying governing equations,” Bracco says. “And all while using orders-of-magnitude less computing resources.”

The human connection

Bracco emphasizes that while AI and ML play a critical role in accelerating research, humans are at the core of progress. “I think the in-person collaboration that led to this paper is, in itself, a testament to the importance of human interaction,” she says, recalling that the research was the result of a workshop organized at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics — one of the team’s first in-person discussions after the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Machine learning is a fantastic tool — but it's not the solution to everything,” she adds. “There is also a real need for human researchers collecting high-quality data, and for interdisciplinary collaboration across fields. I see this as a big challenge, but a great opportunity for computer scientists and physicists, mathematicians, biologists, and chemists to work together.”

Funding: National Science Foundation, European Research Council, Office of Naval Research, US Department of Energy, European Space Agency, Choose France Chair in AI.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00776-3

Students and faculty from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) are leading the Georgia Tech contingent at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE25). The Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) organizes CSE25, occurring March 3-7 in Fort Worth, Texas.

At CSE25, the School of CSE researchers are presenting papers that apply computing approaches to varying fields, including:                   

• Experiment designs to accelerate the discovery of material properties
• Machine learning approaches to model and predict weather forecasting and coastal flooding
• Virtual models that replicate subsurface geological formations used to store captured carbon dioxide
• Optimizing systems for imaging and optical chemistry
• Plasma physics during nuclear fusion reactions

[Related: GT CSE at SIAM CSE25 Interactive Graphic] 

“In CSE, researchers from different disciplines work together to develop new computational methods that we could not have developed alone,” said School of CSE Professor Edmond Chow. 

“These methods enable new science and engineering to be performed using computation.” 

CSE is a discipline dedicated to advancing computational techniques to study and analyze scientific and engineering systems. CSE complements theory and experimentation as modes of scientific discovery. 

Held every other year, CSE25 is the primary conference for the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering (SIAG CSE). School of CSE faculty serve in key roles in leading the group and preparing for the conference.

In December, SIAG CSE members elected Chow to a two-year term as the group’s vice chair. This election comes after Chow completed a term as the SIAG CSE program director. 

School of CSE Associate Professor Elizabeth Cherry has co-chaired the CSE25 organizing committee since the last conference in 2023. Later that year, SIAM members reelected Cherry to a second, three-year term as a council member at large. 

At Georgia Tech, Chow serves as the associate chair of the School of CSE. Cherry, who recently became the associate dean for graduate education of the College of Computing, continues as the director of CSE programs. 

“With our strong emphasis on developing and applying computational tools and techniques to solve real-world problems, researchers in the School of CSE are well positioned to serve as leaders in computational science and engineering both within Georgia Tech and in the broader professional community,” Cherry said. 

Georgia Tech’s School of CSE was first organized as a division in 2005, becoming one of the world’s first academic departments devoted to the discipline. The division reorganized as a school in 2010 after establishing the flagship CSE Ph.D. and M.S. programs, hiring nine faculty members, and attaining substantial research funding.

Ten School of CSE faculty members are presenting research at CSE25, representing one-third of the School’s faculty body. Of the 23 accepted papers written by Georgia Tech researchers, 15 originate from School of CSE authors.

The list of School of CSE researchers, paper titles, and abstracts includes:
Bayesian Optimal Design Accelerates Discovery of Material Properties from Bubble Dynamics
Postdoctoral Fellow Tianyi Chu, Joseph Beckett, Bachir Abeid, and Jonathan Estrada (University of Michigan), Assistant Professor Spencer Bryngelson
[Abstract]

Latent-EnSF: A Latent Ensemble Score Filter for High-Dimensional Data Assimilation with Sparse Observation Data
Ph.D. student Phillip Si, Assistant Professor Peng Chen
[Abstract]

A Goal-Oriented Quadratic Latent Dynamic Network Surrogate Model for Parameterized Systems
Yuhang Li, Stefan Henneking, Omar Ghattas (University of Texas at Austin), Assistant Professor Peng Chen
[Abstract]

Posterior Covariance Structures in Gaussian Processes
Yuanzhe Xi (Emory University), Difeng Cai (Southern Methodist University), Professor Edmond Chow
[Abstract]

Robust Digital Twin for Geological Carbon Storage
Professor Felix Herrmann, Ph.D. student Abhinav Gahlot, alumnus Rafael Orozco (Ph.D. CSE-CSE 2024), alumnus Ziyi (Francis) Yin (Ph.D. CSE-CSE 2024), and Ph.D. candidate Grant Bruer
[Abstract]

Industry-Scale Uncertainty-Aware Full Waveform Inference with Generative Models
Rafael Orozco, Ph.D. student Tuna Erdinc, alumnus Mathias Louboutin (Ph.D. CS-CSE 2020), and Professor Felix Herrmann
[Abstract]

Optimizing Coupled Systems: Insights from Co-Design Imaging and Optical Chemistry
Assistant Professor Raphaël Pestourie, Wenchao Ma and Steven Johnson (MIT), Lu Lu (Yale University), Zin Lin (Virginia Tech)
[Abstract]

Multifidelity Linear Regression for Scientific Machine Learning from Scarce Data
Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian, Ph.D. student Dayoung Kang, Vignesh Sella, Anirban Chaudhuri and Anirban Chaudhuri (University of Texas at Austin)
[Abstract]

LyapInf: Data-Driven Estimation of Stability Guarantees for Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
Ph.D. candidate Tomoki Koike and Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian
[Abstract]

The Information Geometric Regularization of the Euler Equation
Alumnus Ruijia Cao (B.S. CS 2024), Assistant Professor Florian Schäfer
[Abstract]

Maximum Likelihood Discretization of the Transport Equation
Ph.D. student Brook Eyob, Assistant Professor Florian Schäfer
[Abstract]

Intelligent Attractors for Singularly Perturbed Dynamical Systems
Daniel A. Serino (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Allen Alvarez Loya (University of Colorado Boulder), Joshua W. Burby, Ioannis G. Kevrekidis (Johns Hopkins University), Assistant Professor Qi Tang (Session Co-Organizer)
[Abstract]

Accurate Discretizations and Efficient AMG Solvers for Extremely Anisotropic Diffusion Via Hyperbolic Operators
Golo Wimmer, Ben Southworth, Xianzhu Tang (LANL), Assistant Professor Qi Tang 
[Abstract]

Randomized Linear Algebra for Problems in Graph Analytics
Professor Rich Vuduc
[Abstract]

Improving Spgemm Performance Through Reordering and Cluster-Wise Computation
Assistant Professor Helen Xu
[Abstract]

Busy with her career and family, DeWitt tucked the idea away — until she stepped back from the professional world and knew it was time to pursue keeping bees. She enrolled in a one-day beekeeping class that was offered by the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association. From there, DeWitt learned the fundamentals, purchased her first honey bees, and began the fascinating — and sometimes mystifying — work of caring for them in her backyard. 

Like many new beekeepers, she faced steep challenges: sick bees, failing colonies, secondary pests, and ensuring her hives had enough resources to survive winter. But DeWitt says that she also discovered how remarkably generous and supportive the beekeeping community is. She connected with mentors and attended local bee club meetings and state conferences where researchers shared their latest findings. Beekeeping became meaningful in ways she had never anticipated.

“I fell in love with honey bees and all things related. There is an innate spirituality in keeping bees,” she says. “Once I put the veil on, life slows to a standstill and becomes a walking meditation into a delicately complex and endlessly fascinating world.”

Her marketing background came full circle too. “Like any creative endeavor, beekeepers must be keenly observant,” DeWitt explains. “We have to think outside the box, pivot quickly, anticipate problems, and plan ahead.”

As her colony numbers grew, so did her reach. DeWitt established apiaries at several metro Atlanta schools and at sites in Chattahoochee Hills, Grant Park, Brookhaven, Arabia Mountain, and Brevard, North Carolina. Along the way, she earned her Master Beekeeper certification from Cornell University, served as the central regional director for the Georgia Beekeepers Association, taught beekeeping to incarcerated individuals through the Georgia Department of Corrections, and partnered with tree companies to rescue wild honey bee colonies living in trees slated for removal.

Serving as the Beekeeper in Residence

This breadth of experience prepared her for a unique opportunity: becoming Georgia Tech’s 2025 Beekeeper in Residence with the Urban Honey Bee Project. The one-year residency, DeWitt says, offered “a rare opportunity to be part of the Georgia Tech community,” allowing her to explore new ideas in beekeeping while tending to and expanding the rooftop hives at The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design.

The Urban Honey Bee Project, an interdisciplinary initiative of Georgia Tech’s College of Sciences and Office of Sustainability, established the Beekeeper in Residence program to maintain colonies at The Kendeda Building and in the EcoCommons, mentor student beekeepers, and enrich the program with diverse expertise.

“Deb did so much this year — working closely with the Beekeeping Club, keeping our hives healthy, and even rehoming a wild hive from a dead tree on campus,” says Jennifer Leavey, assistant dean for faculty mentoring in the College of Sciences and director of the Urban Honey Bee Project. “Most importantly, Deb showed our students how an expert beekeeper approaches hive care. She took every opportunity to include them, and it made a real impact.”

Georgia Tech undergraduate Alyssa Zhang agrees. “The Beekeeping Club loved working with Deb. She was always happy to teach us — whether it was managing Varroa mites last summer, when she helped reduce counts from 17% to below 1%, or preparing the hives for winter.”

Protecting intelligent pollinators

The Varroa mite is one of many pressures beekeepers face. “The biggest challenges affecting honey bees — as well as native bees and other pollinators — are climate change, habitat loss, pesticide use, pests, and pathogens,” DeWitt explains. “These factors contributed to U.S. commercial beekeepers losing a devastating average of 62% of their colonies last year.”

Honey bees play a critical role in pollinating food crops and producing honey and beeswax. These threats fuel DeWitt’s passion for education, mentorship, and advocacy at the local, state, and national levels. Yet, the most meaningful rewards are personal.

“Honey bee colonies are superorganisms — tens of thousands of individuals working together for the good of the hive,” she adds. “Bees are intelligent, endlessly fascinating creatures, and I never stop learning from them. Beekeeping has made me a better gardener, horticulturist, ecologist, conservationist, carpenter, biologist, scientist, student, teacher, problem solver… you name it.”

Recognized across Georgia

Her passion for the craft is unmistakable. In 2025, DeWitt received one of the state’s highest honors: Georgia Beekeepers Association’s Beekeeper of the Year Award.

“I am profoundly grateful to the state’s beekeeping community for recognizing my efforts over the past eight years,” says DeWitt. “This award reflects the mentorship I’ve received from some truly exceptional beekeepers.”

Inspired by SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster, a team led by Georgia Tech’s Spencer Bryngelson and New York University’s Florian Schäfer modeled the turbulent interactions of a 33-engine rocket. Their experiment set new records, running the largest ever fluid dynamics simulation by a factor of 20 and the fastest by over a factor of four.

The team ran its custom software on the world’s two fastest supercomputers, as well as the eighth fastest, to construct such a massive model.

Applications from the simulation reach beyond rocket science. The same computing methods can model fluid mechanics in aerospace, medicine, energy, and other fields. At the same time, the work advances understanding of the current limits and future potential of computing. 

The team finished as runners-up for the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize for its impactful, multi-domain research. Referred to as the Nobel Prize of supercomputing, the award was presented at the world’s top conference for high-performance computing (HPC) research.

“Fluid dynamics problems of this style, with shocks, turbulence, different interacting fluids, and so on, are a scientific mainstay that marshals our largest supercomputers,” said Bryngelson, an assistant professor with the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

“Larger and faster simulations that enable solutions to long-standing scientific problems, like the rocket propulsion problem, are always needed. With our work, perhaps we took a big dent out of that issue.”

The Super Heavy booster reflects the space industry’s move toward reusable multi-engine first-stage rockets that are easier to transport and more economical overall. 

However, this shift creates research and testing challenges for new designs.

Each of Super Heavy’s 33 thrusters expels propellant at ten times the speed of sound. As individual engines reach extreme temperatures, pressures, and densities, their combined interactions with the airframe make such violent physics even more unpredictable.

Frequent physical experiments would be expensive and risky, so scientists rely on computer models to supplement the engineering process. 

Bryngelson’s flagship Multicomponent Flow Code (MFC) software anchored the experiment. MFC is an open-source computer program that simulates fluid dynamic models. Bryngelson’s lab has been modifying MFC since 2022 to run on more powerful computers and solve larger problems. 

In computing terms, this MFC-enhanced model simulated fluid flow resolution at 200 trillion grid points and one quadrillion degrees of freedom. These metrics exceeded previous record-setting benchmarks that tallied 10 trillion and 30 trillion grid points.

This means MFC simulations provide greater detail and capture smaller-scale features than previous approaches. The rocket simulation also ran four times faster and achieved 5.7 times the energy efficiency of comparable methods.   

Integrating information geometric regularization (IGR) into MFC played a key role in attaining these results. This new approach improved the simulation’s computational efficiency and overcame the challenge of shock dynamics.

In fluid mechanics, shock waves occur when objects move faster than the speed of sound. Along with hampering the performance of airframes and propulsion systems, shocks have historically been difficult to simulate.

Computational scientists have used empirical models based on artificial viscosity to account for shocks. Although these approaches mimic the physical effects of shock waves at the microscopic scale, they struggle to effectively capture the large-scale features of the flow. 

Information geometry uses curved spaces to study concepts of statistics and information. IGR uses these tools to modify the underlying geometry in fluid dynamics equations. When traveling in the modified geometry, fluid in the model preserves the shocks in a more natural way. 

“When regularizing shocks to much larger scales relevant in these numerical simulations, conventional methods smear out important fine-scale details,” said Schäfer, an assistant professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

“IGR introduces ideas from abstract math to CFD that allow creating modified paths that approach the singularity without ever reaching it. In the resulting fluid flow, shocks never become too spiky in simulations, but the fine-scale details do not smear out either.” 

Simulating a model this large required the Georgia Tech researchers to run MFC on El Capitan and Frontier, the world's two fastest supercomputers. 

The systems are two of four exascale machines in existence. This means they can solve at least one quintillion (“1” followed by 18 zeros) calculations per second. If a person completed a simple math calculation every second, it would take that person about 30 billion years to reach one quintillion operations.

Frontier is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and debuted as the world’s first exascale supercomputer in 2022. El Capitan surpassed Frontier when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory launched it in 2024.

To prepare MFC for performance on these machines, Bryngelson’s lab followed a methodical approach spanning years of hardware acquisition and software engineering. 

In 2022, Bryngelson attained an AMD MI210 GPU accelerator. Optimizing MFC on the component played a critical step toward preparing the software for exascale machines.

AMD hardware underpins both El Capitan and Frontier. The MI300A GPU powers El Capitan while Frontier uses the MI250X GPU. 

After configuring MFC on the MI210 GPU, Bryngelson’s lab ran the software on Frontier for the first time during a 2023 hackathon. This confirmed the code was ready for full-scale deployment on exascale supercomputers based on AMD hardware. 

In addition to El Capitan and Frontier, the simulation ran on Alps, the world’s eight-fastest supercomputer based at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. It is the largest available system that features the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip.

Like with AMD GPUs, Bryngelson acquired four GH200s in 2024 and began configuring MFC to the latest hardware innovation powering New Age supercomputers. Later that year, the Jülich Research Centre accepted Bryngelson’s group into an early access program to test JUPITER, a developing supercomputer based on the NVIDIA superchip.

The group earned a certificate for scaling efficiency and node performance on the way toward validating that their code worked on the GH200. The early access project proved successful for JUPITER, which launched in 2025 as Europe’s fastest supercomputer and fourth fastest in the world.

“Getting the level of hands-on experience with world-leading supercomputers and computing resources at Georgia Tech through this project has been a fantastic opportunity for a grad student,” said CSE Ph.D. student Ben Wilfong.

“To leverage these machines, I learned more advanced programming techniques that I’m glad to have in my tool belt for future projects. I also enjoyed the opportunity to work closely with and learn from industry experts from NVIDIA, AMD, and HPE/Cray.”

El Capitan, Frontier, JUPITER, and Alps maintained their rankings at the 2025 International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC25). Of note, the TOP500 announced at SC25 that JUPITER surpassed the exaflop threshold. 

The SC Conference Series is one of two venues where the TOP500 announces updated supercomputer rankings every June and November. The TOP500 ranks and details the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. 

The SC Conference Series serves as the venue where the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) presents the Gordon Bell Prize. The annual award recognizes achievement in HPC research and application. The Tech-led team was among eight finalists for this year’s award.

Along with Bryngelson, Georgia Tech members included Ph.D. students Anand Radhakrishnan and Wilfong, postdoctoral researcher Daniel Vickers, alumnus Henry Le Berre (CS 2025), and undergraduate student Tanush Prathi.

Schäfer’s partnership with the group stems from his previous role as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech from 2021 to 2025. 

Collaborators on the project included Nikolaos Tselepidis and Benedikt Dorschner from NVIDIA, Reuben Budiardja from ORNL, Brian Cornille from AMD, and Stephen Abbot from HPE. All were co-authors of the paper and named finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize. 

“I’m elated that we have been nominated for such a prestigious award. It wouldn't have been possible without the combined and diligent efforts of our team,” Radhakrishnan said. 

“I’m looking forward to presenting our work at SC25 and connecting with other researchers and fellow finalists while showcasing seminal work in the field of computing.”

“This fellowship with the Archive is a fantastic opportunity for me as a physicist. There is an incredible community of creatives that I get to be a part of and draw inspiration from,” he says. “It’s also very validating that an organization with as much prestige as the SJA finds value in the work we’re doing here in the lab. I’m so grateful that people believe in me and the work that we’re doing.”

Cachine is one of just eight individuals selected this year from a nationwide pool. The one-year fellowship supports work at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and will provide essential support for his creative trajectory, including a stipend, mentoring, and a robust community of peers.

At Georgia Tech, Cachine is the lab manager and lead experimentalist for the Matsumoto Group where he works alongside his advisor, School of Physics Associate Professor Elisabetta Matsumoto. 

“As a physicist who studies craft, I often see that this is an overlooked area of research, especially in women’s health,” Cachine says. “I hope that beyond building a pathway to improved patient outcomes, my work this year will show people that crafting traditions are incredible technological feats — they are entire knowledge systems waiting to be explored.  There is so much we can learn from craft.”

“It is a great honor to receive this recognition, which I share with the students and postdocs who have contributed to our research at Georgia Tech,” says Chapman. “I am also deeply grateful for the Institute’s outstanding research environment. It has been a privilege to advance the frontiers of quantum science and technology together.”

“We are delighted by this honor for Professor Chapman,” says Feryal Özel, chair and professor in the School of Physics. “The award highlights Mike’s decades-long contributions to atomic physics and the pioneering techniques he has introduced to the field throughout his career. We are especially proud that most of these contributions happened during his time at Georgia Tech.”

Chapman is a leading experimental quantum physicist whose research centers on developing and applying novel experimental methods in the areas of ultracold atoms, quantum optics, and quantum information. Before joining Georgia Tech in 1997, Chapman received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology.

Simon’s research team has been awarded $1.4 million through NASA’s Precursor Science Investigations for Europa (PSI-E) program. Their project is one of seven selected to provide essential insights that, according to the program announcement, “will maximize the science return during the radiation-limited lifetime of the Europa Clipper.” 

Simon also serves as the institutional lead co-investigator of a second $1.4 million project, led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, which seeks to decipher how Europa's atmosphere and ionosphere contribute to the magnetic field near the moon. This project was selected during the same call for proposals.

“The research award is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to a mission centered on Europa’s complex plasma and electromagnetic environment,” says Simon, referencing the Georgia-Tech led proposal. “Our project combines foundational plasma physics from our School of Physics and geophysical knowledge from our School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences to understand how the magnetic field near Europa is affected by the plasma populating Jupiter’s environment.”

The research team includes Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Ph.D. students Ariel Tello Fallau and Charles Michael Haynes. Neil Baker, a Ph.D. student in the School of Physics, is contributing to the Berkeley-led PSI-E project that also includes Georgia Tech alumnus Lucas Liuzzo (Ph.D. EAS 2018), now an assistant research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. 

Groundwork for discovery

With a radius of only 1,560 kilometers, Europa is one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, known as the Galilean moons, discovered by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in the 1600s.

More than two decades ago, data from NASA’s Galileo mission — specifically magnetic field measurements collected far above Europa’s surface — pointed to the existence of a global subsurface ocean. This ocean, which may contain more liquid water than all of the Earth’s oceans combined, has made Europa a prime candidate in the search for life beyond Planet Earth.

“Finding evidence of a saltwater ocean lurking beneath Europa’s surface was a serendipitous discovery during the Galileo mission,” Simon explains. “NASA’s Europa Clipper mission picks up where the Galileo mission left off.” 

Launched in October 2024, the Europa Clipper space probe is expected to reach Jupiter’s orbit in 2030. That gives Simon and his team only a few years to complete their analysis. 

“Our research is doing the preparatory work to determine what and where we can measure further magnetic evidence of the ocean beneath Europa’s surface,” says Simon. “When the spacecraft arrives, we will find out whether our predictions are correct.”

Using advanced computer simulations, the team aims to better understand the magnetic fields near Europa. Part of these fields is generated by electric currents in the moon’s saltwater ocean; the other part is created by fast-moving flows of plasma — ionized matter that fills much of space — as it interacts with Europa’s atmosphere and surface.  

“Our project focuses on how the magnetic fields from plasma flow patterns compete with the magnetic signal from Europa’s ocean,” says Simon. “We want to determine which part of the magnetic field near Europa originates from the ocean and which part is a disruptive effect from the plasma.”

Deciphering these magnetic signals will provide essential context for interpreting Europa Clipper’s measurements, helping to not only confirm the ocean’s existence but also reveal details about its structure.

“These endowments are allowing stellar early and mid-career faculty to amplify their educational and research activities,” says EAS Chair Jean Lynch-Stieglitz. “We are grateful to reward their achievements and ensure they can continue to contribute at a high level to the ongoing growth of Georgia Tech’s new Environmental Science B.S. program and the School’s research profile in climate and sustainability.”

Jean “Chris” Purvis Early Career Award: Isaiah Bolden

EAS Assistant Professor Isaiah Bolden’s research focuses on providing foundational data needed for climate and sustainability science in vulnerable coastal environments. He and his team in the Chemical Oceanography – Observations and Outreach Lab study chemical fingerprints preserved in coastal waters, corals, and shells to provide early warning indicators and mitigation strategies to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem services.

“I am most excited by the award’s ability to provide the flexible, sustained support necessary to bridge the gap between academic discovery and community impact,” he says. “With this endowment, I can pursue high-risk, high-reward research questions and dedicate resources to long-term, community-based projects. It directly empowers my drive to put science to work as a tool for environmental policymaking and cultural preservation.”

Bolden plans to direct the funds to support marine science curricula for coastal Georgia middle and high school students, paid undergraduate internships, specialized sample analyses, and travel logistics.

New research: Bolden’s group is actively pioneering the use of coastal Georgia oyster shells as novel natural archives of environmental change. Similar to tropical corals, the oyster shells provide high-resolution data on local water quality, pollution, and climate shifts. This work is intended to dovetail with Bolden’s coastal community-based partnerships, including the Ladies and Lads in Lab Coats program, which provides students with STEM exposure and enables them to collect and analyze data that documents their region’s environmental history.

Jean “Chris” Purvis Professorship: Jennifer Glass

EAS Professor Jennifer Glass drives new research at the intersection of environmental microbiology and climate science. The Glass Lab investigates microorganisms that produce and consume greenhouse gases — focusing on the chemical-level mechanisms behind how these gases are created and destroyed — with the ultimate aim of harnessing biological processes to address some of the urgent environmental challenges facing humanity. One major focus of her research is the vast reserves of methane hydrate found beneath the continental margin seafloor, representing the largest natural gas resource on Earth.

“I’m incredibly thankful to the donor and the Institute,” says Glass, who is also the EAS associate chair for Undergraduate Affairs. “This support arrives at a critical time for environmental science and allows me to pursue new opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach.”

She plans to use the funds to attend key conferences, build new collaborations, and support student engagement in upcoming initiatives.

New research: The Glass Lab is exploring environmentally friendly ways to extract and recycle rare earth elements — critical minerals used in batteries and electric vehicles. By studying marine microbes, which are less understood than their soil counterparts, the team aims to develop green biotechnology alternatives to current mining practices.

Jean “Chris” Purvis Early Career Award: Alex Robel

EAS Associate Professor and Rising Tide Director Alex Robel combines physics, applied mathematics, and ocean sciences to understand how climate changes are impacting Earth’s largest ice sheets and glaciers. His research lab, the GT Ice and Climate Group, focuses on developing computational models of ice sheet melt to predict future sea level rise. In partnership with coastal communities, they leverage those predictions to help make city streets more resilient to flooding.

“This award helps me pursue more opportunities to engage closely with community partners, using climate information to make concrete improvements in their infrastructure,” explains Robel.

Specific plans for the funds include enhancing pilot projects in coastal resilience, including the Community Hubs for Optimizing Resilience (CHORUS) initiative. Using building-scale flood models, CHORUS will help communities select potential infrastructure interventions to mitigate future flooding that threatens valued community assets.

New research: Robel is launching a project to use machine learning methods to improve the representation of small-scale processes in ice sheet computational models. These methods will help his group blend an understanding of how ice flows and fractures, based on basic physical principles, with real-world measurements of crevasse formation on ice sheets.

Georgia Power Professorship: Yuanzhi Tang

EAS Professor Yuanzhi Tang is the founding director of the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions and associate director, Strategic Partnerships and Engagement for the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. Her research integrates geochemistry, environmental engineering, and sustainability science to advance a circular economy for critical minerals, from resource discovery and recovery to recycling and reuse.

The Tang Research Group investigates the fundamental chemical, geological, and biological processes that control the transformation and mobility of critical elements across natural and engineered environments. Her work directly informs the development of low-impact extraction technologies and sustainable supply chains essential for clean energy transition.

“The Georgia Power Professorship provides support for building partnerships across academia and industry partners to accelerate innovation in critical minerals,” says Tang. “It enables us to link fundamental geochemical and geological science with real-world applications that strengthen both energy security and environmental stewardship.”

Tang plans to use the funds to expand student participation and interdisciplinary collaborations with academic and industry partners — positioning Georgia and the broader Southeast as a leader in sustainable mineral innovation.

New research: Tang’s research team is developing sustainable methods for the extraction and separation of critical minerals from alternative and waste resources. By coupling molecular-scale characterization with rational engineering design, her team aims to transform waste byproducts into valuable sources of critical elements while minimizing environmental impacts.

About the Purvis Endowment

The Jean “Chris” Purvis Endowed Awards are supported by the generosity of the late J. Chris Purvis, M.D. (Applied Biology 1969), a psychiatrist and neurologist who specialized in juvenile and adolescent behavioral psychiatry.

About the Georgia Power Professorship

The Georgia Power Professorship was established through the generosity of Georgia Power, which funds several endowed professorships at Georgia Tech to support faculty in fields like energy, science, sustainability, and engineering. 

Flooding can be an existential threat, affecting everything from infrastructure to health. Georgia Tech researchers are developing solutions to monitor and forecast flooding, as well as restore ecosystems to prevent future flooding. These efforts support communities’ resilience in the face of climate change and keep the U.S. secure.

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Understanding the brain is key to unlocking human health and flourishing. The need has never been more urgent, but this challenge is too vast for any single discipline to solve alone.

That’s why Georgia Tech recently launched the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS). A step toward a more connected, collaborative future, INNS brings together experts from across Georgia Tech’s seven colleges and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to study the brain in ways that connect scientific discovery with technological innovation and real-world societal needs.

INNS supports research that crosses traditional academic boundaries. As an Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI), it builds community, fosters collaboration, and fills critical gaps in education, professional development, and research infrastructure.

“Georgia Tech has a long-standing culture of interdisciplinary collaboration — it’s in our DNA,” says INNS Executive Director Chris Rozell. Rozell also serves as Julian T. Hightower Chaired Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “INNS builds on that strength to create a space where breakthroughs in neuroscience and neurotechnology can move from lab to life, impacting real people in real ways.”

A Community Built to Collaborate

INNS is home to a growing network of faculty, students, and research centers spanning the full spectrum of Georgia Tech’s research expertise. This diversity is not just a feature, it’s the foundation.

That foundation was laid over decades of growth, vision, and grassroots momentum. Georgia Tech welcomed its first neuroscience-focused faculty member in 1990, sparking a steady expansion of brain-related research across campus. As more faculty joined and new focus areas emerged, a vibrant, cross-disciplinary community began to take shape.

In 2014, that community organized under the name GT Neuro, a grassroots initiative that united researchers who shared a passion for understanding the brain. This collective energy led to new educational programs, including the launch of Georgia Tech’s undergraduate neuroscience major in the College of Sciences.

“Our undergraduate students absolutely love teaching others about Neuroscience,” said Christina Ragan, director of Outreach for the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program and senior academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences. “I'm really excited to explore ways for INNS to connect our neuroscience community at Tech with the public.”

By 2023, the Neuro Next Initiative launched to bring together leaders from across campus and chart a strategic path forward — the result of nearly two years of community-driven planning to formalize and expand Georgia Tech’s neuroscience ecosystem. 

“The launch of INNS has built on the momentum of the Neuro Next Initiative, which ignited crucial conversations and fostered new collaborations between researchers at GTRI and Georgia Tech faculty,” says Tabitha Rosenbalm, GTRI senior research engineer. “The remarkable demonstration at Interface Neuro — witnessing a quadriplegic man walk and communicate thanks to innovative research — underscores the transformative breakthroughs possible when academic and applied researchers unite. INNS is uniquely positioned to serve as a catalyst, propelling Atlanta, Georgia Tech, and GTRI as national leaders in neurotechnology, driving advancements in both human health and engineering innovation.”

INNS is also helping shape the future of education. A new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in neuroscience and neurotechnology welcomed its first cohort this fall, and INNS is poised to support it with professional development, research opportunities, and community engagement.

Breaking Boundaries to Advance Brain Science

Whether it’s developing neurotechnologies, designing therapeutic environments, or exploring the ethical implications of brain research, INNS is here to support work that spans fields and impacts lives.

“To responsibly address the societal and human impacts of advances in neuroscience and neurotechnology, we first need to understand them,” said Margaret Kosal, professor and director of Graduate Students in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. “That requires real and substantive collaboration beyond traditional engineering or biology labs.”

One example of INNS in action is the Smart Transitional Home Lab, a project funded by the inaugural INNS/Shepherd Center Seed Grant. This initiative brings together experts in architecture, inclusive design, neuroengineering, and rehabilitation to prototype environments that actively support stroke recovery, blending rigorous research with human-centered design.

“The establishment of INNS creates a powerful platform where diverse minds, from neuroscience to architecture to rehabilitation, can converge around a shared mission to advance human health,” says Hui Cai, professor in the School of Architecture, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Center, and co-leader of the project. “It enables interdisciplinary work with the potential to transform lives and redefine how we design for healing and recovery.”

“From whole brain recordings, to mapping the connectome, to the incredible advances in artificial intelligence, it's never been a more exciting time to study the mind and brain,” says Bob Wilson, director of the Center of Excellence for Computation and Cognition and associate professor in the School of Psychology. “I'm extremely excited for INNS to act as a central hub, building the neuroscience community at Georgia Tech and beyond.”

Join Us

INNS is more than an institute, it’s a growing, vibrant community of researchers, educators, students, and partners. Together, we’re working to understand the brain, develop technologies that improve lives, and ensure those innovations serve society responsibly.

Whether you're a student, researcher, policymaker, or simply curious about the brain, INNS is your gateway to interdisciplinary neuroscience at Georgia Tech. Get involved at neuro.gatech.edu.

Chu, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has been awarded a $770,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the first-ever comprehensive map of temperatures at the bottom of the ice sheet — a map that will span the entire Antarctic continent.

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

In total, the Antarctic ice sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by over 200 feet — more than 50 feet higher than the top of Tech Tower. Climate models help predict how much of this ice may melt in the coming years, providing critical safety and planning information for coastal communities. However, researchers have limited knowledge of temperatures at the base of the ice sheet — miles beneath the surface — and these temperatures play a critical role in melting.

“Our research addresses this critical gap in Antarctic ice sheet modeling,” Chu explains. “If temperatures at the base are warm enough, the ice can melt and lubricate the interface.” The result? The surface acts like a slip-and-slide, carrying ice toward the ocean and accelerating melt. 

“It is crucial that we can accurately predict this behavior,” Chu says. “This map will be an essential step forward in refining our climate models for the safety of coastal communities, for infrastructure planning, and for climate adaptation worldwide.”

Mapping miles-thick ice

The process isn’t as simple as measuring the temperature with a thermometer though. The Antarctic ice sheet is, on average, over a mile thick and can range up to three miles thick.

Chu, who leads the Polar Geophysical Simulation Lab at Georgia Tech, will combine 20 years of radar data — the result of multiple international polar programs — and leverage a technique called “radar sounding,” which analyzes the echoes of airborne radar measurements. The brightness and shape of the echoes can reveal clues about subglacial meltwater and temperatures. To complete the picture, Chu will use cutting-edge generative artificial intelligence (AI) models.

“Innovations in generative AI are part of what makes this research possible,” says Chu, “but the driving force is the data collected by these long-term research studies. AI can help complete the picture — but only because that data exists.”

Preparing for the future

Chu aims for the temperature map to improve the parameterization of climate models and ice sheet projections. This will enable better predictions of future melt and help scientists assess areas that may be particularly vulnerable.

She hopes that the map will drive further advances in polar science. “Our datasets and radar observations will be open access, meaning they’ll be available for all researchers to use,” Chu shares. “We’ll also be sharing the AI processing codes that we develop and the enhanced ice sheet model outputs.”

Additionally, the research will train the next generation of climate scientists through developing educational programs for high schoolers, empowering and engaging students nationwide with hands-on polar science and AI applications.

“This research is about more than just mapping Antarctica — it’s about building tools that help us prepare for the future,” Chu says. “By making our data and models openly available, and by engaging students in the science behind climate change, we’re not only advancing polar research — we’re empowering the next generation to carry it forward.”

Wang, who is a Ph.D. student in the School of Mathematics and a master’s student in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, will focus on developing mathematically-backed landing solutions for spacecraft. 

“I first became interested in powered descent problems during my Fall 2024 internship with NASA’s Human Landing System at Marshall Space Flight Center,” he says. “With my mathematical background in optimization and topology, and my passion for space exploration, I saw this research topic as a perfect fit when my co-advisor Dr. Panagiotis Tsiotras suggested it.”

Wang is co-advised by School of Mathematics Professor and Hubbard Research Fellow John Etnyre alongside Panagiotis Tsiotras, who holds the David and Andrew Lewis Endowed Chair in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and is also associate director at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines.

In addition to his Georgia Tech advisors, Wang will collaborate with a NASA Subject Matter Expert, who will connect him with the larger technical community. He will perform part of the research as a visiting technologist at multiple NASA centers, giving him the opportunity to work with leading engineers and scientists and share his research results directly with the NASA community.

From abstractions to space exploration

“NASA’s upcoming missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond need technology that allows spacecraft to land precisely at their intended sites,” says Wang. “My research will focus on the last stage of landing, called powered descent. This stage powers up engines, which guide the spacecraft into a safe landing using a pre-designed trajectory that autopilot follows.”

This means that researchers need to figure out the correct thrust, direction, and timing to reach a landing spot — all while navigating a landing that uses as little fuel as possible.

“A common approach is to treat this as an optimization problem: minimizing fuel consumption with rigid-body physics as constraints to determine the best thrust profile,” Wang explains. “This can work well, but it has drawbacks. It assumes that there is no uncertainty in the system (for example, that the thrust of the engines is applied perfectly) and it simplifies the motion of the spacecraft by treating it as though it’s traveling through flat space instead of on a true curved geometry. Both shortcuts introduce errors  — our research aims to address these gaps.”

To improve landing precision, Wang will develop a curved-space geometric mathematical model, which takes into account the curved-space geometry of spacecraft motion rather than assuming flat space. To find a fuel-efficient landing trajectory, Wang will develop the model around optimal covariance steering, a stochastic control problem that both minimizes fuel costs while keeping the uncertainty of the spacecraft's exact landing spot within a safe amount.

It’s a problem that leverages his experience in theoretical math and his background in aerospace engineering. “I’m incredibly honored that NASA finds this research exciting and is supporting my pursuit of it,” he says. “There are so many fascinating engineering problems that could benefit from deeper theoretical scrutiny, especially using abstract machineries not typically covered in an engineering curriculum. I hope this inspires more theoretical researchers and graduate students to explore bridging these gaps.”

“It’s amazing to be recognized for this research,” says Faggert. “I am grateful to my research group for helping me prepare the proposal and inspiring my ideas.”

Through the FINESST program, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate provides three-year grants for “graduate student-designed and performed research projects that contribute to its science, technology, and exploration goals,” according to the program’s website. 

Faggert will serve as the future investigator of the award and will be advised by Feryal Özel, chair and professor in the School of Physics. 

“I am very proud that Cole has been selected for the FINESST Fellowship, one of the most competitive graduate awards in the country,” says Özel, who is the principal investigator of the research. “This fellowship will support groundbreaking research on multi-wavelength imaging of black holes — an area central to advancing our understanding of black holes and galaxies. It is especially exciting that this work also contributes directly to the development of our space-based mission at Georgia Tech.”

A key aspect of Faggert’s proposal is its multi-frequency approach, which generates and analyzes images of supermassive black holes using different radio wavelengths. When combined and compared, these multi-frequency observations allow scientists to learn about black holes and explore fundamental physical concepts such as gravity and plasma behavior.

“One of the coolest things about studying cosmic objects like black holes is that you have to work with the information you have,” explains Faggert. “But when you combine several avenues of information, like in multi-frequency radio imaging, you can gain a better understanding of phenomena and under conditions that can’t be replicated on Earth.”

This research aligns with current trends in astrophysics that focus on advanced imaging techniques to broaden the data available on the structure, formation, and behavior of black holes and other celestial objects. According to Faggert, this information can then be contrasted with theoretical simulations, providing insights into fundamental physics and the nature of the universe.

Receiving the FINESST Award is particularly meaningful for Faggert, given his longstanding interest in space and his previous exposure to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility and Langley Research Center through the Virginia Aerospace Science and Technology Scholars program.

“Being associated with NASA holds a special place in my heart. Over the years, my focus has shifted from designing space missions to studying the science those missions make possible. It is definitely rewarding to come full circle and be recognized by NASA for this research,” he adds.

The Georgia Tech-Shepherd Center Seed Grant Program is part of an ongoing partnership between the two institutions that started in 2023 with the goal of advancing rehabilitative patient care and research.

“The seed grant program is intended to stimulate new interdisciplinary research collaborations by providing seed funding to obtain preliminary data or prototypes necessary for the submission of an external grant or industry opportunities,” says Deborah Backus, vice president of Research and Innovation at Shepherd Center. “As two leading research institutions, we know the potential for advancing rehabilitation therapies is even greater when we work together. We look forward to the solutions, treatments, and therapies that emerge from these initial seed grants.” 

Experts from both institutions evaluated and scored seed grant applications based on the research’s innovation, approach, and potential for training opportunities, as well as its anticipated impact, prospects for commercial translation, and strategy for securing continued funding. This year, each awardee team received close to $50,000.

“We are very excited to launch this new seed grant program, which will spur ideas and propel research forward,” said Michelle LaPlaca, professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Georgia Tech lead of the Collaborative. “The complementary expertise of Georgia Tech and Shepherd Center researchers, combined with the motivation to find solutions for individuals with neurological injury and disability, is a winning formula for innovation.”

"Offering new hope for neurorehabilitation patients requires bringing together interdisciplinary researchers to explore new and creative ideas,” adds Chris Rozell, Julian T. Hightower Chaired professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the inaugural executive director of the Institute of Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS) at Georgia Tech. “I'm excited to see the talent at these world class institutions coming together to develop new solutions for these complex problems."

This year’s seed grants were awarded to the following projects:

• Proof of Concept Development of the Recovery Cushion – Stephen Sprigle, professor, School of Industrial Design and School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Tech; Jennifer Cowhig, research physical therapist, Shepherd Center.
• Paving a Smooth Path from Hospital to Home: A Feasibility Study of an Integrated Smart Transitional Home Lab to Support Stroke Rehabilitation Patients’ Transition to Home – John Morris, senior clinical research scientist, Shepherd Center; Hui Cai, professor in the School of Architecture, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Center, Georgia Tech.
• A Comparative Analysis of Lower-Limb Exoskeleton Technology for Non-Ambulatory Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury – Maegan Tucker, assistant professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Tech; Nicholas Evans (AP 2023), clinical research scientist, Shepherd Center.
• Improving Accessibility and Precision in Neurorehabilitation at the Point of Care with AI-Driven Remote Therapeutic Monitoring Solutions – Brad Willingham, clinical research scientist, director of Multiple Sclerosis Research, Shepherd Center; May Dongmei Wang, professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech.

“This fellowship feels like the perfect launchpad: a place to grow my technical toolkit, collaborate across fields, and turn research into real-world impact — all while honoring Margaret Butler’s legacy of innovation and mentorship," Sethuram says.  

A computational astrophysicist, Sethuram specializes in the development of machine learning models to accelerate simulations of cosmic phenomena. She completed her graduate studies as a NASA FINESST Fellow in Physics Professor John Wise’s computational cosmology group.

In a recent interview published by ALCF, Sethuram discusses how she uses machine learning to study the early universe, the mentors who inspired her journey, and her goal of developing scalable tools that benefit the wider scientific community.

Read the article: "Accelerating Astrophysics with AI: A Q&A with Snigdaa Sethuram"

On New Year’s Day 1995, a monstrous 80-foot wave in the North Sea slammed into the Draupner oil platform. The wall of water crumpled steel railings and flung heavy equipment across the deck — but its biggest impact was what it left behind: hard data. It was the first time a rogue wave had ever been measured in the open ocean. 

“It confirmed what seafarers had described for centuries,” said Francesco Fedele, associate professor Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  “They always talked about these waves that appear suddenly and are very large — but for a long time, we thought this was just a myth.”

Rethinking Rogues

No longer the stuff of legend, that single wave stunned scientists and launched decades of debate over how rogue waves form. 

Fedele — a longtime skeptic of the conventional explanations — led an international team to investigate rogue wave origins. The results, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, underscore the significance of their findings. The team analyzed 27,500 wave records collected over 18 years in the North Sea. It was the most comprehensive dataset of its kind.

Each record captured 30 minutes of detailed wave activity: height, frequency, and direction. Their findings challenged long-held assumptions. To occur, these towering waves don’t require “exotic” forces — just the right alignment of familiar ones.

Fedele explained, “Rogue waves follow the natural orders of the ocean — not exceptions to them. This is the most definitive, real-world evidence to date.”

Extraordinary Waves, Ordinary Physics

The dominant theory about rogue wave formation has been a phenomenon called modulational instability, a process where small changes in timing and spacing between waves cause energy to concentrate into a single wave. Instead of staying evenly distributed, the wave pattern shifts, causing one wave to suddenly grow much larger than the rest.

Fedele pointed out that modulational instability “is mainly accurate when the waves are confined within channels, like in lab experiments, where energy can only flow in one direction. In the open ocean, though, energy can spread in multiple directions.”  

A Deep Dive Into the Data

When Fedele and his team analyzed the North Sea data, they found no evidence of modulational instability in rogue waves.  Instead, they discovered the biggest waves appear to be a product of two simpler effects:

      1.  Linear focusing — when waves traveling at different speeds and directions that happen to align at the same time and place. They stack together to form a much taller crest than usual.

      2. Second-order bound nonlinearities — natural wave effects that stretch the shape of a wave, making the crest steeper and taller while flattening the trough. This distortion makes big waves even taller by 15-20%.

Fedele explained that when these two standard wave behaviors align, the result is a much larger wave. The nonlinear nature of ocean waves provides an extra boost, pushing them to expand further.

From Failure to Forecast

Fedele stressed that this research has real-world urgency. Rogue waves aren’t just theoretical, they are real, powerful, and a danger to ships and offshore structures.  Fedele said many forecasting models still treat rogue waves as unpredictable flukes. “They’re extreme, but they’re explainable.” he said.

Updating those models, he added, is critical. “It’s fundamental for the safety of ship navigation, coastal structures, and oil platforms,” Fedele explained. “They have to be designed to endure these extreme events.”

Fedele’s research is already informing how others think about ocean risk. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and energy company Chevron use his models to forecast when and where rogue waves are most likely to strike.

Fedele is now using machine learning to comb through decades of wave data, training algorithms to detect the subtle combinations — height, direction, timing — that precede extreme waves. The goal is to give forecasters more accurate tools that predict when a rogue wave could strike.

The lesson from this study is simple: Rogue waves aren’t exceptions to the rules — they’re the result of them. Nature doesn’t need to break its own laws to surprise us. It just needs time, and a rare moment where everything lines up just wrong.

Although ocean waves may seem random, extreme waves like rogues follow a natural recognizable pattern. Each rogue wave carries a kind of “fingerprint” — a structured wave group before and after the peak that reveals how it formed. 

“Rogue waves are, simply, a bad day at sea,” Fedele said. “They are extreme events, but they’re part of the ocean’s language. We’re just finally learning how to listen.”

Matsumoto, who is also a principal investigator at the International Institute for Sustainability with Knotted Chiral Meta Matter (WPI-SKCM2) at Hiroshima University, is the corresponding author on a new study exploring the physics of ‘jamming’ — a phenomenon when soft or stretchy materials become rigid under low stress but soften under higher tension.

The study, "Pulling Apart the Mechanisms That Lead to Jammed Knitted Fabrics," was published this week in Physical Review E, and also includes Georgia Tech Matsumoto Group graduate students Sarah Gonzalez and Alexander Cachine in addition to former postdoctoral fellow Michael Dimitriyev, who is now an assistant professor at Texas A&M University.

The work builds on the group’s previous research demonstrating that knitted materials can be mathematically ‘programmed’ to behave in predictable ways. “These properties are intuitively understood by people who knit by hand,” Matsumoto says, “but in order to manipulate and use these behaviors in an industrial setting, we need to understand the physics behind them. This new research is another step in that direction.”

An Unexpected Twist

Gonzalez, who led the research, first became interested in jamming while conducting adjacent research. “I was using model simulations to characterize how different yarn properties affect the behavior of knitted fabrics and noticed a strange stiff region,” she recalls. “In our previous research, we had also seen this behavior in lab experiments, which suggested that what we were seeing in the simulations was a genuine phenomenon. I wanted to investigate it further.”

After digging into the topic, she realized that what she was seeing was called ‘jamming.’ In knits, Gonzalez explains, jamming occurs when stitches are packed tightly together, and the fabric resists stretching. Although it’s a well-known phenomenon, the physics has mostly been investigated in granular systems, like snow or sand, rather than fabrics.

“In fabrics, when you pull softly, the response is surprisingly stiff, but when you start pulling harder and harder, the stitches rearrange, and the material softens,” Matsumoto says. “In granular systems, this is a little like how avalanches work. At low forces, the snow pack is solid, but when the slope is steep, the force of gravity liquidizes that snow pack into an avalanche.”

“In fabrics, it is a little like having a tangle in a piece of jewelry,” she adds. “If you pull on it, it gets quite stiff, but if you loosen the knot, the chain can reconfigure, and it's not so stiff.”

Unraveling the Physics of Jamming

Using a combination of experiments with industrially knitted fabrics and computer models, the team analyzed what causes jamming in fabrics and how to control it. “We wanted to determine how different yarn properties impacted jamming,” Gonzalez explains. “Our goal was to understand the mechanics of jamming through how yarn interacts at various touchpoints in stitches.”

The team found that both machine tension and yarn thickness played a key role in making a fabric more or less jammed, and that jamming behaves differently depending on which direction the fabric is stretched.

“When you stretch a knit along the rows, the stiffness of the yarn causes fabric jamming. Jamming in the other direction is due to yarn contacts,” says Gonzalez. “We also showed that the impacts of changing machine tension and yarn thickness differ depending on fabric direction.” 

“Discovering that fabric jamming works differently in different directions was a key insight,” she adds. “To our knowledge, the physics of this has never been explored before.”

Modern Innovation — With a Centuries-Old Technique

The research dovetails with Matsumoto’s WPI-SKCM2 Center work, which involves investigating fundamental aspects of knots and chirality. The Center is interested in a class of materials called “knotted chiral meta matter” that could lead to more sustainable materials.

For example, knitting — which leverages chiral knots — could be used to create more elastic fabrics from natural materials. “In many cases, manufacturers use yarns that combine, for example, polyester, cotton, and elastane to create a desired elasticity,” Matsumoto says. “Our research suggests that manipulating the topology of the stitches could lead to a similar elasticity, reducing the need for petroleum-based fibers and creating a more sustainable textile.”

“Knitting has the potential to be extremely useful in manufacturing, but knowledge has typically been shared through intuition and word of mouth,” she adds. “By creating these mathematical models, we hope to formalize that knowledge in a way that’s accessible for large-scale manufacturing — so we can leverage this centuries-old intuition for modern innovation.”

Funding: This work was supported by the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan; National Science Foundation (NSF); and Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/g94g-c6tt 

Before merging, both black holes were spinning exceptionally fast, and their masses fell into a range that should be very rare — or impossible. 

“Most models don't predict black holes this big can be made by supernovas, and our data indicates that they were spinning at a rate close to the limit of what’s theoretically possible,” says Margaret Millhouse, a research scientist in the School of Physics who played a key role in the research. “Where could they have come from? It raises interesting questions.”

A binary black hole merger absorbs characteristics from both of the contributors, she adds. “As a result, this is not only the most massive binary black hole ever seen but also the fastest-spinning binary black hole confidently detected with gravitational waves.”

“GW231123 is a record-breaking event,” says School of Physics Professor Laura Cadonati, who has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since 2002. “LIGO has been observing the cosmos for 10 years now. This discovery underscores that there is still so much that this instrument can help us learn.”

A Cosmic View

The findings challenge current theories on how smaller black holes form, says School of Physics Assistant Professor and LIGO collaborator Surabhi Sachdev. Smaller black holes are the result of supernovae: dying and collapsing stars. During that collapse, explosions can tear apart or eject part of the star’s mass — limiting the size of the black hole that forms.

“Black holes from supernovae can weigh up to about 60 times the mass of our Sun,” she says. “The black holes in this merger were likely the mass of hundreds of suns.”

Because of its size, GW231123 also allowed the team to study the merger in unprecedented detail. “LIGO has observed scores of black hole mergers,” says Cadonati. “Of these, GW231123 has provided us with the clearest view of the ‘grand finale’ of a merger thus far. This adds a new clue to solve the puzzle that are black holes, including their origins and properties.”

“While we saw that our expectations matched the data, the extreme nature of this event pushed our models to their limits,” Millhouse adds. “A massive, highly spinning system like this will be of interest to researchers who study how binary black holes form.”

Decoding a Split-Second Signal

Millhouse and School of Physics Postdoctoral Fellow Prathamesh Joshi used Einstein’s equations for general relativity to confirm LIGO’s detections.

To find black holes, LIGO measures distortions in spacetime — ripples that are created when two black holes collide. These patterns in gravitational waves can be used to find the signature signal of black hole collisions. 

“In this case, the signal lasted for just one-tenth of a second, but it was very clear,” says Joshi. "Previously, we designed a special study to detect these interesting signals, which accounted for all the unusual properties of such massive systems — and it paid off!”

“To ensure it wasn’t noise, the Georgia Tech team first reconstructed the signal in a model-agnostic way,” Millhouse adds. “We then compared those reconstructions to a model that uses Einstein's equations of general relativity, and both reconstructions looked very similar, which helped confirm that this highly unusual phenomenon was a genuine detection.”

Sachdev says that seeing the signal at both LIGO Observatories — placed in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana — was also critical. “These short signals are very hard to detect, and this signal is so unlike any of the other binary black holes that we've seen before,” she says. “Without both detectors, we would have missed it.”

A Decade of Discovery

While the team has yet to determine how the original black holes formed, one theory is that they may have resulted from mergers themselves. “This could have been a chain of mergers,” Sachdev explains. “This tells us that they could have existed in a very dense environment like a nuclear star cluster or an active galactic nucleus.” Their spins provide another clue as spinning is a characteristic usually seen in black holes resulting from a merge.

The team adds that GW231123 could provide clues on how larger black holes are formed — including the mysterious supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies.

“Gravitational wave science is almost a decade old, and we're still making fundamental discoveries,” says Millhouse. “It’s exciting that LIGO is continuing to detect new phenomena,  and this is at the edge of what we've seen thus far. There's still so much we can learn.”

The team expects to update their catalogue of black holes in August 2025, which will provide another window into how this exceptionally heavy black hole might fit into the universe, and what we can continue to learn from it.

Funding: The LIGO Laboratory is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated jointly by Caltech and MIT.

Christopher Rozell, Julian T. Hightower Chaired Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will serve as the inaugural executive director of Georgia Tech’s new Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS). 

The award’s €80,000 endowment will support a research trip to Germany for up to a year — during which Kostka will collaborate with Professor Mar­cel Kuypers, director of the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy in Bre­men, Germany — to as­sess the role of mar­ine plant mi­cro­bi­o­mes in coastal mar­ine eco­sys­tem health and climate re­si­li­ence.

Kostka, who holds joint appointments in the School of Bio­lo­gical Sci­ences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is also the as­so­ci­ate chair for re­search in Bio­lo­gical Sci­ences. He was ​​recently named the inaugural faculty director of Georgia Tech for Georgia's Tomorrow. The new Center, announced by the College of Sciences in December 2024, will drive research aimed at improving life across the state of Georgia. 

Wetlands in a changing climate

“Human population is centered on coastlines, and coastal ecosystems provide many services for people,” Kostka says. “Although they cover less than 1 percent of the ocean, coastal wetlands store over 50 percent of the seafloor’s rich carbon reserves.” But researchers aren’t sure how these ecosystems will respond to a changing climate.

Microbes may be the key. Microbes play a critical role in maintaining plant health and helping them adapt to stressors, Kostka says. Similar to human bodies, plants have microbiomes: a community of microbes intimately associated with the plant that help it take up nutrients, stimulate the plant’s immune system, and regulate plant hormones. 

“Our research indicates that plant microbiomes are fundamental to wetland ecosystem health, yet almost everything we know about them is from agricultural systems,” he adds. “We know very little about the microbes associated with these important marine plants that dominate coastal ecosystems.”

Kostka’s work in Germany will investigate how microbiomes help coastal marine plants adapt to stress and keep them healthy. From there, he will investigate how plant microbiomes contribute to the carbon and nutrient cycles of coastal ecosystems — and how they contribute to ecosystem resilience.

Expanding collaboration — and insights 

One goal of the collaboration is to exchange information on two types of marine plants that dominate coastal ecosystems worldwide: those associated with seagrass meadows and salt marshes.

“I’ve investigated salt marsh plants in the intertidal zone between tides, and my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute have focused on seagrass beds and seagrass meadows, which are subtidal, below the tides,” Kostka says. “While these two ecosystems have some different characteristics, they both cover large areas of the global coastline and are dominated by salt-tolerant plants.” 

In salt marshes, Kostka has shown that marine plants have symbiotic microbes in their roots that help them to take up nitrogen and deal with stress by removing toxic sulfides. He suspects that these plant-microbe interactions are critical to the resilience of coastal ecosystems. “The Max Planck Institute made similar observations in seagrass meadows as we did in salt marshes,” Kostka explains. “But they found different bacteria.”

From Georgia to Germany

Beyond supporting excellence in research, another key goal of the Humboldt Research Award is to support international collaboration — something very familiar to Kostka. “I've been working with Professor Kuypers and the Max Planck Institute in Bremen for many years,” he says, adding that he completed his postdoctoral research at the Institute. “Max Planck's labs are some of the best in the world for what they do, and their imaging technology can give us an unprecedented look at plant-microbe interactions at the cellular level.”

“This project is also special because I am collaborating with other scientists in northern Germany,” Kostka adds. “The University of Bremen is home to the Cen­ter for Mar­ine En­vir­on­mental Sci­ences (MARUM), which is designated as a Cluster of Excellence by the German National Science Foundation, so there are a number of fantastic research centers in Bremen to work with.”

His hope is that this project will deepen collaboration between the research at Georgia Tech and research in Germany. “I look forward to seeing what we can uncover about these critical systems while working together.”

“When I finished rehabilitation, my doctors and therapist and, most importantly, the insurance company said, ‘For someone with your condition, we feel like you've made all the improvement that you will, have a nice life,’” said Burkhart, who was left with limited feeling and mobility below the neck after a 2010 diving accident injured his spinal cord. “That didn't sit well with me.” 

Hoping even a fraction of hand mobility would increase his independence, Burkhart turned to a clinical research trial on a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to detect movement signals in the brain and send them to a computer to stimulate the arm muscles, bypassing the spinal cord in the hopes of restoring movement.

“I had had four and a half years of never thinking my hand was going to move again,” he recalled. When testing to see if he qualified for the study, researchers stimulated his hand muscles. “I saw my hand move, and that was all I needed to know — I was ready to risk it all for something that may or may not work.” 

Burkhart’s story is one of many that reveal the deeply personal side of neurotechnology research. Centering lived experiences like his is central to the mission of the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS), a new Interdisciplinary Research Institute launching this July at Georgia Tech.

“If we want to build neurotechnology that truly serves people, their voices should be part of the scientific process from the very beginning,” said Chris Rozell, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the many researchers at Georgia Tech working to understand and advance BCIs. “Hearing from individuals who live with these devices helps guide more ethical, inclusive, and effective research. The entire field benefits from inclusive conversations like these.” 

Life With a Brain Implant

Burkhart and three others recently shared their stories live on the Ferst Center stage at “Wired Lives: Personal Stories of Brain-Computer Interfaces, an event organized by Georgia Tech’s Neuro Next Initiative. Their stories gave over 200 attendees a rare, honest glimpse into the realities of neurological conditions and the path to brain-computer interface research.

“I was at a crossroads in my life at 47 years old,” said Brandan Mehaffie, who told his story of living with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. “I was trying to figure out, do I continue with the status quo and watch my career dwindle into nothing? Watch my life with my family, my kids, not being able to go on hikes or family vacations?” 

Mehaffie eventually qualified for deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment, a procedure where a pacemaker-like device is implanted into the brain to provide electrical stimulation. “It changed my life for the better in ways that I can't even tell you.”

When former U.S. Air Force Sgt. Jennifer Walden’s doctor told her about a clinical trial testing DBS as an epilepsy treatment, she jumped at the chance. “The 48 hours after those seizures are 48 hours where you don't want to live anymore.” Walden explained that her response to medication had dwindled after years of traditional treatment, increasing the frequency and severity of her seizures. “I feared suicide. It's something I didn't want to do, but if something happened in those 48 hours to end my life, I didn't care,” she said.

“I am now probably 99% seizure-free,” she beamed as she recalled her response to DBS on stage. “I don't know how I got so lucky in life, but I don't take it for granted.”

Common themes in their stories were resilience, hope, and a deep desire to give back.

“When I joined the study, it had no physical benefit to me, but that's not why I joined it,” said Scott Imbrie, who experienced a major spinal cord injury and participates in a clinical BCI study at the University of Chicago. “I decided to have invasive brain surgery and have electrodes implanted on my brain to help other people.”

A New Approach to Interdisciplinary Research

Timed alongside the InterfaceNeuro conference at Georgia Tech, the gathering offered a rare opportunity for scientists, engineers, and clinicians to engage directly with the lived experiences of individuals using brain-computer interfaces — a perspective often missing from traditional research settings.

“It makes you think about how we ethically conduct research and how we recruit and interface with patients,” said Eric Cole, a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University, who was reminded that many patients participating in BCI research have been on a long, difficult journey before interacting with researchers. “We should remember to take their experiences seriously and respect them. They're giving up something for research — that part we should always remember.”

“Wired Lives” was one in a series of events highlighting the lived experience of individuals with neurological conditions organized by the Neuro Next Initiative, which has served as the precursor to INNS.

“A core mission of INNS is to consider how neuroscience and neurotechnology impact people’s lives,” said Jennifer Singh, associate professor in the School of History and Sociology, a member of NNI’s executive committee, and a co-organizer of the event. “Their stories matter when it comes to the types of science and technology we pursue and how they benefit the human condition. Many scientists and engineers may never encounter people living with neurological conditions outside of events like this. That will be a priority for INNS — to bring the expertise of lived experiences to the research process.”

Ian Burkhart’s lived experience reminded the audience that not every clinical trial has a happy ending. His BCI was ultimately removed after seven years as research funding ran short, taking his newly improved hand mobility with it. Despite this, Burkhart remained positive.

“I'm so glad I was able to take that risk and have that voluntary brain surgery and participate in this type of research because it's defined my life.” Burkhart went on to found the BCI Pioneers Coalition and his own nonprofit because of his research participation. “It gave me a lot of hope for the future, and a lot of hope that these types of devices are going to be able to help people and improve their quality of life.”

This event was produced in partnership with The Story Collider and made possible through support from Blackrock Neurotech and Medtronic.

The study, “Evidence for a composite volcano on the rim of Jezero crater on Mars,” was published this May in the Nature-family journal Communications Earth & Environment, and underscores how much we have left to learn about one of the most well-studied regions of Mars.

Lead author Sara C. Cuevas-Quiñones completed the research as an undergraduate during a summer program at Georgia Tech; she is now a graduate student at Brown University. The team also included corresponding author Professor James J. Wray (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences), Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernández (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences), and Jacob Adler, then a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech and now an assistant research professor at Arizona State University. 

“Volcanism on Mars is intriguing for a number of reasons — from the implications it has on habitability, to better constraining the geologic history,” Wray says. “Jezero Crater is one of the best studied sites on Mars. If we are just now identifying a volcano here, imagine how many more could be on Mars. Volcanoes may be even more widespread across Mars than we thought.”

A mountain in the margins

Wray first noticed the mountain in 2007, while considering Jezero Crater as a graduate student. 

“I was looking at low-resolution photos of the area and noticed a mountain on the crater’s rim,” he recalls. “To me, it looked like a volcano, but it was difficult to get additional images.” At the time, Jezero Crater was newly discovered, and imaging focused almost entirely on its intriguing water history, which is on the opposite side of the 28-mile-wide crater.

Then, Jezero Crater, due to these lake-like sedimentary deposits, was selected as the landing spot for the 2020 Perseverance Rover — an ongoing NASA mission seeking signs of ancient Martian life and collecting rock samples for possible return to Earth.

However, after landing, some of the first rocks Perseverance encountered were not the sedimentary deposits one might expect from a previously-flooded area — they were volcanic. Wray suspected he might know the origin of these rocks, but to make a case for it, he would need to show that the mountain on the edge of Jezero Crater could indeed be a volcano.

A new researcher — and old data

The opportunity presented itself several months after Perseverance landed when Cuevas-Quiñones applied to a Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program hosted by the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences to work with Wray. 

“A previous study led by Briony Horgan (professor of planetary science at Purdue University) had also suggested that Jezero Mons could be volcanic,” Cuevas-Quiñones says. “I began wondering if there was a way to home in on these suspicions.”

The team partnered with study coauthor Rivera-Hernández, who specializes in characterizing the surface of planets and their habitability. They decided to use datasets gathered from spacecraft orbiting Mars to compare the properties of Jezero Mons to other, known, volcanoes. “We can’t visit Mars and definitively prove that Jezero Mons is a volcano, but we can show that it shares the same properties with existing volcanoes — both here on Earth and Mars,” Wray explains.

“We used data from the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and Perseverance Rover, all in combination to puzzle this out,” he adds. “I think this shows that these older spacecraft can be extremely valuable long after their initial missions end — these old spacecraft can still make important discoveries and help us answer tricky questions.”

For Cuevas-Quiñones, it also underscores the importance of REU programs and opportunities for undergraduates. “I was an undergraduate student at the time, and this was my first time conducting research,” she says. “It was fascinating to learn how different data sets could be used to decode the origin of a landscape. After Jezero Mons, it became clear to me that I would continue to study Mars and other planetary bodies.”

The search for life — and determining Mars’ age

The discovery makes the crater even more intriguing in the search for past life on Mars. A volcano so close to watery Jezero Crater could add a critical source of heat on an otherwise cold planet, including the potential for hydrothermal activity — energy that life could use to thrive. 

This type of system also holds interest for Mars as a whole. “The coalescence of these two types of systems makes Jezero more interesting than ever,” shares Wray. “We have samples of incredible sedimentary rocks that could be from a habitable region alongside igneous rocks with important scientific value.” If returned to Earth, igneous rocks can be radioisotope dated to know their age very precisely. Dating the Jezero Crater samples could be used to calibrate age estimates, providing an unprecedented window into the geologic history of the planet.

The take home message? “Mars is the best place we have to look in our solar system for signs of life, and thanks to the Perseverance Rover collecting samples in Jezero, the United States has samples from the best rocks in the best place on Mars,” Wray says. “If these samples are returned to Earth, we can do incredible, groundbreaking science with them.”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02329-7

Funding: Cuevas-Quiñones was supported by Georgia Tech’s 2021 Research Experience for Undergraduates program sponsored by NSF and 3M corporation. Wray was supported by NASA funding for Co-Investigators on HiRISE and CaSSIS. CaSSIS is a project of the University of Bern and funded through the Swiss Space Office via ESA’s PRODEX program. The instrument hardware development was also supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) (ASI-INAF agreement 2020-17-HH.0), INAF/Astronomical Observatory of Padova, and the Space Research Center (CBK) in Warsaw. Support from SGF (Budapest), the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab, and NASA are also gratefully acknowledged. Operation support from the UK Space Agency is also acknowledged.

Practiced in Japan since the early 1600s, origami involves combining simple folding techniques to create intricate designs. Now, Georgia Tech researchers are leveraging the technique as the foundation for next-generation materials that can both act as a solid and predictably deform, “folding” under the right forces. The research could lead to innovations in everything from heart stents to airplane wings and running shoes.

Recently published in Nature Communications, the study, “Coarse-grained fundamental forms for characterizing isometries of trapezoid-based origami metamaterials,” was led by first author James McInerney, who is now a NRC Research Associate at the Air Force Research Laboratory. McInerney, who completed the research while a postdoctoral student at the University of Michigan, was previously a doctoral student at Georgia Tech in the group of study co-author Zeb Rocklin. The team also includes Glaucio Paulino (Princeton University), Xiaoming Mao (University of Michigan), and Diego Misseroni (University of Trento).

“Origami has received a lot of attention over the past decade due to its ability to deploy or transform structures,” McInerney says. “Our team wondered how different types of folds could be used to control how a material deforms when different forces and pressures are applied to it” — like a creased piece of cardboard folding more predictably than one that might crumple without any creases.

The applications of that type of control are vast. “There are a variety of scenarios ranging from the design of buildings, aircraft, and naval vessels to the packaging and shipping of goods where there tends to be a trade-off between enhancing the load-bearing capabilities and increasing the total weight,” McInerney explains. “Our end goal is to enhance load-bearing designs by adding origami-inspired creases — without adding weight.”

The challenge, Rocklin adds, is using physics to find a way to predictably model what creases to use and when to achieve the best results.

Deformable solids

Rocklin, a theoretical physicist and associate professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech, emphasizes the complex nature of these types of materials. “If I tug on either end of a sheet of paper, it's solid — it doesn’t separate,” he explains. “But it's also flexible — it can crumple and wave depending on how I move it. That’s a very different behavior than what we might see in a conventional solid, and a very useful one.”

But while flexible solids are uniquely useful, they are also very hard to characterize, he says. “With these materials, it is often difficult to predict what is going to happen — how the material will deform under pressure because they can deform in many different ways. Conventional physics techniques can't solve this type of problem, which is why we're still coming up with new ways to characterize structures in the 21st century.”

When considering origami-inspired materials, physicists start with a flat sheet that's carefully creased to create a specific three-dimensional shape; these folds determine how the material behaves. But the method is limited: only parallelogram-based origami folding, which uses shapes like squares and rectangles, had previously been modeled, allowing for limited types of deformation.

“Our goal was to expand on this research to include trapezoid faces,” McInerney says. Parallelograms have two sets of parallel sides, but trapezoids only need to have one set of parallel sides. Introducing these more variable shapes makes this type of creasing more difficult to model, but potentially more versatile.

Breathing and shearing

“From our models and physical tests, we found that trapezoid faces have an entirely different class of responses,” McInerney shares. In other words — using trapezoids leads to new behavior.

The designs had the ability to change their shape in two distinct ways: "breathing" by expanding and contracting evenly, and “shearing" by deforming in a twisting motion. “We learned that we can use trapezoid faces in origami to constrain the system from bending in certain directions, which provides different functionality than parallelogram faces,” McInerney adds. 

Surprisingly, the team also found that some of the behavior in parallelogram-based origami carried over to their trapezoidal origami, hinting at some features that might be universal across designs.

“While our research is theoretical, these insights could give us more opportunities for how we might deploy these structures and use them,” Rocklin shares.

Future folding

“We still have a lot of work to do,” McInerney says, sharing that there are two separate avenues of research to pursue. “The first is moving from trapezoids to more general quadrilateral faces, and trying to develop an effective model of the material behavior — similar to the way this study moved from parallelograms to trapezoids.” Those new models could help predict how creased materials might deform under different circumstances, and help researchers compare those results to sheets without any creases at all. “This will essentially let us assess the improvement our designs provide,” he explains.

“The second avenue is to start thinking deeply about how our designs might integrate into a real system,” McInerney continues. “That requires understanding where our models start to break down, whether it is due to the loading conditions or the fabrication process, as well as establishing effective manufacturing and testing protocols.”

“It’s a very challenging problem, but biology and nature are full of smart solids — including our own bodies — that deform in specific, useful ways when needed,” Rocklin says. “That’s what we’re trying to replicate with origami.”

This research was funded by the Office of Naval Research, European Union, Army Research Office, and National Science Foundation.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57089-x 

Wang is a recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The award recognizes Wang for his lifelong work on democratizing human-centered AI.

“Throughout my Ph.D. and industry internships, I observed a gap in existing research: there is a strong need for practical tools for applying human-centered approaches when designing AI systems,” said Wang, now a safety researcher at OpenAI.

“My work not only helps people understand AI and guide its behavior but also provides user-friendly tools that fit into existing workflows.”

[Related: Georgia Tech College of Computing Swarms to Yokohama, Japan, for CHI 2025]

Wang’s dissertation presented techniques in visual explanation and interactive guidance to align AI models with user knowledge and values. The work culminated from years of research, fellowship support, and internships.

Wang’s most influential projects formed the core of his dissertation. These included:

• CNN Explainer: an open-source tool developed for deep-learning beginners. Since its release in July 2020, more than 436,000 global visitors have used the tool.
• DiffusionDB: a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset that lays a foundation to help people better understand generative AI. This work could lead to new research in detecting deepfakes and designing human-AI interaction tools to help people more easily use these models.
• GAM Changer: an interface that empowers users in healthcare, finance, or other domains to edit ML models to include knowledge and values specific to their domain, which improves reliability.
• GAM Coach: an interactive ML tool that could help people who have been rejected for a loan by automatically letting an applicant know what is needed for them to receive loan approval.
• Farsight: a tool that alerts developers when they write prompts in large language models that could be harmful and misused.  

“I feel extremely honored and lucky to receive this award, and I am deeply grateful to many who have supported me along the way, including Polo, mentors, collaborators, and friends,” said Wang, who was advised by School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Polo Chau.

“This recognition also inspired me to continue striving to design and develop easy-to-use tools that help everyone to easily interact with AI systems.”

Like Wang, Chau advised Georgia Tech alumnus Fred Hohman (Ph.D. CSE 2020). Hohman won the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2022.

Chau’s group synthesizes machine learning (ML) and visualization techniques into scalable, interactive, and trustworthy tools. These tools increase understanding and interaction with large-scale data and ML models. 

Chau is the associate director of corporate relations for the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech. Wang called the School of CSE his home unit while a student in the ML program under Chau.

Wang is one of five recipients of this year’s award to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025). The conference occurs April 25-May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

SIGCHI is the world’s largest association of human-computer interaction professionals and practitioners. The group sponsors or co-sponsors 26 conferences, including CHI.

Wang’s outstanding dissertation award is the latest recognition of a career decorated with achievement.

Months after graduating from Georgia Tech, Forbes named Wang to its 30 Under 30 in Science for 2025 for his dissertation. Wang was one of 15 Yellow Jackets included in nine different 30 Under 30 lists and the only Georgia Tech-affiliated individual on the 30 Under 30 in Science list.

While a Georgia Tech student, Wang earned recognition from big names in business and technology. He received the Apple Scholars in AI/ML Ph.D. Fellowship in 2023 and was in the 2022 cohort of the J.P. Morgan AI Ph.D. Fellowships Program.

Along with the CHI award, Wang’s dissertation earned him awards this year at banquets across campus. The Georgia Tech chapter of Sigma Xi presented Wang with the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award. He also received the College of Computing’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.

“Georgia Tech attracts many great minds, and I’m glad that some, like Jay, chose to join our group,” Chau said. “It has been a joy to work alongside them and witness the many wonderful things they have accomplished, and with many more to come in their careers.”

“This year's Fellows are the embodiment of scientific excellence and service to our communities...their work demonstrates the value of sustained investment in science and engineering,” says Sudip S. Parikh, AAAS chief executive officer and executive publisher of the Science family of journals. 

A self-professed physicist by training and temperament, Goldman’s research investigates how organisms such as centipedes, snakes, worms, and even plant roots navigate the complexities of the natural world. What makes his research unique is that rather than studying organisms in simple environments, he studies them in environments that more closely mimic their natural habitats such as sandy, loose terrain.

The former Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, Goldman has also earned the NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Investigator Award, an American Physical Society Fellowship, and the Georgia Power Professor of Excellence Award.

“Becoming an AAAS Fellow is an incredible honor,” says Goldman. “However, in many ways I feel I’m just the person representing the results of more than 20 years of effort from my students and post-docs, as well as my mentors who helped me find this incredibly interesting field of study.”

Pioneering robophysical modeling

Nearly 20 years ago, Goldman became fascinated with studying the physics of how a small lizard wriggled through sand. Today, he has carved a unique niche in biological physics, including advancing a robophysical modeling approach incorporating the animal’s motion pattern to supplement understanding of principles related to organism movement. The approach has led to his recent development of limbless and multi-legged robots for use in agricultural efforts and search and rescue.

Now, Goldman directs the CRAB (Complex Rheology and Biomechanics) Lab, which focuses on developing robots beyond traditional bio-inspired robots through a strong physics-based perspective to biological questions.

“As a physicist, I try to find the underlying principle governing certain phenomena,” says Goldman. “We’ve been successful in discovering common patterns of movement and applying a beautiful theoretical framework called ‘gauge kinematics’ where we describe tiny nematode worms, sand swimming lizards, and multi-legged centipedes with the same language.”

The practical applications of Goldman’s research are already paving the way for innovations in robotics ranging from space research to agriculture. Goldman’s startup, Ground Control Robotics, has started building robots that can navigate the difficult terrain of crop fields, identify weeds and other pests, and address challenges like herbicide resistance, labor shortages, and plant disease.

“The journey from studying that small lizard swimming in sand to developing robots for agriculture exemplifies the often-unforeseen pathways of scientific research,” says Goldman. “The principles unlocked by observing these seemingly insignificant creatures have proven crucial in understanding how various organisms and subsequently, robots can effectively move through complex environments.

I can’t wait to see where the efforts of my incredible group members take us next!”

“Our results point to the possibility of building quantum computers using light by taking advantage of this entanglement,” said Chandra Raman, a professor in the School of Physics. 

Quantum computers have the potential to outperform their conventional counterparts, becoming the fastest programmable machines in existence. Entanglement is the key resource for building these quantum computers. 

Light has always been seen as ideal for quantum computing, but it presents challenges. Photons don’t interact with each other. “If I have two or more photons, it's extremely difficult to make them interact; they fly right by each other,” said postdoctoral researcher Aniruddha Bhattacharya. “The key discovery here is we can entangle photons in a useful, controllable, and deterministic way.” 

The researchers devised a protocol to create entanglement consistently. Their protocol makes use of a mathematical geometric structure known as non-Abelian quantum holonomy, which can entangle photons without requiring quantum measurements. Holonomy can be implemented with on-chip photonic devices, suggesting this protocol could be used to create scalable and integrable photonic quantum computers.

The research’s implications are staggering for the future of quantum computing. Photonic quantum computers work well at room temperature, are portable, and are more easily integrated with existent quantum communication systems and links. Quantum computing is the future of not just computing but innovation, and photons could unlock new frontiers. This research was published in Physical Review Letters.               

One physicist helping lead this charge is Amira Bencherif, a postdoctoral researcher in the Epigraphene Lab at Georgia Tech, which aims to advance electronics past the limitations of silicon using graphene’s extraordinary electrical properties.  

Bencherif has just been awarded a prestigious European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) global post-doctoral fellowship; This year, it is expected that fewer than 20% of applicants will be selected from a record pool of over 10,000 submissions. 

The highly selective fellowship will support two additional years of research at Georgia Tech with The Epigraphene Lab, followed by Bencherif working for one year at the CEA-PHELIQS Lab in Grenoble, France. 

“The research in Grenoble is a critical component,” Bencherif explains. “Our Georgia Tech team brings the graphene expertise, and the CEA-PHELIQS Lab brings expertise in extreme low-temperature research. Combining these two areas will let me investigate graphene properties at extreme low temperatures, for the first time.” 

The group hopes the research will lead to breakthroughs in sustainable electronics and manufacturing. “We already know that epigraphene can be used as either as a conductor or as an ultra-high mobility semiconductor,” Bencherif says. “We're still in the fundamental research phase with this new project, but combining both properties of this material on a single chip could result in very fast electronics, very small devices, and more sustainable computing.”  

Growing graphene  

The fellowship builds on a longstanding partnership. “We've collaborated with our French partners on previous papers, and we have a great line of communication and trust,” shares Claire Berger, who works in the Epigraphene Lab directed by Regents' Professor Walter de Heer at Georgia Tech. “This prestigious fellowship is a recognition not only of Amira’s skills, talent and dedication as a researcher, but also of the quality of the epigraphene scientific program and the strength of the French-American collaboration.” 

Berger, who serves as a professor of the practice at Georgia Tech, recently received one of France’s highest civilian honors in science and scientific diplomacy, the Chevalier dans L'ordre des Palmes Académiques. She is also the Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) International Research Lab, which has a main presence at Georgia Tech-Europe in Metz, France, as well as a mirror site at Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus.  

“To advance this field, collaboration is crucial,” Berger says. “We cannot do it alone — the MSCA support for Amira’s work is both a testament to her hard work and the important partnership with our French counterparts.”  

The future of graphene 

One key aspect of the Epigraphene Lab’s research involves developing a graphene semiconductor ten times more conductive than silicon that has the potential to create a new kind of electronics. 

“Complementing its semiconducting property, some form of epigraphene has special pathways which make electronic mobility extremely high,” Bencherif explains. “This has benefits like less energy dissipation, which is important for addressing global warming and energy challenges. We use epigraphene — which is graphene grown on a silicon carbide substrate — to make electrical devices and study their electrical properties.” 

“We also suspect we can use another mode of communication with current, based on the wave quantum nature of the electron, leading to coherent electronics,” which Berger shares is a long-term research project the group is pursuing. 

“This type of work is very prospective and ambitious, which is why Amira was granted this prestigious fellowship,” Berger adds. “This type of research is a lot of hard work. To drive this work forward, Amira has put in an astonishing number of hours and a lot of thoughtful effort. She's incredibly creative, and it's an honor to work with her.”  

Students and faculty from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) are leading the Georgia Tech contingent at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE25). The Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) organizes CSE25, occurring March 3-7 in Fort Worth, Texas.

At CSE25, the School of CSE researchers are presenting papers that apply computing approaches to varying fields, including:                   

• Experiment designs to accelerate the discovery of material properties
• Machine learning approaches to model and predict weather forecasting and coastal flooding
• Virtual models that replicate subsurface geological formations used to store captured carbon dioxide
• Optimizing systems for imaging and optical chemistry
• Plasma physics during nuclear fusion reactions

[Related: GT CSE at SIAM CSE25 Interactive Graphic] 

“In CSE, researchers from different disciplines work together to develop new computational methods that we could not have developed alone,” said School of CSE Professor Edmond Chow. 

“These methods enable new science and engineering to be performed using computation.” 

CSE is a discipline dedicated to advancing computational techniques to study and analyze scientific and engineering systems. CSE complements theory and experimentation as modes of scientific discovery. 

Held every other year, CSE25 is the primary conference for the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering (SIAG CSE). School of CSE faculty serve in key roles in leading the group and preparing for the conference.

In December, SIAG CSE members elected Chow to a two-year term as the group’s vice chair. This election comes after Chow completed a term as the SIAG CSE program director. 

School of CSE Associate Professor Elizabeth Cherry has co-chaired the CSE25 organizing committee since the last conference in 2023. Later that year, SIAM members reelected Cherry to a second, three-year term as a council member at large. 

At Georgia Tech, Chow serves as the associate chair of the School of CSE. Cherry, who recently became the associate dean for graduate education of the College of Computing, continues as the director of CSE programs. 

“With our strong emphasis on developing and applying computational tools and techniques to solve real-world problems, researchers in the School of CSE are well positioned to serve as leaders in computational science and engineering both within Georgia Tech and in the broader professional community,” Cherry said. 

Georgia Tech’s School of CSE was first organized as a division in 2005, becoming one of the world’s first academic departments devoted to the discipline. The division reorganized as a school in 2010 after establishing the flagship CSE Ph.D. and M.S. programs, hiring nine faculty members, and attaining substantial research funding.

Ten School of CSE faculty members are presenting research at CSE25, representing one-third of the School’s faculty body. Of the 23 accepted papers written by Georgia Tech researchers, 15 originate from School of CSE authors.

The list of School of CSE researchers, paper titles, and abstracts includes:
Bayesian Optimal Design Accelerates Discovery of Material Properties from Bubble Dynamics
Postdoctoral Fellow Tianyi Chu, Joseph Beckett, Bachir Abeid, and Jonathan Estrada (University of Michigan), Assistant Professor Spencer Bryngelson
[Abstract]

Latent-EnSF: A Latent Ensemble Score Filter for High-Dimensional Data Assimilation with Sparse Observation Data
Ph.D. student Phillip Si, Assistant Professor Peng Chen
[Abstract]

A Goal-Oriented Quadratic Latent Dynamic Network Surrogate Model for Parameterized Systems
Yuhang Li, Stefan Henneking, Omar Ghattas (University of Texas at Austin), Assistant Professor Peng Chen
[Abstract]

Posterior Covariance Structures in Gaussian Processes
Yuanzhe Xi (Emory University), Difeng Cai (Southern Methodist University), Professor Edmond Chow
[Abstract]

Robust Digital Twin for Geological Carbon Storage
Professor Felix Herrmann, Ph.D. student Abhinav Gahlot, alumnus Rafael Orozco (Ph.D. CSE-CSE 2024), alumnus Ziyi (Francis) Yin (Ph.D. CSE-CSE 2024), and Ph.D. candidate Grant Bruer
[Abstract]

Industry-Scale Uncertainty-Aware Full Waveform Inference with Generative Models
Rafael Orozco, Ph.D. student Tuna Erdinc, alumnus Mathias Louboutin (Ph.D. CS-CSE 2020), and Professor Felix Herrmann
[Abstract]

Optimizing Coupled Systems: Insights from Co-Design Imaging and Optical Chemistry
Assistant Professor Raphaël Pestourie, Wenchao Ma and Steven Johnson (MIT), Lu Lu (Yale University), Zin Lin (Virginia Tech)
[Abstract]

Multifidelity Linear Regression for Scientific Machine Learning from Scarce Data
Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian, Ph.D. student Dayoung Kang, Vignesh Sella, Anirban Chaudhuri and Anirban Chaudhuri (University of Texas at Austin)
[Abstract]

LyapInf: Data-Driven Estimation of Stability Guarantees for Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
Ph.D. candidate Tomoki Koike and Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian
[Abstract]

The Information Geometric Regularization of the Euler Equation
Alumnus Ruijia Cao (B.S. CS 2024), Assistant Professor Florian Schäfer
[Abstract]

Maximum Likelihood Discretization of the Transport Equation
Ph.D. student Brook Eyob, Assistant Professor Florian Schäfer
[Abstract]

Intelligent Attractors for Singularly Perturbed Dynamical Systems
Daniel A. Serino (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Allen Alvarez Loya (University of Colorado Boulder), Joshua W. Burby, Ioannis G. Kevrekidis (Johns Hopkins University), Assistant Professor Qi Tang (Session Co-Organizer)
[Abstract]

Accurate Discretizations and Efficient AMG Solvers for Extremely Anisotropic Diffusion Via Hyperbolic Operators
Golo Wimmer, Ben Southworth, Xianzhu Tang (LANL), Assistant Professor Qi Tang 
[Abstract]

Randomized Linear Algebra for Problems in Graph Analytics
Professor Rich Vuduc
[Abstract]

Improving Spgemm Performance Through Reordering and Cluster-Wise Computation
Assistant Professor Helen Xu
[Abstract]

According to David Ballantyne, associate chair for Academic Programs and professor in the School of Physics, the new major is unique because it focuses on the future of astronomy and astrophysics, especially in the era of discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

“We made a concerted effort when crafting this degree to make it modern and forward-facing,” says Ballantyne. “It is very much focused on the next decade of astronomy and astrophysics, providing a strong emphasis on computational skills, data analysis, and big data.”

The new degree includes coursework on the fundamental physical processes and laws that govern planetary systems, stars, galaxies, and the Universe as a whole. These core topics are complemented by training in computational and data analysis techniques that can be applied to a variety of disciplines. 

For Ballantyne, the degree program should appeal to students who are interested in pursuing careers in space science research as well as those interested in non-research career paths. 

“This program prepares students to solve complex problems in a very quantitative, rigorous way. Such problem solving and computational skills are highly marketable for a range of career paths,” he adds.

The evolution of astrophysics at Tech 

While astronomy coursework and outreach have long existed at the Institute, astrophysics officially began in 2008, when the School of Physics launched the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (CRA). Today, the Center boasts more than a dozen faculty and research scientists, with expertise spanning high-energy astrophysics, extrasolar planets, gravitational-wave astronomy, and astroparticle physics.

As the CRA’s faculty roster grew, the School expanded its offering of astrophysics courses. A concentration in astrophysics for physics majors was launched during the 2013-14 academic year. A short time later, the School introduced an astrophysics certificate for non-majors. The new astrophysics major and minor — which will replace the concentration and certificate, respectively — reflects a new chapter in the history of astrophysics education and research at Georgia Tech.  

“Most of our peer institutions have an astronomy or astrophysics degree so the creation of this program at Georgia Tech was a natural fit,” says Ballantyne. “Our program fills a critical need considering that there are few options in the U.S. Southeast for students to obtain this type of training at an institution of Georgia Tech’s caliber.”

Declaring the astrophysics major and minor

Current students

Current students can declare the astrophysics major starting next semester, following the standard major change process for undergraduates. The astrophysics minor will be available to all Georgia Tech undergraduates starting summer 2025.  

Incoming students

Astrophysics will be added to the list of majors beginning with the admissions application for Summer 2025 (transfer students) and the 2026-27 academic year (first-year students). 

In the interim, transfer students enrolling for the Spring 2025 semester should follow the standard major change process for undergraduates. Students applying to Georgia Tech for the 2025-26 academic year should select “physics” as their major during the application process and choose “astrophysics” once admitted, during the major confirmation process. 

“‘Oumuamua was found passing just 15 million miles from Earth — that’s much closer than Mars or Venus,” says James Wray. “But it was formed in an entirely different solar system. Studying these objects could give us incredible insight into extrasolar planets, and how our planet fits into the universe.”

Wray, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, has just been awarded a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship to do just that. Pivot Fellowships are among the most prestigious sources of funding for cutting-edge research, and support leading researchers who have the deep interest, curiosity and drive to make contributions to a new discipline.

Wray has primarily studied the geoscience of Mars. He will leverage knowledge of nearby planets to understand ISOs and planets much farther away. “I want to understand how planets got to be the way they are, and if they could have ever hosted life,” he explains. “Extrasolar planets give us many more places to ask those questions than our solar system does, but they're too distant to visit with spacecraft. ISOs provide a unique opportunity to explore other solar systems without leaving our own.”

The Fellowship will provide salary support as well as funding for research, travel, and professional development. “Seed funds like this are so valuable,” says Wray. “I’m incredibly grateful to the Simons Foundation. I’d also like to thank Georgia Tech for its support,” he adds, sharing that the Center for Space Technology and Research supported a related research effort at the University of Hawaii earlier this year. “My mentor and I were able to spend some of that time improving our Pivot Fellowship proposal, which played a critical role in securing this Fellowship.”

In search of ISOs

Wray will study small solar system bodies like asteroids and comets to decode the processes of planet formation and space weathering, and will analyze data from the 2017 and 2019 ISOs.

He will also work alongside collaborators including Karen Meech of the University of Hawaii, who led the paper characterizing ‘Oumuamua, to conceptualize what an intercept mission might look like. 

“We still have a lot of questions regarding ISOs,” he says. “Hundreds of papers have already been written about them, but we still don't know the answers.” One key mystery is the composition of the bodies: both the 2017 and 2019 objects were compositionally different from those in our solar system.

“Are they inherently different from the bodies in our solar system, or did the long journey to our solar system make them that way? Is our solar system different from others?” Wray asks. “We could answer so many questions with even a simple picture of the next ISO that comes close enough for us to intercept with spacecraft.”

A cosmic timeline

While there is no guarantee that another ISO might be spotted in our solar system, the timing is opportune — upcoming telescope surveys are poised to detect such interstellar objects. “In mid-2025, when I will start this Fellowship, the new Rubin Observatory will begin scanning the entire sky,” Wray says. “It has the potential to discover up to several new ISOs per year.”

“ISO visits are always brief,” he adds, “so the research needs to be in place for when one is spotted.” If an interstellar object is detected, Wray and Meech will be poised to leverage specialized telescopes in Hawaii, along with others worldwide, to better understand it, studying its size, shape, and composition — and potentially sending spacecraft to image it.

“We might never find another ISO — or they might be the key to imminent breakthroughs in understanding our place in the galaxy,” Wray adds. “I'm extremely grateful to the Simons Foundation for the flexibility to pursue this research at whatever pace the cosmos allows.”

“We are proud and excited to honor this year’s recipients of the O’Hara Fellowships,” says College of Sciences Senior Associate Dean David Collard. “They represent the best of our amazing Ph.D. students with impressive research, teaching, service, and leadership accomplishments.”

Meet the 2024-25 O’Hara Fellows

Anthony (Tony) Boever, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Boever is a fifth-year EAS student, conducting research for Martial Taillefert’s Group. His research spans the land-to-ocean continuum and includes studies on how groundwater fluctuations control the fate and transport of uranium in stream sediments, how wetland changes affect methane emissions, and how river pulses influence carbon transformations in low-oxygen ocean sediments. Boever has been extremely active in field research, participating in six research cruises and leading the field component of a Department of Energy-funded project at the Savannah River National Laboratory that included more than six research trips in two years. As a result of his extensive field work, Boever is working on three first-author publications and co-authoring three additional articles.

“I play in the mud, using sensors to monitor chemical changes that affect the environment,” says Boever. “Field studies are tough, but what we learn is invaluable not only for improving our current understanding of these processes but also informing us of their potential influence on future ecosystem function and global climate impacts.”

Erin Connolly, School of Biological Sciences

Connolly will earn her Ph.D. in bioinformatics. As a member of the Gibson Lab, she studies single-cell genomics, data visualization, gene regulation, autoimmunity, cancer, and personalized medicine. In addition to her research activities, Connolly has presented posters or presentations at five national and international meetings, was active in the Women-in-Science promotion, and has mentored high school and undergraduate students.

“My research focuses on understanding how our immune system differs between sexes, changes with age, and responds to treatments such as radiation and immunotherapy,” says Connolly. “By studying these differences, I aim to uncover details that can lead to more personalized and effective therapies for cancer and age-related diseases. This work can potentially make healthcare more effective, improving patient outcomes across diverse populations.”

Sierra Knavel, School of Mathematics 

Knavel, whose research focuses on symplectic topology and is advised by John Etnyre, is an avid mentor and teacher. She served on the Graduate Council and runs the Directed Reading Program for the School of Mathematics, pairing undergraduate students with graduate students to pursue advanced topics in mathematics. She also developed a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) based on her Ph.D. research. As a teaching assistant, she has been recognized with an Outstanding Student Evaluation Award and numerous Thank-a-Teacher certificates.

“My time at Georgia Tech grows more enriching each year,” says Knavel. “The community is welcoming, with abundant mentorship. I've received support at every level for my decisions to attend conferences, teach abroad, and help organize activities in the School of Mathematics. Because of the supportive community, I’ve gained the skills and knowledge necessary to teach and motivate undergraduate students in both classroom and research settings.”

Xing Xu, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Xu will receive her Ph.D. in chemistry and has published two first-author papers, with three more in preparation. She has contributed to four additional publications as a second or third author. Additionally, she mentored several undergraduate and first-year graduate students within the Wu Research Group and served as a mentor for the Summer 2023 National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates Program.

"My research focuses on identifying glycoprotein alterations in human cancer,” says Xu. “I’m particularly fascinated by how I can use chemical probes and mass spectrometry to 'visualize' changes in glycoproteins within clinical cancer models. This area of study interests me because glycoproteins play a crucial role in cancer progression and metastasis, and understanding these alterations could lead to new therapeutic strategies."

Kai Xue, School of Psychology

Xue specializes in cognition and brain science. Although she has been a part of the Ph.D. program for only two years, she has published three scientific papers and has several others submitted and under review. She has also served as a highly ranked teaching assistant.

"My research centers on perceptual decision-making and metacognition, focused on using computational modeling and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to advance our understanding of how confidence is computed,” says Xue. “This exploration into the mechanisms of human confidence computation deeply fascinates me; I am incredibly grateful to my supervisor, Dobromir Rahnev, whose unwavering support and guidance have been invaluable throughout this journey."

Haley scholars receive a one-time merit award of up to $4,000 thanks to the generosity of the late Marion Peacock Haley. Haley’s estate established the merit-based graduate fellowships in honor of her late husband, Herbert P. Haley (ME 1933).

Meet the 2024-2025 Haley Fellows

Emily Gleaton, School of Psychology

Gleaton specializes in engineering psychology. Since 2020, she has served as president, secretary, webmaster, and treasurer of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society student chapter and held multiple leadership positions in the Psychology Graduate Student Council. She was recognized by Georgia Tech’s Center for Student Engagement as part of the 2023 Celebrating Student Leadership Project.

“My research focuses on how to reduce the disuse of assistive technologies and improve user outcomes through enhanced instruction and training,” says Gleaton. “These technologies, from mobility aids to smart devices like wearables and conversational agents, help people perform tasks more easily.  I hope my work fosters the successful adoption of assistive technology — and supports individuals aging in place, improving health, and gaining greater independence.”

Alex Havrilla, School of Mathematics

A third-year Ph.D. student studying mathematics, Havrilla focuses on both theoretical and applied topics in generative machine learning. He has published several papers in academic journals and is an active attendee/presenter in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics student chapter seminar series. Outside of Georgia Tech, Alex co-founded CarperAI, an open-source research group studying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for large language models.

"My theoretical work tries to understand how well models generalize depending on model size and the amount and makeup of training data. My applied research improves the mathematical reasoning abilities of generative models through synthetic data generation," says Havrilla. "I love the interplay between both theory and application. Knowing the theory helps give me a more principled understanding of what is done in practice, and knowing the practice helps me decide what are the most relevant questions to study theoretically.”

Charles “Ross” Lindsey, School of Biological Sciences

As part of the Rosenzweig Lab, Lindsey investigates the evolution of multicellularity and cell differentiation. He also assists Team Phoenix Supercomputing via Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects program, which engages undergraduate and graduate students in long-term, large-scale, multidisciplinary project teams led by faculty. Lindsey trains the Team Phoenix Supercomputing to compete in high-performance computing (HPC) competitions while equipping them with fundamental skills necessary for HPC research.

“My research has largely focused on a small group of freshwater green algae known informally as the ‘volvocine algae’,” says Lindsey. “The varying levels of developmental and sexual complexity make these organisms a useful model system for investigating major evolutionary questions. I infer the phylogenetic relationships of this group and perform ancestral-state reconstructions of key traits thought necessary for the evolution of differentiated, multicellularity.”

Jordan McKaig, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

McKaig has two first-author publications and has presented her research nationally and internationally. She participated in the International Space Station (ISS) analog experiment at Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo and NASA outreach for the Atlanta Science Festival. On campus, she was the 2023 President of ExplOrigins, a group of young scientists interested in the origins and evolution of life, the exploration of our solar system, and the search for habitable planets beyond Earth. 

“My research focuses on detecting signs of life and characterizing microbes in very salty environments,” says McKaig. “I am interested in life at the fringe of habitability, where the environmental conditions are harsh, but adequate for living things to exist. By learning about life in the extremes on Earth, we can make predictions about what life may look like if it exists on other planets or moons, and how we might be able to detect such life forms. In my lab work, I explore the applications that nanopore instrumentation may have in the search for extraterrestrial life.”

Kellie Stellmach, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Stellmach is a Ph.D. student in chemistry. She is heavily involved in the Student Polymer Network, serving as secretary, vice president, and president. As an adamant supporter of reducing the gender gap in STEM fields, Kellie frequently invites female researchers to Georgia Tech to share their science research and assists with outreach events through the Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS) program.

"My research focuses on the chemical recycling of polymers back to their monomers, a process that enables plastic waste to be recycled in a circular fashion,” says Stellmach. “I'm particularly interested in this area of research because it combines the challenge of developing new chemical methods with the potential for significant environmental impact. By improving the efficiency of recycling processes, my work aims to reduce plastic waste and support a more sustainable future."

Called the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE), it will be built off the coast of Washington State in the Cascadia Basin with global collaboration including Georgia Tech’s Ignacio Taboada. 

Taboada, who is the current spokesperson of the IceCube collaboration and a professor in the School of Physics, has been awarded over $1.5 million in funding through a Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build P-ONE’s sensor trigger system, which will record and identify sources of light as they are captured by the telescope’s sensors.

“This is a multi-institute collaboration,” Taboada shares. Co-PI’s include Naoko Kurahashi Neilson of Drexel University, Nathan Whitehorn and Tyce DeYoung of Michigan State University, and Alexandra Rahlin of the University of Chicago.

2,600 meters under the sea

Taboada says the team was drawn to the underwater location, despite the associated building challenges because “the characteristics of the seawater mean that we could identify more individual sources better than IceCube can, if we can build a detector of the same size.”

Capturing astrophysical particles is a balance of finding the right medium for the sensors: the medium’s density contributes to how many particles are captured. 

While an open-air observatory would be possible, Taboada explains that “air is about 1,000 times less dense, so it means that we would get 1,000 times fewer neutrinos interacting in the detector — and neutrino detections are very, very rare.” Using a medium like ice or seawater maximizes the possibility of capturing these particles.

Ice and seawater also present unique challenges. “The ice in Antarctica is extremely transparent,” Taboada explains. This means that when a photon enters the ice, it can travel a very long distance within that ice. “But it doesn't travel in a straight line,” he says. Instead, the particle ricochets and scatters, deviating from its original path.

This makes it more difficult to determine exactly where the particle has come from — a key aspect for astronomical observations. “In comparison, light entering seawater scatters much less," Taboada says. “It always travels in a straight line.” Because of this, neutrino directions are determined more precisely in seawater than in ice.

Tracing the cosmos

Key to capturing these particles is the trigger system that Taboada will build with this new funding. That component  will collect data around interesting events, which are seen as light to the system.  

But there are many sources of light in the ocean that aren’t from astronomical phenomena. “It's not something that can be trivially predicted,” says Taboada. “It's a very complicated situation and you have to adapt the trigger to various amounts of background light.”

For example, there’s bioluminescence to consider.

Some sources, like fish or small organisms, can move around independently, while others, like bioluminescent plankton, might instead react to turbulence. The trigger system will need to identify and filter out all of these sources.

“Seawater also has a lot of potassium,” Taboada adds. “One of the isotopes of potassium is radioactive, and the optical sensors can catch light from that.”

Once the trigger system recognizes and captures the event, the data is sent to the mainland, where computers will leverage machine and deep learning to determine exactly what the sensor has captured.

“It's a process of gathering and analyzing interesting data,” Taboada says, similar to looking into a night sky and differentiating shooting stars, constellations, satellites, and planes.

From sea to space

Because P-ONE is one of the first projects of its kind, the research team plans to initially install six or seven lines of instrumentation across the seafloor. “That is rather small,” says Taboada, “but it will demonstrate how to build the instrument and how to operate it.”

“P-ONE has the eventual objective of being similar to IceCube in size,” he adds. “But it will be a northern hemisphere detector (meaning it can ‘see’ different parts of the sky than IceCube), and should have significantly better angular resolution and sensitivity.” And while P-ONE’s location will provide views that IceCube can’t, the effort also has the potential to provide a new perspective of the ocean floor.

The system will continuously monitor the deep ocean at an unprecedented scale, capturing data about environmental conditions and biological processes, key information for oceanographers and marine biologists — all while furthering the field of neutrino astrophysics.

Funding: NSF

P-ONE is a collaboration between the following organizations: 

Ocean Networks Canada; University of Victoria; University of Alberta; Department of Physics, Queen's University; Department of Physics, Simon Fraser University; TRIUMF; Department of Physics, Technical University of Munich; Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics; Collaborative Research Centre 1258 (SFB1258) at TUM funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); European Southern Observatory; Institut für Kernphysik, Goethe Universität Frankfurt; GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung; Max Planck Institute for Physics; Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Science; University College London; Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University; Georgia Institute of Technology; Drexel University; University of Chicago

“From all of us in Biological Sciences, we’re thrilled to see Ben Freeman named a Packard Fellow,” says School Chair Jeffrey (Todd) Streelman. “Ben’s research is important, compelling, and creative — a triple-threat combination that justifies this recognition.”

Awarded annually to only 20 individuals by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Packard Fellows are known for pursuing cutting-edge research, never-before-done projects, and ambitious goals. 

“These scientists and engineers are the architects of tomorrow, leading innovation with bold ideas and unyielding determination,” shares Nancy Lindborg, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Packard Foundation. “Their work today will be the foundation for the breakthroughs of the future, inspiring the next wave of discovery and invention.” 

“I'm flabbergasted to receive this prestigious award,” says Freeman. “Packard support will be transformative. It will give me the freedom to do the sorts of risky projects that I've dreamed about, and will support the intense fieldwork that I'm convinced is necessary to understand big questions in climate change ecology.”

The Packard funding will support Freemans most ambitious project to date: developing “Tech Mountain” in the tropics, a long-term field project focused on surveying thousands of individual birds. From mountain slope to summit, he will track their motions, their nests and predators, where they live, eat, move, and die — and how this changes as temperatures warm.

The pioneer study will shape a window into how birds and other organisms are responding to our changing climate, while developing technology and methodology that could revolutionize the fields of ecology and biology.

The escalator to extinction

Freeman’s previous research has shown that, in general, birds are moving to higher elevations as our climate changes. 

“I found that as it's gotten warmer in the tropics, it's set in motion what I call an escalator to extinction,” he explains. “Birds are living at higher and higher elevations, and those that were common on a mountain top when I was a toddler in Peru are now gone from that mountain.”

While this previous research has shown that tropical birds are on this escalator, it hasn’t been possible to determine the specifics: which birds might be most vulnerable and what the key stressors are.

Freeman explains that “Tech Mountain” will be a first-of-its-kind field site, equipped with innovative sensors and trackers — think cameras placed on nets, recording equipment, climatic sensors, and small individual trackers on each bird.

“I want to figure out what drives their birth rates, where they're dying, and where they're moving during the course of their life,” he shares. “That will help us unravel how this escalator to extinction works.”

Building ‘Tech Mountain’

Several thousand meters tall, encompassing lowland rainforest, foothill rainforest, and cloud forest, Freeman’s field site will feature dense vegetation, steep grades, and encompass several different climatic zones — each with unique species.

Along its slopes, Freeman’s team will find, catch, mark, and follow the lives of thousands of individual birds across hundreds of species — for a minimum of five years, but potentially for decades. It’s never been done before.

Currently, most GPS trackers are too large for small birds, and smaller trackers capture limited information. Additionally, these smaller trackers cannot wirelessly transfer data — in order to download and access the data, each bird must be recaptured.

“The conditions are tough. It’s rugged. It’s humid. It’s cloudy and wet. We’ll need to put resources into developing technology that fits our needs, and experiment with different ways of tracking individuals in these difficult conditions,” Freeman says.

Freeman will also leverage eBird, an online hub where community scientists can upload their observations. “Millions upon millions of observations are uploaded by community scientists, citizen scientists, birders — people,” he adds. “And using this data, we can estimate the vulnerability of mountain bird species — which species seem to be shrinking their ranges and declining in abundance.”

This builds on Freeman’s current work creating the Mountain Bird Network, which supports community scientists in conducting bird surveys on their local mountains.

Georgia Tech and global connections

Freeman’s tools and methodologies could revolutionize fieldwork for ecologists and biologists, opening the door for rigorous new field studies.

It will also provide opportunities to deepen collaborations abroad. “I'm planning on working closely with Dr. Elisa Bonaccorso's lab at the University of San Francisco, Quito (USFQ Ecuador),” Freeman says, “and I’m looking forward to that collaboration. The Packard funding will also support work in Ecuador conducted by an Ecuadorian graduate student who is studying at Georgia Tech.”

Throughout the research, students will be at the heart of the projects. “I take mentoring scientists very seriously,” Freeman shares. “Undergraduates will have the opportunity to get involved on the biology side of this research, the computational side, and on the engineering side of the research. They’ll even help develop new tracking technologies.

The Packard Fellowship will not only support my research — but help me provide these opportunities in the coming years to Georgia Tech’s future scientists.” 

This goal is the motivation behind a recently introduced principle of physics called rattling, which posits that systems with sufficiently “messy” dynamics organize into what researchers refer to as low rattling states. Although the principle has proved accurate for systems of robot swarms, it has been too vague to be more broadly tested, and it has been unclear exactly why it works and to what other systems it should apply.

Dana Randall, a professor in the School of Computer Science, and Jacob Calvert, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science, have formulated a theory of rattling that answers these fundamental questions. Their paper, “A Local-Global Principle for Nonequilibrium Steady States,” published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, characterizes how rattling is related to the amount of time that a system spends in a state. Their theory further identifies the classes of systems for which rattling explains self-organization.

When we first heard about rattling from physicists, it was very hard to believe it could be true. Our work grew out of a desire to understand it ourselves. We found that the idea at its core is surprisingly simple and holds even more broadly than the physicists guessed.

Dana Randall  Professor, School of Computer Science & Adjunct Professor, School of Mathematics 
Georgia Institute of Technology 

Beyond its basic scientific importance, the work can be put to immediate use to analyze models of phenomena across scientific domains. Additionally, experimentalists seeking organization within a nonequilibrium system may be able to induce low rattling states to achieve their desired goal. The duo thinks the work will be valuable in designing microparticles, robotic swarms, and new materials. It may also provide new ways to analyze and predict collective behaviors in biological systems at the micro and nanoscale.

The preceding material is based on work supported by the Army Research Office under award ARO MURI Award W911NF-19-1-0233 and by the National Science Foundation under grant CCF-2106687. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies.

Jacob Calvert and Dana Randall. A local-global principle for nonequilibrium steady states. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(42):e2411731121, 2024.

The Department of Energy has funded these early career awards since 2010, and this year distributed $138 million to 91 scientists nationwide. These awards are critical to DOE’s long-standing efforts to develop the next generation of STEM leaders and solidify America’s role as the driver of science and innovation. 

“Investing in cutting-edge research and science is a cornerstone of DOE's mission and essential to maintaining America’s role as a global innovation leader,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.

Itamar Kimchi

Kimchi’s research in quantum theory explores the role of entanglement in strongly correlated quantum materials, which have potential applications in quantum computers, sensors, and solid-state devices. His work addresses the challenges posed by defects and quenched disorder in these materials. 

Kimchi’s project aims to construct theoretical models to describe novel behaviors, particularly in quantum spin liquid (QSL) phases of magnetic insulators. The research seeks to demonstrate the transformation of QSLs from weak disorder, predict defect effects in QSLs, and collaborate with experimental labs to address the dichotomy between global and local experimental probes in materials with local defects.

The ECRP award will support Kimchi’s efforts to develop theoretical frameworks that guide new concepts and experimental probes — and to uncover how crystallographic defects can identify, generate, and control emergent quantum behavior, contributing to next-generation technologies for energy applications.

“Quantum sciences and technologies are becoming increasingly important for U.S. interests, as seen in the National Quantum Initiative, the CHIPS and Science Act, and other efforts,” said Kimchi. “Together with my research group, we are delighted to be supported by the Department of Energy and to join its extraordinary network of researchers, which enables us to pursue these challenges in understanding and using quantum materials.” 

Sourabh Saha

Saha’s research focuses on generating novel, advanced manufacturing capabilities that will massively reduce the cost of fabricating fuel capsules for inertial fusion energy. Nuclear fusion is the mechanism that powers the sun and generates the sunlight received on Earth. Fusion can be a clean, safe, abundant, and reliable source of electricity, but controlling it on Earth is a major challenge. 

Inertial fusion is one way to achieve and control fusion. This requires holding the nuclear fuel within pea-sized capsules, called targets, that are manufactured to extreme precision. For fusion to be a cost-effective source of electricity, the expense of producing these fuel capsules must be reduced from tens of thousands of dollars to less than a dollar. This is where Saha’s work lies: in enabling new ways of making the fuel capsules, cost-effectively and precisely.    

The ECRP award will allow Saha to focus on advancing the scientific knowledge base for scalable manufacturing of fusion targets. Generally, manufacturing scale-up is perceived as a late-stage engineering activity that can be postponed until a technology’s scientific underpinnings have been determined. But this perception has also often led to the underfunding of manufacturing science research. 

Saha believes that to solve many of engineering’s current grand challenges, the science of manufacturing scale-up should be considered early on — and in concert with researching other aspects of a technology. 

“The DOE award allows our group to do precisely this kind of research in the area of fusion energy. I am humbled to be able to work on one of the most challenging but worthwhile problems of our time,” Saha said.

Early Career Program awardees in this round of funding were required to be an untenured assistant or associate professor on the tenure track at a U.S. academic institution, or a full-time employee at a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility who received their Ph.D. within the past 12 years. A list of the 91 recipients, their institutions, and the titles of their research projects is available on the ECRP website.

Previous Recipients of DOE Early Career Grants

Wenjing Lao, associate professor, School of Mathematics

Ryan Lively, Thomas C. DeLoach Professor, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair and professor, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Every millisecond will matter when the world's best athletes gather in Paris for the Summer Olympics, and track and field athletes will compete on a surface designed to produce record-breaking performances.  

“Some research says that 80% of infections in human bodies can be attributed to the bacteria growing in biofilms,” Aawaz Pokhrel says, lead author of a groundbreaking new study that uses physics to investigate how these biofilms grow.

The paper, “The Biophysical Basis of Bacterial Colony Growth,” was published in Nature Physics this week, and it shows that the fitness of a biofilm — its ability to grow, expand, and absorb nutrients from the medium or the substrate — is largely impacted by the contact angle that the biofilm’s edge makes with the substrate. The study also found that this geometry has a bigger influence on fitness than anything else, including the rate at which the cells can reproduce.

“That was the big surprise for us,” says corresponding author Peter Yunker, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics. “We expected that the geometry would play an important role, and we thought that figuring out exactly what the geometry is would be important for understanding why the range expansion rate, for example, [the rate at which the biofilm spreads across the surface over time] is constant. But we didn't start the project thinking that geometry would be the single most important factor.”

Understanding how biofilms grow — and what factors contribute to their growth rate — could lead to critical insights on controlling them, with applications for human health, like slowing the spread of infection or creating cleaner surfaces. “What got me excited was this opportunity to use physics to learn about complex biological systems,” Pokhrel, who is also a Ph.D. student in Yunker’s lab, adds. “Especially on a project that has so many applications. The combination of the importance for human health and exciting research was really intriguing for me.”

A new method

While biofilms are ubiquitous in nature, studying them has proven difficult. Because these “cities of microorganisms” are comprised of tiny individuals, scientists have struggled to image them successfully.

That changed in 2015, when Yunker began wondering if interferometry, a commonly used imaging technique in physics and materials science, could be applied to biofilms. “Given my background in physics, I was familiar with its use in materials applications,” Yunker recalls. “I thought applying this technique more broadly might be interesting, because we know from decades of physics that surface interfaces contain a lot of information about the processes that create them.” 

The technique proved to be simple, effective, and time-efficient, providing nanometer-scale resolution of bacterial colonies. “It allows us to essentially get a picture of the topography — the shape of the surface of the bacterial population — with super-resolution,” Yunker adds.

Leveraging interferometry, the team began conducting new biofilm experiments, investigating how colonies’ shapes changed over time. Co-first author Gabi Steinbach, formerly a postdoctoral scholar in Yunker’s lab and now a scientific research coordinator at the University of Maryland, noticed that every colony had a specific shape when it was small: a spherical cap, like a slice from the top of a sphere, or a droplet of water. It’s a shape that shows up often in physics, and that sparked the team’s interest.

“A spherical cap in physics is very interesting, because it is a surface-minimizing shape,” Pokhrel adds. “I was curious why a biological material was growing in this shape, and we started wondering if there was some physics to it – perhaps geometry was involved. And that made us think that maybe we could develop a model. And that got me really excited.”

A mathematical mystery

However, the researchers soon hit a roadblock. “While we could see that the colonies were spherical caps at first, they would deviate from that shape as they grew,” Pokhrel says. “And the shape that they grew into was difficult to describe with existing spherical cap geometry.”

“The middle didn’t grow as quickly as it should to keep the spherical cap shape, and we wanted to connect all of this to the range expansion [the rate at which the colony spread across a surface],” Yunker adds. “But we knew that somehow, geometry was playing a very important role.”

Finally, Thomas Day, a former graduate student in Yunker’s lab, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, and one of the authors of the paper, suggested a quirky problem of geometry called the napkin ring problem.

“As soon as we started to think about the napkin ring problem, we were able to start developing a mathematical toolkit,” Yunker says, though the solution wasn’t effortless. “We couldn't find anyone who  had ever looked at a spherical cap napkin ring before, because the application is very rare.”

Pokhrel, alongside two co-authors, was responsible for working out the geometry. He discovered that the cells grew exponentially at the edge of the shape, expanding further onto the medium, while the cells in the middle grew upward, creating a shape not unlike an egg in a frying pan — if the egg white was expanding outwards, while the yolk was only growing taller.

This was the breakthrough discovery: Because the cells at the middle were only contributing to the biofilm’s height, the team only needed to account for how many cells were at the edge of the biofilm, and the shape they needed to be in to grow and spread.

After incorporating their findings into a mathematical model, the team found that the contact angle was the most important factor: the angle that the very edge of the biofilm made when it touched the surface it was growing on. That single geometric quality is even more important to a biofilm’s growth than the rate at which it can reproduce cells.

The physics-biology connection

Overall, the project took more than three years, from conception to publication. “Aawaz really made an incredible effort seeing this work through,” Yunker says. “It was many years and many, many experiments. But the finished product is 100% worth it.”

The team hopes the research will pave the way for future studies, which could lead to applications like controlling biofilm growth to help prevent infections.

“Going forward, there are still a lot of research avenues,” Pokhrel says. “For example, looking at competition experiments between biofilms — do taller colonies change their contact angle so that they can spread faster? What role does this geometry play in competition?”

“Biology is complex,” Yunker adds. In nature, the surface a biofilm grows on may not be as consistent as a laboratory surface, and colonies may have different mutations or may consist of more than one species. And while the model is based on how biofilms behave in a controlled lab environment, it’s a critical first step in understanding how they may behave in nature.

Citation: Pokhrel, A.R., Steinbach, G., Krueger, A. et al. The biophysical basis of bacterial colony growth. Nat. Phys. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02572-3

Funding information: This research was funded by the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences and NSF Biomaterials

Fenton uses physics to better understand how the heart functions — or malfunctions, as in the case of arrhythmias. Arrhythmias happen when a heart beats irregularly, and too slow or too fast. These contractions are cued by electrical signals — electrical signals that he has spent the last thirty years uncovering.

“I am extremely honored and grateful to have been selected for this award,” Fenton says. “It is really a privilege to join the list of recipients of this award, so many of whom I have long admired and whose research has formed and inspired me since my early days as a researcher. It is particularly meaningful for me to be recognized for my contributions to the study of cardiac arrhythmias by a society predominantly composed of medical doctors, especially given the unusual circumstance of a physicist receiving such an honor.”

Physics at the heart of it

By leveraging mathematical and computational models, along with conducting experiments, Fenton unravels the dynamics of voltage and calcium waves in the heart, and how their instabilities relate to arrhythmias — in particular the unique spiral waves associated with them. By combating these spiral waves with specifically-tailored electrical shocks, he has developed gentler, less-damaging methods than those traditionally-used in current defibrillators, which he hopes can be clinically applied in the future.

Fenton’s contributions to the field have also included new methods to visualize and study arrhythmias experimentally and the development of theoretical and computational tools, increasing the accessibility of cutting-edge computer simulations aimed at personalizing heart treatments. 

“I would like to dedicate this award to my mentors and collaborators Alain Karma, Steve Evans, Robert Gilmour, and Elizabeth Cherry, as well as to all my students whose contributions have been invaluable and with whom I have had so much fun doing research,” he says. “This award is a testament to our collective work.”

“Space weather has many societal implications, including dangers to the power grid, the aviation sector, satellite lifetimes, communications, and navigation,” said Morris Cohen, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the grant’s co-principal investigator. “However, the number of qualified graduating students interested in this area is not sufficient to meet the future demand. This is especially true as the generation of professionals trained during the space race of the 1960s and ‘70s continues to retire.”

NSF will fund the position for five years and $1.5 million. The grant is led by Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair. She and Cohen are joined by Raheem Beyah, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair, and Glenn Lightsey, the John W. Young Chair in the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE). 

The two Colleges relied heavily on their strength in space research and Georgia Tech’s culture of multidisciplinary collaborations in the NSF application. These traits will allow Georgia Tech to conduct a unique search process. Instead of one unit making the hire as is typical in higher education, leaders from four schools will team up with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) for the search process. It’s an approach that addresses a nationwide problem in the field. 

“Decades ago, space physics largely fell within electrical engineering,” Beyah said. “These days, it’s highly interdisciplinary and typically has no true home — faculty are often scattered across aerospace engineering, applied physics, and earth sciences.”

Beyah said that a few universities have a large cluster of space physics faculty as a result. Many others have none. He said this limits the pipeline of future space science professionals because a substantial fraction of students has little or no exposure to the field. 

Georgia Tech is right in the middle, with a presence in solar-terrestrial science and space weather research but not a large cluster of faculty members. The new hire will allow Tech to reach more students interested in the field. Georgia Tech also pointed to its Vertically Integrated Projects program as a mechanism to get many new students involved in the new hire’s research. 

According to Lozier, solar-terrestrial science and space weather encompass at least four buckets: advanced theory and simulations that span the extremes of physics; big data and machine learning; innovative tools to collect new types of measurements; and operational needs in industry and defense, which motivate translation of research into real-world practice. 

“This breadth has hampered faculty growth in this area, as it has other interdisciplinary research fields like quantum computing and neuroscience,” Lozier said. “These areas straddle pure science and engineering, which often are separate in university hierarchy. We believe these interdisciplinary aspects of geospace science should be celebrated. More importantly, we believe they can be turned into a strength.”

Representatives from AE, ECE, GTRI, the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and the School of Physics will form the hiring committee. The hire will complement Georgia Tech’s February announcement of a new Space Research Initiative. Once the NSF-funded position is filled, the Colleges will collectively fund and search for a second faculty member in the field. 

“We are grateful to our NIH sponsor for this award to improve treatment of post-stroke individuals using advanced robotic solutions,” said Young, who is also affiliated with Georgia Tech's Neuro Next Initiative.

The R01 will support a project focused on using optimization and artificial intelligence to personalize exoskeleton assistance for individuals with symptoms resulting from stroke. Sawicki and Young will collaborate with researchers from the Emory Rehabilitation Hospital including Associate Professor Trisha Kesar.

“As a stroke researcher, I am eagerly looking forward to making progress on this project, and paving the way for leading-edge technologies and technology-driven treatment strategies that maximize functional independence and quality of life of people with neuro-pathologies," said Kesar.

The intervention for study participants will include a training therapy program that will use biofeedback to increase the efficiency of exosuits for wearers.   

Kinsey Herrin, senior research scientist in the Woodruff School and Neuro Next Initiative affiliate, explained the extended benefits of the study, including being able to increase safety for stroke patients who are moving outdoors. “One aspect of this project is testing our technologies on stroke survivors as they're walking outside. Being outside is a small thing that many of us take for granted, but a devastating loss for many following a stroke.”  

Sawicki, who is also an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and core faculty in Georgia Tech's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, is also looking forward to the project. "This new project is truly a tour de force that leverages a highly talented interdisciplinary team of engineers, clinical scientists, and prosthetics/orthotics experts who all bring key elements needed to build assistive technology that can work in real-world scenarios."

Monitoring these tiny changes results in a wide range of applications — from improving navigation and natural disaster forecasting, to smarter medical imaging and detection of biomarkers of disease, gravitational wave detection, and even better quantum communication for secure data sharing.

Georgia Tech physicists are pioneering new quantum sensing platforms to aid in these efforts. The research team’s latest study, “Sensing Spin Wave Excitations by Spin Defects in Few-Layer Thick Hexagonal Boron Nitride” was published in Science Advances this week. 

The research team includes School of Physics Assistant Professors Chunhui (Rita) Du and Hailong Wang (corresponding authors) alongside fellow Georgia Tech researchers Jingcheng Zhou, Mengqi Huang, Faris Al-matouq, Jiu Chang, Dziga Djugba, and Professor Zhigang Jiang and their collaborators. 

An ultra-sensitive platform

The new research investigates quantum sensing by leveraging color centers — small defects within crystals (Du’s team uses diamonds and other 2D layered materials) that allow light to be absorbed and emitted, which also give the crystal unique electronic properties. 

By embedding these color centers into a material called hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), the team hoped to create an extremely sensitive quantum sensor — a new resource for developing next-generation, transformative sensing devices. 

For its part, hBN is particularly attractive for quantum sensing and computing because it could contain defects that can be manipulated with light — also known as "optically active spin qubits."

The quantum spin defects in hBN are also very magnetically sensitive, and allow scientists to “see” or “sense” in more detail than other conventional techniques. In addition, the sheet-like structure of hBN is compatible with ultra-sensitive tools like nanodevices, making it a particularly intriguing resource for investigation.

The team’s research has resulted in a critical breakthrough in sensing spin waves, Du says, explaining that “in this study, we were able to detect spin excitations that were simply unattainable in previous studies.” 

Detecting spin waves is a fundamental component of quantum sensing, because these phenomena can travel for long distances, making them an ideal candidate for energy-efficient information control, communication, and processing.

The future of quantum

“For the first time, we experimentally demonstrated two-dimensional van der Waals quantum sensing — using few-layer thick hBN in a real-world environment,” Du explains, underscoring the potential the material holds for precise quantum sensing. “Further research could make it possible to sense electromagnetic features at the atomic scale using color centers in thin layers of hBN.”

Du also emphasizes the collaborative nature of the research, highlighting the diverse skill sets and resources of researchers within Georgia Tech. 

“Within the School of Physics, Professor Zhigang Jiang's research group provided the team with high-quality hBN crystals. Jingcheng Zhou, who is a member of both Professor Hailong Wang’s and my research teams, performed the cutting-edge quantum sensing measurements,” she says. “Many incredible students also helped with this project.”

Du is a leading scientist in the field of quantum sensing — this year, she received a new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, along with a Sloan Research Fellowship for her pioneering work on developing state-of-the-art quantum sensing techniques for quantum information technology applications. The prestigious Sloan award recognizes researchers whose “creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next-generation of leaders in the fields.” 

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk8495

This work is supported by the U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under award No. DMR-2342569, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award No. FA9550-20-1-0319 and its Young Investigator Program under award No. FA9550-21-1-0125, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under grant No. N00014-23-1-2146, NASA-REVEALS SSERVI (CAN No. NNA17BF68A), and NASA-CLEVER SSERVI (CAN No. 80NSSC23M0229).

Georgia Tech’s Simon Sponberg recently collaborated with researchers at the University of Washington, Simon Fraser University, University of Colorado Boulder, and Stanford Research Institute to answer one deceptively complex question: Why can’t robots outrun animals? 

“This work is about trying to understand how, despite have some really amazing robots, there still seems to be a gulf between the capabilities of animal movement and what we can engineer,” says Sponberg, who is Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics and School of Biological Sciences. 

Recently published in Science Robotics, their study systematically examines a suite of biological and robotic runners to figure out how to further advance our best robotic designs. 

“In robotics design we are often very component focused — we are used to having to establish specifications for the parts that we need and then finding the best component solution,” said Sponberg, who also serves on the executive committee for Georgia Tech's Neuro Next Initiative. “This is of course not how evolution works. We wondered if we systematically analyzed the performance of animals in the same component way that we design robots, if we might see an obvious gap.” 

The gap turns out not to be in the function of individual robotic components, but rather the ability of those components to work together in the seamless way biological components do, highlighting a field of opportunity for new research in robotic development. 

“This means that the frontier is not necessarily figuring out how to design better motors or sensors or controllers,” says Sponberg, “but rather how to integrate them together — this is where biology really excels.” 

Read more about man versus machine and the future of bioinspired robotics here.