As ISyE’s A. Russell Chandler III Professor, Huo’s theoretical research focuses on explaining why modern deep-learning methods preform so well. He also uses statistics, machine learning, and data science to better to better understand the reliability and fairness of learning systems.

Huo has authored more than 15 refereed journal articles since 2023 and currently has 10 papers under review. His career includes 71 journal articles, 41 conference papers, 10 book chapters, and an edited volume.

“What I find most rewarding is that rigorous theory and useful tools are not in tension – the mathematical questions that fascinate me most often turn out to be the ones that help others make sense of their data,” Huo said. “I’m deeply honored to receive this award and especially grateful to my students and collaborators, who have been at the heart of this work from the very beginning.”

Huo’s first algorithm for distance covariance remains a standard tool for testing statistical dependence and is reproduced in widely used statistical software. He co-directs the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance's Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design program, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health. He also serves as a co-principal investigator on the $20 million NSF AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation.  

Huo said he is proud of the researchers he has trained. In the most recent recruiting cycle, his doctoral graduates earned tenure-track faculty offers from Georgetown University and the University of Florida. Earlier advisees hold faculty positions at the City University of Hong Kong, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Seoul National University of Science and Technology, while other former students are researchers at companies that include Apple, Citadel, and JP Morgan.

His recently published work includes two 2024 papers in the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). He and his students established learning guarantees for deep neutral networks, including minimax-optimal convergence rates of neural-network classifiers was accepted in 2026 by IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and his work on the universal consistency of wide and deep networks appeared at the International Conference on Machine Learning.   

Huo’s work on the fairness of learning systems is reflected in a 2025 Journal of the American Statistical Association paper that characterizes the asymptotic behavior of the adversarial-training estimator, complementing his JMLR work on distributionally robust estimation. At the Conference on National Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025, Huo and collaborators introduced a kernel-based quantification of the accuracy fairness trade-off in representation learning, along with a new diffusion method for imbalanced text-to-image generation, while a 2026 International Conference on Learning Representations paper advanced policy optimization for large-language-model reasoning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing far more than hospital paperwork. Researchers say it's beginning to help doctors make clinical decisions, identify mental health risks earlier, expand care through smartphones and wearable devices, and extend healthcare to people who might otherwise go without it. 

Caused by the Vibrio coralliilyticus pathogen, the infection is one of the most notorious causes of tissue loss and death in stony corals. In the study, all untreated corals bleached within 48 hours. But corals exposed to the predatory bacteria fared much better: more than half showed no signs of bleaching beyond the infection site — and disease progression was effectively halted. 

“Disease is a major driver of death for these corals, and with sea surface temperatures continuing to rise globally, we anticipate that rates of disease will only increase. It’s part of a deadly synergy profoundly threatening Caribbean coral reefs,” says lead author Lauren Speare, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “Predatory bacteria function like a living probiotic, fighting coral disease without harsh side effects. This could be a targeted way to protect and treat our most vulnerable coral reefs."

The study, “Halobacteriovorax Halts Disease Progression in Endangered Caribbean Corals,” was published in The ISME Journal. In addition to Speare, the research team included Georgia Tech master's student Chloe Manley and postdoctoral scholar Macey Coppinger; University of California, Santa Barbara graduate students Sunni Patton and Eddie Fuques, and Professor Rebecca Vega Thurber, director of the UCSB Marine Science Institute.

Natural Defenders

Speare became interested in the research while completing her postdoctoral training with Thurber. “Dr. Thurber discovered that predatory bacteria are present in many coral microbiomes,” Speare recalls. “We theorized that they might be contributing to what keeps the ecosystem healthy, balancing it through predation.” 

At the time, the theory was hard to test. Marine predatory bacteria are difficult to preserve long-term, making experiments challenging. The bacteria are also extremely scarce, with populations increasing during a coral infection and rapidly declining after. Catching them while their populations are high is a matter of timing, Speare says.

"It's a bit like trying to catch a mountain lion in the act of hunting a deer. If we aren’t looking at the right time, we might miss it entirely,” Speare says. “I knew that if I wanted to study these bacteria in more detail, I would need to carefully design my experiments and timing.”

Testing the Treatment

To test their theory, the team spent six weeks conducting experiments at the Mote’s Elizabeth Moore International Center for Coral Reef Research and Restoration (IC2R3) in Summerland Key, Florida, a facility that maintains lab-grown living corals in seawater aquariums.

“First, we had to make our corals sick,” Speare says. “But there wasn’t an established way to reliably create these infections in this species in a laboratory setting.”

After weeks of experimenting, Speare developed a “pathogen-sticker,” a small agar patch containing the disease-causing pathogens. When placed at the coral’s base, it mimics how infections spread in the wild.

Then, at the first sign of infection, the team treated the coral with the Halobacteriovorax predatory bacteria. “Surprisingly, the most effective method was to pour the bacteria directly into the sick coral’s tank,” Speare says. “The bacteria are tiny, so we were able to create a concentrated liquid of them by using a filter small enough that only they can pass through.”

Halobacteriovorax are among the fastest-known predatory bacteria, and quickly navigate to their food source – presumably the pathogen causing the infection.

From Aquariums to Oceans

Because of the straightforward delivery method, Speare believes the team’s methods could be readily adapted for coral restoration efforts, offering a simple way to deliver treatment on natural reefs.

“There are several approaches to treating corals and mitigating stress, but these techniques don’t work for all situations and all species,” she explains. “Corals are complex, and there is no single cure-all, so we need as many tools as possible to help corals survive.”

For Speare, the next step will be to move from lab-based work to reef environments.  She’s particularly curious as to why the predatory bacteria aren’t already moderating illness on natural reefs. “If this is such an effective way to control pathogens, why isn’t this system preventing disease outbreaks on reefs already?" she says. "We need to understand what's limiting this natural defense system – and that’s what we’re digging into next."

Funding: Lauren Speare was supported as a Simons Foundation Awardee of the Life Sciences Research Foundation. The Vega Thurber Lab was funded by the National Science Foundation.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ismejo/wraf270

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

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

Pressure Points: Helene’s Wake and Market Headwinds 

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

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

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

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

Storytelling Matters: The Power of the Personal 

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

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

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

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

Building a Georgia Carbon Exchange 

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

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

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

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

All the Players at the Table 

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

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

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

Lucas Clay, extension professional at the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, said, “Landowners are focused on the economics of forestry, and buyers are looking for quality credits. I think there's a lot of opportunity for both of these things to happen.” 

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

A Common Goal in Focus 

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

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

Maintaining Georgia’s forests is not only about carbon. Well-managed forests filter water, support native wildlife, improve air quality, protect public health, and provide opportunities for outdoor recreation. These are co-benefits that a carbon credit does not fully capture but that are very much part of the value proposition for maintaining Georgia’s private forests. 

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

As the brain develops, billions of neurons form precise networks that enable perception, movement, and cognition. Disruptions in this process can contribute to neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. To better understand how such disorders arise, Jain’s lab will use molecular and genetic tools to trace the pathway from gene expression to neural connectivity to behavior. 

“I am honored and excited to receive support from the Whitehall Foundation,” Jain says. “It will help us pursue research questions at a stage when our findings can still shape our lab’s long-term direction.”

Jain joined Georgia Tech in 2024. He earned a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Arizona and completed postdoctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The ACS is one of the world’s largest scientific societies, and its Fellows Program recognizes outstanding achievements in scientific research, education, leadership, and service to the chemical profession and honors a select group of members each year.

"Election as an ACS Fellow is a significant honor that recognizes not only scientific excellence but also leadership and service to the profession," said Julia Kubanek, Georgia Tech's vice president for Interdisciplinary Research. "Yuanzhi's pioneering research, her leadership within ACS and the Strategic Energy Institute, and her commitment to advancing interdisciplinary collaboration have strengthened Georgia Tech's impact in chemistry, energy, and environmental research. We are proud to celebrate this well-deserved recognition."

Tang was recognized for her contributions to environmental chemistry, biogeochemistry, and energy-related research, as well as for her leadership and service to the chemical sciences.

"Given her exceptionally energetic research program, which spans topics ranging from the basic understanding of chemical cycling on Earth to creative solutions to recover rare elements from wastes, this honor is richly deserved and completely unsurprising," said Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "We are lucky to have Yuanzhi as part of EAS."

As SEI executive director, Tang leads Institute-wide efforts to strengthen Georgia Tech's energy research enterprise by connecting expertise across disciplines and fostering partnerships with industry, government, and national laboratories. She also maintains an internationally recognized research program focused on understanding the chemical and biological processes that shape natural and engineered environments.

Established in 2008, the ACS Fellows Program honors a distinguished group of scientists who have made exceptional contributions to chemistry and related fields while also demonstrating dedicated service to the society. With this election, Tang joins 17 Georgia Tech ACS Fellows.

"I’m deeply honored," Tang said. "This recognition reflects the contributions of many outstanding students, postdoctoral researchers, colleagues, collaborators, and mentors throughout my career. I am grateful for the opportunity to work alongside such talented people to advance scientific discovery and build interdisciplinary partnerships that address critical energy and environmental challenges."

Founded in 1876, the American Chemical Society represents more than 170,000 members worldwide and is a leading source of scientific information through its journals, conferences, and educational programs.

Veronica Rivera, an incoming assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP), studies human-computer interaction, security, and privacy to create safer digital experiences. Her research earned her selection to the second cohort of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship for Early Career Scholars.

"I am excited and honored to be part of this year's CRA Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship cohort," said Rivera. 

"This program reflects the importance of cross-disciplinary research and collaboration in building AI systems that benefit and support society. I look forward to spending the next year building collaborations that support me and my students' research into protecting the digital safety of the diverse communities who use AI tools."

Rivera's research examines how technology shapes interpersonal relationships. Using empirical and design-based methods, she partners with communities affected by technology-facilitated abuse to understand digital safety risks and develop technologies that better protect users.

Through the fellowship, Rivera will study how AI is reshaping technology-facilitated abuse and develop data collection methods that enable researchers to assess these evolving risks over time.

"Trustworthy AI is a key research area in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the College of Computing," said SCP Interim Chair Mustaque Ahamad. "The CRA Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship recognizes Veronica's innovative research and will help her build a research program that advances an area of strategic importance to our school and the broader AI community."

Supported by Microsoft, the CRA Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship recognizes early-career computing researchers who combine technical expertise with interdisciplinary approaches to address the ethical, societal, and human-centered challenges of artificial intelligence. The fellowship provides interdisciplinary training, mentorship, and collaboration opportunities that help researchers integrate ethical, societal, and human-centered perspectives into AI research and development.

Over the next year, Rivera and the other fellows will participate in a series of professional development activities, including a four-day Field School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The program also includes quarterly virtual meetings, mentoring opportunities, and collaboration with scholars participating in related AI and data ethics programs.

DeMillo was among 80 computer scientists worldwide selected for the Academy's founding class and was the only Georgia Tech faculty member recognized.

"I am honored to be included in the inaugural class of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy," said DeMillo. "This recognition reflects the work of outstanding students, collaborators, and colleagues over many years. Software engineering research has transformed the way society builds and depends upon software, and I hope our community will continue to advance the scientific foundations needed to make software more reliable, secure, and worthy of the trust people place in it."

Established by ACM SIGSOFT, the Software Engineering Academy is a standing body of honor that recognizes members of the software engineering community whose lasting technical contributions, leadership, and service have shaped the field. The Academy celebrates researchers whose cumulative work and influence have advanced software engineering as both a scientific discipline and professional practice.

"Rich's research in software testing is recognized among the most influential contributions to the field of software engineering," said SCP Interim Chair Mustaque Ahamad. "His inclusion in the inaugural ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy demonstrates the lasting impact of his research on building more reliable software systems."

The inaugural class was selected from leaders whose contributions have already been widely recognized across the software engineering community, including ACM Fellows and recipients of ACM SIGSOFT's Outstanding Research Award. Beginning next year, new Academy members will be elected annually through a community nomination process.

DeMillo served as the founding chair of Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, the first school of its kind at a top research university. He previously served as the John P. Imlay Dean of the College of Computing and directed the Georgia Tech Information Security Center.

Throughout his career, DeMillo has held leadership positions across academia, industry, and government. He served as Hewlett-Packard's first chief technology officer, led computing research at Bell Communications Research, directed the Computer Research Division at the National Science Foundation, and led the Software Test and Evaluation Project in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

His research spans software engineering, cybersecurity, election security, and the societal impacts of digital technology. His 1979 paper, Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, is widely regarded as a foundational work in software engineering and has been recognized as one of the 50 most influential papers in computer science.

In addition to his research, DeMillo has helped shape higher education through the creation of Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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

Read more »

Recycled materials promise a cleaner future, but recycled content alone does not necessarily make a product sustainable. At Georgia Tech’s Daedalus Lab, assistant professor, National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient, and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Faculty Fellow Christos Athanasiou and postdoctoral researcher Danqi Sun are working to provide greater certainty to designers and engineers by rethinking how materials are tested for their fracture characteristics. Their article in Science Advances details a new testing protocol that reduces cost, increases speed, and simulates real-world conditions.

Materials shape nearly every part of modern life, from packaging and consumer products to bridges and medical devices. Choosing the right material involves balancing durability, cost, manufacturability, and environmental impact. Yet those decisions are not always guided by a clear understanding of how materials age and fail under real-world conditions, especially for recycled materials like plastics.

One way that materials frequently fail is by cracking. A small crack can begin almost invisibly. Over time, it can spread from regular wear and tear and exposure to common environmental factors like moisture, temperature fluctuations, or even dirt. Eventually, the crack expands, and the part fails. Engineers have studied fracture for more than a century, but connecting the science of cracking to practical decisions about sustainability remains a major challenge.

The characteristics of recycled plastics often vary from those of the same material in unrecycled, or virgin, form. Products made from recycled plastics may be sold with sustainability claims under the assumption that they will perform as if they were made with virgin material. However, premature failure requiring repair or replacement can quickly change the sustainability equation as well as the acceptance of recycled materials by manufacturers and consumers.

Beyond Conventional Fracture Testing

Materials rarely fail due to a single factor. They may be exposed to several factors simultaneously, such as mechanical loading, chemical environments, temperature changes, moisture, and time. Traditional fracture protocols test one specimen at a time under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, which bear little resemblance to the real world. To move beyond this limitation, Sun developed an in-situ, high-throughput platform capable of studying how materials degrade and fail under more realistic conditions.

The platform changes conventional fracture testing in three important ways. First, it can test multiple specimens simultaneously rather than one at a time. By monitoring samples in parallel, testing time can be reduced by more than 60%. Second, it allows materials to be tested in realistic environments. In this study, researchers examined virgin and recycled plastics in alkaline environments that resemble conditions encountered in applications like landfill liner membranes and geotextiles. Third, the platform incorporates an imaging technique known as photoelasticity, which reveals the formation of stress fields that form around the origin of a newly developing crack. This allows researchers to see cracks develop earlier than before, giving them a clearer picture of the forces that drive crack growth.

The researchers have made the technology available for licensing through Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing. “Our goal was to make fracture testing not only faster but also more informative,” Sun said. “By combining high-throughput testing, realistic environments, and full-field stress imaging, we can better understand how materials fail under conditions closer to real-world applications.”

An Honest View of Sustainability

Recycled plastics are often viewed as a greener choice. But according to the study, it’s not always so straightforward. If a recycled product fails prematurely and needs to be replaced frequently, its environmental and economic costs can increase despite its recycled content. As Athanasiou puts it, “Failing materials don’t just break products. They can break sustainability promises.”

For example, comparing virgin polyethylene terephthalate (PET) with recycled PET (rPET) in applications such as landfill geotextiles, the researchers discovered that rPET showed lower resistance to environmental stressors, particularly in alkaline conditions over a pH of 9. In this application, specifying rPET over virgin PET would likely eliminate all of the presumed economic and environmental advantages of using a recycled material.

“Recycling is essential, but recycled content alone does not tell the full story. If a material fails too soon, the environmental benefits can disappear,” Athanasiou said.

From Cracks to Circularity

For the researchers, the significance of the work extends beyond recycled plastics. The broader goal is to provide a fast, affordable, and realistic platform for evaluating the sustainability of any material choice. Because current testing protocols are costly, not widely available, and limited in the information they yield, engineers, manufacturers, and policymakers often have little choice but to continue to specify non-recycled materials because they will perform as expected. Having cheap and accurate data on recycled materials will help to accelerate their adoption because matching the engineering properties of recycled materials to their most appropriate applications will become more obvious.

The researchers also hope to expand the platform to simulate even more complex environments and apply it to a wider range of materials. Because the system generates large amounts of detailed data, it may enable opportunities to use computational modeling or artificial intelligence to digitally simulate mechanical testing, driving down costs and expanding availability even more.

The larger vision is a future in which sustainability is judged not by labels or assumptions, but by evidence for how a material performs, how long it lasts, how it fails, and what it costs society and the environment over its full lifetime.

Please visit the Daedalus Lab YouTube channel to see an explainer video about this new testing protocol: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zmRhiRIiAkQ

Read the paper here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh0456

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award No. 2338508.

Their work, led by Sourabh Saha, associate professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow, and Harnjoo Kim, who conducted the research during his doctoral studies and later as a postdoctoral fellow in Saha's lab, was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

Nanoscale 3D printing allows researchers to create structures thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. These structures have potential applications in fields ranging from advanced computing and optics to biomedical devices and clean energy technologies. However, increasing printing speed often comes at the expense of quality.

Read the full story on the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering website 

SCI Instructor Pedro Guillermo Feijóo-García was selected by Fulbright Colombia to moderate the closing panel of the Fulbright Reimagined Summit 2026: AI Horizons: Learning Pathways for Tomorrow.

Held last month at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia, the summit convened scholars, educators, policymakers, and industry leaders to examine how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming education, work, governance, and society.

Fulbright Colombia invited Feijóo-García to moderate the closing discussion, From Adopters to Architects: Professions of Tomorrow, in recognition of his research on human-AI interaction and the hidden curriculum in engineering and computer science education.

"As a Fulbright alumnus, being invited to contribute to such an important event was an honor and a privilege," Feijóo-García said. "Beyond the personal recognition, I viewed this opportunity as a meaningful platform to facilitate conversations around the future of education, technology, and workforce development."

From Computing Education to AI Futures

At Georgia Tech, Feijóo-García directs the People-Agents Research for Computing Education (PARCE) Laboratory. His research examines the intersection of computing education, STEM learning, and AI, focusing on student preparedness, professional development, and the hidden curriculum- which he explains as the implicit skills and expectations that shape students' academic and career success. 

Feijóo-García says his perspective is shaped by years of work in computing education. During his master's studies in systems and computing engineering at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, he explored ways to expand access to computing education through interactive programming environments. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in human-centered computing from the University of Florida, where he focused his research on computing education and human-centered AI.

"AI is transforming how we learn, work, communicate, make decisions, and interact with one another," Feijóo-García said. "As educators, we need to prepare students not only with technical competencies, but also with critical thinking, ethical reasoning, collaboration, and the ability to adapt."

Preparing Students for the Professions of Tomorrow

Rather than viewing AI as a challenge for higher education, Feijóo-García sees it as an opportunity for universities to rethink how they prepare students for an evolving workforce. He believes educators should help students develop the judgment to know when AI can enhance their work and when independent reasoning and human expertise are essential.

"The conversation should not revolve around whether AI belongs in education, but rather how we integrate it responsibly and intentionally," Feijóo-García said.

He also hopes students begin to think of AI not only as artificial intelligence, but as augmented intelligence. "The goal should not be to replace human thinking, but to enhance it," he said.

Feijóo-García emphasized that AI should augment human capabilities rather than replace human judgment. Preparing students for an AI-driven workforce requires helping them understand when AI can support their work and when human reasoning, creativity, and expertise are essential.

Strengthening U.S.–Colombia Collaboration

The summit reinforced the value of collaboration among scholars, educators, policymakers, and industry leaders in advancing research and education. Earlier this year, Feijóo-García participated in another Fulbright Colombia event focused on strengthening scientific collaboration between Colombia and the United States.

The Fulbright Program, which operates in more than 160 countries worldwide, is the United States government’s flagship international academic exchange program to support peaceful relations between the people of the U.S. and the people of other countries. Fulbright Colombia, the binational commission for educational exchange between the U.S. and Colombia, has supported academic and scientific collaboration between the two countries since 1957.

Feijóo-García’s academic journey reflects the impact of these collaborations. The Fulbright Program supported his doctoral studies in the United States, and he continues to build connections between Colombia and the U.S. through his work at Georgia Tech.

"Scientific diplomacy is built on people," Feijóo-García said. "Events like the Fulbright Reimagined Summit provide the environment where trust is established, ideas are exchanged, and collaborations begin."

Dunkin is an IISE Fellow, the highest classification of IISE membership that recognizes outstanding leaders of the profession who have made significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial and systems engineering. She has served as chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as chief strategy and innovation officer at Dell Technologies. She has also held numerous leadership positions at Hewlett Packard, largely in the areas of manufacturing, research and development and IT. She currently serves as a distinguished external fellow with Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute.  

Dunkin holds appointments as a distinguished professor of the practice in Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. She is also a distinguished external fellow at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

“The Emerging Technologies forum is a great opportunity for practicing ISEs to get exposure to a range of emerging technologies in a short period of time and identify those that they want to experiment with and implement in their organizations,” Dunkin said. 

The Aug. 26 event, which will be held virtually from 1-5 p.m. EDT, will explore technologies shaping the future of industrial and systems engineering, including artificial intelligence, digital twins, and robotics and autonomy. 

As event chair, Dunkin will be joined by experts from the healthcare, aerospace, logistics, manufacturing and technology industries, including representatives from Royal Caribbean, The Boeing Company, UPS and other organizations. 

The complimentary event is open to engineers and improvement professionals of all backgrounds. Registration is available through the IISE Emerging Technologies Forum website. 
 

But a forthcoming study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis by Xindi He, assistant professor of finance at the Scheller College of Business, and his co-author Ning Zhu, professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, suggests that individual investors don’t always treat money as fungible when making decisions in their brokerage accounts. 

Their findings complicate that assumption.  

He and Zhu’s research shows that investors often treat money differently depending on where it comes from. A dollar transferred from a savings account does not feel the same as a dollar generated by selling a stock, even when both sit side by side as cash in the same brokerage account. 

The Idea of “Cash Temperature” 

To capture that difference, He introduced the idea of “cash temperature.” 

“I would describe cash temperature as a way to measure how money feels to an investor based on its recent history,” He said. “‘Cold’ cash is money that recently came from a stable source, such as a savings account. ‘Hot’ cash is money generated by selling stocks or other risky assets.” 

That distinction might sound subtle, but in practice, it shapes how people invest. As He and his co-author analyzed detailed brokerage data, a clear and surprising pattern emerged. 

“What struck us was how systematic the pattern was,” He said. “This was not just about one measure of risk.” 
Across nine dimensions, investors using colder cash behaved more cautiously. They chose less volatile stocks, stocks with weaker recent run-ups and lower attention measures, and stocks more likely to be part of major market indexes. They also held these positions longer, and the stocks had better subsequent performance. 

“The consistency across these dimensions made the pattern much more compelling,” He said. 

By contrast, when investors used hotter cash, money that had already been exposed to market risk, they were more willing to take chances. They pursued riskier stocks, often without better returns to show for it. 

“The evidence points to harm, especially when investors treat hot cash as easier to risk,” He said. “In our data, hotter cash leads investors to buy riskier stocks, and those purchases are followed by lower subsequent returns. Investors take more risk but do not appear to be rewarded for it.” 

Meaning Behind the Money 

At the heart of this behavior is something deeply intuitive. People assign meaning to their money. 

“A dollar from savings may feel like protected wealth, while a dollar from selling a stock may feel like money already set aside for investing,” He said. 

In a pre-registered experiment, that feeling showed up in how people experienced loss. Participants reported that a hypothetical loss felt more painful when the money was framed as coming from a savings account than when it was framed as coming from a brokerage account. 

“That suggests that the source of money changes how investors experience potential losses,” He said. 

The effect plays out in everyday decisions. Someone who transfers $5,000 from savings into an investment account may tread carefully, treating it as something to preserve. But that same person might take bigger risks with money that came from a recent stock sale, seeing it as already “in the market.” 

The study also finds that these mental labels are not fixed. 

“We were also surprised by how dynamic the effect was,” he said. “Cash labels were not fixed forever. They were refreshed as money moved through the brokerage account and faded over time when there was no salient account activity.” 

What Investors Can Learn 

For investors, the takeaway is simple but powerful. Before deciding, pause and strip away the story attached to the money. 

“The practical lesson is to pay attention to the mental labels attached to cash,” He said. “Ask yourself, ‘Would I still make this purchase if I ignored where the cash came from and evaluated the stock on its own merits?’” 

While money may be identical on paper, it does not always feel that way in practice. Its source can shape the stocks investors choose and the returns that follow. 

Read More: "Portfolio Choice with Non-Fungible Brokerage Cash"

Greptile, founded by three current and former Georgia Tech students, has quickly emerged as one of Silicon Valley’s most promising young technology companies. The startup, led by Daksh Gupta, CS 2023; Soohoon Choi, CS 2023, MTH 2023; and computer science major Vaishant Kameswaran, builds artificial intelligence tools that help engineering teams review, analyze, and improve their code. 

GTSI brings talented students from across the state to campus for a weeklong taste of college life.

Along with learning about academic programs and scholarship opportunities, GTSI offers participating students – many from rural and under-resourced communities – hands-on STEM experiences.

Discovering a Different Side of Computing

In its second year of participating in GTSI, the College of Computing broadened its partnership with the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) this summer, offering two full-day, interactive experiences that integrated creativity and computational thinking.

"The College of Computing first participated in 2025 and is excited to build on that partnership," said Aneesah Allen, senior education outreach manager, who coordinated the College's involvement with CEISMC.

"Our goal is to create a memorable experience that helps students see themselves in computing while learning new skills in a fun, engaging way."

Hands-On Learning, Real-World Connections

To achieve this goal, the GT Computing-led sessions gave GTSI students the opportunity to experiment with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, explore physical computing, and discover how technology intersects with:

• Arts & entertainment
• Sports
• Interactive media
• And more

Sababu Barashango and Terry Foster, CS instructional specialists and research associates at the College’s Constellation Center for Education in Computing, along with Cedric Stallworth, GT Computing assistant dean for outreach, led the College’s participation in this year’s GTSI.

For Barashango, the interactive sessions – focused on computer science (CS) and computational media (CM) – were designed to broaden students' understanding of what computing can be.

"The College of Computing and its Constellations Center for Education in Computing are partnering with CEISMC to help high school students understand the many possibilities computer science and computational media offer," said Barashango. "The students were deeply engaged in the interactive sessions.

"The content ranged from an introductory icebreaker using Google Maps and pixel art to block coding and physical computing, and finally to AI and machine learning."

Along with presenting computing’s creative side and emphasizing hands-on participation, the GT Computing-led sessions were designed to challenge long-held assumptions about who belongs in computing and what skills the field requires.

"The experiences in our sessions directly challenge the myth that you can't be both creative and logical," Barashango said.

Expanding Students' View of Computing

Foster believes that introducing students to all aspects of computing before they make decisions about college can help them see opportunities well beyond what they might have considered.

"Learning about CS and CM pathways broadens their view of computing and allows them to apply computing in fields they care about," Foster said.

He pointed to computational media as an especially powerful gateway because it integrates technical and creative thinking.

"When speaking specifically about CM, which is an excellent entry point into computing, students can be both creative and technical, not just one or the other," Foster said.

The GT Computing-led sessions also encouraged students to think beyond traditional technology careers.

"One of the key messages we shared with students was that earning a computer science degree does not mean they have to become software engineers," Foster said.

"We emphasized the wide range of computing careers available, including fields such as sports technology, film production, and interactive media, in which CS and CM skills are highly valued."

Building Tomorrow's Computing Workforce

Despite the success of the College’s GTSI session, Barashango recognizes that the goal of helping students see themselves in computing extends beyond a single summer program.

“Introducing students to computational thinking early can help prepare them for whatever path they choose,” he said. "Regardless of their career choices, their lives will continue to be affected by and integrated with computer science.”

"If they do not develop computational thinking and skills, they will be left behind in the technology and wealth gap."

• AI is accelerating cyberattacks.
• The same technology can strengthen defenses.
• The biggest risk is falling behind.

Artificial intelligence is changing cybersecurity on both sides of the battlefield. The technology helping organizations improve efficiency also enables cybercriminals to identify vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and launch attacks at unprecedented speed.

Researchers in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) say the greatest concern is not that AI is creating entirely new forms of cyberattacks. Instead, it is accelerating activities that attackers already perform, making existing threats quicker, cheaper, and harder to stop.

"AI is dramatically speeding up cyberattacks," said Brendan Saltaformaggio, associate professor in the SCP and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). "AI can identify vulnerabilities far faster than humans and often in places humans wouldn't think to look."

Hackers Are Moving Faster

Most cyberattacks include several stages: finding vulnerabilities, developing ways to exploit them, gaining access to systems, and pursuing a goal such as stealing information or disrupting operations. According to Frank Li, associate professor in the SCP and ECE, AI is having its biggest impact on the early phases of that process.

"AI can help attackers explore potential decisions and implement attacks faster than in the past, whether it's identifying software bugs or constructing social engineering hooks," Li said.

The pace of attacks has already changed dramatically. Peter Swire, J.Z. Liang Chair in the SCP and professor of law and ethics in the Scheller College of Business, says attackers are moving from vulnerability discovery to exploitation much faster than in the past.

"The average time until an exploit is detected even a couple of years ago was measured in months," Swire said. "Now it is measured in hours."

That compressed timeline is forcing organizations to rethink how quickly they identify, prioritize, and patch vulnerabilities.

The Risk Reaches Everyone

Healthcare systems, critical infrastructure providers, government agencies, and small businesses remain attractive targets because they often manage sensitive information or essential services while relying on legacy technology. But experts emphasize that no organization is immune.

"Unfortunately, everyone is at risk," Saltaformaggio said. "AI is not creating new victims; AI is making attackers faster and more effective at targeting the same organizations they have always pursued."

Organizations with outdated systems or limited cybersecurity resources face particular challenges because AI allows attackers to identify weaknesses in less time and at lower cost than ever before.

Fighting AI With AI

Cybersecurity defenders also have access to the same technology.

Experts say AI can strengthen defenses before, during, and after a cyberattack. Defenders can use AI to identify and patch vulnerabilities more quickly, reducing opportunities for attackers to gain access. AI can also detect subtle signs of intrusion by correlating activity across networks and recognizing patterns that would be difficult for humans to spot in real time.

Once an attack occurs, AI can support rapid investigation and response by analyzing how the compromise happened, identifying root causes, and helping deploy targeted protections.

"AI can help defenders in every step of stopping a cyberattack," Saltaformaggio said.

Researchers at Georgia Tech are already demonstrating AI's defensive potential. Saltaformaggio pointed to Georgia Tech's recent success in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge, which highlighted how AI systems can autonomously discover and reason about software vulnerabilities at large scale. Swire also noted that a Georgia Tech team led by Professor Taesoo Kim won a $4 million DARPA prize for developing advanced AI-based cybersecurity defenses.

Speed Is the New Defense

Despite the promise of AI-powered security, significant challenges remain. Security teams need AI tools they can trust, ones that explain how they reached conclusions and provide evidence that analysts can verify. Attackers may also attempt to manipulate AI systems, creating new risks for organizations that rely heavily on automated tools.

Li says organizations cannot rely on traditional, human-paced security processes to keep up.

"AI's primary impact on cyberattacks is enhancing speed and scale," Li said. "Organizations need to adapt to more agile defenses and processes that account for this, in many cases relying on AI as well to help speed up defensive actions."

Organizations also need to rethink how they respond to vulnerabilities. Swire argues that traditional patch management is no longer fast enough in a world where exploits can emerge within hours.

"The entire process for patching systems will have to be re-engineered," he said.

The cybersecurity landscape has always been an arms race between attackers and defenders. AI hasn't changed that reality. It has simply accelerated it. The organizations that will be best positioned are those that adopt AI as quickly as the adversaries they are trying to stop.

The SCC is home to seven student engineering competition teams and provides workspace, tools, and resources to help students apply classroom learning to real-world engineering challenges.

In his new role, Simmons will provide strategic leadership and operational oversight for student competition teams, facilities, staff, budgets, sponsorships, and safety programs. He also will teach and mentor students through engineering design and experiential learning courses, helping connect classroom instruction with project-based experiences.

“Richard brings a unique combination of industry experience, research leadership, and deep commitment to student success,” said Carolyn Seepersad, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair. “As an accomplished engineer and a Georgia Tech alumnus, he understands the value of experiential learning and is well-positioned to lead the Student Competition Center.”

Simmons, ME 1993, joined Georgia Tech in 2016 after spending the first 20 years of his career leading research, technology, and business development initiatives in the automotive industry, energy sector, and federal government. After graduating from Tech, he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Purdue University and later became a licensed professional engineer.

Over the past decade, Simmons has held several leadership and research positions within Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute, including founding director of the Energy Policy and Innovation Center and, most recently, director of Research and Studies. He has also taught a variety of courses at the Woodruff School, including ME 2110, Capstone Design, Energy Systems, and Renewable Energy.

Read Full Story on the ME News Page

Blending engineering challenges, field experiences, and team-based design projects, the weeklong program in June gave students a dynamic introduction to energy, sustainability, and engineering innovation and a rare opportunity to engage directly with the technologies, infrastructure, people, and ideas that help power the world.

“Our goal is to get outside of the classroom, have fun, and demonstrate how a STEM education can literally help turn on lightbulbs,” said SEI’s director of Research and Studies, Rich Simmons, who also directs Energy Unplugged. “Through hands-on learning, field trips, and real-world experiences, these creative students are learning that everyone can play a role in our energy future. Along the way, they are gaining a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs and challenges engineers face and learning from experts about pathways to an energy career.”

Mousetrap-Powered Cars
Putting those ideas into practice from day one, the camp began with an engineering challenge in which students designed and constructed mousetrap-powered cars. Using the stored potential energy of a mousetrap spring to propel their vehicles, participants explored how energy is converted from one form to another and identified sources of friction and inefficiency that affect the distance traveled. The activity encouraged students to think like engineers, iteratively testing and refining their designs to improve results.

Engineering Optimization and Tradeoffs
Similar problem-solving skills were put to the test during an RC car optimization challenge. Equipped with a battery-powered vehicle and energy-monitoring systems, students were tasked with completing a driving course while maximizing their score by balancing speed, energy consumption, safety, and cargo capacity. Participants had the option to add weights and tennis balls to increase potential points, but doing so increased the risk of penalties from dropped cargo, missed obstacles, or vehicle rollovers. The exercise highlighted the tradeoffs engineers routinely face when optimizing systems under competing constraints.

“The overall interest in green energy among youth is increasing, so having demonstrations and experiments as well as some high-level lectures on the actual science was a great way to engage the students,” said student assistant William Nudd, a senior in mechanical engineering who assisted with the camp. “When I was in their shoes, I had never attended a physics class, so the camp was definitely getting them a step ahead and did a great job introducing and showcasing key concepts related to energy: How does my home get electricity? Where does energy come from? How do power plants operate?”

Trivia, Demos, and Scavenger Hunts
Additional activities throughout the week included energy-themed trivia competitions, a steam engine demonstration, a solar microgrid exercise, and a campus scavenger hunt. Together, they reinforced classroom concepts through interactive learning and encouraged students to connect technical principles with practical applications.

Field Trips to Power Plants
While these activities taught foundational concepts, a highlight of the camp was a series of field trips that allowed students to observe large-scale energy infrastructure in operation. Participants toured the Georgia Power McDonough-Atkinson Plant, where they learned how combined-cycle power plants generate electricity using both gas and steam turbines to improve efficiency. Students also visited the Morgan Falls hydroelectric facility, getting an up-close view of the massive generators and equipment used to convert the energy of flowing water into electricity.

Campus Tours
In addition to exploring regional energy infrastructure, students were introduced to Georgia Tech’s innovation ecosystem through visits to campus makerspaces and research facilities, including the Flowers Invention Studio and The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design. Students explored one of the nation’s most advanced examples of sustainable building design during a guided tour of The Kendeda Building, which generates 200% of the energy it consumes. Here they learned how energy efficiency, renewable generation, and resource conservation can be integrated into the built environment.

Final Projects 
To bring together the concepts explored throughout the week, students worked in teams on a final design challenge centered around a solar-powered disaster relief trailer on loan from the Footprint Project. Equipped with photovoltaic panels and battery storage, the trailer was originally designed to provide off-grid power during emergencies. Students were challenged to identify additional uses for the system during periods when disaster response was not required. Many teams proposed sustainable food truck businesses powered by the trailer’s solar energy system.

Teams also evaluated cooking technologies such as pressure cookers and slow cookers, comparing energy consumption, power requirements, efficiency, and operating costs. Students examined how energy demand aligned with available solar generation and battery storage while conducting economic analyses to determine business viability and profitability. The project integrated engineering, economics, and sustainability principles while encouraging creative thinking and collaborative problem-solving. 

“Energy Unplugged is an inspiring demonstration of how hands-on engineering experiences can spark curiosity and passion in the next generation of STEM leaders,” said student assistant Alvaro Hucker, a senior mechanical engineering student. “Working with this group and seeing the fun they were having brought back fond memories of my own childhood. It was an amazing experience.”

Student Contributors: Alvaro Hucker, Senior, Mechanical Engineering and William Nudd, Senior, Mechanical Engineering.

Read the full story. >>

When a bartender checks an ID, they quickly verify a customer’s date of birth and identity before serving them. 

Researchers at Georgia Tech say they have developed a system to help answer that question.

Known as FIRA, the tool analyzes drone crashes to determine whether they were caused by tampered machine-learning (ML) models. The team will present its findings at the 35th USENIX Security Symposium in August. 

The research addresses a growing safety challenge as drones are increasingly used for deliveries, infrastructure inspections, and agriculture.

As drones rely more on machine learning to navigate and make decisions, they also become vulnerable to model poisoning attacks. In these attacks, adversaries manipulate an AI system during its learning phase, embedding hidden triggers that can cause failures under specific conditions.

“Machine learning drones are making more decisions in flight, which makes ML a safety-critical component of these systems,” said Yizhi Huang, Ph.D. student and lead researcher on the project. 

“When something goes wrong, investigators need a way to ask whether the model was responsible, but the model is the part of the system that no one can examine after a crash. FIRA gives investigators a way to investigate these cases by reconstructing what the model was doing during the crash. As more drones run with ML, this kind of forensic capability can help drones be used more effectively and safely.”

When a drone crashes, investigators must determine whether the cause was malicious interference, weather, or mechanical failure. Without reliable forensic tools, accountability is difficult to establish, and safety standards are harder to enforce.

FIRA identifies how drone components interact with machine learning models and monitors those interactions in real time, even with limited bandwidth.

The system functions like a flight recorder, capturing key system activity and reconstructing a timeline after a crash. It then analyzes the model’s behavior to determine whether a malicious trigger was introduced via poisoned ML training data.

In tests across multiple drone platforms and crash scenarios, FIRA identified failure causes and distinguished cyberattacks from environmental or mechanical issues.

The system does not require access to a drone’s source code, making it practical for real-world investigations.

“As commercial drone use expands, tools like FIRA could help improve accountability and trust in AI-powered systems operating in public airspace,” said Huang. 

FIRA: Enabling Automatic Forensic Investigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles was led by Georgia Tech’s Cyber Forensics Innovation Lab in cooperation with the Cyber-Physical Security Lab. These labs reside in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computing Engineering. 

As fans around the world search for tickets to FIFA World Cup 2026 matches, a team of Georgia Tech students is working to make buying tickets to major events less stressful and more transparent. 

Presented annually, the ISCA Influential Paper Award recognizes a standout paper from the ISCA Conference 18-22 years prior. Winning papers are those which have demonstrated “the most impact on the field (in terms of research, development, products or ideas) during the intervening years.”

The awarded paper, Adaptive Insertion Policies for High-Performance Caching, has been highly influential in cache replacement research. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, Qureshi co-authored the paper with his advisor Yale Patt and collaborators from Intel, including Aamer Jaleel, Simon Steely, and Joel Emer.

“I’ve been working on memory systems for 20 years and if I had to pick one favorite paper, it would be this one,” Qureshi said. “Both because of the simplicity of the solution and for the impact it had.” 

When the paper was published at ISCA 2007, on-chip cache sizes were growing but still managed almost exclusively by the Least Recently Used (LRU) replacement policy.  

The paper showed that more than half of the lines in cache were discarded before they could be used under LRU policy and that this happened because the workloads being run were larger than the cache size. The team came up with a simple solution of modifying the “Insertion Policy”, such that the incoming lines were inserted at the LRU position instead of the MRU position, thus protecting the cache from thrashing patterns. The problem was that some workloads benefited from this policy while others were hurt by it. 

Instead of applying one policy across the whole cache, their solution dynamically tested two small segments against each other, each running a different policy. Whichever policy had fewer cache misses was applied to the entire cache. They named this technique Set Dueling. 

Qureshi clearly remembers the moment he knew this paper would be important. He was up late working on the project when he ran the final simulation with the solution. 

“I was so excited that I just didn’t sleep that night. I knew that the solution would get incorporated and it would change how people think about caching. I could not wait to share the results with my collaborators” he said. 

Set Dueling has since become a common technique for choosing between two competing policies when neither wins on all workloads. With close to 1,000 citations, the paper has greatly influenced research on cache optimization.

This recognition is Qureshi’s third test-of-time honor. In 2024, he received one at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, for his work on Multi-core Cache Partitioning and in 2025, at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, for his work on DRAM Reliability. 

Qureshi said that his goal in working in computer architecture is to have an industry impact. 

“It’s very gratifying to see that the ideas that we developed a decade or two decades ago are having an impact and being incorporated,” Qureshi said. “As a researcher, these are the best awards you can have because it serves as a validation that the work you’ve done is valuable to both industry and follow-up research.”  

The surrounding trees resemble those of a eucalyptus forest, which could indicate northern Portugal or the Spanish region of Galicia.

It’s the signposts on the road that give it away. They are flat and wide, which is common in Spain but not in Portugal.

Casapu, a master’s student in Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning, correctly reasons that the picture of a road he’s looking at is in Galicia.

Give Casapu a photo, and he will likely be able to tell you where it was taken. 

“I start with infrastructure clues that are specific to a country, region, state or province,” Casapu said. “They include roads or electricity poles, which often remain consistent throughout a country. Once you narrow down the country, you can use more specific factors like vegetation, specific landscapes, or architecture, because these are very nuanced. It’s a top-down approach.”

This is why Casapu is the reigning GeoGussr World Champion — and the ideal expert to test vision-language models (VLMs) on how good they are at geolocation.

GeoGuessr is a geography browser game launched in 2013 that invites players to guess the location of random Google Street View images. Casapu was already known as one of the top players in the world before he won the third annual GeoGussr World Championship in September.

At the beginning of the spring 2025 semester, School of Interactive Computing professor James Hays reached out to Casapu and invited him to collaborate on a new project. Hays was looking to create a dataset to evaluate VLMs' geolocation ability and reasoning. 

“VLMs are surprisingly good at geolocation right out of the box, even when they’re not trained to be good at it,” Hays said.

Hays and his colleagues, associate professors Alan Ritter and Wei Xu, took issue with many AI companies claiming that the VLMs they were releasing were not good at geolocation.

“When Open AI released GPT 4 Vision, there were privacy concerns about the model’s ability to geolocate someone based on photos they’ve shared on the internet,” Ritter said. “Open AI said this wasn’t a concern and claimed the model wasn’t good at geolocation beyond being able to recognize a city or famous monument. We found that wasn’t the case. These VLMs are state-of-the-art at image geolocation tasks.”

Show Your Work

Hays and Ritter enlisted a team of some of the world’s top geolocators. It consisted of Casapu, Joshua Diao, a master’s student in computer science, and Tejas Santanam, a Ph.D. student in industrial engineering. They each received 500 images to geolocate.

Team members recorded their reasons for each of their answers. The result was GeoRC, the first benchmark for VLM geolocation performance, consisting of 800 “ground truth” reasoning chains. 

Hays and Ritter gave the same images to GPT 5, Gemini, Llama, and Qwen. The highest-performing model geolocated with 90% accuracy — not far off from the team’s 96% score.

However, a major distinction showed up in the reasoning chains. While Casapu and Diao provided clear explanations for how they deduce each location, the VLMs either couldn’t provide reasoning for their guesses or were vague in their answers.

“The research community has been demanding explanations from these models,” Hays said. “For example, how do they know the location is in Italy?”

Hays has been researching this subject for almost 20 years. As a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, he was the first researcher to take a machine learning approach to geolocation. He introduced a new algorithm that could estimate a geographic location from a single image.

“When experts have audited these reasoning chains, we’ve noted many suspicious or hallucinated attributes,” he said. “When they hallucinate a geographic property, why is it so often consistent with the correct guess?

“I believe they’re not revealing the true reasoning pathway that they used to determine the image was Italy. They’re just implicitly recognizing that it was Italy for many reasons, then hunting for evidence to support that. Some of the things they say are true and supported by the image, and some are fabrications.”

Practice Partner

Casapu said there may be only a handful of GeoGuessr players who can currently outperform some top-tier VLMs in geolocation, and it may not be long before no one can.

“I think it could be more difficult playing against these models than playing against another human because a human has the possibility of making mistakes at the top level,” Casapu said. “If a well-trained model has that level of consistency, that is far beyond a normal person, and it would be much more difficult to beat.”

He added that working with Hays and competing against a machine improved his skill level and provided valuable practice ahead of the world championship. 

“It helps to take a step back and see why you’re making the guesses that you are,” he said. “Since then, I’ve taken a more methodical approach to how I practice. Writing these things down is a great way to see what you know and see why you make the guesses that you do. It’s been a great training tool.”

Casapu will defend his title at the 2026 GeoGussr World Championship in September.

Hays, Ritter, Xu, Casapu, Diao, and Santanm are all co-authors of a paper on GeoRC along with lead author Mohit Talrej and Ph.D. students Ethan Mendes and Jim Thannikary. The paper will be presented next week at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in San Diego.

The Petit Center is made possible by a transformational commitment from technology entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Georgia Tech alumnus Parker H. "Pete" Petit.

Since 1980, Petit has provided significant philanthropic support across campus, including the naming of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB), one of Georgia Tech’s 11 Interdisciplinary Research Institutes. IBB is an interdisciplinary hub for transforming biological discovery into real-world health impact, bringing together engineers, scientists, and clinicians to accelerate innovations in diagnostics, therapeutics, medical devices, and biomanufacturing. With more than 300 interdisciplinary faculty researchers, 13 research centers, and 1,300 trainees making unprecedented discoveries and generating innovative technologies, IBB is a catalyst for innovative bioengineering and bioscience research. 

The success of IBB led Petit to make his latest investment, which will build on Georgia Tech’s broader commitment to medical innovation: applying engineering, computing, AI, biosciences, and systems thinking to health challenges that require more than any one field can solve. The Petit Center’s work will strengthen the tools, partnerships, and research pathways needed to help more discoveries move from the lab toward real-world patient care. 

A key goal of the Petit Center will be to use AI to build more precise models of how disease works in the body. Its first research initiative will focus on creating virtual models of human cells. Led by Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor and Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, researchers will use those models to study how diseases progress and to identify treatments that may work best for individual patients. 

By modeling disease at the cellular level, researchers can test ideas faster, uncover links among different diseases, and focus on therapies most likely to help patients based on their unique biology. The work could expedite the discovery of new therapies for some of the hardest-to-treat diseases, including pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. 

“Medical innovation is one of the fastest-growing areas in Georgia Tech’s research, and Pete Petit’s commitment will help us further shape the future of medicine," said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “This new research center will find new ways to harness the power of AI to accelerate critical medical discoveries and move them into clinical settings so patients can get the care they need. We’re deeply grateful for Pete's support, and we’re excited to get started.”

The Parker H. Petit Center for AI-Driven Health Innovation will operate under the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) and bring together researchers from across Georgia Tech to advance AI-driven approaches to human health. Researchers affiliated with the Petit Center will work across fields and with clinical and healthcare organizations to help close the gap between discovery and practical use. Over time and with additional investments, the Petit Center’s work will expand into areas such as cancer biomarker discovery, healthy aging, advanced cellular therapies, and AI-supported healthcare systems. 

"Georgia Tech has the expertise to redefine what is possible in healthcare through AI," said Skolnick. "By combining advanced computational methods with biological and medical insights, we can create powerful new approaches to predicting disease, identifying treatments, and improving patient outcomes." 

Petit’s commitment will support advanced computing infrastructure, graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, seed research grants, and annual programs that will bring together leading researchers from around the world working at the intersection of AI and health. 

Petit hopes this investment will inspire others to support interdisciplinary research at the Institute. "Georgia Tech has long demonstrated its ability to solve complex challenges," said Petit. "I believe artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape healthcare, and I am excited to support a center that can help accelerate discoveries to improve and save lives." 

This transformative commitment is included in Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech and is propelling the comprehensive campaign’s success.  

When Robbie van Zyl first started working with drones, it was not for defense. It started with curiosity. 

It’s a role she knows well.

For more than 11 years, Stoinski has served as president, CEO, and chief scientific officer of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, leading efforts to help the world better understand and protect Rwanda’s mountain gorillas — a species with only about 1,000 left in the wild.

Although she now oversees a multimillion-dollar budget and 400 employees worldwide, she never planned to be a CEO.

“I’m a scientist at my core,” says Stoinski. “Day to day, I function more as a leader and executive, but I still think of myself as a scientist first.”

Her job covers a wide range of responsibilities, including fundraising, public speaking, budgeting, and strategy. One week, she might find herself observing gorilla behavior in Rwanda; the next, she’s back in the U.S., discussing conservation on the popular Armchair Expert podcast. 

“I love my job,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like work; it’s a passion.”

A Helluva Scientist

One of the reasons Stoinski chose Georgia Tech for her Ph.D. was its connection to Zoo Atlanta.

Her doctoral advisor, the late Terry Maple, emeritus professor in the School of Psychological and Brain Sciences, served as director of Zoo Atlanta, giving students rare access to conservation-focused research.

“The zoo was our lab. I studied elephants, lemurs, gorillas, and golden lion tamarins, both in the zoo and in the wild in Brazil and Africa,” says Stoinski.

She appreciates how Georgia Tech prepared her for the challenges of her career.

“The rigor of a Georgia Tech education is something you need as a scientist,” she says. “I also had the opportunity to do a lot of public speaking and teaching, which are huge parts of my job now.”

Leading Global Conservation Efforts

After earning her Ph.D., Stoinski spent 14 years with Zoo Atlanta while also working with the Atlanta-based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. She became CEO in 2014 and now oversees conservation and research programs in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Under her leadership, the Fossey Fund has expanded its footprint, including opening its Ellen DeGeneres Campus in 2022, a 12-acre research and education center in Rwanda.

The site includes labs, classrooms, and a restored landscape, where roughly 250,000 plants from 110 species have been planted to reestablish native ecosystems.

“We host hundreds of students — including groups from Georgia Tech, and support dozens of graduate and postdoctoral researchers, from countries all over the world including many from Africa,” she explains. “Seeing their excitement and commitment gives me lots of hope for the future.”

Scientific Storytelling

A Gorilla Story follows the Pablo family of mountain gorillas living on the slopes of Volcanoes National Park in northwestern Rwanda.

“The Pablo group goes back to Dian Fossey’s time,” explains Stoinski. “It’s the largest group of gorillas ever recorded, at one point reaching 65 individuals. An average gorilla family is about 10.”

Due to Rwandan regulations, filming could take place for just one hour each day. Filmmakers and scientists would often have to hike for five to six hours to reach the gorillas.

Because Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund researchers have followed these gorilla families for decades, they were already familiar with the individual gorillas, including six generations of family history, which “makes the story incredibly rich,” says Stoinski.

“You see grief, relationships, alliances — all of it,” she says. “Ultimately, I hope that connection leads people to care and to take action.”

Collaborative Conservation

Stoinski’s career is all about taking action — and inspiring others to do the same.

“We need people on the ground doing this work, but we also need people outside of our field to support and be aware of what’s happening to gorillas and the planet’s biodiversity,” she says.

She encourages Tech students to stay informed:

 “Even if you’re not going into conservation, take a class, listen, learn,” she says. “Unfortunately, there are real challenges facing the next generation.”

She frequently points out that by helping gorillas, we’re saving ourselves, sharing that gorillas live in the Congo Basin, one of the most important ecosystems on Earth. By dispersing seeds and maintaining forest structure, they help sustain environments critical for climate stability and planetary health.

“Protecting gorillas means protecting those ecosystems, which ultimately support human survival.”

A Lasting Georgia Tech Connection

Stoinski maintains strong ties to Georgia Tech through research collaborations and student engagement. Projects over the years have included helping to establish the Center for Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing at the University of Rwanda, geospatial mapping, and architectural design and planning. 

She invites alumni and students to engage with the work firsthand.

“I encourage more Georgia Tech alumni and students to work with us or come see us. And if you want to meet with a Georgia Tech grad, I lead tours: we can put on our Tech gear and take a photo with the gorillas!”

For communities across the country, this growth hits close to home, and not without controversy. What do data centers actually deliver for the local economies that host them?
 

New research from Daniel Yue, assistant professor of Information Technology Management at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, and his co-author, Yiyang Zeng, examines how data center openings affect local jobs, wages, business activity, and electricity prices. Their findings suggest that geography plays a decisive role in whether communities see meaningful economic gains.
 

“Enormous amounts of capital are flowing into specific communities, much of it tied to new construction, while rigorous evidence on the local benefits of these facilities has been thin,” said Yue. “Community pushback has organized rapidly across the country. Our paper begins to fill that gap by providing new evidence using detailed, facility-level data paired with county-level economic indicators.”

A Historic Investment Wave

There are more than 2,500 data centers, either active or under construction, across the United States. Individual hyperscale facilities often cost more than $1 billion to construct and can consume as much electricity as a small city. Is it all worth it?

On average, Yue and Zeng found that when a data center opens, the host county sees a measurable lift: Employment rises by about 3.5%, wages by 5%, business establishments by nearly 5%, and household income by about 2%. Building permits also increase sharply, reflecting construction activity tied to new facilities.

These are real, economically meaningful gains. But Yue and Zeng discovered that these gains are much smaller than what might be expected from a large investment. And they’re not evenly distributed.

Why Metro Areas Benefit More

The researchers’ clearest finding is that metropolitan areas capture most of the economic benefits from data centers, while rural areas see far fewer spillover effects. While metro counties saw increases in employment and new business growth, non-metro counties saw no measurable gains.

The reason comes down to what economists call “agglomeration,” or economic density.

Data centers don’t operate in isolation. They rely on construction contractors, engineers, equipment suppliers, professional services, and a skilled workforce. Those connections are far easier to build in places that already have deep labor markets and established business networks.

Metropolitan areas are well-positioned to absorb the indirect spending that data centers generate. High-wage technical employees support restaurants, retail, and local services. Suppliers and contractors can scale up quickly. These spillover effects amplify the impact of the initial investment.

In rural areas, that amplification is much harder to achieve. Facilities tend to employ relatively few permanent workers — often fewer than 100 — and many specialized services are imported from outside the county. As a result, the broader economic ripple never materializes.

That doesn’t mean rural communities see no benefit at all. The research finds a small but real drop in unemployment rates in non-metro counties, and local governments may still gain tax revenue or infrastructure investments. But the sweeping job and wage growth often promised during local recruitment efforts will not likely arrive on its own.

“Location, not facility size, determines whether the local benefits show up,” Yue said.

The Hidden Cost: Electricity Prices

Yue and Zeng’s research also uncovers an important trade-off. Data centers use a lot of electricity. A single large facility can use as much power as roughly 80,000 homes. In areas where the researchers can cleanly measure price effects, electricity prices rise by about 5% after a data center enters.

“When the benefits to communities are small, even downsides like higher electricity prices that strain infrastructure will be felt by locals,” Yue shared.

Who pays for the increased cost of electricity isn’t straightforward. Yue and Zeng’s research suggests communities should ask specific questions about who pays for new infrastructure and how those costs will be distributed. Local utility companies divide costs differently among homeowners, businesses, and large industrial users, including data centers. Because cost-sharing systems vary by state, each data center development is unique.

What Communities Should Consider

As states and cities work to attract or push back against data center construction, Yue and Zeng hope their research will encourage more evidence-based decision-making.

For metro areas with strong labor markets and dense business ecosystems, data centers can deliver meaningful, though not transformative, economic gains. For rural communities, the positive impact is more complicated.

“In 10 years, communities will likely wish they had pressed harder on the quality of the decision itself, including whether the debate was evidence-based, whether their local economy was equipped to capture the gains, and whether the fine print aligned with residents' long-term interests,” Yue said. “It’s vital that communities look past flashy, headline incentive packages and focus on the details: tax abatement structures, electricity tariff arrangements, and who ultimately pays for infrastructure upgrades.”

As data centers continue to dot the American landscape, understanding where they create shared value — and where they don’t — will be critical for community leaders and policymakers alike.
 
Read More: The Local Economic Effects of Data Center Entry

The North Georgia Lightning Mapping Array (NGLMA) uses specialized detection equipment to generate detailed maps of the lightning that occurs in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Through a collaboration between GTRI and the National Weather Service (NWS), the array provided continuous lightning information to agencies responsible for visitor safety.
 

“The North Georgia Lightning Mapping Array is providing decision-support information to agencies responsible for protecting events in Atlanta related to the World Cup,” said Michael Peterson, director of the GTRI Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC). “The system has been up and running and gave us excellent measurements of the thunderstorms that occurred in mid-June. It complements the other sources of weather information that the agencies have available.”
 

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

That dichotomy is part of what drives the field of synthetic biology: where scientists apply engineering principles to learn from and carefully adapt nature’s biological systems to address human problems. By understanding biological systems, scientists can carefully redirect them when natural processes cause harm.

This principle has shaped my work as a biomedical engineer for over two decades. My lab studies how to program cells in order to better understand their behavior and ultimately use them as medicine. The goal is not to discard or replace nature, but to learn from biological principles and use that knowledge to responsibly help society.

Researchers announced on July 2, 2026, that they had created the first synthetic cell built from purified, nonliving components.

The lab’s cell-like system, dubbed SpudCell, raises key questions: What does it take to build a cell from scratch? If scientists assemble something that feeds, grows, copies genetic material and divides, have they created life?

How to Create Cells From Scratch

Natural cells are astonishingly complicated. Researchers want to use synthetic cells to learn more about how life works, and they are doing this by rebuilding some of life’s basic features in a simpler, more understandable form.

Earlier designs of minimal cells, used to test which components are necessary for lifelike behavior, began with existing living cells and reduced the size of their genomes. A minimal cell is useful because it is simple, but that simplicity comes at a cost. It may reveal which parts are needed for lifelike behavior, but it usually lacks the autonomy, resilience, metabolism and evolutionary capacity of natural cells.

Instead, synthetic cells are built through a bottom-up engineering approach. Scientists start with a simplified compartment – a kind of biological “box” – and ask what must be added for it to behave more like a living cell. A membrane separates the inside from the outside. Genetic material stores instructions. Molecular machinery reads those instructions to make molecules. Energy sources power reactions. Other components can allow growth, division and adaptation.

A useful way to think about synthetic cells is to compare them with technologies society already depends on. The radio wasn’t invented all at once. Engineers learned how to combine an antenna, tuner, amplifier, power source and speaker to convert invisible electromagnetic waves into sound. A car is not just a metal shell; it becomes transportation only when a frame is connected to wheels, brakes, steering, an engine, and transmission and control systems. A computer began with switches and strings of ones and zeros that could be assembled into circuits capable of storing and processing information.

Similarly, SpudCell was assembled from the bottom up with purified, nonliving parts. Researchers used lipid molecules to create a cell-like membrane, DNA molecules to store genetic instructions, purified enzymes to copy and read those instructions, and other molecular machinery to help build proteins and other molecules from small chemical building blocks, such as amino acids and nucleotides.

SpudCell is exciting scientists because it appears to bring several features of life together in one system. The researchers describe it as capable of feeding, growth, genome replication, genetically encoded division and something close to evolution. These features resemble a biological cell cycle.

Close to Life, But Not Quite

While SpudCell is an important milestone in the field, it stops short of being a fully synthetic living cell. A membrane-bound compartment containing DNA is not automatically a living cell, just as a pile of car parts is not a car.

SpudCell can carry out several life-like processes, but it is not independent. It still relies on carefully controlled laboratory conditions and on researchers to supply its molecular machinery. It doesn’t reliably pass on its genetic material or spontaneously evolve the way natural cells do.

To approach life, a synthetic cell must coordinate many processes at once. NASA describes life as a “self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution,” meaning it must independently use energy, copy information, grow, divide, respond to its surroundings and persist over time. Natural cells do this with extraordinary reliability because they are the products of billions of years of evolution.

SpudCell still falls short of that standard. It depends on researchers to continuously supply it with the molecular machinery to function and to physically help it divide. It also cannot reproduce indefinitely outside a carefully controlled laboratory environment. In other words, SpudCell may have been built rather than born, but it is not yet autonomous life.

That limitation does not make the achievement unimportant. In fact, it is scientifically valuable precisely because it exposes what is still missing to create life. Which parts are essential? Which processes must be coordinated? How much complexity is necessary before chemistry begins to look like biology?

Why Create Synthetic Cells?

Those questions have practical importance. Answering them can help scientists and engineers design safer biological systems for a wide range of industries.

Synthetic cells allow scientists to more cleanly test how the surrounding membrane separates the inside of a cell from its environment, how genetic instructions are read, how energy is used, and how growth and division are coordinated. These cell-like systems could eventually become simplified test beds for studying biological circuits, disease mechanisms and the origins of life.

They could also help scientists build safer systems for making medicines, fuels or materials, detecting environmental toxins, or delivering therapies without relying on fully living organisms.

More broadly, synthetic biology connects medicine and biotechnology: Viruses can be redesigned into vaccines or gene therapy, immune cells can be reprogrammed to recognize cancer, and microbes can be engineered to make useful molecules, such as insulin, or detect pollutants.

Similarly, researchers could use synthetic cells to deliver a drug only to diseased tissue, or create microbial systems that detect toxins or pathogens in water. They can also act as simplified biological factories that can make medicines without requiring a fully living organism, or as biosensors providing early warning of dangerous threats, such as bioweapons.

Creating Life Responsibly

The philosophical question “Is SpudCell alive?” may not have a simple yes or no answer.

Depending on whether your definition of life emphasizes metabolism, reproduction, evolution, autonomy or cellular organization, the boundary between living and nonliving can look very different.

Life is not defined by one property alone. Viruses contain genetic information but depend on host cells to reproduce. Mitochondria perform essential metabolism but cannot live independently outside of cells. A seed can remain dormant for years before resuming growth.

When synthetic biology is guided by a strong sense of responsibility, scientists can learn how to redirect harmful processes, build safer tools and help society. This requires not only asking whether biological systems can be built, but also whether their creation should be controlled, where they should function and what safeguards are needed.

Over the past two decades, scientists have built many kinds of biological kill switches – that is, genetic circuits that can shut down engineered cells under specific conditions. Some researchers have made cells dependent on a specific nutrient. Others have created cells that can survive only in a particular environment or activate self-destructive pathways when conditions change.

Kill switches are not magic off buttons and do not replace careful regulation, physical containment or public oversight. But they are an important example of synthetic biology’s moral compass: to not only build useful biological tools, but to build them with safety, accountability and humility in mind.

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

For years, scientists studying the human gut have relied on a material that most people would never expect: a jelly made from mouse tumors. Called Matrigel, it is used to grow tiny, patient‑derived versions of the intestine that help researchers understand disease, test new drugs, and explore future therapies. However, since this material comes from animal tissue, it’s unpredictable, difficult to control, and limits medical applications. 

Colleagues and friends remember Shelton as a dedicated mentor, collaborator, and educator, whose curiosity, generosity, and sense of humor left a lasting impression on students and peers.

“Sam exemplified the very best of Georgia Tech, and his legacy will continue to inspire generations of engineers and educators,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. “I am deeply grateful for his friendship, mentorship, and leadership. My heartfelt condolences go to his family, and to the many students, colleagues, and friends whose lives he touched.”

A nationally recognized leader in energy systems, Shelton founded SEI as an interdisciplinary organization that brought together engineers, researchers, policy experts, and industry leaders to advance high-impact energy solutions. That vision remains central to SEI’s mission and continues to guide its work today.

“Sam was the quintessential engineer and innovator, whose vision was always accompanied by the development and demonstration of actual products instead of leaving them as promising concepts,” said Srinivas Garimella, Hightower Chair in the College of Engineering and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “He had the rare ability to see through nebulous ideas and claims and get to the fundamental engineering truths. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to seek his advice, which he freely gave. I will miss his friendship and counsel very much.”

During a career of more than 35 years, Shelton made lasting contributions to sustainable energy and engineering innovation. His work spanned combustion research, solar energy technologies, and offshore wind systems. He secured more than $30 million in research funding, held eight patents, founded two energy-focused companies, and helped translate research into real-world energy solutions.

In addition to his research, Shelton was deeply committed to education. During his academic career, he developed undergraduate and graduate courses in energy technology, teaching both in person and online. His Energy 101 course reached tens of thousands of learners through a massive open online course platform, covering topics such as energy supply, independence, economics, and society’s energy demands.

“When I first started at SEI in 2016, Sam and I would meet for lunch to discuss the latest research, consider how far we've come since the Carter administration, and grapple over the world’s energy problems,” said Rich Simmons, SEI’s director of Research and Studies. “Sam was genuine and objective, not working backward from a preconceived notion, but working forward with an open mind to understand, appreciate, and apply the first and second law. He was also colorful and witty! We are all privileged to pay these lessons forward to future energy students.” 

Beyond academia, Shelton’s engineering expertise reached a global stage as the designer of the Olympic torch for the 1996 Atlanta Games, an enduring symbol of innovation recognized worldwide. “The Olympics represented world peace, mankind coming together, and overcoming adversity. It was an amazing event to think about, to witness, to live through, and be a part of helping to create it,” Shelton said in a 2016 interview.

Shelton is survived by his daughters, Suzie and Stacy, three granddaughters, and a wide network of students, colleagues, and collaborators. His legacy continues through the programs he built, partnerships he fostered, and the people he helped.

A memorial service celebrating Shelton’s life will be held Aug. 1 at 1 p.m. at The 57th Fighter Group Restaurant in Atlanta. The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, memorial gifts be directed to Roll Call, Georgia Tech’s Fund for Excellence. Donations may be made at gtalumni.org/SamShelton.

The outing, organized by Director of Research Operations Mary Helen Hayes, is one of a series of activities designed to bring the school’s staff together to foster close relationships between peers. Developing staff culture has been a priority for Hayes since she started at SCP in January 2024. 

“These types of events build trust and remove perceptions,” she said. “It brings together leadership and employees to show that we are all rowing the boat together.”

Soon after she was hired, Hayes attended a meeting to help shape SCP's culture. The fledgling school and its new staff had yet to develop a culture of their own, and Hayes saw an opportunity to draw on her experience planning staff outings to bring people together early on. 

It started with a staff retreat over lunch in 2024. Hayes built a playlist based on the staff’s favorite songs, and the group played icebreakers. From that point forward, SCP staff outings included ceramic pumpkin painting contests, holiday ornament decoration, and more. 

The school also sponsors a welcome breakfast each fall for SCP students and, more recently, hosted a food drive. Both organized by Hayes. 

“Mary Helen has the rare talent to bring process improvements to life while bringing people together, creating lasting improvements that benefit SCP, the College of Computing, and the Institute,” said School Administrative Officer Jan Morian.

While staff culture has become one of Hayes' most visible contributions, it is only part of her impact on SCP. In her two and a half years at the school, she has launched training on research proposals, travel, and expenses. She has also established regular meetings among faculty, administrative, and finance staff and created methods to expedite undergraduate hiring and research proposal intake. 

“I have been at Georgia Tech for about 15 years now, and I looked back on my experience when coming up with new processes for the school,” she said. 

Before joining SCP, Hayes was a financial manager and administrator at several Georgia Tech departments. In 2024 she was hired by SCP as the assistant director for financial operations.

Now as director of research operations, Hayes supports 26 school faculty and oversees a team of four research administrators. She oversees all financial operations for the school including proposal development, sponsor compliance, post-award administration, financial reporting, and award closeout activities.

Hayes runs a tight ship, a fact she will freely admit to. Her department is organized down to the filing system to keep everyone on the same page. Her team of four staff each bring their own strengths to the school’s finances, and Hayes has made sure they are cross trained so there is coverage if someone is out. 

“I want to make sure my team can rely on each other,” she said. “I want them to be able to ask questions and admit if they don’t know something.”

Just as dedicated to the culture of her own team as she is with the overall, Hayes encourages her colleagues to engage in career development conferences and courses. She also was vocal in the job families effort to ensure her staff receive job titles that reflect their day-to-day responsibilities. 

To develop her own career further, Hayes is currently enrolled in the MBA program at Georgia Southern University through the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) offered to full-time employees by the University System of Georgia. She also received the Outstanding Staff Leadership Award from the College of Computing. 

Rather than waiting for challenges to arise, Hayes looks for opportunities to improve workflows before they become obstacles. She regularly gathers feedback from colleagues, refines procedures, and documents best practices to ensure knowledge is shared across the school instead of remaining with a single person.

“I am very honored and excited to receive the NSF CAREER Award,” says Zhu. “This award will support research by my fantastic team of students and post-doctoral researchers and give me the opportunity to carry out education and outreach programs that expand our impact.”

Advancing AI Applications

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2024, Zhu’s research has focused on the mathematical foundations of machine learning and their applications in science and engineering.

With support from the CAREER Award, Zhu and his team will explore the two-way relationship between data and structure in machine learning. They aim to understand how known structures in scientific and engineering problems (e.g., symmetries or physical constraints) can help machine learning models learn more accurately and efficiently from limited data. They will also study how machine learning can uncover hidden structures directly from data, revealing patterns or principles that may not be known in advance.

The project focuses on settings where large amounts of high-quality data are difficult or expensive to obtain, as is often the case in science and engineering. Using mathematical analysis, Zhu and his team will examine how much data is required to accurately learn a model, how structural information can reduce this data requirement, and how much data is needed to reliably identify a model’s underlying structure.

According to Zhu, this approach could reduce the amount of data and time needed to build and test accurate models, leading to more reliable, interpretable, and efficient AI for scientific discovery.

“Such advances align with national AI priorities and help strengthen the mathematical foundations needed for future scientific and engineering applications of AI,” he says.

Expanding AI Literacy

Zhu believes it is important to help students understand AI, noting that they must learn how to interpret and evaluate its outputs rather than accept them uncritically. 

“AI has increasingly become incorporated into many fields of study,” he says. “Institutions must determine how to best integrate it into education while also teaching students how it works. The AI education and outreach components of my project aim to help prepare students for careers at the intersection of mathematics, computing, and science.”

Zhu’s CAREER Award will support educational initiatives at multiple levels, including new graduate and undergraduate courses on machine learning. It will also support a machine learning boot camp for high school students, organized by the School of Mathematics in collaboration with Emory University’s Department of Mathematics. The boot camp seeks to introduce students to foundational ideas in AI and machine learning, with an emphasis on the mathematical principles needed to understand and responsibly use these tools.

Housing and transportation are top priorities for many city mayors, policymakers and public policy researchers—including Brian An, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. But in February 2021, soon after Winter Storm Uri wreaked havoc in Texas, an eight-hour power outage at his Atlanta home became an epiphany.

“While housing stability had long been on my mind, losing power drove home the importance of another piece of urban infrastructure: reliable access to electricity,” says An, an EPIcenter faculty affiliate and co-director of the Center for Urban Research. “It sparked my interest in studying the intersection of energy and urban policy to help make cities and communities not only socially equitable but also resilient to extreme weather.”

Read Full Story on the EPIcenter News Page

Six years after demonstrating that membranes could separate crude oil at the molecular level, Georgia Tech researcher Ryan Lively is part of an international team that has taken the concept a significant step further.

The team, including investigators at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), discovered that a membrane material widely believed to be non-selective for molecules as small as those found in crude can in fact selectively separate crude oil into lighter and heavier fractions in a way researchers did not expect. 

“Dingjing’s selection for this honor is a remarkable recognition of the originality, impact, and promise of her scholarship,” says School of Psychological and Brain Sciences Chair Tansu Celikel. “This achievement is especially significant for Georgia Tech as she is the first person from the Institute to receive this distinction and only the third recipient from the state of Georgia.”

Shi obtained her Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Virginia in 2020. After working as an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, she joined Georgia Tech in 2025.

“Receiving this award is an honor and a responsibility,” says Shi. “This international recognition of my early work encourages me to keep pushing the scientific boundaries of my field and to continue pursuing research that creates meaningful and lasting real-world impacts.”

Foundational Methodology Development

As a quantitative methodologist, Shi develops statistical and computational models that focus on reducing dimensionality (the number of attributes, features, or independent directions needed to describe an object, dataset, or mathematical space); improving classification; and enabling technology-based, real-time adaptive assessment in psychological, brain, biomedical, and health-related research. Specifically, her research transforms complex brain imaging outputs (such as MRIs and EEGs), real-time ecological assessments, and multi-sensor wearable streams into compact, information-rich representations, and she designs personalized, adaptive intervention systems to deliver context-aware and dynamically updated support for individuals.

Shi’s work has been funded by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security. She was a recipient of the SAS Institute Advanced Statistical Fellowship as well as the Citation Abstract Award from the Society of Behavioral Medicine. 

“I’m excited to work at Georgia Tech in the School of Psychological and Brain Sciences because its strong focus on technology and psychological brain sciences aligns perfectly with my research program,” says Shi. “Being part of such a stimulating academic environment, with outstanding colleagues and talented students, makes it an ideal place to contribute, collaborate, and grow as a researcher and educator.”

Communities across Georgia and the nation are navigating a range of economic and energy-related pressures. Gas prices, inflation, and the rapid growth of data centers are shaping the cost of goods and services, influencing everyday household financial decisions.

At the same time, ongoing geopolitical tensions are driving fluctuations in global oil markets and fuel prices. The expansion of AI data centers is also increasing demand for land, power, and water resources. And conflicts involving energy infrastructure in parts of the Middle East and Europe have affected supply stability.

Responding to these challenges requires careful analysis of emerging trends, supported by strong research in policy and economics. Faculty Affiliates of Georgia Tech’s Energy Policy and Innovation Center study these complex, interconnected issues affecting energy systems, costs, and access. They analyze emerging trends, evaluate policy options, and identify practical pathways forward.

Read Full Story on the EPIcenter News Page

This battle of the brains has also been playing out over the course of evolution, but not as a simple clash between old and new. 

“There was a theory proposed in the ‘50s that the brain evolved in layers starting with basic bodily functions, to emotions in the reptilian brain, leading up to sophisticated reasoning in humans,” explains Nabil Imam, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering and a faculty member with Georgia Tech’s Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS). “This is not how an evolutionary biologist would think about the problem.”

Instead of a “new” brain layered over an “ancient” one — or even a logical brain versus an emotional one — research published in Science Advances reveals that brain evolution may come down to wiring. 

By studying the architecture of both biological and artificial brains, Imam’s team found that brain evolution is a strategic allocation of limited real estate. They propose a computational tug-of-war between two fundamentally different types of internal wiring — ones established even before birth.

This new understanding not only helps resolve a longstanding mystery in brain evolution but could also help us design more efficient AI systems.

The Problem With the “Lizard Brain”

When we refer to our “logical” or “lizard” brains, we’re really talking about different groups of brain regions. The logical brain is known as the neocortex, the brain’s outer layer responsible for vision, perception, reasoning, and other higher-level functions. For the lizard brain, the story gets a bit complicated.

“The limbic system, sometimes called the ‘reptilian brain,’ controls emotion broadly speaking — but it also has other components with distinct functions,” explains Imam. The system has separate regions for memory, smell, and navigation in addition to emotional regulation. “Why do people group all these different regions into one big system? There hasn’t been a good theory for what is common between these different circuits.”

To investigate, Imam’s team looked beyond individual regions to examine how these systems scale across species. Instead of comparing single areas based on function, the team analyzed how the limbic system and the neocortex change together across evolutionary history.

The result was remarkably consistent. When one component of the limbic system was larger, the others were also larger, while the neocortex was consistently smaller. These regions don’t vary independently. “Rather,” says Imam, “it’s a coordinated expansion of these regions across species.”

This reveals something new: The limbic system behaves not as a loose collection of functions, but as a unified network that expands and contracts as a group across evolution.

But what is driving this coordinated push and pull?

Maps Versus Barcodes

Imam argues that it comes down to how these different parts of the brain are wired before birth.

In the neocortex, neural circuits are organized as spatial maps. Areas that process touch in nearby parts of your body, like your index finger and thumb, are physically close to each other in the brain. The same is true for sight and sound. 

Wires in the limbic system, however, are not spatially organized. They function more like a bar code, firing in unique, distributed patterns to represent specific scents or complex memories.

To test whether this was an innate trait or acquired through experience, the team developed AI models for different senses. They found that when they pre-wired an AI with localized, spatial connectivity, the network was naturally very good at processing vision, sound, and touch information. Conversely, distributed, “barcode-style” networks were essential for the AI to excel at scent recognition and memory.

The Evolutionary Tug-of-War

The final piece of the puzzle explains how the size of brain components changes predictably across species. Because resources like space and energy are limited, natural selection chooses which system to prioritize.

The team simulated evolution by creating a multimodal network where the spatial and distributed domains competed for “real estate.” When the environment rewarded smell, all areas of the distributed system expanded and the neocortex shrank. When vision was rewarded, the opposite occurred.

This explains why the nine-banded armadillo, which relies on scent, has a massive limbic system, while the highly visual squirrel monkey is dominated by its neocortex. Across the 182 species studied, the research shows that brain evolution is not about adding new layers of "logic," but about strategically reallocating space between different wiring systems to support survival.

By translating this biological architecture to AI systems, engineers could create machines that learn as efficiently as the human brain, requiring far less data and energy.

“Today's artificial neural networks are trained by vast amounts data — it’s about nurture,” says Imam. “But the brain is not a blank slate that gets trained by experience. It is a mix of nature and nurture, and the nature is that pre-wired architecture.” 

“We could translate that architecture to AI systems to make it more brain-like, or make it learn or function as efficiently as the brain.”

This work was a collaboration with Cornell University and was supported by the National Science Foundation.

DOI: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec6112

The latest rankings build on a record year for Georgia Tech commercialization. In 2025, the Institute reported advancing hundreds of technologies toward the marketplace, while achieving record levels of invention disclosures, issued patents, and licensed technologies. Those milestones underscore Georgia Tech’s expanding role in transforming research discoveries into products, companies, and partnerships that create economic and societal value.

“The strong performance reflects a commercialization strategy focused not only on protecting IP, but also on helping researchers translate discoveries into practical applications,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, chief commercialization officer at Georgia Tech. “Whether through licensing technologies, launching startups, or partnering with industry, we are building pathways that help researchers transform discoveries into real-world solutions.” 

From advanced health technologies to environmental monitoring tools and next-generation aerospace ventures, Georgia Tech innovations are reaching users and markets in increasingly diverse ways. One example is Kinemo, a startup developed through Georgia Tech research that is helping people with limited mobility regain independence through wearable assistive technology. Founded by researchers from the College of Engineering, Kinemo uses physiological sensing and small intentional movements to enable users to control digital devices. The company works closely with clinicians and patients at Shepherd Center to refine the technology and expand accessibility for individuals living with spinal cord injuries and mobility limitations.

Another example is Skopii, a startup launched from research in the lab of environmental engineering professor Ameet Pinto. The company is commercializing portable imaging and artificial intelligence technology that enables users to rapidly analyze microorganisms in water and environmental systems, eliminating the need for lengthy laboratory testing. The technology has the potential to improve decision-making for water utilities, food production systems, and environmental monitoring efforts.

As research institutions face increasing pressure to demonstrate impact beyond publications and laboratory discoveries, Georgia Tech continues to show how world-class research can translate into technologies, startups, jobs, and solutions that improve lives. The latest AUTM rankings provide another measure of that success, highlighting an innovation ecosystem that consistently moves ideas from the lab to the marketplace.

Startups such as Kinemo and Skopii illustrate the broader commercialization approach reflected in Georgia Tech's AUTM rankings. 

T1D is caused by the autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells, requiring individuals to manage their blood glucose levels through lifelong insulin therapy. Transplanting pancreatic islets has long been investigated as a potential curative treatment, but long-lasting success in extrahepatic sites has been limited—particularly when islets are transplanted beneath the skin—due to poor blood vessel formation, immune rejection, and cellular stress following transplantation.

Vlahos’ research addresses these limitations by combining synthetic biology and tissue engineering in a new way: engineering cells to actively reshape their local environment after transplantation to make it more hospitable for the graft. Rather than relying solely on biomaterials or porous structures to support transplanted cells, the project focuses on programming the cells themselves to sense stress and respond dynamically.

Read the full story.

Artificial intelligence isn't just changing the way we think about human intelligence — it's changing the way we study the mind. "In recent years," says School of Psychology Assistant Professor Ratan Murty, "it has become very apparent to us that we have new ways to study the brain." 

Those new methods were top of mind as over 100 researchers from across Atlanta gathered for this year’s Computational Cognition Conference (CoCo Con). Hosted by Georgia Tech’s Center of Excellence in Computational Cognition (CoCo) on March 13, the conference allowed researchers from Georgia Tech and beyond working at the intersection of the mind and advanced computing to gain insights into both human cognition and artificial intelligence. 

CoCo itself is “a hub for research, education, and community” housed within the Georgia Tech School of Psychology says Robert Wilson, associate professor in Psychology and director of CoCo. Launched in 2023, the center is home to more than 50 affiliate faculty and 100 trainees across Georgia Tech, Atlanta, and beyond using computational methods to study the mind. Through chalk talks, educational programs, and conferences like CoCo Con, the center aims to rethink how we approach the study of the mind. 

The conference featured multidisciplinary talks spanning the full breadth of computation cognition — from exploration and avoidance in anxiety, what makes music memorable, the theory of mind in humans and machines, dynamic drift diffusion modeling, and the structure of memory for narratives — overall highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of the field. 

Additionally, the day featured a robust poster session highlighting work by the eight inaugural CoCo Pilot Grant recipients as well as other postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates doing computational cognition research at Atlanta-based institutions. In total, there were 20 posters ranging from the physics of cognition to naturalistic decision making and beyond.  

A running theme throughout the conference was the growing influence of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence — and how researchers are preparing for the ethical, social and practical challenges that they bring. “The next operating system won’t run on your phone,” said DeBrae Kennedy-Mayo, senior academic professional in the Scheller College of Business and one of the conference speakers. “It will run on your brain.” With such rapidly advancing technology and the growing reach of computational cognition research, institutions like CoCo are looking to rethink the current practices of studying brain data in a modern light.  

Ending the conference was a panel discussion with researchers from across psychology, anthropology, and related fields to reflect on the future of brain research. Together, they explored what it means to do computational cognition research through the central question: What should be in the CoCo canon? 

The discussion emphasized that understanding what we are studying — and how we study it — is particularly important in an interdisciplinary field. While the narrative or canon of a field is defined by shared knowledge, skills, and history, computational cognition blurs those boundaries. Ultimately, as posed by Emory Department Chair and Professor of Anthropology Dietrich Stout, the field is “an interdisciplinary space trying to become a disciplinary space” within the vast array of sciences, technology, mathematics, and engineering.  

With or without a defined canon, the day underscored the importance of computational cognition for understanding not just how the mind works, but the future of cutting-edge technologies that shape how we approach the study of the mind. 

Through a major investment from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Georgia Tech is helping accelerate the development of domestic critical minerals from unconventional and secondary resources. The $7.5 million award positions the Institute to advance supply chain solutions that span resource discovery, processing, recycling, and circular materials management.

Selected by DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, Georgia Tech will lead the Critical Minerals in the Atlantic Seaboard Plain (CM-MAP) project. The regional effort builds on DOE’s Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) initiative and will examine potential resources across the Atlantic coastal plain.

The CM-MAP project will focus on sedimentary deposits, including kaolin, bauxite, heavy mineral sands, and phosphates, as well as legacy mining residues, coal combustion byproducts, and other unconventional and secondary resources that could support future recycling and circular economy opportunities.

Drawing on existing infrastructure, regional assets, industry bases, and scientific expertise, CM-MAP will establish a regional innovation ecosystem that supports domestic critical mineral production, recycling, and advanced manufacturing, while fostering new economic opportunities throughout the Southeast.

“This is a powerful example of how Georgia Tech brings together leading research capabilities and partnerships from industry, government, nonprofits, and national labs to address complex national challenges,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research. “By identifying and domestically sourcing critical minerals, we are helping secure essential supply chains, while enabling the next generation of energy and materials technologies.”

The DOE award builds on a growing network of research, industry, regional, and international partnerships led by Georgia Tech to translate scientific discovery into real-world supply chain solutions, including:

• Research leadership — Founded in 2024, Georgia Tech’s Center for Critical Mineral Solutions serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research and technology development across the Institute.
• Regional partnerships —Through the Georgia Partnership for Essential Materials, a flagship regional collaboration platform, Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and the Georgia Mining Association convene stakeholders from across the critical minerals sector. The partnership brings together industry, nonprofit organizations, regional economic development agencies, national labs, universities, and technical colleges to connect, collaborate, and stay engaged in the latest developments.
• International engagement — A U.K.-U.S. working group extends partnerships across the Southeastern United States and Southwest United Kingdom, connecting researchers, industry leaders, and government agencies working to strengthen global supply chains.
• Georgia Critical Mineral Supply Chain Manufacturing Demonstration Center — Supported through congressional funding, the center is developing capabilities and regional supply chain demonstrations that connect resource development, materials processing, recycling, and advanced manufacturing.

As part of CM-MAP, researchers will analyze materials collected from natural deposits and industrial sites throughout the Southeast to identify their critical mineral content. The resulting large datasets will be combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches to better understand and predict where resources exist, optimize extraction pathways, and inform future recovery and recycling strategies.

“This project brings together a highly collaborative team from Georgia Tech, national labs, industry partners, and research institutions across the region,” said Yuanzhi Tang, the principal investigator and Georgia Power Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Tang is also the founding director of the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions and executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute. 

“Through this award, we are working to build secure and resilient critical materials supply chains, from resource discovery and characterization to processing, recovery, recycling, and advanced manufacturing, while also developing the skilled workforce needed to support these emerging industries,” Tang said. “Our vision is to create a regional innovation ecosystem that embraces both unconventional resources and circular economy approaches to maximize the value of materials already in use.”

Learn more about critical materials research and workforce development efforts at Georgia Tech by visiting the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions webpage.   

Gong Chen, assistant professor in the School of Mathematics, has received a $450,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to study the long-term behavior of solitons — coherent, particle-like waves observed across physics and mathematics.

While most waves spread out as they disperse (for example, ripples on water), a soliton is different: it can keep a coherent shape while moving, and in some cases, it can interact with other waves and still emerge recognizable afterward.

“Solitons are important because they appear across many areas of science, including fluid dynamics, optics, plasma physics, field theory, and models from mathematical physics,” says Chen. “From a mathematical point of view, they are a beautiful testing ground for understanding nonlinear behavior.”

Predicting Waves

According to Chen, a guiding idea in the field is that complex nonlinear waves may eventually resolve into a collection of stable solitons alongside dispersive radiation — the more diffuse portion of the wave that spreads out and weakens. Chen’s research focuses on how these waves behave over long periods of time, especially when multiple solitons interact.

“If we start with a complicated nonlinear wave, can we predict what it will look like far in the future?” asks Chen. “I want to understand not just whether a wave is stable, but how it evolves: how stability can fail, how energy is exchanged, and how complicated wave motion eventually organizes itself.” 

His work examines multi-soliton systems and more complex wave structures, including topological solitons, where long-range interactions and internal fluctuations make the mathematics more challenging. 

Chen is developing new mathematical frameworks tailored to these moving and interacting waves, including tools from spectral theory and nonlinear scattering. These approaches allow researchers to analyze wave behavior with new precision in settings where existing methods are limited.

A key part of this work involves nonlinear dispersive equations, which capture the competing effects that shape wave systems. 

“A complicated wave may contain several solitons, some radiation that spreads away, and small oscillations trapped near the solitons,” explains Chen. “Nonlinear dispersive equations allow us to ask precise questions: Which part of the wave persists? Which part disperses? How much energy is released during a collision? Does the system eventually simplify into solitons plus radiation?”

Although the work is theoretical, it strengthens the foundation for models used widely in science and engineering.

“A better theoretical understanding of solitons and dispersive waves improves the reliability of these models,” Chen says. “It helps us know when coherent structures should persist, when they should radiate energy, and when instability or collision effects may change the outcome.”

Beyond Research: Teaching and Impact

Chen plans to use the CAREER Award to integrate research and education. He is organizing a summer school focused on dispersive waves and developing new courses, including a second-level course in partial differential equations that emphasizes connections to physical phenomena.

“The CAREER Award provides the stability and long-term support needed to pursue a coherent research program rather than isolated projects,” says Chen. “For me, the award is especially meaningful because the research and education components are closely connected.”

Chen aims to help students connect mathematical theory with real-world phenomena. 

For Chen, that connection is what makes the field compelling.

“One point I would emphasize is that soliton dynamics is a place where abstract mathematics meets very intuitive physical pictures,” says Chen. “Understanding when that particle-like behavior persists, when it breaks down, and what remains afterward is both mathematically deep and scientifically natural.”

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.

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

The grant will support building a robotics and AI ecosystem for dexterous and mobile manipulation, enabling robots to move through environments, interact with objects, and adapt to changing conditions.

Ye Zhao, LIDAR director and associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, leads the project, with Anqi Wu, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, serving as co-principal investigator.

Read the full story on the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering website.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino likened the scale of each game to that of a Super Bowl. The success of a tournament that large will rely heavily on technology, affecting everything from the players on the pitch, all the way to viewers at home.

On top of the state-of-the-art technology used at many large events, this World Cup will also see the debut of new technology. At the center of much of it will be electrical and computer engineering.

Experts from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) weigh in on how the field is enabling the technology behind the world’s largest sporting event.

Read Full Story on the ECE News Page

Researchers at Georgia Tech say they have developed a system to help answer that question.

Known as FIRA, the tool analyzes drone crashes to determine whether they were caused by poisoned machine-learning (ML) models. The team will present its findings at the 35th USENIX Security Symposium in August. 

The research addresses a growing safety challenge as drones are increasingly used for deliveries, infrastructure inspections, and agriculture.

As drones rely more on machine learning to navigate and make decisions, they also become vulnerable to model poisoning attacks. In these attacks, adversaries manipulate an AI system during its learning phase, embedding hidden triggers that can cause failures under specific conditions.

“Machine learning drones are making more decisions in flight, which makes ML a safety-critical component of these systems,” said Yizhi Huang, Ph.D. student and lead researcher on the project. 

“When something goes wrong, investigators need a way to ask whether the model was responsible, but the model is the part of the system that no one can examine after a crash. FIRA gives investigators a way to investigate these cases by reconstructing what the model was doing during the crash. As more drones run with ML, this kind of forensic capability can help drones be used more effectively and safely.”

When a drone crashes, investigators must determine whether the cause was malicious interference, weather, or mechanical failure. Without reliable forensic tools, accountability is difficult to establish, and safety standards are harder to enforce.

FIRA identifies how drone components interact with machine learning models and monitors those interactions in real time, even with limited bandwidth.

The system functions like a flight recorder, capturing key system activity and reconstructing a timeline after a crash. It then analyzes the model’s behavior to determine whether a malicious trigger was introduced via poisoned ML training data.

In tests across multiple drone platforms and crash scenarios, FIRA identified failure causes and distinguished cyberattacks from environmental or mechanical issues.

The system does not require access to a drone’s source code, making it practical for real-world investigations.

“As commercial drone use expands, tools like FIRA could help improve accountability and trust in AI-powered systems operating in public airspace,” said Huang. 

FIRA: Enabling Automatic Forensic Investigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles was led by Georgia Tech’s Cyber Forensics Innovation Lab in cooperation with the Cyber-Physical Security Lab. These labs reside in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computing Engineering. 

Logically this makes sense and has been backed up by past security research. However, researchers at Georgia Tech have found hidden paths in cyber-physical systems that attackers can use to disrupt or even destroy them.

To find these hidden paths before an attacker does, the researchers built a testing tool called ICSFlux. This new tool leans on the physics used by the industrial process and maps out the system to find new threats that were once thought impossible. 

ICSFlux was deployed across 11 different programmable logic controllers in six industrial sectors, including chemical manufacturing, water treatment, power grids, aircraft, desalination, and waste processing. The process uncovered twenty genuine safety violations. 

In one case drawn from a chemical-plant simulation, an attack path uncovered by the tool drove a reactor past its safe pressure limit and into a simulated explosion. By using nothing but valid operator commands, the team took the reactor from a completely normal and stable state to critical territory. 

Because the method relies only on the physics of a process and not on the details of any one controller, the same tool worked across all six sectors without being rebuilt, and it reduced the search space by roughly 50%.

Burak Sahin, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech and the study's lead author, found that by sending a series of perfectly normal, fully authorized commands, intruders can slowly nudge a physical process toward a dangerous state. 

“These systems are usually judged safe as long as nobody hacks into them,'' Sahin said. “What we found is that an attacker who can send everyday commands, the same ones a normal operator sends, can patiently steer the process toward a failure. No single command looks wrong, which is exactly why the usual defenses miss it.''

Most existing tools assume an attacker can rewire the controller or change the software inside it. In the real world, those controllers are locked down and cannot be touched. ICSFlux takes the opposite and more realistic view. It treats the controller as a sealed box that cannot be opened and works only with the commands an operator is normally allowed to send.

Rather than measuring how much of a controller's software it has exercised, the usual yardstick for this kind of testing, ICSFlux measures how close the physical system is getting to an unsafe limit and steers its testing in that direction.

“Two different sensor readings can run through the exact same code and still send a reactor in completely different directions,'' Sahin said. “Looking only at the software tells you nothing about whether the physical system is safe. We had to follow the physics, not the code.''

One of the study's most important takeaways emerged when the researchers tightened the safety margins to see whether caution alone would help. Even when every command stayed within approved limits, the way the controller reacted to a steady stream of small adjustments could still cause pressure to overshoot and the reactor to fail. In other words, staying inside the rules was not always enough.

All of the team's experiments were carried out on secured, controlled test beds. The work was conducted with Georgia Tech's Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab, whose research spans the security of cyber-physical systems from industrial programmable logic controllers to marine, automotive, and drone platforms. Georgia Tech's Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory, a team of researchers who work together to further the investigation of advanced cyber crimes and the analysis and prevention of next-generation malware attacks, also contributed to the paper. 

The labs are a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

Fuzzing the Physical Space: Physics-Aware Testing of Black-Box Industrial Control Systems' was accepted to the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. In addition to Sahin, the team includes Ph.D. students David Oygenblik, Mingxuan Yao, and Yizhi Huang as well as Associate Professors Brendan Saltaformaggio, and Saman Zonouz.

In this article:

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

The Weight of Constant Curveballs

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

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

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

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

The New Operating Environment

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Benchmark Has Changed — For Everyone

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

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

The Real Automation Story: Error-Proofing Over Spectacle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autonomy: Watch the Middle Mile Before the Long Haul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rising Value of Human Judgment

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

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

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

Predictions Leaders Should Keep an Eye On

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

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

What Staying Current Actually Requires

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

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

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

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

The Opportunity on the Other Side

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

And so is the opportunity.

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

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

Related Upcoming SCL Webinar 7/2/2026

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

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

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

The workshop is part of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pathways (AMP) program, a collaboration between the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which connects rural educators with hands-on manufacturing training. This particular training was delivered through a partnership between GTMI, STEM@GTRI — GTRI’s K-12 outreach program — and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, leveraging the facilities and expertise of the Montgomery Machining Mall to provide teachers with direct experience in modern manufacturing. Building on GTRI’s Rural Computer Science Initiative, the program expands access to high-skill, high-wage career pathways across rural communities. The initiative is supported through state funding.

The workshop comes at a time when demand for skilled manufacturing workers continues to grow nationwide, particularly in roles requiring precision, technical expertise, and problem-solving.

Inside the Machine Shop 

The training took place June 3 – 5 in the Montgomery Machining Mall, where staff provided access to facilities, equipment, and technical expertise that made the immersive learning experience possible.

Teachers designed and manufactured a metal meat tenderizer and a metal coaster etched with both the Georgia Tech logo and their name. For many, this was their first exposure to advanced manufacturing tools and processes, and a glimpse into high-skill, high-wage careers within reach for their students.

“Many of these teachers have never been exposed to any advanced manufacturing,” said Sean Mulvanity, a program manager for STEM@GTRI and project lead for this workshop. “By the time they walk out of here, they’ve actually created and manufactured physical items they can take back to their students.” Unlike traditional professional development, the workshop places teachers directly in the machine shop, working on heavy equipment. 

For AMP program leaders, this pilot was a way to build momentum for school districts that may add advanced manufacturing courses and to make the machine shop feel less intimidating in the process. 

“One of the biggest misconceptions about modern manufacturing is that it is inaccessible or limited to specialized factory environments,” said GTMI Deputy Director Steven Ferguson. “Today’s manufacturing combines hands-on skills, digital technologies, AI, and problem-solving in ways that are relevant to students across many career pathways. By giving teachers direct experience in the machine shop, we help them bring that excitement back to their classrooms and show students that they can design, build, and innovate in their own communities.”

From the Shop Floor to the Classroom 

One of the workshop participants is James Beveridge, who teaches computer science for grades 6-12 in the Chattahoochee County School District, a small, rural district south of Columbus. He has participated in multiple Georgia Tech-led training programs, and he runs a full computer science pathway for 450 middle and high school students. This fall will mark his third year in the Rural Computer Science Initiative and teaching computer science after two decades in industry.

Beveridge had some informal experience with tools growing up — his father taught him basic carpentry and welding — but he had never done formal machining work before the AMP workshop.

“Working with metal is different than working with wood, obviously, but it’s been really interesting to see the precision involved,” he said. “With wood, you can be off by a sixteenth of an inch, and nobody cares. When you’re machining metal parts, it has to be very, very precise. Learning to use the precision measuring tools has been eye-opening.”

For Beveridge, one of the biggest benefits of his ongoing work with Georgia Tech through the Rural Computer Science Initiative and related programs is that he never leaves empty-handed.

“Every time I come up here to learn something new, they send me home with the equipment to teach it with,” he said. “The first time, I left with a classroom set of robots so my students could learn to program. Another time, it was a more advanced humanoid robot with artificial intelligence. Now, I’m going back with new skills in machining and a physical project I can show my students.”

Another participant, Juone Brown, teaches high school computer science and AI to students at Dooly County High School in Vienna, Georgia. This is her second year in the rural computer science partnership and her fourth year teaching at Dooly. Previously, Brown was a professor for 25 years at Fort Valley State University. 

Like Beveridge, Brown has no formal machining background but said the way workshop instructors broke down each step — especially the math behind the cuts — made the work feel approachable.

“It has been fantastic and really well-paced,” she said. “We all come from different backgrounds, but the way they present the information makes it click. We know the math, but when you’re on the machine, and they show you easier ways to get the cut you need, it’s very encouraging.”

She’s already thinking about how to translate that feeling for her students, many of whom prefer building things to writing code. “I’m always telling them that skills pay the bills,” Brown said. “A lot of my students are hands-on. Now I can connect what we’re doing in class to real parts and jobs.”

Bringing Advanced Manufacturing to More Georgia Classrooms 

After the workshop, teachers are expected to integrate machining concepts into existing courses or help build new manufacturing pathways at their schools.  

AMP program leaders intentionally kept this pilot cohort small. The team plans to repeat the workshop several times over the coming year, expanding to more schools and districts across Georgia, building local champions who can help launch advanced manufacturing programs in their communities.

About the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI)

The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) convenes industry leaders, government partners, and top researchers to collaborate on the grand challenges facing manufacturing today: accelerating technology development and deployment; creating, maintaining, and filling quality jobs; ensuring global competitiveness; and advancing economic and environmental stability. 
Our vision is to ensure rapid innovation that secures U.S. dominance in advanced manufacturing. Through the design and development of artificial intelligence systems, secure digital manufacturing, additive and subtractive processes, and large-scale production enterprises, GTMI stands at the forefront of manufacturing innovation — leveraging state-of-the-art facilities, including the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility, to turn research breakthroughs into market-ready solutions. 

About the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 3,000 employees, supporting eight laboratories across more than 20 locations nationwide and performing more than $919 million in problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

“It’s a tremendous honor to be recognized alongside such an inspiring group of scientists,” Manafzadeh says. “I’ve always been motivated by big, fundamental questions, and it’s exciting to see that kind of curiosity-driven research celebrated.”

Manafzadeh will join Georgia Tech in August 2026 as an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences. Her research investigates how joints function and how they evolved, using advanced technology to create animations of moving skeletons with sub-millimeter precision.

“My research is aimed at understanding how joints work and where they come from,” she explains. “Physicians can repair ACL injuries and perform hip replacements, but we still don’t fully understand joint mechanics at a fundamental level.” Because joints are a shared feature of virtually all vertebrates, she adds, nearly all movement — from slithering to sprinting to soaring — depends on them.

Manafzadeh first applied these methods to pterodactyls, “reanimating” the extinct animals to study how they flew. Now, her research could also open doors to personalized surgical treatments for people and new designs for bio-inspired robots.

“I used to see ash settling on our terrace from time to time and thought it was just waste,” Tripathi said.

Years later, at Georgia Tech, Tripathi started looking at that ash differently. What once appeared to be ordinary industrial waste became the focal point for her work. 

As a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tripathi, along with Ching-Hua Huang, Turnipseed Family Chair and Professor, and Xing Xie, Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor, both in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, developed a method to recover rare earth elements from coal fly ash.

Rare earth elements (REEs) help power electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, MRI machines, smartphones, and defense systems because of their unusually strong magnetic and electrical properties. Despite the name, most REEs are not actually rare in quantity. They’re rare in concentration. REEs are scattered through the Earth’s crust in amounts too small to mine easily, and much of their global supply chain remains concentrated outside of the United States.

That imbalance has turned REEs into both an economic and national security concern. Countries are competing for the materials sustaining advanced manufacturing, energy systems, and military technologies, increasing pressure to find domestic sources. That urgency has pushed researchers like Tripathi, Huang, and Xie to look at coal fly ash differently: not just as industrial waste but as a potential source of materials that modern technology depends on.

Coal naturally contains trace amounts of rare earth elements. Burning the coal concentrates those elements in the ash left behind.

Tripathi developed a method for extracting rare earth elements that avoids the corrosive chemicals used in conventional extraction. The same ash that once coated her rooftop could now become a secondary domestic source of critical materials.

Mining What Was Left Behind

Coal fly ash already exists in enormous quantities across the United States. About 2 billion tons are stored in impoundments, such as storage ponds and landfills, according to the Department of Energy.

Those sites require long-term monitoring because coal fly ash can release contaminants into soil and groundwater. Major storms can also damage storage sites and spread the material into surrounding communities and waterways.

Inside that ash, REEs are dispersed in tiny concentrations. Recovering them is a challenge; recovering them cleanly is an even greater one. Many existing recovery methods rely on concentrated acids, large amounts of water, or extreme heat during extraction. Some techniques require temperatures high enough to rival industrial furnaces. Others create additional waste streams.

Tripathi and her team wanted a different approach. 

They built the system around a recyclable ionic liquid, a salt-based substance stable enough to operate under conditions that would break down water-based systems. The liquid pulls rare earth elements away from the ash. An applied electrical current then causes the recovered elements to collect onto a surface where they can be removed. Afterward, the liquid can be cleaned and reused.

“The beauty of this system is that it works beyond the limits of water,” Tripathi said. 
“The ionic liquid allows us to recover rare earth elements under conditions that water-based systems just can’t handle.”

The process also changes depending on the voltage applied. At lower voltages, the system selectively recovers neodymium, an REE used in high-strength permanent magnets found in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defense systems. At higher voltages, it recovers a broader mixture. The system recovered nearly half of the available neodymium during testing.

Beyond Coal Ash

Tripathi has shown that the chemistry works in small batches. The next challenge is scale: whether the system can recover enough rare earth elements efficiently enough to make the process commercially practical.

The same approach could extend beyond coal fly ash. Batteries, discarded electronics, and medical waste all contain valuable metals that often end up buried in landfills or destroyed during disposal.

For Tripathi, the idea began at home, where fly ash would settle on her terrace. What once seemed like an ordinary nuisance could help reshape how critical materials are recovered from waste. 

Tripathi’s research is published in Environmental Science and Technology. 
It was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. It’s not about exposure anymore. Atlanta is already a global city, so the focus is on whether the World Cup delivers lasting value for residents.
2. Economic impact is uneven. Big headline numbers do not show who actually benefits, and much of the spending may not reach local communities.
3. Infrastructure will be tested. Transportation and downtown systems will face heavy strain, raising concerns about what improvements last beyond the event.
4. The hidden story is food and logistics. Behind the scenes, Georgia Tech researchers are working to reduce food waste and strengthen systems that could outlast the tournament.

A Global Stage and Familiar Promises

As Atlanta welcomes the world for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the promises are familiar: millions of visitors, global attention, economic growth, and a chance to showcase the city on one of the biggest stages in sports.

But Georgia Tech experts say the real question is not whether the tournament will generate activity — it is who benefits from it and what remains after the final match is played.

From Visibility to Value

Mega-events have long been sold as catalysts for transformation. The 1996 Olympics reshaped Atlanta’s physical landscape and helped position the city as a global destination. Thirty years later, the World Cup arrives at a very different moment.

“There are similarities,” said Emily Barrett, assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning. “Like the Olympics, the World Cup is an accelerator for infrastructure upgrades and public and private investment alike.”

Atlanta is seeing significant public investment in transportation improvements and billions of dollars in private development downtown. But today’s Atlanta is very different from Atlanta in the 1990s.

“Atlanta is no longer a city seeking recognition on the world stage,” Barrett said. “We are a thriving and growing city.”

That shifts the conversation from visibility to value.

“The open question is whether hosting mega-events makes the city work better for the people who live here,” Barrett added.

The Economics Behind the Headlines

Assessing that value becomes more complicated when economic forecasts enter the conversation.

Large projections often dominate headlines, but Declan Abernethy, lecturer in the School of History and Sociology, cautions that economic impact estimates rarely tell the whole story.

“It is far easier to put out an economic impact projection compared to the difficulty of measuring impact,” Abernethy said.

While visitors will spend money on hotels, restaurants, transportation, and entertainment, he notes that much of that spending may not reach the community.

“When we look closely at that spending, we can see that much of the profit will be taken in by large corporations or FIFA in the immediate vicinity of Mercedes-Benz Stadium and not as much by Atlanta residents or small businesses,” he said.

According to Barrett, economic studies often overlook a critical question: What could alternative investments have accomplished?

“Economic studies rarely account for displacement costs, or whether the same public dollars could have generated similar or better outcomes if invested elsewhere,” she said.

Pressure Points Across the City

The World Cup’s impact extends beyond economics; it will also test Atlanta’s infrastructure at a scale few events can match.

Michael Hunter, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says the biggest challenge may be the volume of people moving through the city.

“There will be a number of pressure points. However, one of the most significant will be just the number of people,” Hunter said. “This event will attract significant crowds.”

Atlanta’s transportation agencies have spent years preparing, drawing on lessons learned from events including the Super Bowl, World Series, and major concerts. Still, capacity limits are unavoidable.

“There is only so much traffic that MARTA or any transit agency can handle,” Hunter said. “People need to understand that there will be congestion and longer wait times. The key is to be patient.”

The concern is whether those investments result in lasting improvements or merely support a few weeks of activity.

Abernethy argues that the World Cup should be viewed as part of a broader vision for Atlanta rather than a standalone catalyst.

“We are seeing the World Cup as a part of a longer-running and more cohesive vision for sport and economic development downtown,” he said. “Atlanta may not be repeating the same cycle nor cracking downtown’s development problem with the World Cup itself.”

Behind the Scenes: Food and Logistics

Infrastructure challenges extend beyond transportation. Feeding hundreds of thousands of visitors while minimizing waste requires its own network of logistics, coordination, and planning.

Nicole Kennard, a research scientist at Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, views the tournament as an opportunity to strengthen how food moves throughout the city.

“These large events are a really big opportunity for us to coordinate and test our infrastructure,” Kennard said. “We have to think critically about how to improve the infrastructure and ensure its resilience and efficiency.”

Working with organizations such as Second Helpings Atlanta, the official food rescue partner for the World Cup, Georgia Tech researchers are building technologies and tools to improve coordination among food rescue groups. The effort aims to keep surplus food out of landfills by quickly moving it from stadiums and vendors to local food organizations.

“It’s really a logistics problem, a data problem, and a coordination problem,” Kennard said. “The faster you can move food from the point of surplus directly to a pantry, the more likely it is to reach people who need it.”

What Legacy Looks Like

Ultimately, Atlanta’s World Cup legacy may not be measured by attendance figures or visitor spending alone.

“How we evaluate success depends on what we choose to measure, and too often we focus on headline numbers instead of who actually benefits,” said Abernethy.

Kennard sees the tournament as a chance to build systems that outlast the event itself. “What we build for the World Cup could become critical infrastructure for future emergencies and disasters,” she said.

Atlanta already knows how to host a global event. Whether the investments, partnerships, and infrastructure created for the World Cup leave the city stronger after the crowds leave remains to be seen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2026 Sustainability Next Seed Grant awards are:

Forming Teams:

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

Moving Teams Forward:

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

1. You’re paying more at the pump, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Gas prices are the most visible sign of the crisis, and the increases are already significant. National average retail gasoline prices are more than $1.20 higher than they were in February, before the conflict escalated.

“Even though U.S. petroleum production often exceeds our consumption, we are not insulated from disruptions in global oil supply because oil is a globally traded commodity,” says director of the Energy Policy and Innovation Center, Laura Taylor. “If supply is restricted anywhere in the world, prices will rise everywhere, including in the U.S.”

Markets expect some relief by fall, with future prices pointing lower than today’s levels. But Tony Harding, assistant professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, cautions, “Prices are likely to remain above pre-conflict levels for the foreseeable future, and temporary relief measures, such as Georgia’s motor fuel tax suspension, will not last forever.”

Taylor puts it plainly: “Wages are not rising faster than prices, so people are feeling the pinch and will continue to do so.”

2. Your summer plans just got more expensive.

The impact does not stop at the gas station. For Americans planning summer travel, the timing of this conflict could not be worse. Matthew Oliver, associate professor in the School of Economics, points to commercial air travel as one of the most exposed sectors.

“Jet fuel prices have roughly doubled in the wake of the current oil price spike, putting immediate upward pressure on airfares,” says Oliver.

The ripple effects extend far beyond travel. 

“Oil is an input into the supply chain of nearly every good at some point,” says Bobby Harris, assistant professor in the School of Economics. “When input costs go up, prices go up.”

3. Expect to pay more at the grocery store.

The connection between Middle East tensions and the American dinner table is more direct than many realize, because petrochemicals are a key feedstock for fertilizer production.

“Higher oil prices lead to higher fertilizer prices, which lead to higher food prices,” says Oliver. 

Combined with existing tariff pressures and tight supply chains, the strain on household budgets is coming from multiple directions at once.

“If the crisis persists, there will be upward pressure on the prices of nearly every physical good,” Oliver adds.

4. The government’s options are limited, and the clock is ticking.

Washington has tools to respond, but none are silver bullets. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve currently holds around 400 million barrels and can release about 4 million barrels per day, roughly 20% of U.S. daily demand.

“I see the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a tool to buy time during a crisis,” says public policy professor Dan Matisoff. “But if the conflict drags on, we will ultimately be in a more vulnerable position.”

Quick fixes like price caps or demand subsidies carry trade-offs. 

“Subsidies can mitigate the impact of price shocks, but they can also mask important market signals that help balance supply and demand,” says Harding, using Europe’s 2022 energy crisis as a cautionary example.

5. The smartest thing Americans can do right now is think about efficiency.

“People in general tend to undervalue energy efficiency,” says Matisoff. “Think of energy efficiency investments as a sort of hedge or insurance against volatile energy prices.”

That means considering fuel efficiency when buying a car, and looking at heat pumps, electric vehicles, and home energy upgrades when the time is right.

“Higher energy prices increase the value of investing in energy efficiency upgrades to your home and adopting technologies that are less dependent on fossil fuels,” says Harding.

For families navigating uncertainty, both economists and policy experts point to the same practical advice: Reduce your exposure to fossil fuel price swings before the next crisis hits.

Lieuwen, the executive vice president for Research and Regents’ Professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, received the ASME medal in 2025 in recognition of his pioneering contributions to combustion, clean energy, and the science of resilient energy systems. It is the first ASME Medal ever awarded to a Georgia Tech faculty member or graduate, marking a milestone both for Lieuwen and the Institute.

Read the full story on the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering website.

Scientists have captured the most detailed structural images to date of a specific type of protein’s DNA repair process. The research could reveal ways to inhibit the effects of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations that heighten the risk for breast, ovarian, and other cancers.

“This work lets us see, step by step, one mechanism by which cancer cells could manage to repair their DNA when BRCA genes mutate and fail,” says study co-author Vicki Wysocki, who is chair of the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “By capturing this process in detail, this study opens the door to understanding how those cancerous cells survive and how treatments might disrupt that mechanism.”

Designated as a Breakthrough Article, the study Mechanism of single-strand annealing from native mass spectrometry and cryo-EM structures of RAD52 homolog Mgm101 was recently published in Nucleic Acids Research.

In addition to Wysocki, who is a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a professor emerita at Ohio State University, the Georgia Tech research team included co-first author Zihao Qi, a Ph.D. candidate in the Wysocki Lab.

They were joined by Ohio State researchers co-first author Carter Wheat and senior author Charles Bell, who is a professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology in the College of Medicine. Additional authors include Metro High School student Miqdad Hussain and CAS researcher Katerina Zakharova.

When BRCA Fails

Normally, BRCA genes help prevent cancer by acting as tumor suppressors — producing proteins that help repair broken DNA. When cancer cells lack the tumor-suppression function of normal BRCA genes, research has shown that a protein called RAD52 performs DNA repair.

Since RAD52 allows cancer cells to survive and replicate without tumor suppression, researchers have wondered if blocking it would kill the cancerous cells. Blocking RAD52, however, requires fully understanding its repair activities, which have been difficult to capture with even the most sophisticated techniques. 

DNA strands break every day in cells, which is why proteins exist to fix the breaks and keep cellular processes running smoothly, the team says. But because repairs must happen quickly and human proteins are often more complex than their ancestral counterparts, even the most advanced imaging equipment can’t capture every step in the process.

In order to understand RAD52 better, the research team turned to its ancestral protein, Mgm101, to observe several key steps in its DNA repair process.

A Clearer Image

The team decided to leverage multiple types of imaging. Wysocki’s lab at Georgia Tech conducted native mass spectrometry and mass photometry, using light to measure masses of protein-DNA complexes. The results showed that the ancestral protein Mgm101 assembled from a single copy of itself into a large multi-unit ring composed of 19 copies of the protein.

“This ring is essentially a template,” Wysocki explains. “The first strand of DNA can come down, and then the second strand comes on and starts being annealed to the first strand.” Annealing occurs when two single strands of DNA come together to form the characteristic double helix structure.

The findings were supported by what Bell’s lab determined using cryogenic electron microscopy, observing structures floating in solution and frozen in a thin layer of ice.

“RAD52 high-resolution structures have been determined with single-stranded DNA, but not with the two DNAs that it’s trying to anneal,” Bell says. “Its job is to bind single-stranded DNA and anneal it to its complement sequence. It’s been captured structurally, but only in a few states relevant to the reaction.”

“Here, we have more of the states along the full pathway from substrate, to intermediate and product. And the duplex intermediate is a conformation that’s never been seen before.”

Previously, researchers were unsure if this DNA repair process used one protein ring or two rings working together, the team says. Their findings show that just one ring is used — and that this is likely consistent across different species.

Paths to Treatment

Next, the team plans to try capturing the same phases of the DNA repair process with RAD52 from humans. A clearer understanding of how this family of proteins binds to DNA strands and coaxes them back together after a break provides insights for drug targets that could halt the process in cancer cells empowered by mutated BRCA genes, they say.

“It’s still a proposed mechanism: Just because we see these snapshots of the process doesn’t mean we know all the details, but we do have the best snapshots for any protein that does this single-strand annealing,” says Bell. “This focuses our strategies for drug development.”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkag320

Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The cryo-EM data were collected at Ohio State’s Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis and processed using the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

Grajczak currently serves as a Managing Director in Accenture's Supply Chain & Engineering practice. He is a leader in the firm's Private Equity practice, where he advises operating partners on developing and executing high-impact value creation plans across their investment portfolios.

"We are thrilled to welcome Conrad to our Industry Advisory Board," said SCL Managing Director Chris Gaffney. "His extensive background as a management consultant specializing in margin improvement and cost reduction for private equity-backed companies will be invaluable. We look forward to leveraging his insights to drive our strategic initiatives forward."

A Proven Track Record in Value Creation

Throughout his career, Grajczak has partnered closely with Private Equity Operating Partners to deliver bottom-line value through strategic sourcing. He routinely leads pre-purchase and post-acquisition initiatives to establish a value creation roadmap and implement transformative cost programs across Consumer, Industrial, and Healthcare clients. 

Prior to Accenture, Grajczak was part of Insight Sourcing for 11 years and promoted to Partner.  Insight Sourcing was a boutique procurement consulting firm where he focused on Private Equity.  Insight Sourcing was acquired by Accenture in 2024.

Before consulting, Grajczak started his career out at Merck & Co. in Vaccine Manufacturing Science and Commercialization.  

Academic Credentials

A proud Georgia Tech alumnus, Grajczak earned his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with a minor in Business through the Technology & Management Program. He also holds an MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

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

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

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

Steven Ferguson

Forged in Manufacturing

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

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

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

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

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

Read Full Story on the Enrollment Management News Page

That principle is especially relevant today across the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape. As systems scale, they increasingly become harder to measure, compare, and fix, particularly within proprietary environments. 

A team led by Georgia Tech, working with collaborators across industry, has developed a new approached called Chakra to bring greater clarity to complex AI systems. 

“Imagine a room where everyone is trying to collaborate, but each person speaks a different language,” said Tushar Krishna, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who is leading the effort. “That’s a bit like today’s AI ecosystem. The internet worked because it was built on shared practices and protocols. In AI, we’re still building that kind of common foundation.” 

The work, which Krishna leads through the nonprofit MLCommons, was released alongside a paper at the 2026 Conference on Machine Learning and Systems(MLSys) in Bellevue, Wash.

RAI calls the bicycle robot an ultra-mobility vehicle (UMV). It can reach a height of 3 feet and can jump from the floor onto a platform.

The contributions of a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student helped make these feats possible through a robot control policy he developed.

Jeonghwan Kim, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in robotics under the advisement of Associate Professor Sehoon Ha, spent two semesters interning at RAI. His task was to design a policy to teach the UMV to land after a flip.

The result was iterative motion imitation (IMI), a novel method that imitates flip trajectories generated from prior examples. Kim said the robot bases its flip on a demonstration, and human engineers reconstruct and refine the flip path through simulation to fill in the gaps.

“To guide the robot to flip, we started with an imperfect trajectory generated by a motor-based controller and then ran simulations,” Kim said. “It’s an unstable trajectory, but we use it as a guide to train a single policy that can track it as it lands and tries to balance itself.”

Sticking the Landing

Kim interned under the supervision of Shamel Fahmi, a research scientist at the RAI Institute. RAI has been developing the UMV for nearly three years.

“We wanted to work on a different robot morphology that wasn’t legs or legs with wheels,” Fahmi said. “That’s when we thought of working with bikes. 

“We want to merge the athleticism of (Boston Dynamics’) Atlas with the mobility of a bike. We wanted a robot that can go anywhere, do parkour, and acrobatics.”

Fahmi said that before Kim arrived, the research team had trouble getting the UMV to land consistently without breaking or falling.

The UMV has two joints — an upper and a lower. The upper joint contains the motors and pulls the lower joint along as it propels into the air. The problem is getting the lighter lower joint to absorb the impact of landing without being crushed by the heavier upper joint.

“That’s what brings reinforcement learning into the equation,” Fahmi said. “We teach the robot to minimize its impact on the ground to land gracefully.”

Fahmi said that Kim proved the imitation examples the robot learns from don’t have to be perfect. The process takes some time, but all it needs is a rough idea to get started.

“You can have an imperfect sketch and then constantly refine it,” Fahmi said. “The first time, it’s not going to go well. 

“We don’t care about torque or power limits as long as it does the motion. Then we’ll have a slightly better reference, repeat it, and imitate it again. In every iteration, we can add more parameters.”

Up Against the Clock

Kim said he felt the pressure of time constraints during his two semesters with RAI as he worked to achieve consistent, successful landings. Even though he had multiple UMVs to experiment with, they broke down dozens of times. Each time one broke, a hardware team at RAI had to repair it.

“There was a lot of pressure to not only get this working before my internship ended, but also knowing there are costs behind every failed attempt, and every time the robot breaks, it takes time to repair it,” Kim said. 

“It took almost five months for it to land without breaking. Then we needed two more months for it to stay balanced after the landing. It requires a lot of engineering effort to achieve a robust control policy for a safe flip.”

By the time Kim left RAI, the IMI policy had achieved consistent, seamless landings.

“The jump right now is what we call the visitor demo,” Fahmi said. “If there are guests coming over to see it, we want to show them something that is extremely impressive, but also, more importantly, extremely reliable. It never fails.

“It was only possible because of the huge effort we put into designing, maintaining, and continuously improving the robot.”

Kim authored a paper on his framework and will present it at this week’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Vienna.

For more information about the UMV project, please visit the RAI blog or watch their video on YouTube.

His project was selected through a competitive, peer-reviewed process involving scientific experts, state and local resource managers, and coastal community stakeholders as part of a biennial research competition sponsored by the University of Georgia’s Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, supported by the NOAA National Sea Grant College Program.

“I am excited to continue to contribute to Sea Grant’s critical mission of research that strengthens the resilience of coastal ecosystems,” says Kostka.

Strengthening Coastal Marsh Restoration

Kostka’s team will examine how locally sourced Spartina plants and beneficial root-associated microbes can improve marsh restoration outcomes. The research will evaluate plant growth, stress tolerance, and field performance to identify practical, scalable strategies for supporting coastal ecosystems.

Selected projects are intended to “advance the understanding, management, and strategic use of Georgia’s coastal and marine resources,” while producing results that address coastal management needs and remain accessible to communities, according to an article from Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant. In addition to faculty from Georgia Tech, the 2026 research awards will support investigators from Georgia Southern University and Savannah State University.

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

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

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

Crude Oil is the Biggest Ingredient

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

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

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

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

Refining, Regulations, and the California Puzzle

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

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

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

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

Getting the Gas Into Your Car

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

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

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

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

The Question of Gas Tax Holidays

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

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

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

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

The Jones Act: A Small Number That Adds Up

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

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

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

What Moves the Number

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

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

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

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

The new technology is also set to revolutionize the scale of policy training data collection, which is essential to advancing robotic capabilities and meeting growing production demand.

COBALT is a mobile app that turns smartphones into controllers for robot arms. With a secure Wi-Fi connection to a server, users can move their phones in any direction, and the robot arm will mirror the motion — from anywhere in the world.

Ayush Agarwal, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing who leads a research team developing COBALT, said it works like the games people play on smartphones. Users can press a button to have the arm grasp an object, move it, and release it with another button.

Agarwal conducted several user studies with participants in nine countries who remotely operated robot arms inside Georgia Tech’s People, AI & Robotics (PAIR) Lab. The lab is directed by Assistant Professor Animesh Garg, who advises Agarwal.

“We built an entire distribution system for remote teleoperation scaled to where we had people from Indonesia, India, and Pakistan operating for us,” Agarwal said. “They were novice operators who had never done it before. By collecting data from these new users, we showed that we can train policies to automate certain tasks.”

Garg envisions a world where data collection for policy training is done through crowdsourcing. He began working toward this goal 10 years ago as a postdoc at Stanford University, when he developed RoboTurk, an earlier version of COBALT.

“There is a large-scale data collection requirement for mass robot production to be possible, and it will not be solved purely through simulation,” Garg said.

“Our idea was, what if we could get almost every person on the planet to be a passive source for data collection? There are almost five billion people who have smartphones and know how to use them.”

Education and Economy Impact

Another major implication of COBALT could be expanded access to CS and robotics education.

Students can learn to operate a robot remotely in any classroom. In fact, Garg and his lab recently hosted students from Midtown High School in Atlanta to demonstrate COBALT and let them control robot arms from a phone.

Garg also sees the possibility of a “gig economy” in which people pay remote operators to control assistive robots in their homes and complete household chores for them.

“It could be Uber for robots,” he said. “People who want to log onto the platform can do so at their convenience and for as long as they want.”

Companies with robot-dependent labor tasks could also use the platform to enable human oversight.

“If I deploy a robot in a factory that achieves high autonomy for most tasks, but there are still times it needs help, a human could operate the robot from anywhere in the world,” Garg said.

Building a Network

Agarwal’s studies showed that people prefer to interact with and control a robot using a smartphone rather than virtual reality (VR) headsets, controllers, keyboards, mice, or other devices.

“The phone is a more intuitive interface and can provide data quality that’s on par with other commonly used devices,” he said.

Agarwal also said there is minimal latency in the video feed sent back to operators on the other side of the world. That’s because the amount of data being processed is small.

The data is carried over Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), the same technology used by many streaming services and web conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet.

“There’s a connection from your phone to the teleoperation server, which is connected to the robots,” Agarwal said.

“Then there’s another connection from the teleoperation server back to the user, which allows for a video stream. We need low latency on both because you don’t want the user to move their phone and wait 10 seconds to see the visual feed.”

Agarwal is the co-lead author of a paper on COBALT that is being presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation this week in Vienna. He said the paper stands out because it has moved from theory to the implementation of an entire distribution network. 

“The real novelty of our paper is the systems that we build around it to actually support the scaling of remote operation and data collection at a global level,” he said. 

Fiona Ryan, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, is pioneering research that tracks and predicts user gaze from a first-person perspective in 3D environments.

Currently, most AR devices react to where users look, playing catch-up. Ryan’s method could give these devices a heads-up and make the user experience more seamless.

“It allows an AR system to anticipate what the person will interact with next and where they’re going to look next so it can proactively render the experience,” she said.

Ryan is the lead author of the paper Forecasting 3D Scanpaths in Egocentric Video, which she will present next week at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Denver.

While there is existing research on predicting user gaze from 2D still images, her work is the first to address the issue through a 3D framework.

“Because we live in a 3D world and people are dynamically moving around from multiple points of view, we need to predict gaze in 3D rather than 2D,” she said. “What we’re seeing is a path of the person’s attention in 3D through space. Our paper is the first to attempt to model this.”

Ryan conducted most of the research while interning at Meta, where she used data from Meta’s Aria Digital Twin dataset. The dataset contains first-person video footage of users interacting with objects in an apartment.

“We chose that dataset because it has a high-fidelity 3D reconstruction of a full environment, which helps us get a ground-truth 3D gaze,” she said. “We can trace eye movement and see how it intersects with the environment.”

A video demonstration of Ryan’s work shows her software tracking a user’s path toward a table with a cup on it. Once the user picks up the cup, the software correctly predicts the direction the user will turn next.

“When we look at a scene, we don’t take in everything in full detail all at once,” she said. “We fixate on certain areas, and our gaze is a sequence of fixations, which might depend on what we’re trying to do. If we want to pick up a cup, we might look toward that and then the next step would be looking at where we’re going to put it down.”

Ryan said the software can predict, on average, up to three seconds into the future — and as far as 10 seconds in some cases. That’s enough time for the AR system to proactively render a more enhanced environment.

“We’re not looking that far into the future right now, but it would be interesting to explore longer forecasting windows,” she said. “I think potential futures would diverge pretty quickly, so we’re trying to explore what can reasonably be predicted from a short segment of a person looking and moving through space.”

Ryan said her paper served as a proof-of-concept, and that there is still much future work to be done. She already has some ideas.

“I think future models can include different scenarios to help narrow down possibilities. Sometimes a person’s gaze stays on one thing for a long time. If we know what someone is trying to do, we’ll have a better idea of the likely path their attention might go.”

There could also be future implications for her work in robotics research.

“It could potentially be used for training algorithms for robots to emulate active human perception. If we can understand what a person looks at as they perform a task, we could use that to facilitate a robot learning to do that same task.”