Yes, there are similar academic-based centers studying infectious diseases and the microbes that cause them, but to understand what makes Georgia Tech’s center different, Sam Brown, CMDI co-director and a professor in the School of Biological Sciences, says to concentrate on that third letter in the Center's name.

“Focus on dynamics,” says Brown. “That’s basically how microbes are changing over time and space as well as how they’re changing systems in time. This notion of dynamics operates on different scales. It operates, as I see it, on a behavioral scale — individual bugs making decisions and changing their behavior in time.”

Ecological dynamics are “how populations are changing with time, and how they’re interacting with other communities — for example in biofilms,” Brown adds, referring to the name for communities of microorganisms that stick to surfaces and create their own “neighborhoods.”

There are also evolutionary dynamics, which are worrying to Brown and other researchers, as they can mean bacteria increase resistance to antibiotics. And then there are epidemiological dynamics.

“We’re all glued to our screens watching the epidemiological dynamics of Covid-19 play out in real time,” he explains.

All of this involves the study of some of the natural world’s tiniest troublemakers — and helpers. Humans are pathetically outnumbered by microbes. They live in, on, and around all of us. They are at both ends of the human food chain, helping farmers grow food, and then assisting us in digesting our meals.

“You have trillions of bacteria in your gut,” points out Marvin Whiteley, CMDI’s founding co-director who serves as a professor in the School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech Bennie H. and Nelson D. Abell Chair in Molecular and Cellular Biology, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and co-director for Emory-Children’s CF Center. So, in the spectrum of these tiny communities, there are helpful and harmful microbes alike — and the latter can often make us very sick. That’s where CMDI experts step in.

“CMDI is working to transform how we study microbes in an environmental context, and ultimately find new microbial strategies to improve human and environmental health,” Brown says.

CMDI’s science is conducted in an interdisciplinary manner, like many other research centers at Georgia Tech, with research that reaches into a number of other disciplines — microbial ecology, microbiome dynamics, biogeochemistry, microbial biophysics, socio-microbiology, infection dynamics, host-pathogen interactions, marine and aquatic microbiology, microbial evolution, viral ecology, spatial imaging, and math/computational modeling.

The Center is fairly new, beginning operations in 2018. Yet it’s already closing in on 100 researchers — faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral students — and is aggressively recruiting early career scientists from around the world to research at CMDI.

“We are a unique interdisciplinary research center since our expertise spans such broad subjects from coral reef ecosystems, to antibiotic resistant bacteria, to new infectious diseases therapies,” explains Maria Avdonina, CMDI manager. 

Building CMDI’s foundation, and using it to attack P. aeruginosa

“How does a pathogen do what it does at the molecular level?” Marvin Whiteley asks.

It is a question that he began asking at The University of Texas at Austin, where he founded another center to study infectious disease before coming to Georgia Tech in 2017. Back then, Whiteley was looking for the kind of interdisciplinary mix of researchers that can be found widely across the Institute, so he moved to Atlanta and built that into the CMDI’s mission as its founding co-director.

“It’s the idea of not just working with pure microbiologists, but working with those interested in how things change, and their dynamic aspects, even daily changes in the microbiome,” he says, referring to the term used to describe all the microorganisms that live in a particular environment, whether it’s a human body or a body of land or water. “It requires modelers — people used to looking at big data sets — and people who think about evolutionary biology. It’s a unique kind of expertise that I don’t have in my lab, but the folks who work for me in the lab can take advantage of it within CMDI.”

Whiteley’s research interests include the study of cystic fibrosis (CF), a genetic disease that results in bacteria chronically attacking the lungs of its patients. To combat disease, Whiteley is focusing research on Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa), a particularly dangerous bacteria that’s often found in CF patients’ lungs. He notes that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) lists it as one of the primary pathogens that is cause for clinical concern.

“It lives in nature, but we published a paper showing it’s not everywhere. It’s located near human activity, so wherever we are, it seems to grow and do really well. It’s in a lot of different diseases — and CF is one of them.”

P. aeruginosa is also “a really important cause of wound infections,” Whiteley adds, citing a CDC estimate that by 2050, about 20 percent of the entire U.S. healthcare budget could be spent treating chronic wound infections.

“The biggest problem in environments where it’s problematic is hospitals,” he says. “It’s very tolerant of antimicrobials, and it acquires resistance fairly quickly. That causes it to enrich in its environment.”

Taking on Covid-19

Joshua Weitz, who is a CMDI faculty member, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in Biological Sciences, and founding director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program, is a key scientist behind Georgia Tech’s Covid-19 surveillance testing efforts, along with Covid-19 event risk and population immunity modeling research around nation and beyond.

Weitz has led a series of concurrent efforts to estimate epidemiological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2, develop novel approaches to use large-scale testing as an intervention, and leverage mathematical models and real-time datasets to inform the public of ongoing transmission risk.   

Weitz recently received a best paper award from the Georgia Tech Chapter of Sigma Xi for his work on the Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool, which calculates the odds of being exposed to an infected individual in groups of different sizes; it has received more than 8 million unique visitors who have generated more than 40 million risk estimates since the planning tool’s launch in July 2020.

Weitz also joined fellow faculty and staff in sharing an Institute Research Award and Institute Service Award in recognition of collective efforts to design, develop, implement, deploy an asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 saliva-based testing program to address the coronavirus pandemic across campus. “We’re very proud of what Joshua has done,” Sam Brown says, “both in the context of Covid-19 and also in exploring new therapeutic angles for bacterial infections, by harnessing the viral natural enemies of bacteria: phages.”

The search for new antibiotics — and how best to use them

While Covid-19 is a virus that has dominated headlines since early 2020, bacterial resistance to antibiotics has been a problem for decades. Penicillin was first available as an antibiotic in 1941. Staphylococcus aureus was found to be resistant to it as early as 1942.

CMDI faculty member Julia Kubanek, a professor of in the School of Biological Sciences and School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, former associate dean for Research in the College of Sciences and newly appointed vice president for Interdisciplinary Research (VPIR) for all of Georgia Tech, has spent the past 17 years diving into the waters near Fiji and the Solomon Islands, looking for natural marine products that could fill that widening gap in resistance-free drugs.

“It’s been a long time since entirely new classes of antibiotics were brought to market,” Kubanek explains. “Pharmaceutical companies have reduced their investments in antibiotic drug discovery, despite the continuing rise of antimicrobial resistance among existing drugs. More resistant strains of infectious bacteria and fungi are evolving constantly and present severe threats to public health.”

The Covid-19 pandemic is a related example. It has revealed that science’s arsenal of antiviral drugs is inadequate, she notes.

Kubanek and CMDI faculty colleague Mark Hay, Regents Professor and Harry and Linda Teasley Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, are both part of Georgia Tech’s drug discovery program, which looks at small molecule natural products from marine organisms as sources for potential future medicines against infectious diseases.

A partnership with Emory University School of Medicine helps researchers screen Georgia Tech’s natural product library — what Kubanek and her research team found on those South Pacific trips — for potential drug candidates has resulted in encouraging news for viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the specific coronavirus that causes Covid-19.

“We’re currently following three promising classes of natural products from marine algae and sponges that show preliminary activity against this coronavirus,” Kubanek says. Those molecules are distinct from currently marketed antivirals and antibiotics, and that could mean more weapons in science’s arsenal for fighting infectious diseases.

CMDI researchers also approach the antibiotic resistance crisis through an epidemiological and evolutionary lens. For example, recent work from the Brown Lab has identified new strategies to slow or even reverse the increase in drug-resistant strains, by changing how doctors dose their drugs, and how they make use of diagnostic information.  

Microbes, climate, and environmental health 

Beyond human infections and pathogen control, CMDI also focuses on the significant impacts that microbes have on human and environmental health. CMDI faculty member Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair of Research in the School of Biological Sciences who also serves as a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is a leading researcher in environmental microbiology, bringing the power of “omics” technologies to discover the role of environmental microbes in shaping key aspects of our shared world, from bioremediation to climate change. 

Kostka’s work led to the discovery of key marine microbes that played an important role in cleaning up the oil spilled during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Disaster — microbes that turned out to be abundant in oil-contaminated soils around the world. 

Kostka’s work in this space “revealed a natural capacity for rare microbes in the Gulf of Mexico to catalyze the bioremediation, or natural cleanup, of petroleum hydrocarbons,” he explains. “These microbes show promise as biological indicators to direct emergency response efforts, as well as to elucidate the impacts of oil exposure on ecosystem health during oil spills and other environmental disasters,” he adds. 

The Kostka Lab has also long characterized the role of the environment in shaping microbial communities that limit the release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.  

In a large scale climate change experiment that’s being conducted in northern Minnesota with funding by the U.S. Department of Energy, Kostka’s research recently showed that warming accelerates the production of greenhouse gases from soil microbial respiration — and that microbial activity “was fueled by the release of plant metabolites, suggesting that enhanced greenhouse gas production is likely to persist and result in amplified climate feedbacks.”  

“Joel is our key player in this space,” Brown says. “He’s done incredible research on how the environment can dictate microbial species abundance and their behavioral contributions to the functioning of Earth’s ecosystems. He’s shown that different ‘taxa’, or groups of organisms, become metabolically active or ‘switched on’ depending on environmental factors like temperature. His research contributes to building better climate models as well as to develop new geoengineering strategies to adapt to climate change. He’s doing beautiful work.”

CMDI’s global call to early career microbiologists

CMDI’s research is funded by grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health to individual labs run by faculty — and by money distributed directly to the Center from across Georgia Tech, including the College of Sciences and its Office of the Dean and Sutherland Dean's Chair.

These sources “are getting healthier by the minute, and that’s a testament to the scientists at the Center,” Brown points out — so much so that two new positions have recently been created: a senior research scientist who will assist postdoctoral and graduate students with grant and fellowship applications, and a CMDI Early Career Award Fellowship that seeks out “superstars, people who are going to go on to be faculty success stories.”

“We want to get them early,” Brown says. “We’re interviewing some great candidates just out of their Ph.D.s. We’ll give them maximum independence, their own space, their own office, their own pot of money. They’ll be sitting at the intersection of our research interests but can run their own lab and their own research program.”

This allows postdoctoral students to focus on research projects, Julia Kubanek says. “Because postdocs generally don’t enroll in formal courses, nor are they generally expected to teach in the classroom, they get to immerse themselves in research in collaboration with faculty, students, and other postdocs. The CMDI is rapidly growing as a collaborative environment, where postdocs can try out their best ideas and learn from others how to tackle the most pressing scientific questions in microbial dynamics, microbial communication, ecosystem health, and infectious disease.” Kubanek adds that a related fellowship program “will augment postdoctoral salaries to attract the very best candidates, enabling grant dollars to stretch further, leading to new discoveries.”

The Center is also ratcheting up outreach, including what it calls its "Research Envoys Program." The intitiative features graduate students giving seminars at local institutions throughout the Atlanta area, including at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Although it’s mostly on pause right now due to the pandemic, two Ph.D. students and a postdoctoral student working with CMDI faculty member Brian Hammer — a professor in the School of Biological Sciences who is also chair of the Institute Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, and co-director of the Aquatic Chemical Ecology Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program — recently gave remote seminars at Spelman College and Kennesaw State University.

“Our trainees get practice in speaking, and it opens doors to folks seeing Georgia Tech as an option,” Brown explains. The CMDI is also working with Georgia Tech’s Institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the Southern Regional Education Board to continue to increase the number of underrepresented minorities at all levels of recruitment.

“We’re really interested in educating the next generation of scientists in biology,” Whiteley adds. “Everybody says that — but we’re actually developing programs to recruit the best talent in the world.”

CMDI research areas and faculty:

Sam Brown

Virulence, microbiomes, biofilms, cystic fibrosis

Steve Diggle

Biofilms, virulence

Neha Garg

Cystic fibrosis, coral reef microbial disease

Brian Hammer

Vibrio cholerae (cholera), microbial interactions

Mark Hay

Marine ecology/coral reefs

Joel Kostka

Environmental microbiology, biogeochemistry, microbiomes, wetlands, bioremediation

Julia Kubanek

Natural product drug discovery, marine chemical ecology

William Ratcliff

Multicellular evolution, biofilm dynamics

Frank Rosenzweig

Cellular genomics and evolution

Peter Yunker

Soft matter physics, biofilms, multicellular evolution

Joshua Weitz

Viruses/viral modeling, bacteriophages, microbial ecology/evolution

Marvin Whiteley

Microbial ecology/virulence, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, cystic fibrosis

Learn more about each faculty member’s area of research on the CMDI website.

Writer: Renay San Miguel

Editors and Contributors: Jess Hunt-Ralston, Joel Kostka, Joshua Weitz, Julia Kubanek, Maria Avdonina, Marvin Whiteley, Sam Brown

COVID-19 has sent many to seek out the latest information and ask questions about the spread of the virus in Georgia and whether initial sources of the coronavirus in the state can be tracked.

Georgia Tech College of Sciences faculty continue to share insights and expertise in news reports focused on the topic:
 

Joshua Weitz on viral spread modeling 

GPB Political Rewind: A Closer Look At Georgia's Outbreak Numbers

Joshua S. Weitz is a professor of biological sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding director of the Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech. He was part of a Political Rewind panel that included Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editor Kevin Riley, and Dr. Mark Rosenberg, former CEO of the Task Force for Global Health.

Weitz: “We are connected, and we’re connected in the sense that the steps individuals take to social distance from others to try not to get infected also reduces infection that could affect other people. That really is the core idea of what we’ve done in terms of these models of the epidemic’s spread.”

Read more and listen to the show on GPBnews.org.

M.G. Finn on the difficulty of viral source tracking

WXIA 11Alive: Kemp suggests COVID-19 entered state before March; Scientists believe tracking first cases possible, but challenging

The first coronavirus cases were confirmed in Georgia just a few weeks ago, but Governor Brian Kemp thinks the illness was in the state long before that.

M.G. Finn said backtracking to find the earliest cases of this specific virus could be very challenging. Finn is a professor and the chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech. 

"Imagine if you're looking at a smooth lake and somebody throws a single rock into the lake and you see the waves come out, it is very easy to track those waves back any you will know exactly where the rock landed," Finn said. "The problem now is that it is raining pebbles."

Read more and watch on 11Alive.

Daniel Cornforth, James Gurney, Joshua Weitz lend expertise to a widely watched coronavirus video

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: The Coronavirus Explained & What You Should Do

Daniel Cornforth, James R. Gurney, and Joshua S. Weitz from Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection helped inform this instructional video, which illustrates how COVID-19 attacks and how to slow its spread. To date, the video has 20 million views.

Watch on YouTube.

Joshua Weitz on the mathematics of crowds and viruses

National Geographic: See why keeping groups small can save lives in the era of COVID-19

Why are large events so dangerous in a pandemic? Just look at the math: As COVID-19 cases increase across the U.S., the risk of exposing members of a group to the virus goes up exponentially with event size, according to Georgia Institute of Technology biologist Joshua Weitz.

Weitz says that the increased risk strongly justifies recent efforts to limit event sizes. Testing delays in the U.S. have further compounded the issue by obscuring the disease’s true prevalence.

“Things have moved fast (as they do in epidemics),” Weitz says in an email. “We should be physically distancing whenever feasible.”

Read more at National Geographic.

Related Stories:

• Follow @GTSciences on Twitter for more news and stories
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Media Relations Assistance: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

One of these researchers, Salimah LaForce of the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP), said it’s clear that Covid-19 changed many aspects of our lives, and we need to continue studying those changes to prepare for an ever-more uncertain future. 

“The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a sea change for how we engage,” LaForce said. “It’s changed how we work and how we receive health services, even attitudes about the same. I think and hope, in some cases, that those changes are here to stay. So it’s exceedingly important that we continue to evaluate the technology-mediated ways in which we engage with one another and our systems to understand the intended and unanticipated outcomes, and to develop strategies and policies to mitigate, if not eliminate, negative consequences. 

Here’s a roundup of some of the pandemic-related research recently published by Ivan Allen College faculty: 

How Ivan Allen College Researchers Helped Make Covid-19 Tests Better 

“The Critical Role of Engineering in the Rapid Development of COVID-19 Diagnostics: Lessons from the RADx Tech Test Verification Core” 

Sarah Farmer and Amanda Peagler, research scientists, Center for Advanced Communications Policy 

Farmer and Peagler wrote this paper with authors from Georgia Tech and Emory University whose work involves evaluating Covid-19 tests under a federal grant. It details the characteristics of successful tests and the team’s evaluation process as part of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative. Georgia Tech and CACP’s HomeLab were crucial partners in that effort. 

The researchers found three main characteristics led to the success of these diagnostic tests. They found that tests using samples from the nose were more likely to be approved because it is easier to process those samples than those taken from saliva or breath. They also found that tests using signals such as color changes or fluorescence to indicate results were more successful than tests using other methods. Finally, the most successful tests came from companies that considered manufacturing and human factors early in the design process — a particularly crucial consideration for Farmer, Peagler, and their colleagues in CACP. 

“The pandemic accelerated a shift in diagnostic testing. Previously, testing mainly occurred in clinics, hospitals, and labs. Now, testing happens where the patient is, in places such as clinics, schools, workplaces, and homes,” Farmer said. “Anyone can do these tests instead of just trained professionals. It’s more important than ever to make the tests easy to use for all kinds of users and in all kinds of environments. 

“Now we need to make sure tests are more accessible, improve accuracy and speed, and incorporate detection of additional viruses such as flu and RSV. The knowledge we’ve gained can help in other areas of testing for different health conditions,” Farmer said. “We hope this work will help us be ready for future pandemics.”

Georgia Tech scientists, including a researcher from the School of Biological Sciences, have formed the core of an interdisciplinary, inter-organizational team which seeks to prevent disease outbreaks by integrating the study of human behavior with computational data-driven models. 

Calling themselves BEHIVE (BEHavioral Interaction and Viral Evolution), the group recently received a $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant toward multidisciplinary team formation and novel outbreak prevention research.

“Our goal is to bring together all these terrific researchers from different disciplines to help bring a paradigm shift in the science of pandemic prediction and prevention,” said B. Aditya Prakash, associate professor with Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). 

“While epidemic forecasting is compared to weather forecasting, there is an important difference. Unlike weather, our actions and behavior can change the course of an epidemic.”

Prakash is the principal investigator of the $1 million NSF grant. Fellow BEHIVE members include:

• Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech
• Thomas Kingsley, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic
• Shinobu Kitayama, Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan
• Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab
• Liliana Salvador, Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia’s Department of Infectious Diseases
• Joshua Weitz, Professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS) at Georgia Tech

Prakash emphasized BEHIVE’s primary goal to use its interdisciplinary organization to bridge research methodologies between hard and soft sciences. 

He explained that human behavior was underutilized in epidemic science before Covid-19, largely due to data scarcity and underdeveloped computational technologies. Behavioral dynamics encountered during the pandemic, such as social distancing, mask wearing, and vaccine hesitancy, has provided new research and data that now can be considered in models and simulations.

Here, BEHIVE will develop high fidelity computational models by designing new artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques that bridge human behavior knowledge and traditional epidemiological theory and models.

“It is still an open question of how we can best incorporate human behavior knowledge into the study of pandemics. That is the challenge,” Prakash said. “Our main idea is to better integrate knowledge from psychology and the humanities into pandemic science using novel computational methods.”

BEHIVE originated when team members met through various workshops held in 2020 and 2021. Prakash was an invited organizer of the National Symposium on Predicting Emergence of Virulent Entities by Novel Technologies (PREVENT). 

PREVENT reported that interdisciplinary collaboration was an obstacle in predicting and preventing pandemics. For example, some vocabularies often don’t mean the same thing across disciplines, so a consistent methodology to establish a common language must be developed.

BEHIVE is custom built to solve these challenges PREVENT revealed. Along with a wealth of knowledge learned through past epidemics, each BEHIVE researcher brings to the group experience working across interdisciplinary lines. 

Among the Georgia Tech researchers alone, Keskinocak interfaced with policymakers and the public on measures to slow Covid-19's spread. 

Prakash’s lab led several high-profile Covid-19 forecasting initiatives, including collaboration with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Weitz teamed with fellow Georgia Tech researchers in the College of Sciences, College of Computing, and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering to create a predoctoral training program that integrates computational modeling and data analytics into bioscience.

Keskinocak, Prakash, and Weitz together are also faculty in the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS), one of Georgia Tech’s ten interdisciplinary research institutes. IDEaS connects research centers and efforts in foundational areas such as machine learning, high-performance computing, and algorithms.

BEHIVE’s $1 million grant is funded through NSF’s Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) initiative. This program supports high-risk, high-payoff convergent research that aims to identify, model, predict, track, and mitigate the effects of future pandemics.

According to Prakash, the PREVENT symposium’s summary report also helped highlight the need for an initiative like PIPP.

PIPP is a two-phased initiative in which NSF selects to fund 25 to 30 project teams, including BEHIVE, for eighteen months through phase one. However, this does not necessarily limit PIPP’s influence to chosen project teams within academia.

BEHIVE intends to partner with industry, governmental, and non-profit organizations to expand its interdisciplinary, interorganizational network. 

BEHIVE’s nucleus of Georgia Tech researchers connects the group with the CDC, Georgia Department of Public Health, and numerous hospitals across the state. BEHIVE’s other researchers also serve in leading roles at non-profits, such as the Pathcheck Foundation, and top hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.

Along with developing interdisciplinary methodologies, new disease prevention models, and partnering with external organizations, BEHIVE hopes to develop educational training programs. This would ensure their effort last generations to bring about the necessary paradigm change to prevent future pandemics.

“Our initial projects and research the next eighteen months will help us get a sense of research gaps and enlarge our perspective” Prakash said. “We’re approaching PIPP as a science, and we want to lay the foundation of the science by bringing in many people from different fields for the future.”

The Center is intended to strengthen public health response to infectious disease threats and support public health workforce development.

The award is part of a $90 million investment by the CDC to build a network of centers in five states. Each Pathogen Genomics Center of Excellence consists of a health department and one or more academic institutions.

The Georgia Department of Public Health will provide overall leadership and prioritization of center efforts. UGA will be the leading the effort to translate new discoveries into usable data and interventions. GTRI will be leading the operations and implementation arm of the Georgia-based center.

Collectively, this work will be focused on transitioning innovations out of academia and into use at public health departments across the United States.

“We really are trying to learn about outbreak epidemiology, those population-scale processes that are impacting disease spread. Patterns of transmission that are really hard to observe,” said Justin Bahl, an associate professor with joint appointments in UGA’s College of Public Health and College of Veterinary Medicine. Bahl will be leading the project at UGA.

More data, better targeting

Molecular epidemiology uses genomic data to learn how pathogens such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus move and infect people within populations. This work is what allows scientists to trace the origins of a virus strain and track its spread as it moves from place to place.

Bahl says that adding pathogen genomic data to traditional epidemiological surveillance could dramatically strengthen the public health workforce’s ability to prevent and mitigate local outbreaks.

“We're going to be able to work closely with these departments of public health, connect the genetic data from the pathogens to the actual population characteristics. That provides information for those public health practitioners to direct their interventions,” he said.

Researchers from GTRI will support the data management, data analytics, and information security needs of the center toward a goal of providing disease information in real time to public health organizations at the local and state levels.

“We want to support public health departments in getting out ahead of pathogen trends,” said Rebecca Hutchins, chief engineer in GTRI’s Advanced Concepts Laboratory. “With COVID-19, we had to stand up new genomic sequencing and data analytics capabilities. In future infectious disease outbreaks, this center will allow us to pivot from a reactive mode – responding to what the virus is doing – to a more proactive mode aimed at quickly taking preventive measures.”

By facilitating ongoing collaborations, the network will help ensure that academic researchers, public health agencies, and others involved in a pandemic response will have systems in place to share crucial information and apply consistent data-gathering techniques. Sampling and sequencing innovations developed at the center will be shared with other centers and public health agencies nationwide.

“The true measure of success for the Georgia-based Pathogen Genomics Center of Excellence will be the increased capabilities of public health departments across the United States to prevent and respond to infectious disease outbreaks,” said Hutchins.

Building on a deep foundation

“We have a very strong infectious disease research community here at UGA, especially with pathogen transmission modeling, and a lot of experience with integrating different types of data,” said Bahl. “There are probably not many other places that have the amount of expertise that's here.”

This work will build on the innovative tools generated from UGA’s interdisciplinary infectious disease research centers, including the Center for Vaccines and Immunology, Center for Influenza Disease Emergence Research, and the Center for Ecology of Infectious Diseases.

“And now we have this center that is focused on taking all this wealth of information that we've generated and these new approaches and methodologies, and apply them at the population level, to inform public health response,” said Bahl.

This project, which will establish the Center for Applied Pathogen Epidemiology and Outbreak Response (CAPE), is the fourth major funding investment the university has received in the past five years.

Bahl is optimistic that this investment in pathogen genomics will create more pathways for data sharing among scientists and practitioners and enhance genomic surveillance nationwide.

“We're active, and we're trying to learn more, translate more to the public health labs and be better prepared collectively to respond to these new threats,” said Bahl. “This investment is about trying to strengthen partnerships with public health. We're part of that effort, building up public health across the board.”

The team

Team members include Tonia Parrott at the Georgia Department of Public Health, Amy Winter, Erin Lipp, Travis Glenn, Magdy Alabady, Liang Liu, Pej Rohani, Susan Sanchez, Mandev Gill, and John Drake from UGA. They will be joined by Rebecca Hutchins and True Merrill at GTRI. The network across Georgia also includes researchers from Emory University, Georgia State University, and Augusta University Medical College of Georgia.

GTRI Communications

Georgia Tech Research Institute

Atlanta, Georgia USA

About 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 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, the state, and industry. For more information, please visit www.gtri.gatech.edu.

In the study, online now in Cell Reports, the team performed the most comprehensive analysis to date of Covid-19 antibodies in a small set of patients with severe disease. They found that antibody profiles of internal viral proteins, including those conserved across coronaviruses, predicted which patients survived or died just as well as corresponding profiles for surface proteins, suggesting that targeting other parts of the virus beyond the spike protein could be important for enhancing Covid-19 vaccines and therapies.

“The novel aspect of this study is that we conducted very deep profiling of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and looked at many different aspects of these antibodies,” said co-senior author Jishnu Das, assistant professor of immunology and of computational and systems biology in Pitt’s School of Medicine. “The whole world has been focused on the spike protein and the receptor binding domain, but this study is the first concrete evidence that specific antibodies against internal proteins are also positively associated with survival in severe Covid-19.”

When the immune system encounters a virus, it produces antibodies that help neutralize and clear the infection. Each antibody specifically recognizes just one antigen, often a viral protein. Most Covid-19 immunity research has focused on the spike and other surface proteins, which form the virus’s outer coat, but beyond these so-called “canonical antigens,” SARS-CoV-2 has about 25 other internal proteins.

To see whether immune responses to these non-canonical antigens could predict survival outcomes in patients with severe Covid-19, Das teamed up with co-senior authors Aniruddh Sarkar, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, and Harinder Singh, professor of immunology and the director of the Center for Systems Immunology at Pitt.

The researchers analyzed blood samples that had been collected from 21 patients who were hospitalized with severe Covid-19 in 2020 — prior to the approval of vaccines. Seven of these patients died from the disease, and the other 14 survived. Using a microscale antibody profiling platform developed by Sarkar, the team comprehensively analyzed antibodies to three canonical and four non-canonical antigens.

According to Sarkar, the platform analyzes three key features of antibodies. One is antigen specificity, or what the antibody is binding to. The second is effector function, which relates to the antibody’s role in immune response. The third feature is glycosylation, or the addition of carbohydrate molecules to the antibody, which dramatically impacts antibody function.

“By simultaneously profiling these three features, we can get a far deeper understanding of a given antibody than just looking at antibody titers,” Sarkar explained.

The researchers found that no single antibody feature could differentiate between patient survival outcomes. But when they analyzed overall antibody profiles — either canonical or non-canonical — they noticed clear differences between survivors and non-survivors.

“We were surprised to find such compelling evidence that antibodies directed at canonical and non-canonical antigens were equally predictive of survival outcomes,” Singh said. “Our findings suggest that non-canonical antibodies may play a role in recovery from severe disease, although more research is needed to prove causation and pinpoint the mechanisms.”

Most Covid-19 vaccines and monoclonal antibodies — artificial antibodies used to treat Covid-19 — have become less effective with the emergence of delta and omicron variants because mutations in the spike help the virus avoid detection. According to Singh, far fewer mutations have accumulated in the virus’s internal proteins, suggesting that augmenting vaccines or therapies to target these non-canonical antigens could elicit more robust immunity against emerging variants of concern.

When the team restricted their analysis to antibodies against non-canonical antigens conserved across coronaviruses — including those that cause the common cold and other respiratory infections — in Covid-19 patients, they could still distinguish survivors and non-survivors. These antibodies were also found in nine pre-pandemic, healthy control subjects, suggesting that exposure to coronaviruses besides SARS-CoV-2 could induce antibody responses linked with favorable outcomes in severe Covid-19.

According to Das, these findings could inform development of pan-coronavirus vaccines.

In ongoing work, the team is using their platform to look at antibodies in vaccinated people with breakthrough infections compared with unvaccinated individuals. They’re also interested in understanding whether different antibodies play different roles in protection against Covid-19 over time.

They also plan to extend the platform to understanding antibodies in other contexts, including rejection of organ transplants and other infectious diseases.

Other authors who contributed to this study were co-first authors Sai Preetham Peddireddy, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Syed A. Rahman, Ph.D., of Pitt, as well as Anthony R. Cillo, Ph.D., Godhev Manakkat Vijay, Ph.D., Ashwin Somasundaram, M.D., Creg J. Workman, Ph.D., William Bain, M.D., Bryan J. McVerry, M.D., Barbara Methe, Ph.D., Janet S. Lee, M.D., Prabir Ray, Ph.D., Anuradha Ray, Ph.D., Tullia C. Bruno, Ph.D., Dario A.A. Vignali, Ph.D., Georgios D. Kitsios, M.D., Ph.D., and Alison Morris, M.D., all of Pitt.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant Nos. DP2AI164325 and U01AI141990) and the UPMC Immune Transplant and Therapy Center. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

The study was conducted collaboratively by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina (UNC), and North Carolina State University (NCSU) and the findings published in the research journal JAMA Network Open. The study methods were based on a mathematical simulation originally developed at Georgia Tech. 

The study evaluated how many Covid-19 cases could be avoided in the Tar Heel State if more people get vaccinated and continue to follow mask and physical distancing guidelines. As of June 3, North Carolina has had 1 million reported cases of Covid-19 and more than 13,000 recorded deaths.

“The main takeaway from the paper is that while the increasing vaccine coverage in the U.S. has a positive impact, we are not really there yet. We still need to follow preventive measures such as mask wearing,” said contributing author Pinar Keskinocak, the William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

The caution is well founded when the researchers account for viral mutations, including the variant currently dominant in the United States that was initially identified in the UK and was associated with the surge in Michigan. There, as recently as May 2, the state averaged nearly 3,500 cases a day, according to a June 2 story in Bridge Michigan.

According to one scenario from the simulation, which was populated with data from the state of North Carolina, if 75% of the population gets fully vaccinated but continues to wear masks and socially distance,  there is a sustained decline down to very few new Covid-19 cases over a six-month period.  But, if only 25% of the population gets fully vaccinated and does not adhere to these non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), there could be a steady increase in daily Covid-19 cases, peaking around 8,000 before there is another decline.

Keskinocak points to the Georgia Covid-19 Vaccination Dashboard that tracks county-level differences in vaccination rates based on race as further evidence of the need for caution.

“Our dashboard shows that there has been high variability in the level of vaccination in different geographic regions and communities,” she said. “So even if we say over half of U.S. adults are vaccinated, it’s not uniform across the entire country. This further raises concerns about quickly lifting the NPIs.”

Julie Swann, department head, North Carolina State University’s Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and long-time research collaborator with Keskinocak, concurs. “Current variants are more infectious, and there are still locations with less than 30% of the population vaccinated.”

Swann adds that ongoing spread “endangers people now. It also increases the chance of a future mutation that could increase the risk even to people who are vaccinated.” 
Swann and Keskinocak are two of three researchers who co-founded Georgia Tech’s Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems in 2007, the year they developed a comprehensive, agent-based simulation model for pandemic flu, which has since been at the core of their modeling efforts for Covid-19. Over the years the two industrial engineers have collaborated closely to advance the model and make results available to decision makers as new pandemics emerged.   

“Julie and I have been working on infectious disease modeling for over a decade now. We had developed this agent-based model for pandemic flu and then when Covid-19 hit, Georgia Tech adapted that model to Covid-19 and shared it with Julie’s team at NC State who then modified the model to test additional scenarios and calibrated it with North Carolina data,” Keskinocak said.

“I am grateful that Pinar and I had spent such a long time trying to understand pandemics and improving the science behind them,” Swann added. “If we had not invested that time, we would not be able to have such a fast turnaround and the high participation level that we have this year.”

According to Keskinocak, the simulation model is extremely detailed – in essence, it recreated demographics of the population down to the state’s household size, and even individuals’ workflow, to give a clear picture of how people move from one geographic area to another. 

 “The model is flexible and can change based on the research question being asked, including the current research question, ‘What is the impact of lifting NPIs in increasing vaccine coverage?’”

Swann credited the close partnership with public health partners in Georgia and North Carolina, as well as their work under a grant funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, with the speed of developing models to test interventions during the pandemic. 

“It’s really key because sometimes we get additional ideas or research questions from the stakeholders with whom we interact,” Swann said.

Both researchers emphasized the critical role students played in advancing these models under tight deadlines while juggling coursework. Between them they estimate more than two dozen graduate students across the partnering institutions have been engaged in the Covid-19 modeling work since the pandemic began. The two also were integral in establishing a professional education HHSCM certificate program.

 # # #

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

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

Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent

Produced in a collaboration between the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this technical solution helps address a challenge faced by the CDC, which must rapidly classify illness based on data from electronic forms with free-text information entered by clinical or health department personnel. Because of its variability, the free-text data from each electronic form currently must be reviewed by clinicians.

Text Field Data Useful, but Challenging to Analyze

“Not all information helpful to know about a COVID-19 illness can be captured in the boiled-down coded data that gets entered into forms,” said Charity Hilton, a GTRI research scientist who led the GTRI component of the project. “There can be much more information in the text fields — which may be copied directly from patient charts — that can help understand the broader scope of what is going on. This project will help improve the speed and accuracy of disease classification.”

Providing clarifying information that goes beyond the standardized codes is the purpose of the text fields, but their variability and lack of consistent structure can make them challenging to process and interpret. Natural language processing (NLP), an automated approach using artificial intelligence, can help provide the kind of understanding that would otherwise require human review, extracting the meaning of text to go beyond the simple matching of words, Hilton explained.

Beyond providing additional information to assist with the classification, the NLP solution can validate information provided elsewhere on the forms to catch coding errors or other discrepancies.

State, Local, and Territorial Health Departments Provide Data

Health departments report information on COVID-19 cases to CDC, including pregnancy status. State and local health departments have the option of providing additional data on pregnant people with COVID-19 and their developing babies. These data are collected as part of CDC’s Surveillance for Emerging Threats to Mothers and Babies Network (SET-NET).

Thirty-two jurisdictions have reported data on the health of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy. So far, data from over 71,000 pregnant people with SARS-CoV-2 infection have been reported to SET-NET. COVID-19 severity classification is based on a hierarchy of factors such as intensive care unit (ICU) admission, invasive ventilation, COVID-19 therapies required, and complications. That information is used to classify illness as asymptomatic, mild, moderate-to-severe, or critical.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Natural Language Processing

To evaluate the effectiveness of the NLP approach, CDC and GTRI researchers compared severity classifications provided by the NLP-based approach against those made by the standard human review. They found that the classifications produced by the NLP agreed with the clinician’s judgment in 99.4% of the 4,378 COVID-19 cases studied.

“Concordance between approaches was high, validating that automated approaches could reduce the need for clinical review to classify COVID-19 severity,” the researchers wrote in an abstract of a presentation on the project planned for an upcoming conference.

Analysis Helps CDC Understand Risks to Pregnant People

Information provided by SET-NET helps the CDC formulate recommendations for pregnant people, and the new system will help evaluate data coming into the agency.

“Automated approaches, such as natural language processing, have helped CDC investigators ‘sift’ through thousands of records to determine the level of COVID-19 severity among pregnant people more efficiently,” said Van T. Tong, MPH, who leads the Emerging Threats Team in CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “This work to better understand the increased risks of COVID-19 infection, along with the growing body of evidence supporting the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, was used to support CDC’s message that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh any potential risks of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.”

Next Steps in Implementing the Project

The project is largely completed and operating in CDC’s information technology environment. A few more tweaks will be made, and the project could soon help CDC analyze data about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on pregnant people. The team is working to share the code and mock dataset on the CDC GitHub. Details of the project are scheduled to be presented at the 11th International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases later this year.

Natural Language Processing Has Broad Application

Using information from free-text fields is one of the challenges facing database systems used in health care and other applications, and it’s an area where proven NLP techniques can be especially useful.

“Especially in the clinical case, text data can be a rich source of information,” Hilton said. “Providers, clinicians, and nurses have to put information into the coded sections of forms, but the text fields allow them to provide more detail about a patient and what they are experiencing. They want to provide this information because the coded boxes can’t tell the whole story.”

Examples of information useful to clinicians and policy planners might include context on the patient’s family history, earlier illness, or social dimensions relevant to the treatment and disease outcome.

Project Results from Long-Term Collaboration with CDC

GTRI researchers have collaborated with the Atlanta-based CDC through a long-term initiative designed to support the agency’s overarching Data Modernization Initiative (DMI). Launched in 2020, DMI is a multiyear, billion-plus dollar effort to modernize core data and surveillance infrastructure across the federal and state public health landscape. Now in its third year, the CDC-GTRI collaboration has moved modernization forward by focusing on high-performance computing, health care interoperability, data analytics, machine learning techniques, synthetic data generation, predictive model development, and visualization to identify trends in the vast data sets the agency receives and analyzes.

In addition to Hilton, GTRI researchers Richard Boyd and Jordan Chandler also supported the project. At CDC, in addition to Van Tong, the researchers included Suzy Newton, Kate Woodworth, and Lucas Gosdin.

DMI is not just about technology, but about putting the right people, processes, and policies in place to deliver real-time, high-quality information on both infectious and non-infectious threats. The CDC-GTRI partnership is a key piece of CDC’s overall DMI strategy.

See CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative | CDC for more information.

Writer: John Toon (John.Toon@gtri.gatech.edu)

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I began my “year at home,” and my connection to school felt far away. I spent a long year in New Jersey, looking forward to my time ahead in Europe. I never lost hope that my semester abroad would happen. I knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and my dream of spending a few months in Europe would become a reality.

Departure day finally arrived! I got a covid test 72 hours before departure, and I had already received both doses of the vaccine before leaving. Once I arrived in Metz, I had to quarantine for 7 days, and then I got my first covid test in Europe, alongside everyone else who was at GTL for the summer. After that, it was smooth sailing for the rest of the summer. 

Staff and faculty at GTL did everything possible to keep us safe. During the week, we had the same seat in each of our classes for the entire semester and were socially distanced from the students surrounding us. Masks were always mandatory in the GTL building. Common spaces like the lounge were still accessible, and a wonderful place to get work done and meet with other students! Classes had the same feel as in Atlanta, but to me were just a bit more special since I was in France.  

During my weekly planning for weekend travels, it was a part of my routine to look up the covid precautions of each new place I would be visiting. For example, my first weekend was spent in Belgium. Their covid precautions, at the time, were to get a covid test, and fill out a covid tracking form. After doing that, traveling anywhere within Belgium was easy. As the summer went on, traveling to different countries required fewer steps as vaccination became the main requirement. Then, all I needed was my vaccination card, and hopping on and off flights was truly a straightforward process.  

The silver lining of this entire experience was being able to see Europe without big crowds of tourists, and being able to absorb everything for as long as I desired, without 700 other people wanting to absorb it at that exact moment as well! Everything I did felt so special and personal. Going to the Louvre and being able to stand in front of the Mona Lisa for as many minutes as I wanted without feeling any pressure to move on, was simply amazing. The pictures of me outside the Louvre without a single person in the background is something few people can say they have.  

Streets were emptier, places were more accessible, and being able to absorb more authentic culture came easier. I did not meet one single American while traveling, other than the people who were at GTL. I met dozens of people from all over Europe, however, on train rides, at parks, in the middle of huge cities, and that is something I hold special in my heart.  

When I was not traveling, being in Metz was truly a delight. I would often go for walks downtown, and do my coursework at cafes, and felt like I was really getting into the French culture. Sometimes, I would eat out at one of the restaurants downtown, and other times, I would cook some dinner with my best friend, who lived next door to me. Most days I'd find myself relaxing in one of the gardens around town. At GTL, relaxing and being able to spend my days doing whatever I wanted came more often than in Atlanta. School abroad gave us the opportunity to do activities other than school, which is the opposite from life on the main Atlanta campus.  

What an exciting time to study at Georgia Tech-Lorraine! 

By Jessica Pepe, Materials Science and Engineering undergraduate 

The team, including Oliver Brand and Wilbur Lam from the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) at Georgia Tech, were featured in a March 15th article published by The New York Times. The article, “Inside the High-Stakes Race to Test the Covid Tests,” covers the work they have been doing and how they are making an impact.

“The Atlanta team ‘has been absolutely heroic,’ said Bruce Tromberg, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.”

Read the article

1. The federal government has launched a Covid-19 OTC Tests website for online ordering. This site allows each household to order up to four free Covid-19 tests.  

2. Online or over-the-counter tests are also available through the University System of Georgia (USG) Healthcare plan without a prescription. As a member, you can receive up to eight tests per 30-day period. Below are instructions for how to obtain the tests based on your healthcare plan.  

Consumer Choice HSA, Comprehensive Care, or BlueChoice HMO 
For employees enrolled in the Consumer Choice HSA, Comprehensive Care, or BlueChoice HMO plans, tests are available through in-network pharmacies at no cost, if they are purchased through one of the following options:  

• Order online through CVS’s Member Website or the CVS Mobile App. Covered tests will be available within the hour, at the location with available test kits.  
• At an in-network pharmacy location. Covered tests must be purchased at the pharmacy counter.  

If you paid out-of-pocket, you may request reimbursement through the CVS website.  Members who choose this option will be reimbursed up to $12 per test up to the eight tests per 30-day limit. 

For questions or assistance submitting a reimbursement request, call Accolade at 866-204-9818. 
 
Kaiser Permanente 
For Kaiser plan members, go to the Kaiser website for information on where to obtain the tests and how to submit them for reimbursement.  

For more information about the types of tests available and in-person testing sites, visit the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) website.    

Information is also available on the USG Benefits website at: benefits.usg.edu. 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently granted emergency use authorization (EUA) of two Covid-19 tests – one manufactured by SD Biosensor and distributed by Roche and the other manufactured by Siemens. Both tests are capable of detecting the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 in lab and clinical studies. Combined, it is estimated the companies can produce tens of millions of tests per month for use in the U.S.

The FDA's authorization of the tests comes amid the Biden Administration's recent commitment to purchase half a billion at-home tests to be provided to Americans for free this winter and to stand up new federal testing sites across the country. 

HomeLab, which is part of the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP) in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, conducted usability assessments of both Covid-19 tests, which included inspecting the devices, reviewing the instructions for use, observing how the tests are used at various clinical sites in the area, and considering what human errors may occur during usage. The FDA and National Institutes of Health (NIH) then used HomeLab's assessments to decide which tests to authorize and roll out to the U.S. public. HomeLab began in 2011 as a way to provide innovators with an independent testing facility capable of evaluating the safety, efficacy, effectiveness, usability, and accessibility of products that promote independent living.  

"You can have a highly usable physical test, but if the instructions aren't thorough and easy to understand, it's going to be less effective," said Sarah Farmer, the director of testing and evaluation at CACP and managing director of HomeLab who also has a joint appointment at GTRI. "Luckily, instructions are probably the easiest thing to improve."

Amanda Peagler, a research scientist at CACP with a joint appointment at GTRI, reiterated the importance of providing users with a clear testing roadmap in order to maximize results.

"Many people don't do these kinds of home tests," Peagler said. "The closest thing would probably be a pregnancy test. So, people are going to look at instructions very closely because many of them aren't familiar with testing at home."

Farmer noted that the group also worked to ensure that users with various physical limitations, such as reduced manual dexterity and low vision, are able to use the new Covid-19 tests effectively.

HomeLab's recommendations have already made an impact. For the Siemens-manufactured test, Siemens has said it will modify some of the product's instructions and packaging in line with HomeLab's suggestions. The NIH, meanwhile, has asked HomeLab to assist with writing regulatory guidelines for all future Covid-19 tests to come as well as for potential future pandemics. 

HomeLab's efforts complement work by researchers and faculty in the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, as part of the NIH's $500 million RADx Tech initiative. RADx launched in April 2020 to speed innovation in the development, commercialization, and implementation of technologies for Covid-19 testing.

Georgia Tech and Emory University worked alongside Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta within the Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineered Point-of-Care Technologies (ACME POCT) to evaluate test kits from other countries in order to increase U.S. supply and drive down test costs.

"The big idea behind this effort is that we just need more testing options," said Farmer. "In December, people could not get their hands on tests because there just weren't enough on the shelves. The idea is to get more out there."

HomeLab's work is far from over. The group is set to assess up to 30 additional Covid-19 tests that the FDA and NIH plan to bring to the U.S. market in the coming weeks.

"We're reviewing about one test a week," Farmer said. "We're definitely busy." 

Writers: Anna Akins and Kelly Petty                                                                                        Photography: Sean McNeil 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia USA

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Learn more at www.gtri.gatech.edu and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

As workers go back to the office and children return to school, knowing what’s in the air they breathe is important because scientists now understand the role that airborne virus particles play in transmitting this highly infectious disease. In a program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) – in collaboration with scientists and engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the semiconductor company Cardea Bio – have taken important steps toward developing a system that would continuously monitor building air for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

“The idea is that if somebody in a medium-sized building were sick with the virus that causes Covid-19 and spreading that infection by talking, singing, coughing or sneezing, we would be able to detect that and sound an alert within 15 minutes,” said Mike Farrell, a GTRI principal research scientist leading the project. “At the downstream sensor level of the system, we were able to show specific detection of SARS-CoV-2 with about a thousand viral particles in a very pure sample. We are now working to demonstrate that the front-end collection and fluidics filtering and sample concentration strategies can collect enough air to deliver a sample containing that amount of virus to the sensor.”

The sheer volume of air that would have to be monitored in a medium-sized office building creates an extreme “needle-in-a-haystack” search. The GTRI researchers are combining capture of virus-containing particles from the air with a wet-walled cyclone – collecting air at 2,000 liters per minute – and a microfluidic sample volume concentrator that ultimately feeds the sample into a biosignal processing unit (BPU). The BPU captures and detects SARS-CoV-2 virus particles via an artificial antibody-like bioreceptor attached to a graphene surface that is specific for the virus.

The SenSARS project has not yet met DARPA’s goal of detecting a single viral particle in one liter of air. The GTRI team is still working toward that goal and planning to integrate the system into the kind of package that might one day become part of building HVAC equipment.

“This is the next generation of bio-detection,” said Farrell. “But it’s really, really difficult, and we’re not there yet.”

DARPA funded four different research organizations to pursue indoor air monitoring goals, and the GTRI team chose to develop a system for continuously monitoring air in a 10-story office building. Phase I funding for the project ends in November 2021.

The system being developed by the GTRI research team would work like this to capture virus particles:

• A wet-walled cyclone aerosol collector pulls in and spins air from a building’s return ductwork into an atomized carrier fluid. The liquid captures particles and throws them against the chamber’s wall for collection.
• Liquid carrying the particles enters a microfluidic network, and a concentrator reduces the liquid volume, enriching the target virus concentration. The sample is then moved to the BPU for analysis.
• The liquid carrying the suspended virus particles then passes over the BPU, which is covered with bioreceptors specific to SARS-CoV-2. The bioreceptors selectively bind to and capture any virus particles present.

Three researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and one from Emory University are trying to help clinicians sort through these factors and spectrum of patient outcomes by equipping healthcare professionals with a new “decision prioritization tool.”

The team’s new artificial intelligence-based tool helps clinicians understand and better predict which adverse effects their Covid-19 patients could experience, based on comorbidities and current side effects — and, in turn, also helps suggest specific Food and Drug Administration-approved (FDA) drugs that could help treat the disease and improve patient health outcomes. The researcher's latest findings are the focus of a new study published October 21 in Nature Scientific Reports.

Artificial intelligence, protein drivers, and ‘24 out of 26 clinical manifestations’ of Covid-19

The team’s new methodology, or tool, is called MOATAI-VIR (Mode Of Action proteins & Targeted therapeutic discovery driven by Artificial Intelligence for VIRuses. Researchers report it predicts 24 out of 26 major clinical manifestations of Covid-19 and their underlying disease-protein-pathway relationships.

Those clinical manifestations cover a range of issues including acute respiratory distress, blood clotting issues, cytokine storms, low blood oxygen and white blood cell counts, and even bone marrow failure. The commonly reported loss of smell or taste, along with unusual neurological symptoms such as “brain fog” have received widespread attention — as have considerations for patients who have previous health problems, or comorbidities, that could place them in higher risk categories related to Covid-19.

“It’s still the question of, what’s causing the side effects?” says Jeffrey Skolnick, professor and Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, and corresponding author for the study. “So, you lost sense of smell and got brain fog — and another (patient) had respiratory distress, and another can’t remember the day of the week. What we’ve identified are the possible mode of action drivers for these various conditions, which is now setting the stage for who’s getting what side effects.”

Skolnick, also Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology, notes that it makes sense to predict the side effects based on protein interactions.

“Humans are molecular machines, and presumably there are biological and physical rules to dictate our responses,” Skolnick says . “We basically built an AI-based approach which was designed given the interactive set of proteins in humans which interact with the [novel] coronavirus,” he adds. “We then asked ourselves, ‘Could we predict, based on biochemical pathways, which interactive proteins are associated with side effects?’”

Joining Skolnick from the School of Biological Sciences are Ph.D. student Courtney Astore and senior research scientist Hongyi Zhou, both from the Center for the Study of Systems Biology. Joshy Jacob of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the Emory Vaccine Center at the Emory School of Medicine also worked on the study.

MOATAI-VIR methodology

Skolnick explains that most known diseases are due to the “malfunction and interaction of many proteins,” and notes that it’s a collective effect — a “many-targeted protein effect.” His team’s new AI methodology is identifying as many targets as possible of an interacting nature to predict a complex response from a complex set of interactions.

It’s also well-understood in the medical community that comorbidities — existing and chronic health factors such as diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disorders, and other conditions that affect the immune system — can play an outsized a role in risk factors related to Covid-19. Skolnick says those comorbidities can be plugged into the team’s algorithm, too.

 “Alzheimer’s and hyperthyroidism are strongly correlated — as is diabetes. There are six to eight (Covid-19) comorbidities with a patient that has Alzheimer’s,” Skolnick explains. “It’s not just old age — it’s much more complicated.”

The MOATAI-VIR methodology helps identify the common proteins of the comorbidities in relation to the parent disease. A clinician can then target the diseases with drugs. Researchers report that this specific methodology had 72% success in 123,146 drug-indication pair predictions found by Skolnick’s team.

“For a given disease, we prioritize them by the proteins that are most in common with the comorbid diseases to the given disease, giving rise to the particular complication, such as respiratory failure. This identifies the putative (assumed) driver proteins for the given complication,” he says. “Then we select repurposed drugs in two ways — we screen the most common comorbid proteins for their most frequent binding to repurposed drugs. For the set of comorbid diseases to a given complication, choose the drugs that treat the most complications.”

It’s critical to find the right drugs for those complications and side effects — and using the new “decision tool” can help do that, Skolnick says.

He cautions that researchers and clinicians must approach this objectively because “there are deep reasons why you have these ‘off-target’ interactions, where a drug binds to another protein that is not its original intended target — and that’s what these algorithms take in to counter them. It’s not magic” to run this methodology, Skolnick explains. “It’s fractional assistance in a decision-making process — which comes with probabilities [that] it might work. If there’s an 80 percent probability, you probably ought to try it.”

The MOATAI-VIR methodology algorithms (decision prioritization tool) can be downloaded at: https://sites.gatech.edu/cssb/moatai-vir/

This project was funded by R35GM118039 of the Division of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. DOI: www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-00368-6

Related News

Skolnick and Team Win Next Stage of NCATS Competition

Jeffrey Skolnick is also part of an award-winning National Institutes of Health effort to create innovative, AI-powered platforms for discovering new pain management drugs, and for identifying immediate solutions. The competition staged by NIH’s NCATS (National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences) addresses the national opioid public health crisis.

In September, a team with Skolnick, Hongyi Zhou, senior research scientist in the School of Biological Sciences, Andre Ghetti with ANABIOS Corporation, and Nicole Jung with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, was one of four winning the 2020 (NCATS) ASPIRE (A Specialized Platform for Innovative Research Exploration) Challenge, Stage 2, Milestone 1 Award. Skolnick and Zhou won the previous stage in May.

Their platform, Development of a Comprehensive Integrated Platform for Translational Innovation in Pain, Opioid Abuse Disorder and Overdose, will face the final stage, Prototype Delivery, Independent Validation and Testing in 2022.

The roundtable focused on structural barriers faced by marginalized groups in STEM, as well as how the pandemic has compounded these problems. In addition to discussing these topics, participants identified critical failure points in regard to them and suggested best practices to advance equity in science and technology moving forward. Participants emphasized the need for robust and intersectional data collection that would shed light on the impact Covid-19 has had on gender-diverse people, as well as the need to address these issues in order to build a stronger science and technology workforce that supports everyone.

“I was grateful for the opportunity to be able to share policy-actionable research with Eric Landers, science advisor to the President; and Alondra Nelson, deputy director for science and society.” Sugimoto said. “The pandemic has made manifest several disparities in the scientific workforce, and it is clear that the White House is dedicated to addressing these issues.”

Homecoming at Georgia Tech is one of the most tradition-filled and exciting weeks of the year. With many students missing out on events last year, this year’s highly anticipated festivities will include particular attention to safety protocols, including masks and hand sanitizer being offered at indoor events.

Events are scheduled all week long, starting with the Homecoming concert on Wednesday, Oct. 20, and students are encouraged to test frequently as they participate in more social activities.

That testing can start now. Students who test today, Oct. 13, can pick up a free t-shirt at the Community Market. Get your test, grab a sticker, and bring it to the Jackets Moving Forward table on the Instructional Center Lawn from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Buzz will be there to welcome you, too.

Plan to test again at the end of this week, and early next week before the Homecoming festivities begin.

Covid-19 campus testing continues to be fast and free. The saliva-based test takes about two minutes and all sites are open regular hours this week. And, of course, cookies and other treats await you at test sites. View site locations and hours, and start your next test at mytest.gatech.edu.

The best ways to prevent Covid-19 are still through vaccination and wearing face coverings when indoors. Vaccines continue to be distributed on campus at Stamps Health Services, and face coverings are encouraged in all campus facilities. If you have not been vaccinated, learn more and make an appointment today.

With fall break happening Oct. 11-12, students should plan to test this week in order to get their results before leaving campus for the long weekend. Even those staying on campus should test, knowing they might participate in extra social activities during the break.

Covid-19 campus testing continues to be fast and free. The saliva-based test takes about two minutes and all sites are open regular hours this week. And, of course, cookies and other treats await you at test sites. View site locations and hours, and start your next test at mytest.gatech.edu.

When you get back to campus, test again as soon as you return. A recent decline in campus cases can only be maintained through regular testing and isolating cases before they become outbreaks.

The best ways to prevent Covid-19 are still through vaccination and wearing face coverings when indoors. Vaccines continue to be distributed on campus at Stamps Health Services, and face coverings are encouraged in all campus facilities. If you have not been vaccinated, learn more and make an appointment today.

During his annual Institute Address earlier this month, President Ángel Cabrera said, “We are still in the middle of a long and difficult public health crisis that will continue to test us in countless ways. But we are in this together and, like last year, we will navigate through this successfully again.” Cabrera urged the Georgia Tech community to test weekly and encourage other students, colleagues, and friends to do the same.

Bryan Gomez, executive president of the Residence Hall Association and an undergraduate student, has shared that he is vaccinated and continues to test weekly.

“I continue to test every single week and encourage others to do the same, because it’s the best way we can keep each other safe on campus,” he said.                        

Georgia Tech’s surveillance testing program began in spring of 2020 by visionary faculty who foresaw the problem and, with support from Tech leadership, researchers, and students, started working to address it. The initiative has been a campuswide effort with major contributions from the College of Sciences, the College of Engineering, the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences, and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

“Our Covid-19 testing program is a story about how the state government, the USG, and Georgia’s biotech industry were mobilized in order to protect us,” said True Merrill, a senior research scientist in GTRI and a member of the campuswide team working on surveillance testing.

“Young people are more mobile and they tend to be more asymptomatic, so they get more people sick without appearing to be sick themselves,” Merrill said. “To control the degree of spread, testing young people is really important.” 

Georgia Tech’s testing program has had support from the state’s political leaders since its inception. Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan visited campus in August 2020 and walked through the testing process shortly after it was introduced. All Georgia legislators were tested twice a week at the state capitol during the 2021 legislative session, and they will do it again this fall. And earlier this month Teresa MacCartney, acting chancellor of the USG, visited campus and was tested at the Library before touring the testing lab.  

The Asymptomatic Testing Program: How It Works

The testing is done by a 30-person team that collects samples and works around the clock in a federally certified lab constructed in the basement of a campus research building. The process begins with registration on a campus website, which generates a barcode that participants bring to one of the testing sites with no appointment necessary. At the site, participants register and are given a test kit in a plastic bag. They spit into a small plastic cup and use a pipette to transfer a saliva sample to a small plastic vial containing a buffer solution that inactivates any virus that may be present. Treats are offered at all sites, usually in the form of stickers and cookies, as a thank you to those who test.

The samples are transferred to the test lab three times a day for evaluation. To reduce the number of PCR tests that must be run each day, the saliva samples are pooled so that a single test can examine samples from five individuals. An innovative double pooling strategy can identify one individual in a set of six pools who is positive, while clearing another dozen individuals. Using standard equipment, the team evaluates 225 samples at a time, and can test thousands of samples a day.

By placing each individual sample into two different pools, when a positive result is obtained, the researchers can focus on the likely infected person for diagnostic confirmation. The surveillance and diagnostic testing is normally completed within 24 to 48 hours, allowing contact tracers to identify other community members who may have been exposed.

Cabrera said it is important for everyone to continue doing what they can to keep Georgia Tech as safe as possible by using all of the tools that are available, including weekly asymptomatic testing.

Why do so many people embrace Covid-19 misinformation? Does lack of health insurance discourage people from getting tested, even when testing is free? And what prevented doctors in Italy from sharing what they learned about oxygen levels, even though it could help predict which Covid patients were at the highest risk of dying? 

Four faculty members in the School of History and Sociology (HSOC) at Georgia Tech are examining these questions and more to help craft effective policy responses to the pandemic. 

“This research by the School’s faculty shows that the pandemic is not just a problem in biology and medicine. Instead, curbing the pandemic requires scholars who understand human knowledge and human behavior, which are topics at the center of the social sciences and humanities,” said Eric Schatzberg, chair of the School of History and Sociology. 

Understanding Covid Conspiracies 

HSOC Associate Professor Amit Prasad found something surprising when he examined Covid-19 conspiracy theories: these theories are not automatically anti-science. Often, purveyors of misinformation use the credibility of science and scientists to spread falsehoods. 

For example, Dr. Judy Mikovits’s pseudo-documentary Plandemic received millions of views despite its false claims—such as “wearing a mask literally activates your own virus.” Why did people believe such claims? 

Mikovits’s falsehoods didn’t matter to viewers because her use “of ‘science’ and so-called ‘scientific claims’ in the video facilitated a sense of trust for the general public,” wrote Prasad. 

Prasad’s research also examined how the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates had created the pandemic spread for different reasons in different communities. For instance, Prasad argues that within the Black community, the messaging reflected “the long history of mistrust resulting from racial discrimination and exploitation.” In contrast, among many white people, the conspiracy was driven by messaging about protecting individual freedom and the republic. This analysis shows that “histories of particular social groups may play a very significant role in the acceptance and spread of misinformation and conspiracies.” 

Prasad’s approach differs from past studies that characterized conspiracy theories as anti-science. These studies called for clearer communication of scientific knowledge to combat misinformation. But Prasad finds that better communication may not be the most effective solution. “My research shows that broad characterizations of misinformation and conspiracies as anti-science does not help in properly understanding what is going on,” he wrote. 

As Georgia and other states begin to transition from mass Covid-19 vaccination efforts to a more targeted approach, understanding that vaccine skepticism is caused by social and political factors beyond anti-science beliefs can help create more effective messaging.  

“A ‘war’ on misinformation and conspiracies, which is aimed at banishing them completely, may not work in our instantaneously and globally connected world,” concluded Prasad. “Instead, we need to carefully study misinformation and conspiracies and deal with them by addressing the social and health issues experienced by particular social groups.” 

Prasad’s article, “Anti-Science Misinformation and Conspiracies: COVID–19, Post-Truth, and Science & Technology Studies (STS),” is open access and appeared in Science, Technology and Society in April 2021. 

Advocating for vulnerable families 

How do social and economic factors — such as relying on public health insurance, living below the poverty line, or losing work during the Covid-19 pandemic — disproportionately affect Black children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their families? 

HSOC Associate Professor Jennifer Singh will research this topic in summer 2021, with funding from a Special Opportunity for Faculty Development Activities (SODA) grant from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Her survey and interviews seek to map disruptions not only in children’s learning, treatment, and well-being, but also in the well-being of their caregiver. According to Singh’s research objective, the goal is “to understand how they have managed socially, emotionally, and economically during the Covid-19 crisis.”  

With this data, Singh plans to identify how families are coping with Covid-related barriers to their children’s continued progress. She hopes to understand how caregivers use support networks to balance their dual roles as financial supporters and supervisors of their children’s education. Finally, Singh hopes to identify unique opportunities and challenges presented by the new learning and social environments that emerged during the pandemic. 

Singh is also working with Milan Riddick, a fourth-year student in the College of Engineering minoring in Health, Medicine, and Society. Riddick’s interdisciplinary President’s Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) project will study “Mistrust of the Covid-19 Vaccine Among Black Citizens of Georgia.” 

Quantifying health and education inequalities 

Lower rates of health insurance coverage were associated with lower levels of Covid-19 testing, according to a study of state-level data from March 2020 by HSOC assistant professor Allen Hyde and co-author Angran Li from Zhejiang University in China. This relationship may have exacerbated the spread of the virus and the deaths associated with it. 

“Further, lack of health insurance coverage may exacerbate racial and class inequality in Covid-19 testing and subsequent hospitalizations and death,” wrote Hyde and Li.  “For example, a majority of Covid-19-related deaths reported in Louisiana are African Americans, accounting for 70 percent of the deaths, while African Americans only make up 30 percent of the state’s population (Doubek 2020). Similar patterns have occurred in other cities.” 

In 2018, about 8% of the U.S. population was uninsured. However, that number varied by state and jumped as high as 17.7% in Texas. Research from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that in the same year, “one in five uninsured adults went without needed medical care due to costs.” This could mean that even if uninsured people show symptoms of Covid-19, they may not get tested or seek treatment because of financial concerns. Although the Trump Administration announced that Covid-19 testing and treatment would be free, people may have been unaware or skeptical that they would not have to pay.  

Hyde and Li’s research, “A Slow Start on an Urgent Crisis: How Lack of Health Insurance Helps Explain Deficiencies in Coronavirus Testing in U.S. States,” was published in Contexts, official publication of the American Sociological Association. It gives support to the long-running argument that universal health care can save lives. 

Hyde also worked with Li and Amanda Maltbie, a Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama, to research the impact of Covid-19 on education. The article, forthcoming in the book Social Justice and Education in the 21st Century: Research from South Africa and the United States, examines how disasters reinforce existing structural inequalities and exacerbate them in the aftermath. 

What makes knowledge move? 

“Knowledge does not move transnationally by itself,” wrote Kranzberg Professor Emeritus John Krige with co-author Sabina Leonelli, professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Exeter University. For information to move efficiently around the world, they found, interested parties need to have access to “technological infrastructure” — such as the internet — and shared systems for data collection and sharing.  

When those systems aren’t in place, information doesn’t move as fast as it should, as was the case when it took doctors in Italy two months to get international recognition for their finding that low oxygen levels were a “key cause and potential predictor” in Covid-19 deaths. But when global data-sharing systems are successful, they plug researchers into more extensive networks that hold them accountable, increase their visibility and clout in their home countries, and help amplify their expertise to others.  

By understanding the challenges of transnational knowledge movement, Krige and Leonelli hope to help mitigate them. Their paper documented the creation of Covid-19 data-sharing systems at a historically significant moment, when they were still “in the making,” forming and adapting in real-time to the changing Covid-19 situation. The first case study focused on the French debate to use a local, centralized contact tracing app versus the decentralized app created by Apple and Google. The second examined an international group called the Research Data Alliance that successfully coordinated and shared Covid information across borders where other groups failed. 

In their work, Krige and Leonelli envision a better future, where doctors, scientists, researchers, government officials, policymakers, and experts in every field can “engage in a collective effort, driven from the bottom-up, to ensure that everyone, including the most vulnerable victims of Covid-19, benefits from the knowledge — and the vaccine — that can contain its spread.” 

Krige and Leonelli’s research “Mobilizing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows. COVID-19 and the Politics of Research at the Borders” is open access and appeared in the journal History and Technology in March 2021. 

For more coverage of Georgia Tech’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, please visit our Responding to Covid-19 page.

Monitoring pneumonia remains a challenge because it manifests itself differently in almost every patient and can develop in any patient infected by coronavirus. The Georgia Institute of Technology is part of a team of engineers, data scientists, and medical clinicians led by the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin that has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation's ASCENT program. The purpose of this project is to develop a wearable device for patients with pneumonia, allowing medical personnel to track their progress remotely and use data to predict how their condition may change.

This project combines state-of-the-art technology across wearable devices, integrated circuits and machine learning. And the larger goal is to develop ways to safely monitor patients remotely and maintain high-quality care, wherever they are.

"We hope to solve this global challenge of achieving pervasive surveillance of patients, whether they're in the hospital, out in the world or quarantining at home in the midst of a pandemic," said Nanshu Lu, an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG), who is leading the project.

The team was awarded $1.5 million over four years for the project, and the primary researchers include engineers, medical doctors, data scientists and more. They hope this interdisciplinary team will help knock down walls between specialties that keep medicine from advancing.

The researchers will make a hair-thin, skin-soft wireless wearable sensor, known as an electronic tattoo or “e-tattoo." This part of the project is led by Lu, who has been developing her e-tattoo technology for a decade at UT Austin.

An integrated system-on-chip will read out sensor signals and perform signal processing with ultra-low power consumption to ensure that patients can wear the device without interruption for at least a week on a single charge. Shaolan Li, an assistant professor in Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Ph.D. graduate from the Cockrell School, is handling this aspect of the project. 

Li noted that he and his team at Georgia Tech have previously developed a few sensor interface integrated circuits that are designed to read biomedical signals like ECG or EEG with record-setting energy efficiency. He also added that he wants to leverage this knowledge to expand all of the capabilities of this new wearable device, aiming to profoundly advance the engagement of wearable electronics in clinical medicine. “Through this project, we really hope to showcase that the circuit technology innovation developed in our lab can truly address the most pressing problems that are facing humanity,” said Li. 

A deep learning framework will be tailored to analyze all the data coming from the e-tattoo and predict how clinical condition progresses with evolution of the disease. Hongyu Miao, associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, is leading the data science work and developing the deep learning tool.

And all this information will be managed through Sickbay, an FDA-approved virtual patient monitoring platform. Craig Rusin, associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine and head of the Predictive Analytics Lab at Texas Children’s Hospital, developed Sickbay. The program is used by hospitals across the country, including Texas Children’s, and he started the company Medical Informatics to commercialize it.

Parag Jain, a pediatric critical care physician at Texas Children’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, will lead a clinical trial of the device. Using deep machine learning techniques, he will develop algorithms that can predict the progression of pneumonia using historical data.  Once a prototype device is ready, likely in two to three years, the team will test it on 20 patients at Texas Children’s Hospital, aged 13 to 18 years, with progressive pneumonia.

The researchers targeted pneumonia for this project because it is a common illness, one that can be very dangerous, regardless of age or health status. As a side effect of not just COVID-19, but other respiratory viruses and bacteria, it is also quite prevalent. It also requires individualized care because each patient progresses differently.

The multi-faceted nature of the team illustrates the complexity of the problem they are trying to tackle. They are aiming to solve a challenging engineering problem as well as real-world issues with patient care.

Despite tremendous advances in medical technology, tools to continuously track and analyze all the data patients generate remain lacking. That often means that clinicians are only getting small snapshots of patients' condition, not the full picture.

This continuous monitoring and data analysis will allow medical personnel to use their time more wisely, to check in on patients at the most important moments. In critical cases of pneumonia, timing is everything, and the right treatment at the right time can make the difference between life and death.

"The pandemic really exposed gaps in care that patients with severe disease have to be treated using bulky, constrained, conventional monitors," Lu said. "We need sensors with ‘brains’ that can tell doctors when the time is right for that critical intervention, whether the patient is in a hospital bed just a few steps away or in their own home."

With the recent uptick in Covid-19 cases, the great outdoors has once again been the safest place to exercise and socialize. And with cooler temperatures on the way, there are worse things than being out in nature.

According to David Knobbe, director of Outdoor Recreation Georgia Tech (ORGT), a program of the Campus Recreation Center, “It is well known that connecting with nature is good for people’s health and well-being. It lowers blood pressure, reduces stress, improves mood and focus, and helps us heal better.”

Fortunately, several groups at Tech are helping the campus community take advantage of these benefits, including ORGT, Starter Bikes, and Trailblazers, to name a few:

ORGT

ORGT has been providing outdoor adventures for the Georgia Tech campus for more than 50 years. Typically, ORGT serves around 5,000 individuals annually, offering over 120 open-enrollment trip options in nine different adventure sports.

Earlier in the pandemic, ORGT had to discontinue providing transportation to and from its outdoor adventure destinations, opting instead for “meet-up-style trips.” That, unfortunately, “left a lot of people behind,” Knobbe says. “But now, we are fully back in business, offering trips that include orientation, expertise, equipment, and transportation.”

People are “chomping at the bit to get out and connect not just with the outdoors, but with one another,” he said, and ORGT-led trips scheduled for fall are filling up fast. But, he added, those who want to venture out on their own should know that ORGT has equipment for rent.

“We rent backpacking gear, boats, sleeping bags – really everything one needs to put together their own adventure,” Knobbe says.

For novices, he recommends starting simple. “Know what you’re doing and be sure you have the basics,” he said. “ORGT has a lot of information like that, plus coaching is available around where beginners might go within a few hours of campus.”

STARTER BIKES

Jordan Lym, fourth-year industrial design student and president of Starter Bikes, wasn’t sure what he expected at their opening day this semester, but it wasn’t almost 150 people lined up to buy a bicycle.

“At the beginning of the year, we usually have 50 at most, so this was pretty crazy,” he recalls.

Starter Bikes serves as an “adoption shelter” of sorts for abandoned bicycles from around campus. The bike is tagged and if the owner doesn’t show up to claim it within 30 days, it is sold “for a quarter to half of what it would cost on the secondhand market,” Lym says.

The catch is, if repairs are required — which is often the case — the new owner must provide the labor. To help, Starter Bikes sells replacement parts for cost, provides tools, and coaches buyers through the repair process.

Inventory is always changing, and “the bikes can range from really poor condition to it just needs a simple lube on the chain and you’re done,” Lym says.

Adhering to Covid-19 protocols has been fairly painless, Lym says, because everyone can spread out on the bottom level of the CRC parking lot, where Starter Bikes is located.

Starter Bikes sees itself as an integral part of the cycling culture at Tech, which has a Bicycle Master Plan and has been designated a Gold Level Bicycle Friendly University.

“It’s rewarding to see people excited about bikes and learning to do their own maintenance,” Lym says. “We want to inspire people to ride, even after college, and the best way to do that is to give them confidence.”  

TRAILBLAZERS

For Trailblazers, it’s not enough to get out in nature — while they’re at it, they work to preserve it, promote it, and make it more accessible to all.

Emily Schroeder, a second-year business administration major and Trailblazers’ outreach chair and alternative break coordinator, is busy these days planning the group’s camping trip for fall break. She also leads tree tours around Tech’s campus arboretum.

Last year, the pandemic curtailed some of their activities and pushed their meetings onto BlueJeans, but “if anything,” Schroeder says, “an online format made the club more accessible.”

This year, they’re moving toward more in-person activities — doing things like pulling invasive plant species and working in community gardens — although they’re limiting events to 20 participants for now, just to ensure that everyone can distance according to their comfort level and feel safe.

“Students and staff should know that Trailblazers is an easy and fun way to get involved outdoors,” Schroeder says. “We have numerous events that are beginner-friendly and super hands-on. If you love caring for the environment and giving back to the community, Trailblazers is the organization for you.”

The grants will be used to fund education and training programs to help workers and employers recognize infectious diseases, including the novel coronavirus health hazards, and identify preventive measures for a safe workplace. In addition to hazard control, the training will include understanding workers’ rights and employer responsibilities under the OSHA Act of 1970.

Georgia Tech’s award will provide 1-hour and 6.5-hour Covid-19 training sessions to 475 employers and workers in the long-term healthcare and mortuary industries, through its Safety, Health, and Environmental Services (SHES) program. The SHES training will focus on infectious disease awareness and prevention. Existing materials will be used, and the training will be conducted in English and Spanish. 

Sean Castillo, a SHES industrial hygienist, will lead the project for Georgia Tech. Additionally, SHES will collaborate with University of Georgia professor Toni Miles to integrate stress management and bereavement skills and training materials to provide this work-group population the tools necessary to address the health implications of grief.

“We are thankful to be included in this OSHA funding to advance awareness and understanding of disease risk and measures to take to mitigate exposure,” said SHES Director, Paul Schlumper. “A healthy and safe Georgia workplace environment is essential for employers and employees alike. This funding will be a critical part of our efforts in our continuous fight against the pandemic.”

An offering of the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech’s economic development arm, SHES provides a broad range of occupational safety and health training, consulting services, and academic education to organizations in Georgia and the Southeast. In 2020, the SHES group helped employers remove nearly 36,000 workers from workplace hazards. SHES staff also identified nearly 1,500 workplace hazards in 2020.

The OSHA award includes “Workplace Safety and Health Training on Infectious Diseases, including the novel coronavirus” grants funded by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The grants derive from the Susan Harwood Workplace Safety and Health Training program, named in honor of the late Susan Harwood, former director of OSHA’s Office of Risk Assessment. In her 17-year OSHA career, she helped develop federal standards to protect workers from bloodborne pathogens, cotton dust, benzene, formaldehyde, asbestos, and lead in construction.

The program funds grants made available to nonprofit organizations, including community and faith-based groups, employer associations, labor unions, joint labor-management associations, colleges, and universities. Target trainees include small-business employers and underserved vulnerable workers in high-hazard industries. These grants are a critical element in supporting OSHA’s role in educating workers on their rights and assisting employers with providing safe workplaces.

Learn more about the 2021 Susan Harwood Training Grant Program recipients.

Now, they are recruiting 200 Georgia Tech students to participate in a six-week research study this semester sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). All study participants will receive $150.

Participants will be divided into two groups. One will continue to wear whatever mask they currently use, whenever they would usually wear one. The other group will be asked to wear a mask provided to them. Using a simple online Qualtrics form, both groups will log their daily activities, as well as any health symptoms that may arise during the six-week study.

“There were a lot of misconceptions early on in the pandemic with the role of masks,” said Sundaresan Jayaraman, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. “Our desire and hope is to dispel misconceptions around masks and show how effective and useful they are.”

But the project goes beyond function. The mask designed by Jayaraman and Sungmee Park, principal research scientist in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, is meant to be comfortable and stylish as well. They also want to learn how masks affect social and psychological elements of the wearer’s life.

“We want to get a feel for, ‘What is their view of masks? Does the mask affect their social life? Does it make a difference if the mask matches their outfit?’ Park said.

The study will include three phases. In the first two weeks, all participants will wear their own face coverings and continue their usual habits. The second two weeks will have half the cohort wear the masks provided by the research team. During the last two weeks, all participants will return to their usual habits — wearing their preferred mask, whether it’s the new one or not, and logging their activities and any symptoms.

The study is approved by Georgia Tech’s Institutional Review Board and is registered as a clinical trial with clinicaltrials.gov. Those interested in participating can learn more and sign up at maskstudy.gatech.edu. For questions, email maskstudy@gatech.edu.

Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences, is one of four 2021 recipients of the Blaise Pascal International Chair of Excellence. Weitz will be based at the Institute of Biology at the École Normale Supérieure (IBENS) in Paris. Previous winners of the Pascal Chair of Excellence include several Nobel Prize recipients. 

Weitz’s work in Paris, which will last one year, will involve research and educational components that will bring attention to Georgia Tech in the global science community. 

“Altogether, this integrative research and educational program will help connect initiatives developed in the College of Sciences with a broad, international community,” Weitz says. 

“The central aim of my project is to deepen understanding of the entangled fates of viruses and their hosts. In doing so, my research program spans viral ecology, evolution, and epidemiology. It will also be shaped by necessity, as a significant amount of my time — and that of my group — remains directed towards developing mathematical models, real-time dashboards, and public health-centered intervention tools to understand and mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2.“

Background on rapid testing, Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool

Weitz came up with the concept for the Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool, which measures the risk that one or more individuals infected with COVID-19 are present in an event of various sizes. Weitz, along with Clio Andris, assistant professor in the College of Design, and researchers from the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory, Duke University, and Stanford University developed the Tool’s website and dashboard. Weitz says the tool has helped more than 8 million visitors make tens of millions of risk estimates since its July 2020 launch.

Weitz is also part of the team that developed a rapid saliva-based asymptomatic surveillace testing program for the Georgia Tech community — a program credited with keeping infection levels low on campus.

“I am proud of having served, along with Greg Gibson, and many faculty and staff colleagues, as part of an interdisciplinary team to implement an asymptomatic testing program in the 2020-21 academic year in support of the Institute’s response efforts to protect the safety of our community – and support ongoing efforts to ensure that science and public health evidence shapes response policy at Georgia Tech and throughout the University System of Georgia,” Weitz says. Gibson is also a Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair, and was recently named a Regents’ Professor for his service in research and teaching.

“Moving ahead, the ongoing spread of the Delta variant, and potential spread of variants to come, necessitates a sustained response, bridging fundamental models with public-facing interventions,” Weitz adds. “To this end, I look forward to continuing to work with a network of colleagues to advance a rigorous, data-driven, and open approach to pandemic response, mitigation, and prevention. This will be a long-term effort and I have already begun the process to engage with international colleagues to share approaches and lessons learned.”

Joining international scientists in researching viruses — and how to beat them

The Blaise Pascal Research Chair award will aid in that effort. According to its website, the program “is intended to bring international researchers to French institutions in the Ile de France region (Paris and nearby) for year-long research stays, to facilitate research collaboration with French-based teams, and to support the training of the next generation of France-based junior researchers.” 

Weitz was selected as part of the 2019 cohort, which includes scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Glasgow. The 2020 cohort was postponed due to the pandemic.

Weitz will work with his colleagues at the Institute of Biology at the École Normale Supérieure to advance foundational understanding of viral infections of single cell microbes, including the study of infections that don’t necessarily lead to the death of the infected cell. “Latent (or chronic) infections of single-celled microbes can paradoxically provide benefits to both viruses and infected cells, yet the relationship can be tenuous,” Weitz says. “Understanding virus-microbe interactions on a continuum from antagonistic to mutualistic has implications for improving human health and the health of the environment.”

On the human health side, Weitz will be collaborating with Laurent Debarbieux of the Institut Pasteur in Paris to advance the use of bacteriophage for therapeutic treatment of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. Bacteriophages (also called phages) are viruses that exclusively infect and eliminate bacteria, and they are increasingly being used in therapeutic contexts given the potential for elimination of targeted pathogens. “I am currently the principal investigator, along with Professor Debarbieux, of a National Institutes of Health R01 grant on phage treatment of acute respiratory infections caused by bacterial pathogens. In the coming year, I intend to explore the potential to utilize phage to target pathogens that persist in chronic infections as part of complex microbiomes.”

Environment and education round out Weitz’s work in France

The environmental aspect of Weitz’s work in France will see him build on his group’s existing relationship with a global network of researchers to advance understanding of viral impacts on surface ocean ecosystems. This work, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation, aims to understand how viral infections of key bacteria in surface ocean ecosystems modulates the fate of microbes and ecosystem functioning, including global carbon and biogeochemical cycles.  

“Collaborations with researchers in Israel and in France will help expand study sites for our ongoing work to integrate mathematical models of viral dynamics, along with time-series observations collected in ocean-going research expeditions,” he says. 

The educational component revolves around two major initiatives, one of which could end up on Georgia Tech’s campus. In the fall, Weitz will be co-teaching a short course on quantitative viral dynamics “as part of an effort to characterize how viral infections at cellular scales transform the fate of cells, organisms, and populations. I hope to bring this course back to Georgia Tech as part of an effort to introduce short-form summer courses affiliated with the Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. Program, and the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection.”

Weitz is also in the process of developing a larger winter school and workshop for spring 2022, part of a joint project with the Q-Life Institute of Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL). “In many ways, the Q-Life Institute shares some of the same guiding principles of the Quantitative Biology Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech, and I look forward to learning more of their approach to integrate mechanisms, models, and data analytics into the principled study of living systems across scale.” The planned theme for the winter school/workshop will be viral dynamics, with more information to come later this fall.

Vaccination

The best way to prevent Covid-19 is to get vaccinated — and Georgia Tech is continuing to offer free, convenient Covid-19 vaccines this semester. Clinics will take place at McCamish Pavilion Aug. 16-20, Aug. 23-25, and Aug. 27, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Clinics will also take place Tuesday, Aug. 31, at Stamps Health Services, as well as Sept. 7-10 and Sept. 13-17, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., at Stamps Health Services. Book a vaccination appointment at mytest.gatech.edu.

Vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe illness from Covid-19. If you are unvaccinated and are exposed to someone with Covid-19, you will be subject to quarantine per current Georgia Department of Public Health guidelines.

To date, Georgia Tech has administered more than 32,000 doses to more than 17,000 individuals.

Testing

Asymptomatic surveillance testing will also continue to be offered during the fall semester for all students, faculty, and staff. For those new to campus or who did not participate previously, this saliva-based testing program takes just a few minutes per test and is available at multiple sites on campus. Georgia Tech faculty who are top researchers in their field created this simple, effective testing program to reduce transmission of Covid-19 in the campus community. The program has been an essential tool in keeping cases down throughout the past year. Everyone on campus, regardless of vaccination status, is invited and encouraged to test weekly. Learn more about how it works and find a testing site today.

No reservations are necessary — simply visit mytest.gatech.edu on your smartphone when you arrive at the test site. Results are delivered via email. Make weekly testing part of your routine — pick a day and time, and even go with a friend. (If you experience Covid-19 symptoms, seek symptomatic testing instead.) Regular testing can help identify potential clusters before they become outbreaks.

Facial Coverings

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently issued new interim guidance recommending the use of masks inside public buildings, even by fully vaccinated individual, as a precaution given the broad circulation of the highly contagious delta variant of the virus.

At Georgia Tech, everyone is encouraged to wear a mask or face covering while inside campus facilities. Vaccines and masks are highly effective at stopping the spread of Covid-19.

PPE

Similar to recent semesters, Infrastructure and Sustainability has supplied Housing with personal protective equipment (PPE) kits to distribute to students living on campus this fall. Each student will get a box of tissues and a kit containing a cloth face covering, hand sanitizer, and stickers. Additional PPE requests for students, faculty, or staff can be made through this online form.

Ventilation

Teams in Infrastructure and Sustainability have been hard at work since the beginning of the pandemic to help ensure a safe and healthy environment for the campus community. We know that good ventilation and air circulation can significantly reduce the risk of transmission in indoor settings. Facilities Management has upgraded air filters across campus to MERV-13 filters and is ensuring that all systems are operating optimally. As an added precaution, outside air ventilation rates have been increased where possible, and ultraviolet lights have been incorporated in air handling units across campus. An expert team of Georgia Tech faculty and students continue to monitor data captured from air quality sensors, which have been installed in various classrooms across campus.

Cleaning and Disinfecting

Hand sanitizer stands are stationed at every building entrance as well as in restrooms and classrooms. Disinfectant and wipes will continue to be made available in classrooms and for workspaces. Custodial Services also continues to clean and disinfect classrooms, common areas, and restrooms daily. However, heavily used restrooms located in buildings that operate 24 hours a day (such as Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons) will continue to be cleaned and disinfected four times a day.

Last August, teams from Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) and I&S collaborated with Professors Nga Lee (Sally) Ng, Thomas Orlando, and Loren Williams from the College of Sciences and College of Engineering to test several types of air purifying equipment to gauge their effectiveness in removing small air particles. Using a research-grade particle measuring instrument, data was collected over the course of two semesters to determine which air purifier was the most effective in removing particulate from the air.

Data captured from these aerosol studies guided the decision to purchase the BreathSmart 75i HEPA Air Purifier. The BreathSmart unit uses an ozone-safe ionizer to attract air particulate. This particulate is then captured in the high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter, thereby significantly reducing the levels of bacteria, allergens, and viruses in the air.

Evaluation of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in every building on campus is routine at Georgia Tech. I&S ensures indoor ventilation systems on campus meet the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers standards by performing the following preventative maintenance measures:

• Replacing ultraviolet bulbs in all applicable HVAC systems that are near the end-of-life stage.

• Using Merv-13 (Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value) filters as an upgrade to existing filters where the HVAC equipment allows.

• Increasing the fresh air intake and exchange rate in buildings when feasible.

Since the pandemic began, I&S has become accustomed to quickly adapting new mitigation measures. Facility directors and building managers were notified of the addition to the classrooms, and rollout began this week. Purifiers will be placed near the lectern or instructional area and turned on at the beginning of the instructional day and turned off at the end of the day. All packaging and waste from delivery and setup will be collected by the Office of Solid Waste and Recycling and sorted accordingly. Individual area shops will maintain the new units.

The collaboration with researchers and the organized team effort across multiple departments within I&S underscores the Institute’s commitment to the safety and well-being of the campus community.

“Sally Ng’s research students are continuing to monitor aerosol sensors placed in 19 classrooms across campus that provide real-time data on aerosol levels,” said Nazia Zakir, interim vice president of Infrastructure and Sustainability. “Fifteen additional sensors have been procured and will be installed this week to expand our sampling areas and provide additional data. I&S continues to partner with our valued researchers to implement Covid-19 mitigation measures on campus based on proven data and testing.”

For more information on building ventilation and filtration, visit facilities.gatech.edu/corona-vent.

"[Covid-19] was so disruptive to life and the economy that I realized we need to focus technology development on emerging health threats and planning for the next pandemic," Harris said.

Harris developed an interest in UV water disinfection while working for a UV disinfection company from 2011 to 2013. While there, he helped develop and author the patent for the world's first flowing water UV disinfection system and gained firsthand knowledge of the engineering mechanisms behind designing and powering such a device.  

Once Covid-19 became a widespread concern early last year, Harris was eager to put his knowledge of UV disinfection to work.  

"I knew something about UV [and] UV LEDs (light-emitting diodes), and it was a tool that I knew existed for infection," Harris recalled. "At the beginning of the pandemic, nobody knew what would happen, and I thought, 'This is a tool that can help.'"

Ultraviolet water disinfection systems are already used in a number of commercial and consumer settings — including drinking water disinfection, swimming pool and wastewater treatment, as well as in the pharmaceutical and food and beverage industries — where consumer safety is a top priority. The technology specifically uses UV-C light, which works by deactivating the genetic makeup of bacteria and viruses found in water, air, and hard surfaces, and thus prevents those pathogens from multiplying and causing infection.

According to Chelsea White, professor in the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, “supply chains don’t like disruptions—especially low-cost supply chains—and they’re all low cost.”

White is the Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech​.

“When demand is smooth and supply is balanced with demand, supply chains run well and inexpensively,” said White.

However, covid has caused dramatic drops and increases in demand, thus adding to supply disruptions. A rapid recovery in the United States has helped spike that dramatic increase.

In addition to dramatic demand flucuation, the supply side of this was also interrupted with shipping workers in China contracting covid, reducing the capacity to move goods out of major Chinese ports. With the dramatic rise in demand, congestion has been causing further delays even though the supply chains have plenty of capacity according to White.

White says some of this lack of smooth supply and demand is self-inflicted, “container ships have gotten much bigger, naturally causing surges all over the freight transportation system – ocean carriers, rail, and trucks. The tariffs kicking in caused ‘front loading,’ which we’re seeing now to ensure shelves will be stocked during the holidays at the end of the calendar year.”

“We’re finding out that the global freight transportation system is less resilient than originally thought,” said White. “My prediction for 2021 is there will be toys on the shelves for the Christmas holidays, but perhaps not as many toys and their prices may be higher.”

Chelsea White, along with other experts, were recently interviewed by CBS News in Atlanta, Georgia. You can view White’s interview and learn more about the supply chain crisis topic here: CBS46 News, Supply Chain Crisis Forcing Shoppers to Buy Early.

Led by Associate Professor Nga Lee “Sally” Ng in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, the team evaluated the effect of a hydroxyl radical generator in an office setting. Hydroxyl radicals react with odors and pollutants, decomposing them, and hydroxyl radical generators have been marketed to inactivate pathogens such as coronaviruses.

However, Ng’s study found that in the process of cleaning the air, the hydroxyl radicals generated by the device reacted with volatile organic compounds present in the indoor space. This led to chemical reactions that quickly formed organic acids and secondary organic aerosols that can cause health problems. Secondary organic aerosols is a major component of PM_2.5 (particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 2.5 mm), and exposure to PM_2.5 has been associated with cardiopulmonary diseases and millions of deaths per year.

The paper, “Formation of oxidized gases and secondary organic aerosol from a commercial oxidant-generating electronic air cleaner,” is published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.

While the pandemic has made various types of electronic cleaners increasingly popular, Ng explained that consumers are probably not aware of the secondary chemistry taking place in the air, with the pollutants generated not being directly emitted by the cleaning device itself.

“There are increasing concerns regarding the use of electronic air cleaners as these devices can potentially generate unintended byproducts via oxidation chemistry similar to that in the atmosphere,” Ng said.

Two types of air cleaning technologies are commonly used to remove indoor pollutants such as particles or volatile organic compounds and to inactivate pathogens: mechanical filtration and electronic air cleaners that generate ions, reactive species, or other chemical products such as photocatalytic oxidation, plasma, and oxidant-generating equipment (e.g., ozone, hydroxyl radical), among others.

Ng’s team selected a hydroxyl generator for the study to measure the oxygenated volatile organic compounds and the chemical composition of particles generated by the device in an office on the Georgia Tech campus.

While previous research reported pollutant formation from various electronic air cleaners (ionizers, plasma systems, photocatalytic systems with ultraviolet lamps, etc.), Ng believes that her team’s study is the first to monitor the chemical composition of secondary pollutants in both gas and particle phases during the operation of an electronic device that dissipates oxidants in a real-world setting.

Advanced instrumentation made Ng’s study possible. Gas-phase organic compounds were measured using a high-resolution time-of-flight chemical ionization mass spectrometer, purchased through a National Science Foundation major instrumentation grant. The study received support from Georgia Tech’s Covid-19 Rapid Response fund.

Ng noted that future studies on air cleaning technology should not be limited to inactivation of viruses or reduction of volatile organic compounds, but should also evaluate potential oxidation chemistry and the formation of unintended harmful gaseous and particulate chemicals.

“More studies need to be conducted on the effects of these devices in a variety of environments,” Ng said. “Electronic air cleaners greatly rose in prominence because of the pandemic, and now there are a lot of these devices out there. Millions of dollars are being spent on these devices by businesses and schools. The market is huge.

“Our results show that care must be taken when choosing an adequate and appropriate air cleaning technology for a particular environment and task,” she said.

Ng stressed the importance of future studies concerning the unintended effects of electronic purifiers, as these devices are not currently well regulated and do not have testing standards.

 “There needs to be more peer-reviewed scientific data on electronic air cleaners,” Ng said. “We hope that additional studies will lead to more government guidelines and regulation.”

CITATION: Joo et al., “Formation of oxidized gases and secondary organic aerosol from a commercial oxidant-generating electronic air cleaner.” (Environmental Science & Technology Letters) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.1c00416

About the Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

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

Media Relations Contacts: Jason Maderer (jmaderer3@gatech.edu) or Brad Dixon (braddixon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Brad Dixon

The study was conducted collaboratively by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina (UNC), and North Carolina State University (NCSU) and the findings published in the research journal JAMA Network Open. The study methods were based on a mathematical simulation originally developed at Georgia Tech. 

The study evaluated how many Covid-19 cases could be avoided in the Tar Heel State if more people get vaccinated and continue to follow mask and physical distancing guidelines. As of June 3, North Carolina has had 1 million reported cases of Covid-19 and more than 13,000 recorded deaths.

“The main takeaway from the paper is that while the increasing vaccine coverage in the U.S. has a positive impact, we are not really there yet. We still need to follow preventive measures such as mask wearing,” said contributing author Pinar Keskinocak, the William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

The caution is well founded when the researchers account for viral mutations, including the variant currently dominant in the United States that was initially identified in the UK and was associated with the surge in Michigan. There, as recently as May 2, the state averaged nearly 3,500 cases a day, according to a June 2 story in Bridge Michigan.

According to one scenario from the simulation, which was populated with data from the state of North Carolina, if 75% of the population gets fully vaccinated but continues to wear masks and socially distance,  there is a sustained decline down to very few new Covid-19 cases over a six-month period.  But, if only 25% of the population gets fully vaccinated and does not adhere to these non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), there could be a steady increase in daily Covid-19 cases, peaking around 8,000 before there is another decline.

Keskinocak points to the Georgia Covid-19 Vaccination Dashboard that tracks county-level differences in vaccination rates based on race as further evidence of the need for caution.

“Our dashboard shows that there has been high variability in the level of vaccination in different geographic regions and communities,” she said. “So even if we say over half of U.S. adults are vaccinated, it’s not uniform across the entire country. This further raises concerns about quickly lifting the NPIs.”

Julie Swann, department head, North Carolina State University’s Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and long-time research collaborator with Keskinocak, concurs. “Current variants are more infectious, and there are still locations with less than 30% of the population vaccinated.”

Swann adds that ongoing spread “endangers people now. It also increases the chance of a future mutation that could increase the risk even to people who are vaccinated.” 
Swann and Keskinocak are two of three researchers who co-founded Georgia Tech’s Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems in 2007, the year they developed a comprehensive, agent-based simulation model for pandemic flu, which has since been at the core of their modeling efforts for Covid-19. Over the years the two industrial engineers have collaborated closely to advance the model and make results available to decision makers as new pandemics emerged.   

“Julie and I have been working on infectious disease modeling for over a decade now. We had developed this agent-based model for pandemic flu and then when Covid-19 hit, Georgia Tech adapted that model to Covid-19 and shared it with Julie’s team at NC State who then modified the model to test additional scenarios and calibrated it with North Carolina data,” Keskinocak said.

“I am grateful that Pinar and I had spent such a long time trying to understand pandemics and improving the science behind them,” Swann added. “If we had not invested that time, we would not be able to have such a fast turnaround and the high participation level that we have this year.”

According to Keskinocak, the simulation model is extremely detailed – in essence, it recreated demographics of the population down to the state’s household size, and even individuals’ workflow, to give a clear picture of how people move from one geographic area to another. 

 “The model is flexible and can change based on the research question being asked, including the current research question, ‘What is the impact of lifting NPIs in increasing vaccine coverage?’”

Swann credited the close partnership with public health partners in Georgia and North Carolina, as well as their work under a grant funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, with the speed of developing models to test interventions during the pandemic. 

“It’s really key because sometimes we get additional ideas or research questions from the stakeholders with whom we interact,” Swann said.

Both researchers emphasized the critical role students played in advancing these models under tight deadlines while juggling coursework. Between them they estimate more than two dozen graduate students across the partnering institutions have been engaged in the Covid-19 modeling work since the pandemic began. The two also were integral in establishing a professional education HHSCM certificate program.

 # # #

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

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

Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent

The Georgia COVID-19 Vaccine Dashboard displays vaccination rates by race and county, and the differences between white and black vaccination rates, for the entire population and for the 65+ age group. The dashboard also has an interactive map as well as an interactive table, which allow users to compare and rank counties by vaccination rates, social vulnerability index, and other indicators of equity.

As of June 3, the dashboard indicated that vaccination rates among white residents are higher than those of Black residents in all large metro counties as well as around 70% of all Georgia counties. 

“There is a lot variability in different regions of the state, so we wanted to take a closer look from an equity perspective,” said Pinar Keskinocak, the William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), an interdisciplinary research center at Georgia Tech.

The Georgia Tech team, including Ph.D. students Akane Fujimoto and Tyler Perini, was able to set up the dashboard, working closely with partners at the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH). They shared early demos of the dashboard with both DPH and the Georgia Covid-19 Health Equity Council.

Robert Breiman, professor of global health, environmental health, and infectious diseases at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, considers the dashboard critical to the job facing the public health community both in targeting areas and population segments in the state with low vaccine coverage rates and understanding broader trends.

“The data contained within the vaccine equity dashboard are immensely important for Georgia. While figures like 70% to achieve herd immunity are often quoted, they are only meaningful if applied locally,” Breiman said. “Even if herd immunity targets are achieved nationally overall, where there are communities that have far lower coverage rates, the potential for virus transmission will persist. This dashboard will help to focus context-specific messaging programs and immunization campaigns so that we can close the doors on this pandemic.”

Georgia Tech’s vaccination dashboard results come as a new CDC MMWR report released at the end of May shows vaccination coverage was lower among adults living in counties with the highest social vulnerability. According to the CDC, disparities in county-level vaccination coverage by social vulnerability have increased as vaccine eligibility has expanded, especially in large suburban and nonmetropolitan counties.

Vaccination coverage among adults was lower among those living in counties with lower socioeconomic status and with higher percentages of households with children, single parents, and persons with disabilities.

According to CHHS Research Director Dima Nazzal, Georgia Tech’s dashboard shows high vaccination rates across both racial groups in some counties, and low rates in those below the poverty level, compared with the national average. Some counties currently have higher vaccination rates among white residents, including some of the large metro counties, while in a few counties the vaccination rate is higher among Black residents. The researchers acknowledge the multifaceted outreach efforts of DPH and local health departments to increase vaccination rates across the state and hope that the dashboard will support these efforts.

The research team is updating the dashboard as new data becomes available and finalizing a manuscript summarizing the key findings. They also are actively collecting data from other states to integrate into the dashboard.

***

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

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

Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent

• Consistently invents or improves tools, processes, or systems.
• Regularly evaluates situations, gathers data, and uses the data to identify opportunities for change.
• Constantly asks, “how can we do this better?” and “why do we do it that way?”
• Frequently considers non-traditional approaches.
• Regularly identifies problems but focuses on potential solutions.
• Proactively seeks feedback and involvement from constituents.

The winners of these awards, presented by Georgia Tech Human Resources, easily meet those criteria. 

In addition, the Spirit of Georgia Tech Award aims to honor employees who “inspire others with their presence and professionalism, creating an environment where others flourish and thrive.” That, say those who work with her, exactly describes School of Biological Sciences Academic Program Coordinator II Chung Kim, this year’s award winner.

One Giant Leap to fight the pandemic 

For the One Giant Leap Award — which identifies those who exhibit those behaviors on an Institute level — the winning team includes College of Sciences' Greg Gibson, Patton Distinguished Professor in the School of Biological Sciences, Director of the Center for Integrative Genomics, and member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience; and Joshua Weitz, Patton Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences.

Both Gibson and Weitz have been heavily involved in the Institute’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Gibson helped to set up the process for testing Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff, and Weitz and an interdisciplinary team created the Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool, an interactive map estimating Covid-19 risk levels for gatherings of different group sizes for every county in the United States and in the UK. Both Weitz and Gibson are on an Institute task force helping to create a safe return to campus in the fall.

The Testing Site Operations team, which shares the 2020 award, includes: Dale Allgood, Alfred Blue, Tokiki Brown, Anton Bryksin, Jenny Cotton, Greg Gibson, Sheree Gibson, Benjamin Holton, Jamison Keller, Brian Liu, True Merrill, Alex Ortiz, Miles Paca, Mike Shannon, Nicholas Speller, Sara Warner, Joshua Weitz, and JulieAnne Williamson.

The Spirit of Georgia Tech = Chung Kim’s support for faculty 

Lisa Redding, academic program coordinator II for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biosciences, School of Biological Sciences, says that in dozens of supporting comments from graduate students and faculty, “Chung was praised for her kindness, professionalism, and positive attitude. She is known for being knowledgeable, helpful, organized, and for following-up to make sure that problems are resolved.”

Redding says students echo those comments; Chung “cares about them as people, not just as students. She is said to exude positivity,” and goes out of her way to make students feel well-supported in their graduate education. They also praise her for taking time to greet them by name when they pass on campus. 

One Small Step for secure GT devices

For the One Small Step Award — for a team or individual who exhibits those behaviors on an individual or departmental level — the award goes to a team of College of Sciences Academic and Research Computing Services (ARCS) professionals who came up with a new way for enrolling and managing devices on campus networks. 

The following ARCS staffers, along with an Office of Information Technology (OIT) staff member, were honored for their work on the College of Sciences Asset and Endpoint Management Dashboard:

Steven Daniele, Academic & Research IT Senior Support Engineer, ARCS

Justin Filoseta, Director of IT, Research Scientist II, ARCS

Troy W. Hilley, Systems/IT Architect Principal, 

Jeffrey S. Lowe, Senior Web Developer, ARCS

Nguyen T. Nguyen, Support Engineer Lead, ARCS 

Arian Padron, Lead Support Engineer, ARCS

Michael Sheldon, Application Developer Manager, ARCS

Troy T. West, Information Security Engineer Lead, OIT

“The whole process of verifying inventory, enrolling devices with endpoint management, and signing the loan form, is now a simple and self-service workflow, available via the one-stop-shop of the College of Sciences Asset and Endpoint Management Dashboard,” says Lew Lefton, College of Sciences Assistant Dean for Information Technology and Associate Vice President for Research Computing. “This convenience increased the number of people who were in compliance with policy, and consequently reduced the likelihood of data disclosures and their associated risks.”

Keskinocak has focused her career on heath and humanitarian systems, including hospital operations management, infectious disease modeling, and evaluating the effectiveness of intervention strategies. Since the initial coronavirus outbreak, she has worked on developing a comprehensive agent-based disease spread model, in collaboration with ISyE Professor Nicoleta Serban and Ph.D. students Buse Eylul Oruc, Arden Baxter, and others. The model estimates the spread of the disease geographically and over time; resource needs such as hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators; and enables the team to evaluate the impact of various intervention scenarios to determine the best course of action.

In a recent CNN interview, Keskinocak discusses the impact of social distancing and current shelter in place orders. She cautions that a careful, gradual approach is needed as society plans to go back to work and social life, a balancing act between public health and the economy. She emphasizes the importance of the need to continue social distancing to slow down COVID-19 spread, flatten the curve, and save lives.

Now Keskinocak has been called on to lend her expertise to the Committee on Addressing Issues of Vaccine Distribution and Supply Chains to Advance Pandemic and Seasonal Influenza Preparedness and Response. This ad hoc committee formed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will examine “supply chain and distribution challenges related to vaccines and vaccinations during the COVID-19 response and explore their implications for pandemic and seasonal influenza.” 

Among other responsibilities, the committee will review pandemic vaccine manufacturing during the H1N1, SARS, Ebola, and Covid-19 outbreaks; identify critical gaps in vaccine delivery on both a regional and global basis; and examine how Covid-19 vaccine manufacture and distribution may have important implications for the manufacture and distribution of flu vaccines.

Closer to home, Keskinocak serves on Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera’s Recovery Task Force, a group of leaders from across campus formed to help guide the Institute’s eventual return to normal – and safe – operations. The task force has been modeling different return scenarios using guidelines set forth by federal and state public health agencies, as well as the University System of Georgia. In March, Institute leadership announced plans for the Fall 2021 semester to see resumption of fully normal operations.

The study measured the filtration efficiency of submicron particles passing through a variety of different materials. For comparison, a human hair is about 50 microns in diameter while 1 millimeter is 1,000 microns in size.

“A submicron particle can stay in the air for hours and days, depending on the ventilation, so if you have a room that is not ventilated or poorly ventilated then these small particles can stay there for a very long period of time,” said Nga Lee (Sally) Ng, associate professor and Tanner Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

The study was conducted during spring 2020, when the pandemic triggered a global shutdown of most institutions. Communities faced massive shortages of personal protective equipment, prompting many people to make their own homemade masks. Georgia Tech quickly set up the study since it already had “a great system for testing filtration efficiency using existing instruments in the lab,” Ng recalled.

The study’s findings were used to shape homemade face mask recommendations here last April, with the comprehensive study findings published on March 22 in the journal Aerosol Science and Technology.

In all, the researchers tested 33 different commercially accessible materials not limited to cloth fabrics, including single-layer woven fabrics such as cotton and woven polyester, blended fabrics, nonwoven materials, cellulose-based materials, materials commonly found and used in hospitals, and various filter materials.

“We learned there was a lot of variability in filtration performance even in the same type of material,” Ng said.  

"We found commercially available materials that provide acceptable levels of submicron particle rejection while still maintaining air flow resistance similar to a surgical mask,” said Ryan Lively, an associate professor and John H. Woody Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “These materials combine fabric fiber density, a maze-like structure, and fiber surface chemistry to effectively reject submicron particles.”

The best-performing materials for homemade masks were blackout drapery and sterilization wrap widely used for packing surgical instruments. Both materials are commercially available.

The researchers said people should avoid using filters such as a HEPA/MERV or vacuum bags unless they are certified to be fiberglass-free since often such filters on their own may release glass fibers that can be inhaled. Other materials to avoid for masks include loose-knitted material, batting fabric, felt, fleece, or shiny, reusable shopping bags.

Multilayered samples performed much better than single-layer samples, but people should pay attention to breathability. The two-layered and three-layered samples tested show an overall filtration efficiency of about 50% for submicron particles. Mask fit is also important since particles can easily escape through gaps at the nose or through the sides of the mask.

The analysis showed that properly fitted and multilayer masks reject 84% of particles expelled by a person when one person wears it. Two people donning these types of masks reduces particle transmission by 96%. 

A final takeaway of the research was the importance of universal mask wearing. 

“The best way to protect ourselves and others is to reduce exhaled particles at the source, and the source is our face,” Ng said, adding, “That really gets amplified when everyone starts wearing masks.”

She expressed optimism that the findings will motivate people to more widely embrace mask wearing if they are sick and need to be in public.

“Not everyone understands the importance of airborne virus transmission, and the importance of wearing a mask,” she said. “I hope that the practice will continue to help reduce the release of these viral particles into the environment and help protect others.”

In addition to Ng and Lively, the researchers included Taekyu Joo, Masayuki Takeuchi, Fobang Liu, Matthew P. Rivera, and Bahnisikha Dutta from Georgia Tech; Joy Barr and Eric Parker from theClubhou.se; Emily S. Blum and John H. Tipton from the Global Center for Medical Innovation; and Julia Varnedoef from Cobb County (Georgia) Schools.

The work was supported by the Center for the Science and Technology of Advanced Material and Interfaces (STAMI) at Georgia Tech.

CITATION: Joo, Taekyu, et al, “Evaluation of Particle Filtration Efficiency of Commercially Available Materials for Homemade Face Mask Usage.” (Aerosol Science and Technology, 2021) https://doi.org/10.1080/02786826.2021.1905149.
***
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

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

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181

Media Relations Contact: Anne Wainscott-Sargent (404-435-5784) (asargent7@gatech.edu) or Tracey A. Reeves (tracey.reeves@gatech.edu)

The two studies address very different scientific issues, but they are both authored by College of Sciences faculty — and are the two studies that share the 2021 Best Faculty Paper Award, presented by the Georgia Tech Chapter of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society, during its annual end-of-year honors. 

Joshua Weitz, Patton Distinguished Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and founding director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program, is one of two corresponding authors of “Realtime, interactive website for US-county-level COVID-19 event risk assessment”, published in Nature Human Behavior in November 2020. The paper's co-author and project collaborator, who shares the award with Weitz, is Clio Andris, assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning in the College of Design, with a joint appointment at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.

Four other researchers and experts from the School of Biological Sciences — Aroon Chande, Quan Nguyen, Stephen J. Beckett, and Troy Hilley — also worked on the study.

The ability for the Covid-19 Risk Assessment Planning Tool website to drill down to the county level for the entire country was introduced in July 2020, during the height of the pandemic. “We have developed an interactive county-level map of the risk that one or more individuals may have Covid-19 in events of different sizes,” Weitz explained, at the time. 

“The issue of understanding risks associated with gatherings is even more relevant as many kinds of businesses, including sports and universities, are considering how to re-open safely.”

Since the website launched last summer, it has been featured in over 150 external stories and interviews by media outlets on the pandemic. The website was developed in collaboration with Andris’ lab and with researchers from the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory, a public/private partnership between Georgia Tech, IHRC Inc., and ASRT Inc.

For David Zeb Rocklin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, it was the intersection of art and science — or rather, using the math in origami principles to enhance science — that led to his paper and latest honor from Sigma Xi.

"Hidden symmetries generate rigid folding mechanisms in periodic origami", published in November 2020, appeared in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

The paper, which Rocklin co-authored with graduate student James McInerney, “gives us access to a lot of mathematical technology,” Rocklin says, by looking at origami sheets in a new way, which could lead to even more practical scientific and engineering applications for origami. 

“I’m a soft matter physics guy, so I study how the geometric structure of a system controls how it changes shape when you push on it,” Rocklin says. “On the one hand it’s something you can hold in your hand and feel it and see it moving in real space, but on the other hand, it embodies and obeys these really austere algebraic structures.” 

Since 1947, the Georgia Tech Chapter of Sigma Xi has annually honored faculty and students for their research at the annual Spring Awards Banquet. The Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Research Awards are made possible by the support of the Georgia Tech Research Corporation and the Ferst Foundation.  

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, founded in 1886 at Cornell University, is the honor society of scientists and engineers that recognizes scientific achievement. Its mission is to enhance the health of the research enterprise, foster integrity in science and engineering, and promote the public’s understanding of science for the purpose of improving the human condition.

Turns out, Cassie Mitchell already was on the case.

“We’d been working for a few weeks on something, since the White House started asking data scientists to do analysis on old SARS data, but also on the emerging Covid dataset that was being updated weekly,” said Mitchell, assistant professor in Coulter BME who specializes in using data to forecast disease. “We had already started adapting our text-mining architecture for Covid-19.”

Text mining is what it sounds like: an artificial intelligence process that involves analyzing a lot of existing text for useful data that could lead to new discoveries. Mitchell’s lab received a $10,000 seed grant to use her tools to dig through millions of peer-reviewed articles, seeking hidden patterns that would be relevant to Covid-19 — perhaps identifying patient risk factors or even drugs that might be repurposed to treat the virus.

Using Covid-19 as a test case, the lab adapted a process called link prediction, an important tool in artificial intelligence and machine learning that predicts the existence of a link between two entities. It’s kind of like filling in the blanks after identifying the blanks.

Link prediction is at play when your social media platform suggests a new friend for you, or when an online marketplace predicts which customers will buy what products.

“Though it’s used for other things, we adapted it to biomedical text — as you might imagine, a biomedical application is more difficult than dealing with customer segmentation data,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell’s team excavated information from the articles and built a “knowledge graph, or network that links symptoms, drugs, antecedent diseases, genes, proteins, and much more to Covid-19 or similar coronaviruses,” she said.

The team ranked relationships with the coronavirus to find the most promising research paths, with the intent of expediting translational research. They highlighted thousands of potential repurposed drugs for further research.

“The process can be applied to any emergent or poorly understood biomedical issue for a quicker and more diligent meta-analysis of research, compared to existing methods,” said Kevin McCoy, a third-year BME student who was technical team lead of the lab’s Covid-19 study and co-authored a journal article on the work that’s currently under review.

“The most important finding is that machine learning techniques can be used to rapidly ingest and summarize biomedical literature to generate insightful and accurate summaries of the current research.”

Mitchell said the grant primarily supported student researchers, who took part in several conferences during the year in addition to writing their study.

And what started as a modest seed grant could yield results for years to come — the data mining technology, “which we intend to use for other biomedical issues,” Mitchell said — and a new course for McCoy’s future.

“I quickly fell in love with the applications of data science to biomedical engineering,” McCoy said.

He joined Mitchell’s lab in Summer 2020 and is now looking at Ph.D. programs in statistics and machine learning, “to continue learning about and using their respective techniques to solve pressing biomedical problems.”

“Watching the pandemic unfold, I felt helpless about improving the situation, so I looked for a way to give back to the community while also advocating for change,” Kandarpa said. He discovered TCC through social media and was motivated to apply for the executive board because he resonated with the mission to raise awareness of the pandemic’s impact. TCC launched in two phases, first as an Instagram account in April 2020 and then as an organization with a full executive board in August. Now, they are working toward obtaining 501(c)(3) status as a non-profit.

Most of TCC’s executive board are college students at the University of Georgia. Together, the team appeals to their own demographic by using Instagram to spread crucial information and awareness of service activities. With over 2,000 followers, the @thecovidconversation Instagram account posts colorful – and more importantly – informative and accurate infographics. Some focus on reporting Covid-19 case numbers and news; others promote campaigns such as “Mask to School,” which encouraged safe behaviors while living on campus. They also post about ways to celebrate and enjoy holidays while still staying socially distanced.

Why does the organization want to raise awareness for Covid-19 specifically among their peers?

“We felt that Gen Z hadn’t been taking the pandemic seriously enough,” Kandarpa explained. “Gen Z isn't the only age group that faltered in how they treated the pandemic, but it's one that we could address the most easily.” Accordingly, TCC targets younger people who are contributing to the spread of the coronavirus by providing a convenient way to stay informed.  

“Throughout the pandemic, I was disappointed with how there was a lot of false information going around,” Kandarpa said. “It's hard to find a common place where you can get all the information that you need in a way that's digestible.” Although he enjoys reading scientific articles and staying up-to-date with the news, he recognizes that most people do not have the time, and that’s where TCC is bridging the gap. Recently, they have posted infographics summarizing President Biden's 200-page Covid-19 response plan, as well as a comparison of the Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Moderna vaccines.  

Kandarpa’s first role at TCC was director of Georgia outreach, in which he helped organize two fundraisers. The success of their first fundraiser was an exciting achievement: “I've never led such a large-scale effort before,” he said. “We met our goal of $150 within 30 minutes of opening [our fundraiser].” Almost $1000 was raised, enabling them to purchase 4000 masks for Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center. A second fundraiser raised $450 for Bigger Vision, a homeless shelter in Athens.

With his current role as chief of staff, Kandarpa is interested in improving the organization’s operational efficiency as well as developing a long-term strategic plan as they work towards becoming a non-profit. He contributes his unique perspective and skills as an ISyE major to TCC’s multi-disciplinary team of students from majors such as biology, computer science, public policy, and finance. “It is interesting to see how all of us with diverse backgrounds have the same passion for public health, and it is fun to work with them,” he noted.

Since the beginning of his college career, Kandarpa has always sought ways to be involved with public health. At Georgia Tech, he serves as the chair of Health and Well-being for the Student Government Association and as the secretary of the Undergraduate Public Health Association. He also previously served as a student assistant for the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. These experiences have taught him about communication, organization, and leadership – important skills that prepared him for his roles at TCC. Furthermore, being connected with other student leaders on campus has allowed him to share infographics that TCC creates with a wider audience.

Kandarpa’s experience pushing these boundaries has solidified his desire to pursue a career in public health. He originally joined Georgia Tech as a pre-med neuroscience major but switched to ISyE in the middle of his first semester. Through talking to other ISyE majors, he has learned about the importance of industrial engineering in improving the efficiency of public health and is interested in shaping a more scientific approach to policy making.

“I want to be able to see how [modeling and simulation] can be better utilized when we make policy decisions on public health,” he said. “I want to use ISyE skills in shaping our global health policies, making sure that we're better prepared [for another pandemic].” This summer, he will be interning with the Strategic Planning Division of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Further on in his career, he would like to pursue a master’s degree in public health.

For Kandarpa, what started out as a passion for public health plus a yearning to do more has turned into an organization that reaches thousands.

“The feeling that we are contributing to the betterment of not only the local community, but also the global community, is so rewarding in the time of the [Covid-19 pandemic],” Kandarpa said.

Shelley Wunder-Smith and ISyE Communications Assistant Taylor Hunter interviewed the student featured in this article; Communications Assistant Grace Oberst wrote the story.

The study measured the filtration efficiency of submicron particles passing through a variety of different materials. For comparison, a human hair is about 50 microns in diameter while 1 millimeter is 1,000 microns in size.

“A submicron particle can stay in the air for hours and days, depending on the ventilation, so if you have a room that is not ventilated or poorly ventilated then these small particles can stay there for a very long period of time,” said Nga Lee (Sally) Ng, associate professor and Tanner Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

The study was conducted during spring 2020, when the pandemic triggered a global shutdown of most institutions. Communities faced massive shortages of personal protective equipment, prompting many people to make their own homemade masks. Georgia Tech quickly set up the study since it already had “a great system for testing filtration efficiency using existing instruments in the lab,” Ng recalled.

The study’s findings were used to shape homemade face mask recommendations here last April, with the comprehensive study findings published on March 22 in the journal Aerosol Science and Technology.

In all, the researchers tested 33 different commercially accessible materials not limited to cloth fabrics, including single-layer woven fabrics such as cotton and woven polyester, blended fabrics, nonwoven materials, cellulose-based materials, materials commonly found and used in hospitals, and various filter materials.

“We learned there was a lot of variability in filtration performance even in the same type of material,” Ng said.  

"We found commercially available materials that provide acceptable levels of submicron particle rejection while still maintaining air flow resistance similar to a surgical mask,” said Ryan Lively, an associate professor and John H. Woody Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “These materials combine fabric fiber density, a maze-like structure, and fiber surface chemistry to effectively reject submicron particles.”

The best-performing materials for homemade masks were blackout drapery and sterilization wrap widely used for packing surgical instruments. Both materials are commercially available.

The researchers said people should avoid using filters such as a HEPA/MERV or vacuum bags unless they are certified to be fiberglass-free since often such filters on their own may release glass fibers that can be inhaled. Other materials to avoid for masks include loose-knitted material, batting fabric, felt, fleece, or shiny, reusable shopping bags.

Multilayered samples performed much better than single-layer samples, but people should pay attention to breathability. The two-layered and three-layered samples tested show an overall filtration efficiency of about 50% for submicron particles. Mask fit is also important since particles can easily escape through gaps at the nose or through the sides of the mask.

The analysis showed that properly fitted and multilayer masks reject 84% of particles expelled by a person when one person wears it. Two people donning these types of masks reduces particle transmission by 96%. 

A final takeaway of the research was the importance of universal mask wearing. 

“The best way to protect ourselves and others is to reduce exhaled particles at the source, and the source is our face,” Ng said, adding, “That really gets amplified when everyone starts wearing masks.”

She expressed optimism that the findings will motivate people to more widely embrace mask wearing if they are sick and need to be in public.

“Not everyone understands the importance of airborne virus transmission, and the importance of wearing a mask,” she said. “I hope that the practice will continue to help reduce the release of these viral particles into the environment and help protect others.”

In addition to Ng and Lively, the researchers included Taekyu Joo, Masayuki Takeuchi, Fobang Liu, Matthew P. Rivera, and Bahnisikha Dutta from Georgia Tech; Joy Barr and Eric Parker from theClubhou.se; Emily S. Blum and John H. Tipton from the Global Center for Medical Innovation; and Julia Varnedoef from Cobb County (Georgia) Schools.

The work was supported by the Center for the Science and Technology of Advanced Material and Interfaces (STAMI) at Georgia Tech.

CITATION: Joo, Taekyu, et al, “Evaluation of Particle Filtration Efficiency of Commercially Available Materials for Homemade Face Mask Usage.” (Aerosol Science and Technology, 2021) https://doi.org/10.1080/02786826.2021.1905149.
***
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

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

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181

Media Relations Contact: Anne Wainscott-Sargent (404-435-5784) (asargent7@gatech.edu) or Tracey A. Reeves (tracey.reeves@gatech.edu)

It’s a milestone achievement for the students and the Capstone program in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering: this is the first time Capstone teams have presented at a conference as part of the poster sessions or podium talks.

These weren’t student design competition presentations; the students shared their advances as part of the professional program alongside other researchers.

“This is a wonderful opportunity that allowed our students to showcase their innovative work to a broader audience,” said James Rains, who leads the Coulter BME Capstone program and is a professor of the practice. “This audience was composed of clinicians and researchers, who are passionate about clinical and translational science. Our students appreciated the ability to tell their story to a group of individuals who can provide relevant feedback and insights.”

One of the breakout sessions featured a presentation from a team that created a prototype plasma viscometer to rapidly test the viscosity of blood plasma in Covid-19 patients. Current devices are expensive or require too much time to process samples. Their solution uses light to measure fluid flow, which is proportional to viscosity.

“It was a really rewarding experience, because I was able to present and get feedback from top scientists and researchers within the BME and clinical science field,” said Lichao Tang, one of the three team members who presented the device. All graduated with their bachelor’s degrees in the fall. “It was also valuable to learn about the research on Covid-19 and infectious disease from the other presenters during my session.”

Another team presented their device to measure blast exposure of mortarmen in the U.S. Army — work that won them the first-place award among nearly 70 posters in the translational research session.

Other poster presentations included devices to improve early detection of preeclampsia in rural Ethiopia; better model blood vessels and simulate their behavior in specific patients; regulate infants’ body temperature and prevent hypothermia in Ethiopia; simulate brain mapping to help train neurosurgeons; and improve treatment for cardiac arrest patients by improving blood flow to the brain.

It’s a wide range of applications that represents just a slice of the projects that students tackle each semester. Rains said he hopes the invitation to show off the students’ work at the conference will spark new opportunities for future teams.

“This allows us to create new connections who will potentially participate in the near future in our Capstone program. These posters and talks demonstrate the potential of partnering with a team of Georgia Tech engineers to jointly develop a solution to a challenge that professionals have identified or encountered,” Rains said.

Rains said the Capstone teams applied to participate in the conference with the encouragement of Andrés García, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and one of the lead planners of the conference. The conference was organized by the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (Georgia CTSA), a longtime sponsor of Coulter BME Capstone.

“It is wonderful that Georgia CTSA helps support our students’ education and offers avenues like this for our students to engage in scholarly endeavors beyond the classroom,” Rains said.

The virtual event marked the 20^th year of the WST lecture series. Kossek’s keynote was followed by a panel discussion with Institute faculty members Drs. Terry Blum, Kim Cobb, Kaye Husbands Fealing, and Bonnie Ferri.

Dr. Mary Frank Fox, ADVANCE Professor with Ivan Allen College’s School of Public Policy and WST co-director said, “The WST Distinguished Lecture brings to Georgia Tech eminent leaders who have supported women, science, and technology through research, policy, and initiatives. Dr. Kossek exemplifies this tradition.”

Kossek recently led the writing of a committee report for the National Academies of Science on the effects of Covid-19 for women in academic science. The report, which was issued the same day as the lecture, emphasized Covid-19’s trends, individual coping styles, organizational practices, and opportunities for policy innovation and research. “I hope we can think about -- especially now with the pandemic -- how we can make cultures and work-place structures support healthy living on and off the job, and what we can learn from Covid,” she said.

The study surveyed over 200 national universities on work-life issues and found that the pandemic did not create inequity, but rather magnified it for women, especially reducing chances for faculty women to attain tenure. Some of the issues women faced, the survey reported, were difficulties balancing work and home-life duties -- such as assisting children with virtual learning -- while working from home.

“What we found in the STEM women we interviewed and through comments on the survey is that many women felt really challenged in managing not just workload, but professional and personal identity."

View Kossek’s presentation at: https://youtu.be/_r0XEpkdih0.

The virtual event marked the 20^th year of the WST lecture series. Kossek’s keynote was followed by a panel discussion with Institute faculty members Drs. Terry Blum, Kim Cobb, Kaye Husbands Fealing, and Bonnie Ferri.

Dr. Mary Frank Fox, ADVANCE Professor with Ivan Allen College’s School of Public Policy and WST co-director said, “The WST Distinguished Lecture brings to Georgia Tech eminent leaders who have supported women, science, and technology through research, policy, and initiatives. Dr. Kossek exemplifies this tradition.”

Kossek recently led the writing of a committee report for the National Academies of Science on the effects of Covid-19 for women in academic science. The report, which was issued the same day as the lecture, emphasized Covid-19’s trends, individual coping styles, organizational practices, and opportunities for policy innovation and research. “I hope we can think about -- especially now with the pandemic -- how we can make cultures and work-place structures support healthy living on and off the job, and what we can learn from Covid,” she said.

The study surveyed over 200 national universities on work-life issues and found that the pandemic did not create inequity, but rather magnified it for women, especially reducing chances for faculty women to attain tenure. Some of the issues women faced, the survey reported, were difficulties balancing work and home-life duties -- such as assisting children with virtual learning -- while working from home.

“What we found in the STEM women we interviewed and through comments on the survey is that many women felt really challenged in managing not just workload, but professional and personal identity."

View Kossek’s presentation at: https://youtu.be/_r0XEpkdih0.

Getting Started Socializing

It can already be difficult to make friends in college, and that can be worsened by students feeling isolated during the pandemic.

“Feeling shy or experiencing some level of social awkwardness is nothing to feel ashamed about, and for many students, the pandemic has amplified those feelings,” said Tiffiny Hughes-Troutman, director of the Center for Assessment, Referral, and Education (CARE). “Start by seeking out environments that suit you.”

Some suggestions for how to do this include attending residence hall events for students who live on campus, as well as developing social media networks. Volunteering can also help students make friends while giving back to their local communities, and pen pal networks are regaining popularity in light of the pandemic.

If you know someone is new to campus, or could use a connection, ask them to join you to do something outdoors. This, too, can be uncomfortable — but everyone needs a friend, especially these days.

You can also find student organizations across a wide variety of topics on Engage. Many organizations are operating fully online, while others have occasional in-person events as well. View a list of upcoming events from student organizations here. Once you’ve found someone to hang out with, whether they’re a new friend or an old one, there are plenty of ways to have socially distanced “friend dates.”

Sporting Events

Several Georgia Tech sports are in the middle of their spring seasons, and many of them are competing outdoors. Students can attend baseball, softball, track and field, and tennis events for free. The 8-3 baseball team is currently climbing after taking down the ACC’s top-seeded Louisville; their next home series runs March 12 – 14 against Pittsburgh.

Volleyball also just started its 10-match spring season. The Yellow Jackets finished the fall semester ranked 17th in the country and look to continue their streak and lock in their first NCAA tournament berth since 2009. Both men’s and women’s basketball are also looking to continue their postseason runs, with the men playing in the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament on Thursday. View the full schedule of sports at ramblinwreck.com.

Atlanta’s Outdoor Spaces

Atlanta also boasts several outdoor areas for people to enjoy the weather away from others. On campus, Tech Green, Burger Bowl Field, and the new EcoCommons are some of the many places to hang out. Off campus, places such as the BeltLine and Piedmont Park are easily within driving or biking distance. If you’re looking for a little more adventure, visit one of the Atlanta area’s many hiking trails.

Georgia Tech Arts Skyline Series

For those missing live performances, Georgia Tech Arts is here to help. From March 26 to May 18, there are 25 performances scheduled for the outdoor stage being built on the W21 parking lot at the intersection of Ferst Drive and State Street, ranging from the Atlanta Ballet to student musicians. Tickets are on sale now; click here to learn more and view the full event schedule.

“There are so many ways to socialize safely. Strong social connections and friendships support mental well-being, improve sleep, and strengthen our immune systems,” Hughes-Troutman said. Learn more about how to stay safe while socializing here.

View more events taking place on or around Georgia Tech's upcoming well-being days.

• Support participation in campus activities that promote a sense of community and well-being.
• Schedule meetings for 45 or 50 minutes, allowing for transitional breaks between tasks.
• Encourage walking meetings or meetings held outdoors.
• Invite team members to return to campus for lunches on Tech Green and/or campus walks.
• Be intentional in your meeting planning. If information can be shared over chat or phone, consider eliminating the need for another virtual meeting.
• Ensure employees set boundaries for themselves and understand expectations of when to return emails or texts. Just because our computers may be with us at home doesn’t mean we have to be working on them at all times.

In addition to encouraging our employees to take time for themselves, focus on their well-being, and maintain boundaries, it's also a great opportunity to remind everyone of the tools and support mechanisms Georgia Tech Human Resources provides for all employees. 

As the greater-Atlanta school systems continue to vacillate between in-person and online instruction, we encourage employees and people leaders to regularly visit our Working through Covid-19 site for resources and fun-family suggestions as employees manage not only their work responsibilities, but facilitate instruction for their children. In addition, many Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) provide resources and supportive communities for employees coping during the pandemic. Employees can contact our Employee Engagement department receive more information about these opportunities and connect with campus leaders in these spaces.

GTHR Employee Engagement’s department provides resources that cover the spectrum of our five dimensions of well-being: Social, Emotional, Physical, Professional, and Spiritual. Employees can choose from a myriad of topics in our monthly Be Well series or peruse the many resources offered through the University System of Georgia (USG). The USG has also partnered with Kepro to provide a comprehensive Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to Georgia Tech employees and their families. Not only does the EAP provide counseling services, employees can also find an abundance of work-life resources and training opportunities for employees and people leaders. Currently, only a small portion of our employees are taking advantage of this invaluable resource, so we encourage you to promote this serviceto your employees. 

During this time of transition, we recognize workplace disputes may arise. In addition to utilizing effective communication skills, contacting our Employee Relations team, or submitting a concern via EthicsPoint, employees can request assistance from the Georgia Tech Ombuds. The Georgia Tech Ombuds Office is an impartial entity that provides consultations for all Georgia Tech faculty, staff, and students seeking workplace problem solving resources. The Ombuds follows the guiding principles of confidentiality, neutrality, informality, and independence.

Recently, though, Georgia Tech researchers have developed even more ways for members of the Georgia Tech community to help slow the spread.

One project in the works is in coordination with the National Institutes of Health RADx initiative. This program is designed to evaluate novel high-throughput, cost-effective tests, and positive samples are needed for validation. Surveillance testing participants will be able to opt in to provide an additional sample at the campus testing site in the Couch Building. Identities are not tied to samples. To participate, visit the Couch Building testing site during regular operating hours and let the testing staff know you’d like to participate.

In the fall, Georgia Tech started using NOVID, an exposure notification app. The app has been enhanced since the fall and now runs in the background on both Androids and iPhones, so users need only open it once and not fully turn it off for it to work. Without collecting any personally identifiable information from its users, the app uses ultrasound and Bluetooth technology to keep track of who each person has been in contact with. Users are alerted if someone they’ve been in contact with tests positive, enabling them to judge their risk of exposure and whether to self-isolate. Learn more about NOVID here.

In addition, the COVIDvoice project lets people anonymously submit voice recordings and know immediately if they may have Covid-19 or not. Bruce Walker, professor in the School of Psychology and School of Interactive Computing, is leading the project. COVIDvoice’s algorithms are designed to detect subtle changes in the body’s speech systems sometimes caused by the virus.

Users are encouraged to submit to COVIDvoice regularly to help improve the program’s algorithms, which are already approximately 80% accurate.

Meanwhile, David Ku, Regents Professor and Lawrence P. Huang Chair in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, helped create Count Covid, an anonymous survey that allows people to track any potential Covid-19 symptoms they may have. Respondents also provide their zip code to contribute to time-based displays that show the spread of Covid-19 in individual communities.

Finally, the American Red Cross is always looking for blood donations, especially now. Blood drives will be on campus approximately once a month; you can see the next one on the GT American Red Cross Club’s calendar or find another one here. Donations are now being screened for Covid-19 antibodies. Donors will be able to learn the results of their antibody test and whether they may have had an asymptomatic case without knowing it.

While students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to participate in these new opportunities to help slow the spread as much as possible, they are no substitute for regular testing, masking, and social distancing. Those who test positive off campus should report their results to Stamps Health Services. Learn more about those initiatives here.

Called Rotations, the web-based platform was selected on Jan. 28 as the winning concept for Hack Covid-19, a student hackathon organized by Emory Global Health Institute and Georgia Tech. The winning team includes two Georgia Tech computer science (CS) majors.

Rotations is an automated schedule generator that helps mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in shared workspaces. According to its developers, the tool uses current health and safety data to auto-generate schedules, as well as suggested seating layouts, optimized to keep returning in-person employees and students safe.

“We put ourselves in the place of an office manager or school administrator and asked, ‘What kind of tool could make returning to in-person functions as easy as possible and how could we minimize the spread of the virus as much as possible at the same time?’” said Arvin Poddar, Rotations team member and third-year Georgia Tech CS major. 

The schedules and seating charts output by the platform are customizable based on variables unique to a particular workspace. These can include a maximum number of people, square footage of a room, ventilation, and other factors. These data points are also used to calculate a safety score that integrates available research resources.

“We are trying to change the game by looking at the research and seeing how floor layouts can truly be optimized with data,” said Merissa Coleman, team member and a third-year human health major from Emory University.

Another feature that helps mitigate the spread of the virus is the platform’s ability to automatically stagger arrival times for in-person employees. This helps to minimize contact and ensure proper social distancing. If someone does report contracting Covid-19, the platform will automatically alert all of those that were in recent contact with that person.

“We wanted the product to be applicable to both management and employees. So, along with being easy to use, we wanted to be able to give peace of mind to those returning to the office and the classroom,” said Coleman.

As the winners of the Hack Covid-19 competition, Coleman, Poddar, and teammate Ryan Cobelli – also a Georgia Tech CS major – receive a $3,500 cash prize and earn a spot in the CREATE-X Startup Launch program this summer. CREATE-X is Georgia Tech’s entrepreneurial accelerator for students that helps develop projects like Rotations into business startups.

“As we know, Covid is changing every day and the situation is evolving. So, we are really looking forward to developing this product into something that people can really use,” said Poddar.

A primary feature that the team would like to develop while participating in the Startup Launch program is direct integration of the Rotations tool. Being able to directly connect with systems that schools and businesses already use will do away with the current need for administrators to manually upload .csv files to develop rosters.

Beyond this, Poddar sees potential for even more integration with existing systems.

“Ultimately, maybe Rotations doesn’t even need to be its own stand-alone platform. Maybe it could be directly integrated into an existing HR system or learning management platform,” said Poddar.

A team of students from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering wants to make that easier for people to practice as they return to working in-person. The team’s idea was one of the best to emerge from the Emory and Georgia Tech HACK Covid-19 competition in late January.

Team GoodVibes developed a bracelet to reinforce proper distancing — or prompt users with other customizable reminders. Their idea won an honorable mention from the hackathon’s judges.

“We wanted to design an affordable, accessible, and practical device that helped employees transition safely to an in-person setting,” said team member and third-year BME student Rebecca Jeltuhin. “We chose to create a bracelet due to its simple and subtle nature, along with the possibility of quickly bringing it to market.”

The bracelet would work in conjunction with others — any time a wearer encounters another user within a 6-foot radius, it would vibrate to remind both individuals to increase the space between them. Jeltuhin said they also want to  build in the ability to gently prompt others — to help avoid the uncomfortable situation of having to ask someone to move farther away.

“The bracelet has a manual override button. When pressed, it will activate the vibration feature for everyone in a 6-foot radius in case someone is not following social distancing protocol,” said Mai Nguyen, another member of the team and also a third-year biomedical engineering student. “This subtly reminds people to maintain proper distancing without calling them out.”

The team envisions including a dial to adjust the distance for alerts even closer than 6 feet, if a user wished. They’ve also discussed adding a long-press function to the button that businesses could customize, using it to send vibration patterns as reminders to put on a mask or sanitize hands, for example.

The GoodVibes team included fourth-year biomedical engineering student Varun Mosur and third-year students Jeltuhin, Nguyen, Matthew Nuese, and Anna Williams, who’ve worked together since their sophomore design class. They also recruited Emeline Ruvinskiy, a fourth-year undergraduate in the Goizueta Business School at Emory, to bring her business skills to the table.

The hackathon was a collaboration of the Emory Global Health Institute, CREATE-X at Georgia Tech, and Coulter BME. 130 students on 29 teams competed to develop products to help schools and businesses safely reopen. Top prize went to Team Rotations, a digital platform to allow schools and businesses to quickly create safe seating charts and schedules to minimize exposure to Covid-19.

“Our hackathons with Emory allow students from both schools to engage, develop ideas and create solutions that can later be commercialized through a startup incubator like CREATE-X,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, founding director of CREATE-X and interim chief commercialization officer at Georgia Tech. “Most importantly, these students want to contribute to helping solve what’s arguably the greatest public health crisis of our lifetime. Fostering an entrepreneurial spirit in our students helps them believe that they, too, can contribute to finding solutions to complex problems, even ones as difficult as Covid-19.”

The GoodVibes team hopes to refine their idea, looking even beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. Ruvinskiy said they’d like to apply to CREATE-X to continue the design process and make their idea a reality.

“The current pandemic requires quick action, which is why entrepreneurs are so critical to helping solve the issues produced by Covid,” Nuese said. “During the hackathon, each one of our teammates had the chance to feel this entrepreneurial spirit within them, and we hope our GoodVibes will reverberate around the world.”

In January Georgia Tech, in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH), began administering Covid-19 vaccines. Health experts recommend that, even though the vaccine is being administered, weekly surveillance testing should continue.

“Studies show that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are effective at preventing severe illness from Covid-19. What we don’t know yet is how effective they are at preventing asymptomatic infection and whether they prevent people from carrying the virus and spreading it to other people,” said Dr. Ben Holton, senior director of Stamps Health Services. “That’s why the current recommendations from the CDC are, even if you’ve had two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, you still need to wear a mask and practice social distancing, because we don’t know yet if you can spread the virus after being vaccinated. We are encouraging people to continue getting tested after they have had the vaccine.”

Testing is done on a walk-up basis, is free of charge, and takes just a few minutes. Participants should login to mytest.gatech.edu with their Georgia Tech account, complete the survey, and generate a tracking barcode for the test before visiting one of the testing sites on campus,

How Testing Works

The samples are transferred to the test lab three times a day for evaluation. To reduce the number of polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests that must be run each day, the saliva samples are pooled so that a single test can examine samples from five individuals. An innovative dual pooling strategy can identify one individual in a set of samples who is presumed positive.

• Your sample is split into two pools. Each pool contains a total of five samples. With six pools from 15 participants, everyone is uniquely in two of the pools.
• The samples are mixed together and each pooled sample is tested with a single test.
• Everyone who participates in surveillance testing will receive a notification that they are either recommended or not recommended for a follow-up diagnostic test.
• If neither of your pools comes back positive, then you are informed that you are not recommended for a follow-up test and no further action is required at this time.
• If both of your pooled samples are positive, your original sample is then tested individually in the CLIA lab to confirm the sample has SARS-CoV-2.
• If one of your pools comes back positive but your other pool does not, then usually your sample was not the positive one. However, sometimes there is ambiguity and the lab retests it anyway, which is why some people are notified that they are recommended for a diagnostic test, but subsequently test negative. This double positive requirement minimizes false positives.

The surveillance and diagnostic testing is normally completed within 36 to 48 hours, allowing contact tracers to identify other community members who may have been exposed.

Surveillance testing participants may notice they are asked to reconsent before their next test when they visit mytest.gatech.edu. The lab will now perform additional tests to identify the strain of virus, for the purpose of informing policy to help keep campus safe. The reconsent acknowledges this fact. Individuals will not be provided the strain information, since it does not change any follow-up procedures for a positive result.

Continued surveillance testing is important in identifying asymptomatic Covid-19 members of the Tech community and keeping the daily case counts low.

The therapy is based on a type of CRISPR, which normally allows researchers to target and edit specific portions of the genetic code, to target RNA molecules. In this case, the team used mRNA technology to code for a protein called Cas13a that destroys parts of the RNA genetic code that viruses use to replicate in cells in the lungs. It was developed by researchers in Philip Santangelo’s lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

“In our drug, the only thing you have to change to go from one virus to another is the guide strand — we only have to change one sequence of RNA. That's it,” Santangelo said. “We went from flu to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. They're incredibly different viruses. And we were able to do that very, very rapidly by just changing a guide.”

The guide strand is a map that basically tells the Cas13a protein where to attach to the viruses’ RNA and begin to destroy it. Working with collaborators at the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Kennesaw State University, Santangelo’s team tested its approach against flu in mice and SARS-CoV-2 in hamsters. In both cases, the sick animals recovered.

Their results are reported Feb. 3 in the journal Nature Biotechnology. It’s the first study to show mRNA can be used to express the Cas13a protein and get it to work directly in lung tissue rather than in cells in a dish. It’s also the first to demonstrate the Cas13a protein is effective at stopping replication of SARS-CoV-2.

What’s more, the team’s approach has the potential to work against 99% of flu strains that have circulated over the last century. It also appears it would be effective against the new highly contagious variants of the coronavirus that have begun to circulate.

The key to that broad effectiveness is the sequence of genes the researchers target.

“In flu, we're attacking the polymerase genes. Those are the enzymes that allow the virus to make more RNA and to replicate,” said Santangelo, the study’s corresponding author.

With help from a collaborator at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they looked at the genetic sequences of prevalent flu strains over the last 100 years and found regions of RNA that are unchanged across nearly all of them.

“We went after those, because they're far better conserved,” Santangelo said. “We let the biology dictate what our targets would be.”

Likewise, in SARS-CoV-2, the sequences the researchers targeted so far remain unchanged in the new variants.

The approach means the treatment is flexible and adaptable as new viruses emerge, said Daryll Vanover, a research scientist in Santangelo’s lab and the paper’s second author.

“One of the first things that society and the CDC is going to get when a pandemic emerges is the genetic sequence. It's one of the first tools that the CDC and the surveillance teams are going to use to identify what kind of virus this is and to begin tracking it,” Vanover said. “Once the CDC publishes those sequences — that's all we need. We can immediately screen across the regions that we're interested in to target it and knock down the virus.”

Vanover said that can result in lead candidates for clinical trials in a matter of weeks — which is about how long it took them to scan the sequences, design their guide strands, and be ready for testing in this study.

“It’s really quite plug-and-play,” Santangelo said. “If you're talking about small tweaks versus large tweaks, it's a big bonus in terms of time. And in pandemics — if we had had a vaccine in a month or two after the pandemic hit, think about what things would look like now. If we had a therapy a month after it hit, what would things look like now? It could make a huge difference, the impact on the economy, the impact on people.”

The project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's PReemptive Expression of Protective Alleles and Response Elements (PREPARE) program. The goal is to create safe, effective, transient, and reversible gene modulators as medical countermeasures that could be adapted and delivered rapidly. That’s why the team decided to try a nebulizer for delivering the treatment, Santangelo said.

“If you're really trying to think of something that's going to be a treatment that someone can actually give themselves in their own house, the nebulizer we used is not terribly different from one that you can go buy at a pharmacy,” he said.

The team’s approach also was sped along by their previous work on delivering mRNA to mucosal surfaces like those in the lungs. They knew there was a good chance they could tackle respiratory infections with that approach. They decided to use mRNA to code for the Cas13a protein because it’s an inherently safe technique.

“The mRNA is transient. It doesn't get into the nucleus, doesn't affect your DNA,” Santangelo said, “and for these CRISPR proteins, you really don't want them expressed for long periods of time.”

He and Vanover said additional work remains — especially understanding more about the specific mechanisms that make the treatment effective. It has produced no side effects in the animal models, but they want to take a deeper look at safety as they consider moving closer to a therapy for human patients.

“This project really gave us the opportunity to push our limits in the lab in terms of techniques, in terms of new strategy,” said Chiara Zurla, the team’s project manager and a co-author on the paper. “Especially with the pandemic, we feel an obligation to do as much as we can as well as we can. This first paper is a great example, but many will follow; we've done a lot of work, and we have a lot of promising results.”

This research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, grant No. HR00111920008. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

Kilbey, an ISyE alumnus (IE 1982), quickly realized that Covid-19 would have a similar impact in the U.S. and began contemplating how his company, EZY Wrap, could be part of the solution. PPE — specifically surgical and N95 face masks — were already in high demand by medical and essential workers. It was a natural shift for EZY Wrap, a medical device manufacturer, to begin making face masks.

Two days after Kilbey heard from his colleague, the company had a workable prototype for a new kind of mask: fully adjustable for people of any size, thanks to the Velcro ear straps; reusable (when handwashed and air-dried); and remarkably breath­able. A week after that propulsive conversation, the company had filed patent applications in the U.S. and the European Union and had begun round-the-clock manufacturing. 

An additional quality of the EZY Wrap products sets them apart: They are treated inside and out with an antimicrobial agent that is 99.99% effective. 

“Covid-19 comes from a novel coronavirus, but it has ‘brothers and sisters’ in other coronaviruses,” Kilbey noted. “SARS, MERS, H1N1 — they come from the same gene pool as Covid-19, and the antimicrobial treatment on our mask has been shown to kill them all. We are confident that it will kill Covid-19 as well.”

Sales of EZY Wrap’s antimicrobial mask number in the millions. The company has also donated thousands of them to groups in Florida, where it is headquartered, ranging from first responders to private busi­nesses seeking to protect their employees. And Kilbey was able to provide help in yet another way, hiring people who had been laid off because of the pandemic to staff the ramped-up production lines. 

EZY Wrap has developed a second-generation product — a multilayer mask with a reusable N95 filter — and is pursuing FDA Class 2 registration for it.

Avoid large gatherings. The likelihood that someone in a group is infected increases as the size of the group grows. While there’s no official number that constitutes a “safe” small group, public health guidance has recommended limiting groups to 10 people.

Follow all appropriate protocols. Maintain at least 6 feet of distance between yourself and others when spending time together in person. Face coverings are also required while inside campus facilities and buildings where 6 feet may not always be possible (though not inside one’s own living space). Masks aren’t a substitute for social distancing; the two should be practiced in tandem. And while masks aren’t required outdoors, you’re still safest when wearing one, even if you’re already social distancing.

There are several guidelines for events hosted throughout the spring. If you’re hosting a student event, make sure to review those a few weeks in advance. Click here for more formal processes and recommendations for in-person gatherings.

Hang out outside. There are several outdoor spaces on campus for students to utilize, including Tech Green on East Campus and Burger Bowl and Roe Stamps Recreation Fields (SAC Fields) on West Campus. Note that the SAC Fields are sometimes reserved in advance by different organizations. Many small courtyards and lawns, perfect for small outdoor hangouts, are located between various sets of on-campus dorms and apartments.

In addition, there are tents located around campus equipped with heaters and lawn chairs. Tents can be reserved through the online event management system (log in with Georgia Tech credentials).

Remember that others will also want to take advantage of outdoor spaces. While it’s important to spread out, don’t do so in a way that takes up more space than you need. If you’re participating in an activity that involves moving around, make sure you don’t cross over into someone else’s personal space.

Avoid sharing food, drinks, and other items. It’s possible that Covid-19 can be spread from an object that has the virus on it. Therefore, it’s safest to avoid sharing anything with your friends, especially food and drinks.

Utilize the contact tracing app NOVID. Georgia Tech is using NOVID, a contact tracing app that will anonymously notify those who might have been exposed to Covid-19. Keeping the app on standby mode whenever you’re outside of your usual living space can help keep track of those you come into contact with and notify you when someone you’ve been around tests positive for Covid-19. Learn more about the app here.

Regularly sanitize your hands while socializing, and wash them thoroughly once you get home. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that everyone frequently wash their hands, especially after returning from a public place. If you can’t wash your hands, use hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol.

Get tested regularly. Consistent testing is one of the most important parts of containing the spread of the coronavirus on campus. Georgia Tech offers free surveillance testing for asymptomatic students at multiple locations on campus, and students are encouraged to get tested once a week. Register for testing at mytest.gatech.edu and see testing site locations here. Symptomatic students can get tested at Stamps Health Center.

Two researchers in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering work with the components that make up the vaccine and say they’re safe and effective.
 

1. Both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are made with mRNA. What is an mRNA vaccine?

These vaccines are made of two primary ingredients: a piece of mRNA and a lipid nanoparticle, which is made from different fats.

The mRNA is essentially a set of instructions — the “m” stands for “messenger.” In this case, the instructions tell our own cells how to make a piece of protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus called the spike protein.

“If you ever see pictures of the coronavirus, this protein is the big spike that is sticking out of the virus particle,” said Philip Santangelo, professor in the Coulter Department.

First, the mRNA has to enter your cells, which is where the lipid nanoparticle, or LNP, comes in: It’s like an envelope that delivers the instructions. The LNP is a combination of four different fats to create a shell around the mRNA that allows it to penetrate into our cells.

“If you just inject mRNA on its own, your body does not like that, and the mRNA will not enter your cells,” said James Dahlman, assistant professor in the Department. “You can imagine the lipid nanoparticle as a Trojan horse for the mRNA: The mRNA has to enter a cell to work as a drug, but it cannot enter the cell on its own. So, you put the mRNA inside the LNP, which can enter the cell, and as a result the mRNA enters the cell.”

Once the mRNA is inside, the cells start to produce the spike protein. Your body recognizes an invader and starts to mount an immune response.
 

2. Can I get Covid-19 from the vaccine?

No. The Covid-19 vaccines contain no virus.

“The mRNA is only making the spike protein. It’s not the whole virus; it’s only a part of it,” Santangelo said. “You can’t get the virus from the mRNA vaccine.”
 

3. What about the bad reactions some people have experienced?

Santangelo said some people have had reactions at the injection site, but that’s common with many vaccines and, while annoying, it usually means the vaccine is doing exactly what it’s intended to do: prompting your body to react.

“The needle and the lipids do cause a little inflammation,” he said. “That’s what tells the immune system, ‘Hey, we need to send some cells to the muscle to pick up that spike protein,’ and then initiate the immunological responses. Then, when your body sees that protein [again] if you’re exposed to Covid-19, your body will respond rapidly and help clear the infection.”
 

4. Are any human cells used to create the vaccines?

No. The two parts of the vaccine are made in labs using readily available, purified ingredients —and no human or animal tissue, Santangelo said.

The mRNA particles are just like the RNA made in our bodies, he said, but they are assembled chemically in a lab using natural proteins.

Dahlman said the four parts of the lipid nanoparticle are either naturally occurring — like cholesterol — or designed by scientists in the lab.
 

5. How were the vaccines developed so quickly?

Two reasons, according to Dahlman and Santangelo.

First: The pharmaceutical companies had a head start.

“Both companies had lipid formulations they knew would be useful for delivering mRNA via an intramuscular injection,” Santangelo said. At that point, they just needed to know what kind of mRNA to use.

“One of the reasons why this platform is so exciting is that it is somewhat plug-and-play,” he said. “As soon as they had information about the sequence for that spike protein, the companies were easily able to put that into their pipelines and generate an mRNA for that spike. Then all they had to do was make that mRNA and combine it with the same lipids that they had been using before.”

The government and the pharmaceutical industry also had been planning for some kind of pandemic to happen eventually — most likely a flu — and conducting research on mRNA vaccines, Dahlman said.

“Did we know it was going to be Covid-19? No, we didn’t. But scientists had an idea that something could come along,” he said. “There’s been a lot of research ahead of time to study whether mRNA-based vaccines would work against emerging diseases.”

The second reason the vaccine came together quickly was a result of the design of the clinical trials, according to Dahlman. The companies designed the phase 2 and phase 3 trials at the same time as the initial trials were underway. That’s usually a prohibitively expensive proposition.

“In this case, there was a global emergency, so companies and governments took on the financial risk to design the phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials earlier,” Dahlman said. “It was worth the risk to have the vaccine move along more quickly, given the dire human and economic consequences of this pandemic.”
 

6. How do we know the vaccines are safe?

Dahlman and Santangelo pointed to the tens of thousands of people involved in those clinical trials.

“Just because the clinical trials were run more quickly than normal does not mean the data are unreliable,” Dahlman said. “The data have been peer-reviewed. The data are clear: The vaccine is safe.”

He and Santangelo also pointed to the short amount of time the vaccine’s components remain in the human body.

“mRNA does not last forever,” Santangelo said. “The mRNA may express for a few days, and it will degrade through normal processes inherent to every cell in your body. The lipids also are metabolized through normal metabolization pathways.”

He added: “We want the vaccine to go in, to express the viral protein — the spike protein — you want your body to react to that, you want your immune system to mobilize in response to that spike being there. But we don’t want the vaccine there forever. You’re relying on your immune system to do the heavy lifting; the vaccine just gets things started.”
 

7. Why do we get two doses of the vaccine instead of one?

Santangelo said it’s not uncommon for vaccines to require multiple doses. Think of the booster shots kids receive for some vaccines.

In the case of the Covid-19 vaccine, he said: “The data suggests that after one shot, there is an immune response, but it’s not as strong as they would like, and that’s why they give you the second one. The second one is a booster. And what you see in the data is your antibody responses increase significantly.”
 

8. Why do the vaccines have to be stored at such cold temperatures?

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has to be stored at -70 degrees Celsius. Moderna’s is frozen at -25 degrees Celsius. That’s all about preserving the stability and effectiveness of the vaccine, Santangelo said, and the difference is attributable to the different kinds of lipids the two companies used around the mRNA.

It may not be ideal, but Santangelo said the requirements keep the vaccine from degrading in any way.

“They had to move so fast creating the vaccines, so they went with what they knew would work,” he said.
 

9. How long will protection last from the vaccine?

We don’t have as much information about the durability of protection as we would like, Santangelo said. He pointed to data that shows persistence of antibodies for at least three to six months after the second dose.

Even with that question still unanswered, he said getting the vaccine will benefit everyone.

“It’s going to help protect you from the virus,” he said. “Even if you get Covid — not from the vaccine, but post-vaccination — you’re not going to get as sick if you have the vaccine than if you didn’t have the vaccine. If the vaccine keeps us out of the hospital, if it keeps us from getting very, very sick, that is a very good thing.”

In its initial allocation, Georgia Tech received both the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine and the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine.

The first phase of distribution, called Phase 1A+, includes Stamps Health Services staff; CARE staff and Counseling Center staff; Health Initiatives victim advocates and nutritionists; Georgia Tech Police Department (GTPD) staff; Covid-19 surveillance testing personnel; Athletic Association medical staff and trainers; and Georgia Tech employees ages 65 and older.

Captain Marcus Walton with GTPD was among the first to get vaccinated.

“I was excited because to me it is the sense of knowing that we are one more step closer to getting back to some type of normalcy in the world,” he said.  

“Personally, I have family members that I have not visited since the pandemic started, and I would love to go visit and hug them,” Walton said. “Professionally, I am what you call a critical or essential employee, and when I took this job 16 years ago I took an oath that I would do this job to the best of my ability. Taking the vaccine, along with practicing other safety measures, allows me to continue to go out and do my job daily knowing that I am helping and not hurting. I want to be a part of the solution, not the problem.”

Janet Foley, a pharmacist with Stamps Health Services, is working at the vaccine distribution clinic in the Exhibition Hall. As a healthcare worker, she was glad to get it.

“I believe in vaccination, and I believe in the benefit vaccines give to building herd immunity. So I think it’s important for everybody to get vaccinated,” Foley said. “I have trust in the system that the vaccine is safe, so I wanted to get it right away to show my family, neighbors, and everybody that it’s good to get this vaccination.”

Foley, who has been in her job for seven years, said she likes the large turnout for vaccines.

“Demand seems to be pretty high on campus, and that’s encouraging,” she said. “I hope the students come out and get vaccinated when it’s open to them.”

The next phase, Phase 1B, is expected to be open to all faculty and staff, including affiliate, auxiliary, and foundation employees. Phase 1C is expected to include people ages 16 to 64 with medical conditions that increase the risk for severe illness with Covid-19. This includes Georgia Tech students. Phase 2 is expected to include all Georgia Tech students. The DPH is responsible for setting all phases of the vaccine rollout, including the timing.

“We’re ironing out the process to make it faster to get people in and out,” Foley said. “The more of these clinics we do, the faster the process is going to get.”

NOTE: As a reminder, community members in the initial phase of the vaccine distribution ­— Phase 1A+ — are eligible to schedule an appointment to receive their vaccine. For more information on the Covid-19 vaccine, including the rollout plan for the Georgia Tech community, visit health.gatech.edu/coronavirus/vaccine/

“My cousin introduced me to Georgia Tech when I came from Ghana, looking for a new life in America,” Osekre said. He joined his mother, three brothers, and three sisters who had already relocated to Atlanta.

In 2020, the coronavirus brought the implementation of new safety precautions for Osekre’s work as a custodian on campus.

“My job, specifically, includes cleaning carpets, shining floors, deep cleaning the restrooms, and cleaning and misting public areas to keep people safe. I always want to keep people safe. We always put on masks and gloves,” he said.

During his years at Tech, Osekre has worked in a number of buildings and made friends all over campus. He met Susanna Printz, director of Research and Prospect Management in the Office of Development, when he worked in the Wardlaw Center.

“Seth has a wonderful smile, a hearty laugh, and a great personality,” said Printz. “I looked forward to saying hello when he made his afternoon rounds. He and I are soccer fans, so we would compare notes on the teams and players. He’s such an interesting person.”