The agreement was signed during a Sept. 14 visit by PNNL leadership to Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility. It builds on years of successful collaboration between researchers at the two institutions. 

The enhanced collaboration has three primary goals: solving big problems through multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research; sustaining and engaging human capital by creating opportunities for students, faculty, researchers, and interns to work on complex real-world challenges; and accelerating technology adoption by taking scientific discoveries and innovations into industry and the federal marketplace.

"Strengthening our partnerships with national laboratories is a strategic priority for Georgia Tech,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. "PNNL is an outstanding partner, and we look forward to deepening connections among our researchers and students, expanding opportunities and access to world-class capabilities and facilities, and advancing discovery, innovation, and national impact together."

PNNL is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that advances scientific discovery and innovations that support reliable energy, national security, and economic competitiveness. Georgia Tech is one of the nation's leading research universities, conducting more than $1.5 billion in research annually and pursuing a mission to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

"PNNL and Georgia Tech have a long history of working together," said Deb Gracio, laboratory director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “This agreement provides the foundation to take on difficult research challenges and to leverage our complementary expertise and investments in the years ahead.”

The Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) has played a central role in advancing Georgia Tech's engagement with the national laboratory system and connecting researchers with partnership opportunities.

"As SEI takes on a greater role in coordinating Georgia Tech's national laboratory partnerships, this agreement with PNNL demonstrates how we are building stronger pathways for faculty, researchers, and students to engage with world-class national lab capabilities," said Yuanzhi Tang, SEI executive director.

The National Laboratory Partnership Program supports engagement between Georgia Tech and the U.S. national laboratories. SEI now leads the program, with ongoing support from Georgia Tech’s Office of the Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research. The agreement with PNNL is the first formal agreement established through the program since its transition to SEI.

"This MOU formalizes and strengthens relationships that have been growing for many years," said Scott McWhorter, SEI director of national laboratory partnerships. “It leverages the unique strengths of Georgia Tech and PNNL and provides a framework for expanding engagement across areas of mutual interest.”

Georgia Tech and PNNL bring complementary strengths in energy and environmental systems, electric grid resilience, cybersecurity of critical infrastructure, alternative fuels and advanced materials, biofuels, radiation detection, data science and visual analytics, nuclear nonproliferation, and national security. These capabilities will be brough together through two upcoming Genesis Mission projects.

Bill Pike, PNNL's deputy director for Science and Technology, who joined the laboratory’s leadership delegation for the MOU signing, said the projects reflect the growing partnership and expanding collaboration between the two institutions. 

About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's leading research universities, with strengths spanning engineering, computing, science, business, design, and the liberal arts. With more than $1.5 billion annually in research awards across its Colleges and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech is among the nation's most research-intensive universities. The Institute's mission is to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

About Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

The CHORUS (Community Hubs for Optimizing Resilience) project will collaborate with coastal communities in Georgia and New York and will be split into two pieces: technology development and community engagement. 

“We’re not just building a simulator and hoping it fits the needs of coastal residents,” explains Alex Robel, project leader and Jean “Chris” Purvis Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "By collaborating with community partners from the very beginning, we can ensure that what we ultimately develop will be effective because the people who will be using it are helping design it.”

Putting Flood Modeling in Residents' Hands

The technology development component will include faculty from the College of Sciences and the College of Computing. The College of Sciences team will develop an AI-based flood simulator and the College of Computing team led by Josiah Hester, associate professor and Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early Career Professor, will create a web platform that allows users to visualize potential flood impacts.

Traditional flood models can take hours or days to generate results and often require specialized expertise and expensive computing resources. The CHORUS platform will be designed to provide easy-to-understand results in seconds, producing building-scale flood maps that show how water moves through streets, yards, and structures during a range of flooding scenarios. Researchers will use the model to test how specific interventions, such as seawalls, restored marshes, or improved stormwater infrastructure, could affect flooding.

Eventually, users will be able to test their own scenarios through the browser-based tool, enabling them to explore how different decisions could change flood impacts in their communities:

“Users will be able to go into a web browser and indicate where a sea wall could go or change a parking lot into a porous vegetated landscape, then click simulate. Within a few seconds, they’ll have a new flood map showing the impacts of these interventions,” says Robel.

A Community-Driven Approach

A collaborative effort with the New York Climate Exchange, the project will be funded by Georgia Sea Grant and IBM, with support from Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow (GT2), Georgia Tech’s Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub, and the National Sea Grant College Program. The CHORUS project is an initiative of the New York Climate Exchange, where Georgia Tech is a core partner institution.

Community engagement in Georgia is being led by CEAR and the Pin Point Betterment Association, which represents descendants of the historic Gullah Geechee community near Savannah. In New York, the project team is partnering with the New York Climate Exchange and the Waterfront Alliance to work with communities surrounding Jamaica Bay.

“What makes this partnership meaningful is that it puts community voices at the center,” says Jasmine Smith, president of the Pin Point Betterment Association. “Too often, decisions are made to ‘better’ communities without actually involving the people who live there. We hope this partnership can serve as a blueprint for how communities are included in future sustainability projects from the very beginning.”

The project includes community advisory boards and technical advisory boards in both locations. Community members will help identify priority assets, select flood scenarios for analysis, and shape the design of the web-based tool. They’ll also test and offer feedback. Technical advisory boards made up of local officials, planners, and other experts will help evaluate the feasibility of proposed solutions.

“The aim is to blend information from both groups without allowing the technical perspective to override community priorities,” says Robel.

According to Robel, giving communities direct access to flood modeling tools can help close the gap between public input and infrastructure planning.

“We are putting decision making in the hands of the community. With a tool like this, the community can say: ‘We want to prevent flooding at this community center, this school, or this road,’” says Robel. “They can run the model, produce data, and present it to local governments or the Army Corps of Engineers  — advocating for potential solutions themselves rather than relying on outside experts.”

Robel sees this project as just the beginning:

“Funded by two-year grants, CHORUS is meant to be a pilot for how this kind of community-centered project can be done. Once we understand some of the challenges and opportunities involved, it will hopefully make it easier for us to scale this work to additional community partners.”

About Community-Engaged Research at Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech is actively working to foster more projects that foster community engagement. Collaborative groups at Georgia Tech involved in the CHORUS project include:

• The CEAR Hub, part of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and housed at the Georgia Tech Savannah campus, advances community-engaged research and planning throughout coastal Georgia, helping communities build resilience to environmental and climate challenges. 
• The Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) trains faculty, students, and staff in best practices for conducting community-engaged research as well as facilitating connections directly with communities.
• The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) houses SCoRE and is Georgia Tech’s point of contact to the New York Climate Exchange. BBISS forms partnerships like these to fulfill its mission to expand the reach and impact of Georgia Tech’s sustainability research. 

The internship provided Burnett with valuable insight into national laboratory research and reinforced skills he developed through his studies at Georgia Tech. When he returned to campus, we asked Burnett to share more about his internship and what he learned.

Research Interests: Fusion energy, computational plasma physics, high-performance computing, and structure-preserving machine learning

Degree Program: Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering

Faculty Advisor: School of CSE Assistant Professor Qi Tang

2026 Internship: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Many people are unfamiliar with national laboratories, like ORNL. Could you explain the purpose of these institutions and why they are important?

The Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories are responsible for moving forward science and technology in the United States and solving high-consequence challenges in science, energy, and national security. They work on both applied and theoretical research with both short-term and long-term returns. ORNL has eight core research areas: biology and environment, energy science, fusion and fission, isotopes, physical sciences, national security, neutron science, and supercomputing. I was an intern in the supercomputing division.

How well did coursework and experience at Georgia Tech prepare you for your ORNL internship?

My coursework at Georgia Tech was vital in my preparation for this internship. I wrote highly parallel code where I leaned heavily on what I learned in CSE 6220: High-Performance Computing. I also worked on numerical methods which required an understanding of partial differential equations and numerical linear algebra which I also learned at Georgia Tech from classes like CSE 6643: Numerical Linear Algebra and a space plasma physics course.

What did you work on while interning at ORNL?

At ORNL, I was a developer on the Adaptive Sparse Grid Discretization (ASGarD) codebase. The code uses adaptive sparse grids and the Discontinuous Galerkin method to beat the curse of dimensionality and solve high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs). The code is designed to simulate fully kinetic plasmas in up to 6-dimensional phase space. My project was to implement an iterative method to solve the efficiently solve the Poisson equation within the codebase. This project gave me hands on experience with linear algebra, numerical PDEs, parallel computing and software engineering which was invaluable to my development as a CSE researcher.

Do you have a favorite memory or remarkable achievement from your internship?

My favorite memory from my internship was spending time with the other ORNL interns outside of work. There was an amazing group of interns at ORNL, and it was great getting to know them. One particularly good memory was when we went out to a restaurant with live music and played laser tag during our last week of the internship to celebrate our time at ORNL. The achievement I am most proud of was getting a working, highly efficient version of the Poisson solver into ASGarD. The ASGarD codebase is open source, so I hope other plasma physics researchers will use the code and find it helpful for their research.

While interning, you were selected for a GEM Fellowship, which Georgia Tech and ORNL nominated you for. What does this fellowship mean to you and is there anything you would like to say to your supporters?

To me, receiving the GEM Fellowship indicates that other people recognize the hard work I am doing, and they believe in my ability to meaningfully contribute to the field. Having this support from GEM, ORNL, and Georgia Tech gives me greater confidence in myself and my potential and inspires me to put my all into my work. I would like all my supporters to know that I am so grateful for the opportunity you have given me to be a part of the excellent community of researchers within GEM, ORNL, and Georgia Tech. I will do my very best to make your support worthwhile!

Overall, how helpful was this internship toward your studies at Georgia Tech and career as an aspiring researcher?

The internship was extremely important to both my studies at Georgia Tech and my career as a researcher. The hands-on experience I gained is irreplaceable and it helped me to apply all the skills I have developed throughout my education. I am also optimistic that the internship will open doors for me when I am seeking a job post-graduation.

Upon returning to Georgia Tech, Phute reflected on her summer internship and what it taught her about the evolving relationship between research and industry.

Research Interests: Machine learning (ML) robustness and artificial intelligence (AI) safety

Degree Program: Ph.D. in Computer Science

Faculty Advisor: School of CSE Professor and Associate Chair Polo Chau

2026 Internship: International Business Machines (IBM), San Jose, California

What about IBM interested you in applying for and accepting an internship there?

IBM is often at the forefront of AI safety, my field of interest, and has a culture that encourages exploratory and fundamental research. I felt this would give me a closer look at cutting-edge industry approaches without compromising on my research interests or my progress toward my thesis.

How well did your coursework and experience at Georgia Tech prepare you for your IBM internship?

My experience at Georgia Tech was very helpful in preparing me for IBM. My coursework and other academic experiences certainly transferred over, but I believe that the wide range of people I met during those courses and what I learned from them helped me connect and relate strongly with people at IBM. Being conversant in different fields of research really helped me interact better with IBM coworkers and feel comfortable in a new environment.

What did you work on while interning at IBM?

I worked on IBM’s AI Foundations team, focusing on the security of multimodal agent communication during my internship. This is an important problem as we see an increase in agents applied in many use cases. It was also closely aligned with my research interests of AI safety.

Do you have a favorite memory or remarkable achievement from your internship?

One of my favorite moments was presenting my work to a broad, cross-team audience of technical and non-technical members. Afterward, my manager told me I was good at explaining my research to people with varying levels of familiarity with the domain. This feedback meant a lot to me because communicating clearly across different audiences is a skill I've deliberately worked to improve. So, hearing that the effort was paying off was very rewarding.

Overall, how helpful was this internship toward your studies at Georgia Tech and your career as an aspiring researcher?

This internship was very valuable for my development as an aspiring researcher. I worked alongside accomplished people in the AI safety field on projects that aligned closely with my research interests. I also saw how those same projects connect to a company's broader business priorities, a perspective that isn’t easily available in academic settings. I shared many fruitful discussions with people working in safety, policy, and alignment, which gave me a much clearer sense of how industry approaches these issues compared to the more academic-oriented framing I am used to.

Based on what you learned during your internship, how important is private industry in progressing research and scientific discovery?

Working in private industry was a fascinating experience. I come away believing that industry plays an important role in advancing research, especially in AI, where companies have access to computing resources that are less prohibitive than in academic environments. I also think that because private industry has a strong hand in implementing and deploying research, understanding industry priorities can help us frame and design our research in ways that complement industry applications. This ensures research has a bigger impact, particularly in the domain of ML safety and reliability.

“It was something I had wanted since I was a kid,” he said. “Growing up in India, it wasn't known for martial arts.”

Agrawal knew he needed something to help him balance his physical health with the challenges of graduate school. He checked the list of classes offered by Georgia Tech’s Campus Recreation. One stood out: Georgia Tech Taido.

Taido is a niche martial art that applies a modern, scientific approach to traditional Okinawan karate. There is only one school in the U.S. that teaches it — Taido Karate in Peachtree Corners, Ga., which is currently the world’s largest taido school.

Taido means “the way of the body and the mind.” It was invented in the 1960s by Seiken Shukumine. 

One of Shukumine’s students, Mitsunobu Uchida, brought the new martial art to the U.S. when he immigrated in 1975. Uchida decided that Atlanta would be an ideal place to open a new school. 

Since then, generations of students have trained at Taido Karate, including Georgia Tech alumnus Bryan Sparks (EE 2000), and Andy Fossett, who started as a student at Tech in 1996 before transferring to Georgia State.

Sparks and Fossett learned taido together as kids. Both became black belts before graduating high school. 

Shortly after becoming students at Tech, they started an official taido club on campus. They taught their first class in 1996, which only had one student. By the next semester, they had almost a dozen. 

“The class was held in an open area, and a lot of people would walk by and see us training,” Sparks said. “That was the best advertisement we could ever have. We’d invite them to work out, and it grew from there. We did some demonstrations around campus in the early days.”

The taido club is still going strong and celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. 

Agrawal discovered it in 2018 as a first-year Ph.D. student. He earned his doctorate in robotics from Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing in 2025.

While keeping his Ph.D. studies first, Agrawal trained for five years to earn a black belt. He said the process was the most physically and mentally challenging he’s ever experienced.

“The tenets of taido teach you how to compose yourself and how to have a good mindset, which becomes helpful in dealing with daily life stress,” Agrawal said. “It helps you focus on what’s important in the moment.”

“There were times when I felt like nothing was going right, and I kept asking ‘What am I even doing?’ But I knew if I could do some of the harder things in taido, there’s no reason I couldn’t do the same thing in my Ph.D.”

Agrawal’s commitment paid off in 2022 when he became one of five students from Tech Taido to pass the black belt test that year.

“The test is grueling,” he said. “It’s four hours long. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done physically, and I’ve run several marathons. They test you on everything you’ve learned from white belt level to brown belt level. I was training five days a week for five months.

“It was one of the best days of my life. It felt like no matter what happened, I could move forward with my life and be proud of that accomplishment.”

Agrawal landed a remote job with a robotics startup after graduating. His new position allowed him to stay in Atlanta and continue with Georgia Tech Taido as an instructor.

He said the unique aspect of taido is its emphasis on community and culture, which can be attributed to Uchida’s influence. 

“A lot of times, American senseis open dojos after learning martial arts overseas. They bring the techniques and the discipline over, but they don’t bring the culture that comes with it. I love how taido is a part of our lives. It’s not a separate workout; it’s a communal thing.”

Agrawal teaches classes with Lacy Hardcastle, who took over as lead instructor when Sparks moved out of the area in 2019. Hardcastle took her first Taido class at Tech in 2007.

Hardcastle said students trying taido for the first time will get a challenging workout.

“I didn’t know how weak my legs were until I took taido,” she said. “It kicked my butt the first semester. We do whole body conditioning with lots of push-ups, lunges, squats and other exercises. It’s a very athletic martial art and requires whole-body fitness and control.”

Hardcastle describes the environment as welcoming and supportive, with regular get-togethers outside of class and a biennial trip to Japan with the Taido Karate school.

“We have a great social community where we support each other,” she said. “We occasionally go out to social events together. Sometimes we’ll get together to watch MMA fights, things like that. But we also work out hard.” 

Georgia Tech Taido classes are held every Monday and Wednesday from 8:30 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. in Studio A of the Georgia Tech Campus Recreation Center. The registration cost for the fall semester is $75. To register, visit https://crc.gatech.edu/martial-arts-4/.

“Every living organism runs on chemistry, and metabolomics is the attempt to read that chemistry directly by measuring thousands of small molecules at once: in a drop of blood, a leaf, a microbial colony, and even a single cell,” Fernández says. 

Advances in understanding metabolites could provide new insights for cancer diagnostics, drug development, and environmental monitoring.

“The Metabolomics Society’s members are pushing the field forward and translating metabolomics knowledge into real health benefits for society,” he adds. “Being selected by that group of scientists and students feels like a special kind of honor.”

Fernández joined Georgia Tech in 2004 and also serves as the Vasser-Woolley Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. His research focuses on developing tools to measure and analyze small-volume samples, tissues, and single cells. He also directs the Systems Mass Spectrometry Core at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. 

His two-year term on the Metabolomics Society's Board of Directors begins Oct. 1. 

Policymakers, health system executives, community leaders and others working to address this challenge now have help from Rural Evaluation and Analytics for Community Health (REACH GA), an advanced decision-support platform that offers a comprehensive view of healthcare use in rural Georgia. In addition to updated information on rural health issues, the platform provides computer-based tools to guide allocation of healthcare resources and explore the potential impact of changes to rural health services. 
 

“The REACH GA platform provides up-to-date, actionable information to help leaders understand the big picture of healthcare in rural Georgia,” said Jon Duke, M.D., a principal research scientist in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the project’s principal investigator. “Beyond more accurate data, the platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and other computer-driven tools to support improved decision-making.”
 

Of Georgia’s 159 counties, 126 are considered rural. Approximately 24 percent of the state’s 11.3 million residents live in these rural areas.

Read the full article on the GTRI news page

Ahmadi and Brown find that neighborhoods with higher shares of Black residents experience higher energy burdens, even after accounting for factors such as income, renter status, and housing characteristics. In this study, energy burden refers mainly to the share of household income spent on electricity, gas, and water. The authors estimate that an approximately 11 percentage-point increase in a neighborhood’s Black population share is associated with about a 1 percentage-point increase in household energy burden, equal to an average annual increase of about $785 in utility costs. These findings suggest that unequal energy burdens are tied not only to household finances, but also to the lasting effects of segregation and discrimination. 

Read Full Story on the EPIcenter Page

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

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

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

Read Full Story on The Conversation

The GTRI field office, which includes a new large secure classified workspace, will house GTRI engineers and scientists working shoulder to shoulder with U.S. Space Force teams. The Colorado Springs Field Office currently has forty GTRI personnel on staff.  The arrangement reflects a growing conviction inside the defense community that the pace of modern threats requires a closer, faster collaboration between researchers and the warfighters they support. 
 

“We won’t have to go through layers of translation because the government people with technology needs will be sitting next to the GTRI engineers offering solutions. It makes for a very close interaction that we expect to continue for many years to come” said John Bunnell, GTRI’s Director of Space Program Development.

Read the entire article on the GTRI News page

The cells that keep vaccines working for decades have long remained a mystery deep within human bone marrow. A new study watched them move, settle, and survive in a living human tissue model, revealing a surprisingly dynamic world that could reshape how scientists think about immunity, aging, cancer, and vaccine protection. 

For decades, immunologists have known that the body's most durable defenses depend on plasma cells, the antibody-producing cells responsible for long-term immune memory. Long after an infection has passed or a vaccine has been administered, these cells continue releasing protective antibodies, sometimes for decades. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Georgia Tech research team was recently recognized for an influential paper that helped define how applications could run efficiently outside the cloud.  

But recent research from Georgia Tech’s School of Economics in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts suggests adding an asterisk to earlier research that makes that conclusion, saying previous studies failed to account for one simple fact: people adapt. 

Georgia Tech economist Bobby Harris used a massive database of Fitbit step count data to measure how temperature shapes physical activity and found that extreme heat cuts step counts by 6% when compared to ideal weather. And while residents of the warmest regions cut their activity by an average of only 354 steps on days over 100 degrees, those living in the coldest regions cut theirs by 1,081, according to Harris’ analysis. 

To be fair, cold bites, too. On days that stay below freezing, people take roughly 1,000 fewer steps. That’s a 12% drop, enough to pack on a pound over the course of a typical Madison, Wisconsin winter, Harris found. 

But as the climate grows warmer, how humanity will respond to warmer temperatures remains a significant concern. In fact, earlier research projected that, by 2050, temperature-driven declines in physical activity could contribute to 500,000 premature deaths a year worldwide and annual productivity losses topping $2.4 billion. 

Projections like those typically assume everyone responds to heat the same way, with no capacity to adapt, Harris said.  

Read Full Story on the IAC News Page
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting AI to the Test

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

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

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

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

Lesson from the Competition

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

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

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

However, AI-generated fixes remain a major challenge.

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

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

Sharing the Lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student Enters Ph.D. Program as Stamps Fellow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For archaeologists, it may be necessary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further workshop activities include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Snapshot of Interdisciplinary Paths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, teaching was something he had to learn.

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

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

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

The 2026 Foley Scholar Awards will be announced in November. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microscopic Motorboats

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

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

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

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

Flexible Filaments

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

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

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

Toward Tunable Materials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Steps

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seed Grant Support

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

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

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

Looking Ahead

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

Support Acknowledgement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pressure Points: Helene’s Wake and Market Headwinds 

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

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

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

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

Storytelling Matters: The Power of the Personal 

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

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

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

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

Building a Georgia Carbon Exchange 

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

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

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

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

All the Players at the Table 

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

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

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

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

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

A Common Goal in Focus 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer is yes. Ozdemir demonstrated the technique by taking a piece of paper with a small Waldo-shaped hole cut out and placing it over the page. The demonstration confirms that Waldo is on the page without revealing his location or other details and is a simple example of a concept called a zero-knowledge proof.

In computer science, zero-knowledge proofs allow one person to prove that something is true without revealing the information that makes it true.

These types of problems sit at the center of Ozdemir’s work. As a computer scientist and cryptographer, he studies ways to use mathematics and computer programs to protect information. But his work goes beyond creating new methods for keeping data secret. He is interested in connecting those methods to the computer systems that use them.

“I get excited about what no one else is working on,” he said. “What I’m excited about now is how you relate the security of a computer system to a crypto scheme.”

Two recent papers published at USENIX Security show how Ozdemir is applying this approach to real-world privacy and security problems.

One of these problems is how to handle sensitive information without revealing it.

Imagine two organizations want to combine or analyze information, but neither wants to share its private data with the other. Cryptography can make this possible, but some of these privacy protections can be slow and difficult to use with large amounts of information.

Ozdemir and his collaborators developed a new system called FLOSS (Fast Linear Online Secret-Shared Shuffling) to make one of these tasks much faster.

FLOSS allows two parties to mix a set of private information without either party seeing the original data or learning the final order. This process, known as shuffling, is useful in privacy-preserving applications such as data analysis, anonymous messaging, and private advertising.

In tests, FLOSS shuffled more than one million items in less than half a second, making it more than 800 times faster than previous leading methods.

FLOSS achieves much of this speed by doing some of the hard mathematical work in advance, before the actual data is available. When the data arrives, the system can complete the shuffle quickly, with very little communication between the two computers.

The system is designed to protect against cheating. If one of the parties tries to manipulate the process or access information it shouldn’t, FLOSS can detect the problem and stop the computation.

The researchers also used FLOSS to create a faster way to sort private information. Sorting is a basic computer task but doing it while keeping the information secret can be expensive. Making that process faster could allow privacy-preserving tools to handle much larger amounts of data.

Ozdemir tackled another problem through a project called Orbit: How can computers perform useful work on information that remains encrypted?

Fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, is a form of encryption that allows computers to perform calculations on protected data without first decrypting it. For example, a hospital could send encrypted medical information to a cloud service for analysis without the service seeing the patients' records.

The challenge is that this type of computing can be extremely slow.

Orbit is a computing tool called a compiler that helps make these encrypted calculations more efficient. A compiler takes computer code and turns it into instructions that a computer can run. Orbit examines an entire computation and identifies more efficient ways to handle some of the most expensive steps in fully homomorphic encryption.

Rather than treating those steps separately, Orbit looks at how they work together and identifies opportunities to reduce the amount of work the computer must do.

In tests, Orbit was between 1.19 and 1.73 times faster than previous leading systems on the workloads studied, including complex tasks such as running artificial intelligence models. The calculations also remained within 0.3% of the accuracy of those performed on unencrypted data.

For Ozdemir, projects like FLOSS and Orbit are part of a broader goal: making advanced cryptography practical enough to use with the computer systems people use every day. 

Now at Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP), Ozdemir is recruiting Ph.D. students from across the computing stack to work with him. He was drawn to Georgia Tech in part for its multidisciplinary approach to security.

“I also just love being around universities,” he said.

At SCP, Ozdemir plans to continue exploring programmable cryptography across the computing stack, integrating cryptography, compilers, and automated reasoning to address security problems from multiple angles. He received his Ph.D. at Stanford University and bachelor's degree from Harvey Mudd College. 

For Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Veronica Rivera, the growing role of AI in daily life raises important questions about what happens when technology designed to help people puts their privacy and safety at risk.

Rivera studied AI at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but her research has increasingly focused on how people interact with technology and the risks that can emerge from these interactions. Her work examines technology-facilitated risks and abuse. She uses research and innovative design approaches to understand digital safety risks and develop tools that better protect people.

One area she is exploring through her recent Computing Research Association Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship for Early Career Scholars is the design of safe AI tools for labor unions.

“Unions are developing AI tools to sort through complaints,” she said. “Many of these are built with proprietary AI models, which leads us to ask what the risks are of sharing personal information through these tools.”

Rivera wants to give unions more control over how workers’ data is collected and used. One way she plans to explore this is through a workshop at the upcoming ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, where union leaders and technical experts collaborate to develop a secure reporting tool.

This research will build on Rivera’s recent work focusing on platform-based gig workers. A paper she published this year at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security examined how freelance workers often use secretive "digital whisper networks," informal online communities where people warn one another about workplace abuse.

Rivera and her team found that these workers often avoided formal reporting channels when they experienced wage theft, discrimination, health and safety violations, or sexual misconduct. The study highlighted the need for secure channels that allow workers to report abuse and organize without further endangering themselves.

“There needs to be a way to report this abuse,” Rivera said. “But how you do that in a safe and secure way is something we don’t yet have answers for.”

Rivera is also expanding her research beyond the workplace to examine technology-based threats and abuse in romantic relationships. As a new assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, she plans to study how AI can blur the line between technology and intimacy.

Consider a person who creates an AI chatbot that imitates someone they know, turning that person’s likeness, personality, or private information into a virtual romantic partner without their consent. If that happens, Rivera asks, what protections does the person have? How can the chatbot be reported and removed?

Existing policies and reporting systems may not adequately address situations like these. In fact, they can pose new challenges for people whose identities or personal information are used without their permission.

Another project Rivera would like to explore is how platforms handle abuse involving romantic chatbots. Rivera has reviewed Reddit discussions in which users expressed concerns about reporting abusive behavior and about what happens to the intimate information they share with their chatbots.

“There is a lot of confusion on what these platforms know about their users’ intimate details based on their chats,” she said. “There is also a lot that isn’t known on the back-end of abuse reporting.”

Rivera has identified a need to design safer reporting features so people feel comfortable reporting abuse while also knowing their personal information will remain private.

She plans to cover these topics and more this fall in her new course that explores sociotechnical security. Rivera says working within SCP’s interdisciplinary structure gives her the opportunity to explore these research problems from multiple angles.

“It is hard to find a place for the work I do in security and privacy,” Rivera said. “Our goal is to protect users from bad things, and SCP approaches it from several different angles.”

For Rivera, this means studying not only how technology can be secured, but how it can be designed to protect the people who rely on it.

This year, Team Blue Water – which features nine Georgia Tech participants –came out on top after three days of intense competition.

“I've competed in DEF CON CTFs for four years now,” said Ph.D. student Kevin Stevens. “After winning second place three years in a row, it's so rewarding to finally achieve first place with such a great team.”

Blue Water finished with 578,103 points, well ahead of second-place team 0x4b52, which scored 454,797 points. SuperDiceCodeLovers took third place with 425,686 points.

The results highlighted Georgia Tech’s strength in the competition. The first-, second-, and third-place teams all included Georgia Tech students or alumni.

Georgia Tech participants on Blue Water included:

• Jalen Chuang, Ph.D. student
• Jiho Kim, Ph.D. student
• Andrew Chin, Ph.D. student
• Youngjoon Kim, postdoctoral researcher
• Kevin Stevens, Ph.D. student
• Yong Hwi Jin, Ph.D. student
• Sunghyeon Jo, Ph.D. student
• Yu-Fu Fu, Ph.D. student
• Gye Jin Lee, Ph.D. student

Blue Water consisted of members from Perfect Blue, Water Paddler, r00timentary, RedBud, BunkyoWesterns, and undef1ned. Combining multiple teams into a single roster is common at DEF CON CTF.

The competition unfolded over three days, with teams competing for about seven hours on each of the first two days and an additional two and a half hours on the final day. However, the work continued beyond the competition's official hours. The teams were allowed to continue working through the evenings and nights to find vulnerabilities, protect their systems, and gain points.

The challenges were designed by the Benevolent Bureau of Birds, the group that had won the competition for the past four years under the team name Maple Mallard Magistrates. The group is a collaboration between Plaid Parliament of Pwning from Carnegie Mellon University, The Duck from Theori Inc., and Maple Bacon from the University of British Columbia.

This year’s bird-themed competition featured a wide range of technical challenges, including escaping game softlocks, programming in a custom bird emoji language, working with a custom computer architecture and using Game of Life patterns for data exfiltration. Other challenges included a bot battleground, protecting the 1994 Netscape Navigator browser, and exploring a reimagined version of the internet built around “bird HTTP” and “bird CSS.”

For Stevens, one of his contributions to the winning effort focused on a new competition mechanic introduced this year, the “rebate mechanic.”

Teams could earn partial points back for flags stolen from them if they recovered those flags from recorded network traffic. Stevens created and maintained a service to manage the new mechanic, adding another layer of strategy to an already complex competition.

The victory adds another accomplishment to Georgia Tech’s growing record in elite cybersecurity competitions, where students regularly apply classroom knowledge and research skills into practice against some of the strongest teams in the field.

“SCP students and their collaborators continue to excel, winning elite cybersecurity competitions, including this year’s CTF at DEF CON,” said Mustaque Ahamad, interim chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP).

“This is because of the excellence of our students and the SCP research projects and courses that prepare them with the advanced knowledge and skills needed to discover and mitigate the most challenging security vulnerabilities in systems on which we all rely.”

Rather than rushing the drive, the couple’s cross-country road trip included several stops to visit family and friends, explore new parts of the country, experience changing landscapes, and enjoy the adventure of the open road.

The journey began in Claremont, California, where they met as students at Harvey Mudd College. After packing their belongings into Pods, they headed north to Sacramento to spend the Fourth of July with family. From there, they drove to Eugene, Oregon, to visit more family and friends.

Then they turned east and began the long drive to Georgia. 

Rivera and Ozdemir stayed two nights and a full day at nearly every stop. The plan was to have enough time to experience each place they visited while still making it to Atlanta in time to watch the World Cup Final at their new place.

The trip went well overall, but summer weather presented challenges along the way.

“At every stop, we experienced a different kind of heat,” Ozdemir said. “Boise’s dry heat was the worst, and Nashville came in second for its humidity.”

“Boise’s heat made it feel like our skin was going to melt off our bones,” Rivera said.

Both said the trip was unlike anything they had done before. They had traveled outside California, but neither had taken a road trip of this scale. The journey gave the couple a chance to see much more of the country.

For Rivera, one highlight was the ecological diversity.

“Oregon was lush in parts, and very dry and flat, like California,” she said. “We just got back from Germany, and in Europe you have to travel between countries to see the diversity we saw in the U.S.”

The drive took them through the Rockies, the Great Plains, and ultimately the lush mountains of Northwest Georgia.

“I didn’t want to fall asleep in the car because I didn’t want to miss the scenery,” Rivera said. “I really liked the mountains in Oregon and western Colorado.”

Ozdemir also enjoyed the changing landscapes, but he said his favorite part of the trip was the people they met along the way. He enjoyed seeing family and friends they do not regularly get to visit.

The couple found different ways to pass the time in the car. As they drove through each state, Ozdemir would look up facts about it and read them aloud. They also filled the miles with music and audiobooks, listening to two books from Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid series.

“It kept us guessing until the end,” Rivera said of the audiobooks.

The playlist ranged from Noah Kahan to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Southern rock classics. When Rivera was driving, Taylor Swift was a regular in the mix.

The stop in Nashville added another memorable soundtrack to their road trip. They were struck by the abundance of live music throughout the city. From the farmers market to restaurants, “it felt like everyone was trying to make it as a musician,” Rivera said.

To keep them company during their journey, Rivera and Ozdemir shared their road trip with an unexpected travel companion: Buzz the Bee.

When Ozdemir interviewed at Georgia Tech, he received the plushie as a gift. The plushie accompanied them on the cross-country trip, appearing in photographs at Utah’s Arches National Park and beside several state welcome signs along their route.

After their weeks long long odyssey, they arrived in Atlanta in mid-July, just in time for the World Cup final. Or so they thought. Atlanta traffic and spotty internet nearly derailed their plans.

But after arriving at their Midtown apartment, the couple managed to stream about half the game over a mobile hotspot before their wireless provider limited their service.

“We watched the second half of the game with varying levels of video quality,” Ozdemir said.

With the journey from where they met to their new home in Atlanta behind them, Rivera and Ozdemir are preparing for the new academic year. Ozdemir is a security researcher specializing in programmable cryptography, while Rivera focuses on human-centered security and privacy.

As part of the existing Georgia Traffic Management Center (TMC), those systems notify drivers of changing highway conditions, operate traffic management devices, and help the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) identify and respond to traffic issues requiring immediate attention.

In December 2025, Georgia Tech cybersecurity researchers began working with GDOT to ensure the security of those networked systems and devices. As part of this advanced cybersecurity project, they are applying machine learning (ML), a type of artificial intelligence (AI), to safeguard existing systems and set the stage for future automation.

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

Instead of becoming steadily stickier as they are pulled apart, soft hydrogels first become less adhesive and then more adhesive as the pulling speed increases, revealing a previously unknown "sweet spot" where detachment is easier. The discovery challenges a long-held assumption in adhesion mechanics and reveals a new physical mechanism that governs how soft materials attach and detach.

"We expected the adhesion to increase continuously with pulling speed, as predicted by classical theories," said Yuhang Hu, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "Instead, we found the exact opposite over a broad range of speeds. That told us there had to be a completely different physical process at work."

Read the full story.

"One of the goals of the program is to give students the time and support needed to make meaningful progress on their dissertation research while helping them understand the broader policy, economic, and societal implications of their work," said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter.

The stipends enable participants to focus exclusively on clearly defined research goals. The program also supports peer discussions, communication training, and interdisciplinary learning opportunities designed to strengthen both their research and professional development.

This year's cohort explored topics ranging from electricity markets and air pollution to critical mineral supply chains and grid modernization, highlighting the breadth of energy-related research taking place across Georgia Tech.

Exploring Complex Energy Challenges

Ana Mazmishvili, who studies environmental and energy economics, used the summer to examine how climate policies affect communities across state lines.

"My research measures who is actually exposed to pollution from power plants when some states adopt climate regulations to cut emissions while neighboring regions do not," Mazmishvili said. "Because air doesn't stop at state borders, the key question is what happens once the pollution is emitted, and who ends up breathing it."

Her work focuses on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program in the Northeast, and investigates whether the benefits and burdens of emissions reductions are distributed equitably between regulated and neighboring states.

Mazmishvili said the program provided valuable time to focus on her job-market paper, a central component of her dissertation.

"The regular meetings with the program director and other fellows create useful accountability checkpoints and let me hear perspectives from people in very different fields," she said. "We're also learning how to make academic research understandable to a general audience, a skill I expect to use well past this summer."

Industrial and systems engineering doctoral student Faeze Fahimi Aghda spent the summer developing an optimization model for the U.S. gallium supply chain, a critical component of many advanced technologies.

Her research uses mathematical modeling to examine where and when domestic gallium processing facilities should be established under the threat of supply disruptions.

"Working on my research through EPIcenter has taught me to look at my problem from a policy point of view rather than focusing only on the math," Fahimi Aghda said. "The feedback within the meetings helped me improve my model."

Ryan Anthony, in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, explored how one of the largest oil shocks in U.S. history affected electricity customers and whether utility ownership influenced the impact on consumers.

"So far, my research suggests that it mattered a lot,” Anthony said. “Municipal utilities held rates down and absorbed many of the costs, while private, investor-owned utilities passed more costs through to their customers."

Anthony said the program provided critical support for the archival research required for the project.

"My project depends on data that only exists in old government reports, and that kind of archival work is difficult to fund," he said. "EPIcenter gave me the time and space to do it properly."

Connecting Research to Real-World Impact

For Samin Alipour, the summer provided an opportunity to explore how electric grids can adapt to growing numbers of distributed energy resources.

"Most electric distribution systems were built like one-way roads, carrying power from a substation to homes and businesses," Alipour said. "Rooftop solar, batteries, and electric vehicles are turning those roads into two-way systems."

Her research examines how these emerging technologies can be coordinated to increase grid flexibility and clean energy adoption while maintaining safety and reliability and ensuring that costs and benefits are distributed fairly.

With support from EPIcenter, Alipour focused on the economic and policy dimensions of those challenges. "I did not want my research to remain only a technical model," she said. "The program has helped me connect the technical results of my dissertation to economic value, reliability, equity and compensation policy."

One study developed during the summer was accepted for presentation at a specialized power systems conference, an achievement Alipour credits in part to the opportunity to focus on the broader implications of her work.

Building the Next Generation of Energy Scholars

Beyond advancing individual research projects, the Summer Research Program encourages students to engage with colleagues from different disciplines and develop skills for communicating complex ideas to broader audiences.

“Through regular cohort meetings, participants build a community of accountability, discuss research challenges, explore interdisciplinary energy topics, and develop communication skills,” said Gil Gonzalez, program support coordinator for EPIcenter. “Students also write a research-focused blog post for EPIcenter and present their work at the program's fall workshop, which allows them to share their research with the broader Georgia Tech energy community.”

As EPIcenter continues to support interdisciplinary energy scholarship at Georgia Tech, the Summer Research Program equips future leaders with the tools to address complex energy challenges through technological innovation, informed policy, and economic analysis.

Shreyes N. Melkote, Morris M. Bryan Jr. Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and executive director of the Novelis Innovation Hub at Georgia Tech, has been named interim associate vice president of Corporate Engagement, effective Sept. 1. He will report to Executive Vice President for Research Tim Lieuwen and will lead the Office of Corporate Engagement (OCE) during a national search for the position’s permanent successor. 

Join Georgia Tech undergraduate Harrison Burnside on this latest episode of Engineered at Tech as he tours Katherine Graham's lab and discovers how to track pathogens in the Chattahoochee River. The goal is to help local agencies pinpoint sources of pollution in rivers and reservoirs to protect public health. 

Watch the video on the COE News page

Launched in 2025, INNS serves as a hub for neuroscience and neurotechnology research, connecting researchers across disciplines to advance discovery, innovation, and societal impact.

“A core part of INNS's mission is helping people find one another, connect around shared interests, and build something bigger than they could accomplish alone,” says Executive Director Christopher Rozell. “Simon has spent his career bringing together people, perspectives, and disciplines to tackle complex challenges. I can't think of a better person to help lead our interdisciplinary research efforts and support the next generation of collaborative neuroscience research.”

A longtime leader in Georgia Tech's neuroscience community, Sponberg helped shape the institute's early foundations through the Neuro Next Initiative, which evolved into INNS. As associate director, he will help guide research strategy, foster new collaborations, and support interdisciplinary work across the neuroscience ecosystem.

“Neuro-related research touches so many fields that we inevitably have a problem of finding all the potential right people and opportunities to tap into,” he said. “A core responsibility of this role is helping catalyze the ideas of new teams of talented researchers, educators, and trainees from inception to realization.”

Sponberg is the Glen Robinson Professor in Complex Systems with appointments in the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences, where he directs the Agile Systems Lab. His work also connects him to the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) and the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM), underscoring the cross-disciplinary approach that defines both his research and leadership.

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2014, he has built a highly collaborative research program spanning neuroscience, biology, physics, engineering, and robotics while helping foster interdisciplinary connections across campus. He currently leads a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) that brings together neuroscientists and engineers from five universities to understand how brains achieve fast, flexible perception and decision-making in complex sensory environments. He also co-leads the Integrative Movement Sciences Institute, an NSF Biological Integration Institute focused on understanding movement and muscle function across scales.

His contributions have been recognized through numerous honors, including a Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Neuroethology, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in the Neurosciences, and the Leddy Family Dean’s Faculty Excellence Award.

As associate director, Sponberg will focus on helping researchers identify new opportunities for connection and collaboration. In addition to overseeing seed funding programs, he hopes to create pathways for researchers to build teams, access support resources, pursue ambitious interdisciplinary research ideas, and team with Georgia Tech’s undergraduate and graduate neuroscience degree programs.

“I look forward to being a resource for our community when people are looking for help in building teams or finding opportunities to support their ideas,” he said. “Bring your best ideas and please reach out if you want to talk about ideas in the interdisciplinary neuro space that you want to see realized.”
 

The Air Quality Index (AQI) measures how clean or polluted the air is. A healthy AQI is between zero and 50, but when wildfire smoke blows in and settles over cities, the AQI can reach levels of 500 or more. Poor air quality changes where and how people spend their time and money, reduces productivity (even for those working indoors), and increases healthcare costs.

“Environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act dramatically improved our air quality over the past 40 years, but as wildfire season becomes the new normal, wildfire smoke is eroding those gains,” Wichman said. According to recent research, wildfire smoke has erased about a quarter of the progress made over previous decades, and more than half in many western states. 

Read Full Story on the IAC News Page

As many organizations and businesses are turning to AI to improve workplace efficiency, risk remains high. Between overlooked footnotes and misread graphics, small mistakes can have expensive consequences. 

To address this challenge, researchers from Georgia Tech and J.P. Morgan developed SlideAgent. The new framework helps large language models (LLMs) better understand complex visual documents like presentation slide decks, brochures, and reports. 

SlideAgent works by breaking documents into multiple levels, allowing the model to analyze both the big picture and the fine details. This human-inspired approach leads to more accurate and reliable interpretation than existing systems. 

Beyond improving workplace tools, SlideAgent also points to a broader shift in AI. Instead of building only larger and more powerful models, the work shows how smarter design and more efficient reasoning can improve performance. 

“Multimodal LLMs such as GPT, Gemini, and Claude, can save people time and reduce the mental effort required to understand these documents, but they remain imperfect,” said Yiqiao (Ahren) Jin, a Ph.D. candidate in Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

“In high-stakes fields such as finance, for example, misreading a number, overlooking a footnote, or making an incorrect comparison across pages could affect reporting, risk assessment, or strategic decisions.” 

The researchers tested SlideAgent on a wide range of real-world documents, including financial presentations, technical slides, and visual question-answering datasets. 

The system consistently outperformed leading commercial models and open-source tools throughout the evaluation. In some cases, it improved accuracy by up to 10%. The gains were especially strong on more complex tasks, such as comparing information across slides or understanding how visuals relate to each other on a page.

“We found the results very encouraging. SlideAgent reaches an improvement of 7.9% over its proprietary base model and 9.8% over the evaluated open-source base models,” said Jin, the project’s lead researcher. 

“These are meaningful gains given the strength of the underlying multimodal models and the difficulty of the tasks.” 

Current multimodal AI systems often process entire pages at once. This approach can lead to mistakes, such as miscounting items in a chart or overlooking important details in dense visuals.

SlideAgent addresses this by mimicking how people read documents. Instead of treating each page as a single unit, the system looks at information at three levels: the full document, individual pages, and specific elements like charts, tables, and text blocks.

A network of agents, each specialized for a specific level, divides and coordinates analysis. Then, SlideAgent combines outputs to build a structured understanding of the overall document. This allows it to answer questions more accurately and reason across multiple pages.

“The central inspiration was how people naturally read a long presentation,” Jin said.

“We first develop an understanding of the overall narrative, then identify the relevant pages or sections, and finally zoom in on individual charts, tables, or text blocks when precise evidence is needed.”

The work highlights a growing challenge with AI. As systems become more popular and more powerful, users increasingly discover the technology’s limitations. This is especially true for real-world tasks that require structured reasoning and contextual understanding.

SlideAgent shows that better performance does not always come from building bigger models. Instead, it points to smarter ways of organizing how AI processes information that can lead to improvement.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) accepted SlideAgent for presentation at its annual meeting. The 64th ACL 2026 meeting took place July 2-7 in San Diego.

ACL is a scientific and professional organization for researchers in natural language processing (NLP). Its namesake conference is one of the world’s leading venues for presenting NLP research.

ACL 2026 followed a year after Jin completed an internship at J.P. Morgan AI Research, where he worked on SlideAgent. He interned under Rachneet Kaur, Zhen Zeng, and Sumitra Ganesh, all co-authors of the paper. School of CSE Associate Professor Srijan Kumar advises Jin at Georgia Tech.

Along with SlideAgent, Jin authored two other papers accepted at ACL 2026.

“Conferences such as ACL are valuable not only for sharing results, but also for refining future project ideas with the broader community. Discussions across institutions and research areas can reveal limitations, suggest new evaluations, and spark collaborations that are difficult to develop in isolation,” Jin said.

“For SlideAgent, I was particularly interested in feedback on how we can make the framework more computationally efficient without sacrificing accuracy or interpretability.”

Instead of becoming steadily stickier as they are pulled apart, soft hydrogels first become less adhesive and then more adhesive as the pulling speed increases, revealing a previously unknown "sweet spot" where detachment is easier. The discovery challenges a long-held assumption in adhesion mechanics and reveals a new physical mechanism that governs how soft materials attach and detach.

"We expected the adhesion to increase continuously with pulling speed, as predicted by classical theories," said Yuhang Hu, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "Instead, we found the exact opposite over a broad range of speeds. That told us there had to be a completely different physical process at work."

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

For researchers in Georgia Tech's Cyber-Physical Security (CPSec) Lab, however, the vulnerabilities behind many of these incidents are far from new.

Associate Professor Saman Zonouz leads the CPSec Lab and has studied programmable logic controllers (PLCs) for years. These devices automate critical infrastructure, including water treatment facilities, power grids, manufacturing plants, and transportation systems. The lab’s work has revealed widespread internet exposure and software vulnerabilities that leave many industrial control systems vulnerable to cyberattacks.

"Out of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, four are considered lifelines," Zonouz said. "Of those four, communications, energy, transportation, and water, the water sector is the most vulnerable, which is why it is so often targeted."

PLCs serve as the brains of industrial operations, monitoring sensors and controlling equipment that keep essential services operational.

"Imagine you have a thermostat that controls the temperature of your house. That is a type of controller," Zonouz explained. "The professional version does the same thing in industry."

When these controllers are directly accessible from the internet, attackers can exploit them to disrupt operations, manipulate industrial processes, or interfere with the systems that deliver essential services. Controllers may be intentionally exposed to allow operators to monitor equipment remotely. They can also be unintentionally accessible online because of configuration errors.

However, internet exposure is only part of the problem.

The CPSec Lab maintains a collection of PLCs that researchers reverse engineer to better understand their firmware, communication protocols, and security weaknesses. Their research has found that many controllers contain vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit once they gain access.

"Not only can the attackers see the house they want to rob, but the doors are also left unlocked," Zonouz said.

In 2024, Zonouz and his collaborators presented PLCHound at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), introducing an automated system that identifies internet-connected PLCs hidden within massive internet-scale datasets collected by services such as Shodan and Censys. The work was led by Ph.D. student Ryan Pickren. Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Raheem Beyah, Assistant Professor Frank Li, and Research Scientist Animesh Chhotaray are co-authors of the study. 

Rather than relying on traditional scanning techniques, PLCHound identifies subtle network signatures that reveal industrial devices that prior methods often missed. Using the system, the researchers conducted one of the largest studies of publicly reachable PLCs from major manufacturers.

Their findings showed that previous estimates undercounted the number of internet-accessible industrial controllers by as much as 37 times. Even more concerning, nearly 96% of the identified devices exposed protocols linked to recently disclosed critical vulnerabilities.

The researchers did more than document the problem. After identifying exposed devices, the team launched a large-scale notification campaign, contacting more than 7,000 industrial operators to alert them that their systems appeared vulnerable. The effort enabled many organizations to investigate and address security issues before they could be exploited.

The recent attacks on municipal water systems reinforce concerns researchers have raised for years: many critical infrastructure operators continue to rely on operational technology designed primarily for reliability and performance rather than for cybersecurity.

Improving those defenses, Zonouz said, will require more than simply patching individual vulnerabilities.

The researchers cite the energy sector as a model. Compared with other critical infrastructure sectors, electric utilities generally operate under more mature cybersecurity requirements and undergo routine compliance audits, providing organizations with greater visibility into the devices connected to their networks and the risks they pose.

Implementing those improvements will not be easy. Many municipal water utilities operate with limited budgets and aging infrastructure, leaving little funding available for cybersecurity investments. As attacks on critical infrastructure become more frequent, the researchers argue that gaining visibility into operational technology assets and strengthening oversight are essential first steps to protect the systems communities rely on every day.

The CPSec Lab is a collaborative laboratory within the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy as well as the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Initial public offering (IPO) filings are dense disclosures submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. They can stretch hundreds of pages and combine legal language, financial data, and visuals like charts and infographics. Even experienced analysts struggle to read them end to end, leaving many everyday investors relying on headlines or summaries. 

New research from Georgia Tech’s Financial Services Innovation Lab reveals how artificial intelligence can make these critical documents more accessible and reveals where AI still has room for improvement. 

“IPO-Mine: A Toolkit and Dataset for Section-Structured Analysis of Long, Multimodal IPO Documents” authors include Michael Galarnyk, Siddharth Lohani, Vidhyakshaya Kannan, Sagnik Nandi, Aman Patel, Liqin Ye, Arnav Hiray, Rutwik Routu, Prasun Banerjee, Siddhartha Somani, and Sudheer Chava. 

Making the Complex Understandable

The authors developed IPO-Mine, an open-source toolkit and dataset designed to break IPO filings into manageable pieces. Instead of treating filings as a single document, IPO-Mine separates them into structured sections and extracts visuals like charts for analysis.

“IPO filings are important public documents, but they are very difficult to work with at scale,” said Siddharth Lohani, a Georgia Tech computer science major ’26, software engineer at Bloomberg, and co-first author of the study. “We wanted to make these filings easier to analyze systematically.”

Why IPO Filings Matter

IPO filings offer investors a detailed look at how a company operates before it goes public.

“IPO filings give investors a clearer look at how a company makes money, what risks it faces, and how it positions itself before entering the public market,” said Arnav Hiray, a Georgia Tech machine learning doctoral student in the Financial Services Innovation Lab, AI for Financial Markets VIP instructor,  and co-author. “Even if everyday investors don’t read the full filing, these documents can help them better understand a company’s prospects.”

For retail investors, that insight can help cut through marketing hype and offer a clearer sense of a company’s underlying strengths and risks.

AI’s Strengths

Research shows that large language models and multimodal AI models can use their speed, scale, and pattern-recognition capabilities to offer significant advantages when analyzing IPO filings, including:

• Processing massive documents: IPO filings can exceed hundreds of thousands of words, making manual review difficult. IPO-Mine structures the filings into sections and extracts visuals for analysis.
• Structuring unorganized data: IPO-Mine standardizes inconsistent sections across filings, making comparisons easier across companies and industries. 
• Analyzing text and visuals together: By extracting charts and images, AI can evaluate not just what companies say, but how they present information visually. 
• Identifying trends at scale: Researchers can analyze patterns in disclosure practices across decades, industries, and thousands of companies.
   

Together, these capabilities could help democratize financial analysis, giving more investors access to insights that were once limited to professionals.

A Key Finding

One of the study’s most striking findings is that IPO filings are evolving in two different directions.

“What stood out was that the text and visuals appear to be moving in different directions,” Lohani said. “Investors and researchers need to pay attention to both.”

The research shows that written sections are becoming more standardized, while visual elements such as charts and infographics are becoming more complex and varied.

“As text becomes more standardized, more of a company’s distinctive story shifts into its visuals,” said Vidhyakshaya Kannan, a Georgia Tech Financial Services Innovation Lab intern and co-author. “Because boilerplate language often looks the same across filings, charts and infographics are increasingly where companies differentiate themselves and make their case to investors.”

For investors, that means understanding a company requires studying the visuals as carefully as the text; figures can’t simply be skimmed or skipped over.

Where AI Struggles

Despite its promise, AI is not yet a perfect solution.

• IPO filings are long: longer documents can reduce model performance, making it difficult for AI to maintain accuracy across an entire filing.
• IPO filings are visual: AI tools struggle to interpret visual data correctly.
• IPO filings are multimodal: filings combine text, tables, and visuals in inconsistent formats. This makes them difficult for AI models to process reliably.
   

“Our results show that even strong multimodal models can disagree with expert human judgments on financial charts, especially when they are misleading,” Kannan said. 

The Future of Financial Transparency

AI can accelerate analysis and uncover patterns, but human judgment remains essential for interpreting the visuals companies increasingly use to tell their story. Even with these limitations, researchers believe tools like IPO-Mine could play an important role in shaping the future of financial transparency.

“IPO-Mine can help researchers, regulators, and investors analyze IPO disclosures more systematically, revealing patterns in how companies communicate risk, performance, and strategy before entering public markets,” said Hiray. 

By making complex financial disclosures more accessible and actionable, AI-powered tools have the potential to broaden access to critical market information and support more informed investment decisions.

Watch the researchers explain IPO-Mine and its impact

Read More: IPO-Mine

Learn More: Center for Finance and Technology

With a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and as a former trainee in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB), it’s no surprise that Georgia Tech alumnus and serial entrepreneur Chris Lee loves numbers. One in four. Eighty percent. Five times.  

Read more »

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

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

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

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

Beyond Conventional Fracture Testing

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

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

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

An Honest View of Sustainability

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

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

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

From Cracks to Circularity

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

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

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

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

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

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

CultivAgents is a three-agent system that fields gardening questions and creates tailored plans based on a user’s gardening skill level, climate and environment, and cultural background.

The experience agent, environmental agent, and ethnobotanical agent inform one another and work together to guide users through the gardening process.

“Multi-agent systems provide multi-faceted support,” said Diana Wang, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing who created CultivAgents. “My interest was in how we could provide more personalized and aligned support to individuals trying to grow food themselves while facing unique environmental or cultural factors.”

Gardening is a hobby that many people start but give up because of the time and effort it requires to be successful. Ryan Pemberton, a horticulturist at Georgia Tech’s community garden, said the two biggest mistakes he sees novice gardeners make are starting too big and overwatering.

“If you’ve never gardened before, trying to manage a large plot could be overwhelming,” Pemberton said.

“You can start small. You don’t have to have a big garden right away. You can start with one tomato plant and grow from there. See how well you can keep that one plant alive and then expand as you feel comfortable.”

Aside from the built-in health benefits of growing fresh food and working outdoors, Pemberton said gardening can lower your grocery bill and reduce carbon emissions by minimizing food transportation. 

It can also be a great way for international students at Tech to grow foods native to their homelands. He said a tool like CultivAgents could be useful for determining whether Atlanta’s climate is suitable. 

“People might want to grow a lot of different vegetables in their garden, but if you go too far south of here, it gets a little too hot to grow things like broccoli and strawberries,” he said. 

“A little north of here, it gets a little too cold to grow some species of peppers. Having something tell you what grows well in your region means you’re not having to pick and choose or guess.”

That’s one of the reasons Wang designed CultivAgents to feature multiple agents that consider unique environmental and cultural contexts.

“Multiple agents help distribute specific types of support as opposed to the generic support you often get from a single chatbot,” Wang said.

“Another advantage is that they tend to build on each other. The environmental agent builds on the experience agent’s detailed steps. This allows the system to tell you how to grow bush beans, for example, within a specific local community.”

Wang said she surveyed and interviewed new and experienced gardeners who use Tech’s community garden to learn what they would want from a conversational agent. She found that many wanted step-by-step instructions and guidance on what to plant, how to plant it, and a schedule for upkeep.

“All of our users told us they view gardening as something that’s long term, so they wanted this platform to be able to facilitate that kind of relationship,” she said.

The community garden is a shared space with nine garden beds. Pemberton said it’s a great place for new gardeners to learn to grow food before starting their own gardens. Much of the food grown there is donated to Klemis Kitchen, Georgia Tech’s on-campus food bank.

For more information about the community garden and how to get involved, visit https://sustainability.campusservices.gatech.edu/community-garden/

To see a live demo of CultivAgents, visit https://cultivagents.onrender.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researchers at Georgia Tech play a key role in the international collaboration. The Georgia Tech-LIGO research group includes School of Physics Professor Laura Cadonati, Assistant Professor Surabhi Sachdev, Research Scientist Margaret Millhouse, Postdoctoral Scholar Prathamesh Joshi, eight graduate students, and multiple undergraduates.

The LVK network detects gravitational waves when a massive cosmic event — like the collision of two black holes — creates invisible ripples in the fabric of space-time. Waves ripple out at the speed of light, and millions of years after the events that first created them, they reach the LVK detectors. 

But detecting gravitational waves does not simply mean capturing a signal — clues first need to be untangled from background noise.

“Identifying gravitational-wave signals requires carefully separating real astrophysical events from random fluctuations in the data,” says School of Physics graduate student Urja Shah, whose work to quickly identify phenomena supports rapid follow-up by the broader astronomical community.

To support the identification of phenomena, School of Physics graduate student Megan Arogeti conducts consistency tests between waveforms, checking results to find unexpected or unusual features. “Tests like this give us confidence in our models as we continue to observe gravitational waves with increasing sensitivity,” she explains. “They support new observations and help identify exciting new physics.”

“These efforts help ensure that gravitational-wave signals are robustly identified and accurately characterized, turning each detection into a precise measurement,” adds Shah. “In turn, these measurements deepen our understanding of some of the most massive and dense objects in the universe and the fundamental laws governing the cosmos.”

Astrocalibration Autotune

When a sensor detects a gravitational wave, it produces a distinctive response, says School of Physics graduate student Shobhit Ranjan. “Those signals encode a wealth of information we can analyze to learn about their sources — their masses, spins, distance, and location.” But in order to detect these chirps, the detectors must be carefully calibrated, and if calibration is not optimal, the signals can be compromised.

Now, a new tool is helping the LVK collaboration recalibrate less optimal signals. The technique is already showing promise: In an article recently accepted in Physical Review Letters, LVK researchers successfully applied it to two interesting signals. The first signal served as a testing opportunity for the method. The team used astrocalibration to recover the data and check it against secondary independent calibration data that was available. They then put the technique to use, recovering information from a second event where no secondary calibration data were available. 

“Like autotune in the music industry, the new research shows that theoretical models can be used as guides, similar to how sheet music can help a studio shift off-key music to its correct tone,” Ranjan explains. “These theoretical models suggest the shape of the signal, and together with data from other detectors, we can adjust the data and read it correctly.”

“The fact that these detectors can now not only sense cosmic events, but leverage them to improve the data being collected marks a new era in gravitational wave science,” he adds.

A Record-Setting Dataset

The LVK Collaboration also published their fifth catalog of gravitational wave events this spring. The findings include an updated estimate of how fast the universe is expanding, evidence for the existence of second-generation black holes, the most precise sky localization ever achieved for a gravitational wave source, and the first measurement of three vibrational modes of a black hole.

“Our group helped enable 140 detections out of the 161 reported in this catalog,” says Joshi, who contributed to one of the flagship searches and designed a specialized search focused on detecting especially heavy black hole mergers.

Joshi also worked on determining precise locations of where the gravitational waves originated from in the universe — research that he says will allow astronomers around the world to perform long-term follow-up observations of interesting events.

One record-setting detection showed two black holes that had violently collided more than 3 billion light-years from Earth. Researchers were able to pinpoint its location in the sky more precisely than any other gravitational wave event observed before.

Improvements in the LVK network’s ability to localize events along with the large number of detections allowed for a better estimate of the Hubble constant, which measures the rate at which the universe is expanding. The new measurement is over 25% more precise than previous estimates.

The new catalog also includes the “clearest” gravitational wave signal ever detected. The clarity of the signal led to the most accurate test of general relativity ever performed and confirmation of Stephen Hawking’s black hole area theorem.

“This catalog provides not just the largest number of black hole detections, it marks a new era of rapid progress,” Sachdev says. “This is just the beginning of what these observations will allow us to uncover.”

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

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

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

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

Natural Defenders

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

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

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

Testing the Treatment

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

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

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

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

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

From Aquariums to Oceans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Computing Education to AI Futures

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

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

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

Preparing Students for the Professions of Tomorrow

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

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

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

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

Strengthening U.S.–Colombia Collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering a Different Side of Computing

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

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

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

Hands-On Learning, Real-World Connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding Students' View of Computing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Tomorrow's Computing Workforce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hackers Are Moving Faster

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

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

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

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

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

The Risk Reaches Everyone

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

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

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

Fighting AI With AI

Cybersecurity defenders also have access to the same technology.

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

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

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

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

Speed Is the New Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Full Story on the ME News Page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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