A Georgia Tech research team was recently recognized for an influential paper that helped define how applications could run efficiently outside the cloud.
The team received the 10-Year Test of Time Award at the 20th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2026) in July.
Professor Umakishore Ramachandran and his former Ph.D. students – Enrique Saurez, Kirak Hong, Dave Lillethun, and Beate Ottenwälder – were recognized for their 2016 paper, Incremental Deployment and Migration of Geo-distributed Situation Awareness Applications in the Fog. Saurez, now a researcher at Microsoft, was the lead author of the paper.
Most of a person’s daily internet use, such as sending emails or shopping, runs through the cloud. Cloud computing does have latency issues, but this is typically not perceptible to people. However, in situation-awareness applications, such as virtual reality or autonomous vehicles, this latency becomes a barrier.
“Cloud computing is not appropriate for these latency-sensitive applications where events occur at computational perception speeds as opposed to human perception speeds. And this is the reason that edge computing became important,” Ramachandran said.
Rather than using the cloud, edge computing brings computation closer to the data source. This method reduces latency and backhaul bandwidth consumption. Beyond latency reduction, edge computing offers other advantages over the cloud. Businesses and organizations that handle confidential data may not want to store their records in the public cloud, and edge computing offers a more secure alternative.
The awarded paper proposed a new programming model, Foglets, that enables domain experts with limited knowledge of edge computing to run their applications on the geographically distributed edge infrastructure.
“We showed that with edge compute you can actually do some of the things that you need for situation awareness applications,” Ramachandran said.
“All of these students that I worked with on this paper have graduated and moved on to industry and academia and are doing great things, so it’s a nice honor to see something we did 10 years back get recognition.”
A Georgia Tech research team was recently recognized for an influential paper that helped define how applications could run efficiently outside the cloud.
The team received the 10-Year Test of Time Award at the 20th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2026) in July.
Established in 2014, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program brings together distinguished faculty from across Georgia Tech to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, strengthen the sustainability research community, and advance the Institute's mission of generating real-world impact through research, education, and engagement. Serving three-year terms, fellows act as strategic advisors, community ambassadors, and thought leaders within the broader sustainability ecosystem. Building on this foundational vision, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program has evolved to meet the dynamic needs of modern sustainability leaders. The newly revamped program emphasizes active leadership development, offering tailored networking opportunities, connections with broader sustainability networks, and focused training to help fellows grow as influential voices in their respective fields. Through these enhancements, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program aims to empower early-career researchers to maximize their reach, elevate their research, and innovate transformative sustainability solutions.
The 2026 cohort represents a wide range of expertise spanning AI and sustainability, sustainable finance, computational materials discovery, infrastructure systems, environmental chemistry, urban resilience, and community-engaged research.
Collectively, their research addresses the sustainability of interconnected human, natural, and engineered systems, encompassing topics such as watershed resilience, resource stewardship, carbon cycling, circular materials management, and evidence-based environmental decision-making. Their diverse expertise fosters new interdisciplinary collaborations that accelerate the development of practical, scalable solutions for communities, industries, and ecosystems.
“We are delighted to welcome this exceptional group of faculty leaders to the BBISS community,” said BBISS Executive Director Beril Toktay. “Their expertise, creativity, and commitment to sustainability will help expand opportunities for collaboration and accelerate the impact of sustainability research across Georgia Tech and beyond.”
]]>The Tech Promise Scholarship, founded in 2007, makes it possible for Georgia students with family incomes below $55,500 to earn a debt-free degree from Georgia Tech. Weigel’s appointment as a faculty guide on the eve of the program’s 20th anniversary marks the first time a recipient of the scholarship has returned to the program in a mentorship capacity.
For Weigel, a senior academic professional in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences, the position is a full-circle moment:
Nobody gets to Tech by accident, but I know that for students who come from backgrounds similar to mine that it might not always feel that way. I’ve been keeping an eye out for this opportunity because I truly think it makes all the difference to have a broad support system and people who get where these students are coming.
Read Emily Weigel's story. >>>
]]>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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Communications Officer at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
]]>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:
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.”
]]>This year, Team Blue Water – which features nine Georgia Tech participants –came out on top after three days of intense competition.
]]>Communications Officer II at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
]]>School of Computing Instruction (SCI) faculty member Nimisha Roy has been named director of online undergraduate initiatives, a new role created to expand online undergraduate programs and broaden access to computing education at Georgia Tech.
The position was made possible by philanthropic support from alumnus Henry Shi. A College of Computing Advisory Board member and longtime advocate for accessible online education, Shi has built a career around scaling technology to reach millions. He cofounded Snapcommerce, which has more than 30 million users. The College previously honored him with its Rising Star Award.
Shi said his motivation for supporting this new role stems from a belief that too many talented students are shut out of opportunity by barriers that have nothing to do with ability.
“I’ve seen firsthand how much talent is excluded from opportunities when cost, geography, and exclusivity are the gatekeepers,” he said. “This role is about widening the aperture to make a Top 10, world‑class undergraduate education far more accessible and affordable for students.”
Shi completed Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program in 2018. He says the experience shaped his view of what online learning can achieve.
“OMSCS has proven to the world that online education can deliver real rigor, excellence, and impact at scale without compromising quality,” he said. “It opened my eyes to the life‑changing impact higher education institutions can have at scale when access is treated as a first‑class goal.”
A Leader for the Next Phase of Online Undergraduate Growth
Roy brings more than eight years of experience at Georgia Tech, serving in roles ranging from graduate teaching assistant to faculty lecturer. She has taught in the Online Master of Analytics (OMSA) program and led research on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into computer science (CS) education.
This work included redesigning courses to use AI as a learning tool and benchmarking AI tools for software engineering tasks. She has also focused on improving accessibility in online computing courses, ensuring that materials support a wider range of learners.
In her new role, Roy will help bring the quality and rigor of Georgia Tech’s online graduate programs to the undergraduate level.
“A big part of the role is working with faculty to build these courses and making sure that what we offer online is just as strong as what students experience in person,” she said.
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Olufisayo Omojokun, who supervises the position, says the new role reflects the College’s commitment to expanding access to high-quality computing education at scale.
“As undergraduate programs continue to grow, this position will play a key role in strengthening student learning experiences and ensuring our curriculum remains rigorous, accessible, and responsive to emerging areas in computing like AI,” Omojokun said.
“With that said, it's important to remember that the undergraduate space also includes the College's dual enrollment offerings. Nimisha will play an important role across Georgia's many school districts, especially as we expand our AI literacy offerings.”
Interim Vice Provost for AI in Education David Joyner noted that perceptions of online learning have shifted significantly.
“When OMSCS started, there was a general belief that online education worked better for more experienced adults who could manage their own learning,” Joyner said. “But especially coming out of Covid, it’s been more and more clear that online education offers fantastic benefits for undergraduates as well.”
That shift has created momentum to expand online offerings beyond graduate education—momentum Roy is positioned to lead.
Early Priorities: Online Minors and Scalable Access
Roy’s first major initiative is starting online CS minors, which she sees as a practical way to make an immediate impact.
“We can reach a lot of students without having to build an entire degree from scratch,” she said.
She will continue teaching while serving in this leadership role, something she considers essential for staying connected to students’ day‑to‑day experiences.
Roy views online education as a powerful tool for expanding access for students who cannot relocate to Atlanta or enroll in a full-time program. She believes online learning can be more interactive, flexible, and personalized than traditional formats, especially in computing fields where practice and feedback are essential.
“Especially in computing, we can design systems that support that more intentionally,” she said.
Building for the Future: AI, Accessibility, and Opportunity
Roy is also exploring how AI tools can support accessibility and content-creation workflows by improving video and audio quality, generating and refining captions, and creating narrated tutorials from demonstrations. Her research focuses on how AI can make course materials more accessible across different learning styles, whether that’s presenting concepts in multiple ways, generating diverse examples, or supporting different learning styles.
Looking ahead, Roy hopes her work will expand access to a Georgia Tech education.
“There are so many bright, curious, and hardworking students who, for different reasons, aren’t able to be physically present on campus,” she said. “If we can give them access to the same level of rigor, support, and opportunity, that’s incredibly meaningful.”
Joyner sees this work as part of a broader reimagining of undergraduate computing education that uses online flexibility to reshape the timeline between education and employment.
“Our hope is to eventually make it so students can jumpstart their careers while still finishing their degrees because of the flexibility online classes give them,” he said.
School of Computing Instruction (SCI) faculty member Nimisha Roy has been named director of online undergraduate initiatives, a new role created to expand online undergraduate programs and broaden access to computing education at Georgia Tech.
]]>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.”
]]>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.
]]>This press release is shared jointly with the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) newsroom. Georgia Tech faculty Martha Grover and Maggie Kosal also serve as SRNL Joint Appointees.
The Georgia Institute of Technology and the Savannah River National Laboratory announced the joint appointment of Facundo M. Fernández to collaborate in research around mass spectrometry, an analytical technique used to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions for research.
“Our partnership with Facundo will deepen SRNL’s innovative research in mass spectrometry and its groundbreaking applications,” said Tammy Taylor, SRNL’s deputy director of Science and Technology. “His expertise and collaboration will undoubtedly accelerate our lab’s drive for scientific excellence and impactful discoveries.”
Fernández is renowned internationally for his work in bioanalytical chemistry. His research focuses on developing tools to analyze small-volume samples, tissues and single cells, with applications in understanding diseases such as cancer, cystic fibrosis and inflammatory bowel disease. He has published 234 peer-reviewed papers, given over 230 invited lectures, and supervised 35 doctoral and master’s degree students.
He also directs the Systems Mass Spectrometry Core (SyMS-C) at Georgia Tech’s Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, managing more than 15 mass spectrometers.
“Being appointed as a joint faculty member with SRNL opens many new opportunities for collaborative research at the intersection of biology, chemistry and engineering,” said Fernández. “This type of collaborative research is what Georgia Tech is renowned for. We aim to address societal questions with global impact. I have been incredibly impressed with the quality of science at SRNL, and I look forward to many joint discoveries in the future.”
Fernández is a Regents’ Professor and the Vasser-Woolley Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry at Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees (Licenciatura) in chemistry from the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, in 1995, and his doctorate in analytical chemistry from the same university in 1999. From 2000 to 2001, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Department of Chemistry. He served as a senior postdoctoral researcher and later as a research scientist between 2002 and 2003 with a research group at the University of Arizona.
“Professor Fernández is a renowned expert in the field of mass spectrometry, and it has been a privilege to already have him as a collaborator involved in our Laboratory Directed Research and Development program,” said SRNL’s Christopher Orton, division director for Nuclear Nonproliferation. “This joint appointment will strengthen the relationship between SRNL and Georgia Tech as we continue to work together to improve our understanding of the environmental fate of chemical contaminants in complex matrices.”
SRNL’s Joint Appointment Program provides university faculty opportunities to engage in research and development addressing the nation’s energy related challenges. SRNL staff and joint appointees help ensure America’s security and prosperity through transformative science and technology solutions, and joint appointees serve as a bridge between their university and SRNL researchers to deliver the future workforce for the Department of Energy.
Savannah River National Laboratory is a multi-program federally funded research and development center managed and operated by Battelle Savannah River Alliance for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. EM transforms the nation’s environmental liabilities into opportunities for innovation, job creation, and economic growth, while ensuring safe, secure and prosperous communities across America. For more information, visit energy.gov/em.
Lindsey Bullinger, associate professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, has been named associate dean for research, effective Aug. 1.
Bullinger is the Associate Director of the Health Economics and Policy Innovation Collaborative and a co-editor for the Journal of Policy Analysis & Management and a consulting editor for Child Maltreatment. She is also a faculty affiliate with the Georgia Policy Labs at Georgia State University, the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at the University of Notre Dame, the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Children's Pediatric Research Alliance at the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.
“Dr. Bullinger’s deep expertise in research and leadership will be a tremendous asset to supporting and amplifying the amazing research in the College,” said Amanda Murdie, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, Regents’ Professor, and Ivan Allen Jr. Chair. “Her leadership roles both at Georgia Tech and in her research area make her an ideal leader for the College’s research enterprise.”
Bullinger’s research examines how public policies affect child and family health and well-being, especially among low-income families. Her work has been published in American Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, Contemporary Economic Policy, Review of Economics of the Household, Economics & Human Biology, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Housing Policy Debate, Child Abuse & Neglect, Children and Youth Services Review, Health Affairs, BMC Pediatrics, Health Services Research, American Journal of Public Health, JAMA Pediatrics, Maternal and Child Health Journal, and more.
Bullinger’s research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE), Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, Spencer Foundation, Cash Transfer Lab at NYU, and Pew Charitable Trusts.
For the past three years, Bullinger has co-chaired the Georgia Tech Office of the Executive Vice President for Research's steering committee, developing recommendations for a new Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI) on health and well-being. She has also served two elected terms on the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy’s Faculty Executive Committee and co-hosts the annual Atlanta Workshop on Public Policy and Child Well-being.
She earned a Ph.D. from the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. She holds an MPA from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a bachelor's degree from Miami University in Ohio.
]]>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.”
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.
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.”
]]>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.
]]>Meghna Iyer (Biology 2026) came to Georgia Tech trying to understand her mother’s illness. What she discovered is changing how scientists connect three neurodegenerative diseases.
]]>As fans around the world search for tickets to FIFA World Cup 2026 matches, a team of Georgia Tech students is working to make buying tickets to major events less stressful and more transparent.
DoorTix, a startup ticket-buying concierge founded by computer science major Arayna Saxena, industrial engineering major Shinhai Chen, and mechanical engineering major Dhruv Narang, helps users navigate the increasingly complex world of event ticketing. Earlier this year, the startup earned the People’s Choice Award at Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize competition for its approach to combating dynamic pricing and improving access to live events.
The Problem
Whether fans are trying to attend a sporting event or a concert, the team says that securing tickets often means navigating fluctuating prices, limited inventory, hidden fees, and the risk of scams.
“Buying tickets today can feel like entering a maze with a timer running,” Saxena said.
“Prices change, listings disappear, fees show up late, and fans often feel like they need to be experts just to get into the event they care about.”
How DoorTix Works
DoorTix was built from that frustration. Instead of requiring users to constantly monitor multiple ticket marketplaces, the platform tracks listings across sites and automatically purchases tickets when they meet a user’s target price.
The system is designed to respond to dynamic pricing and automated purchasing bots that can cause ticket costs to shift rapidly across platforms.
“That gives fans fair and predictable access without the guesswork,” Saxena said.
“We wanted to build something that brings the human side back into ticketing, something that feels less like fighting an algorithm and more like having someone in your corner.”
The World Cup: A Global Test Case
The World Cup tournament is a high-profile example of the problem DoorTix is designed to solve. With global demand and limited availability, the tournament reflects the same challenges seen across major live events.
“When fans are trying to attend something as massive as the World Cup, the stakes are higher. The excitement is higher. The confusion is also higher,” Saxena said.
“That is exactly where DoorTix can be useful. The World Cup gives us a real, high-pressure use case for what we are building.”
From Idea to Startup
The idea for DoorTix began with a simple observation: buying tickets often creates more stress than excitement.
As a computer science student, Saxena has helped translate that idea into a working product, balancing technical development with user experience design.
“A lot of the work is not just ‘write code and ship it.’ It’s asking what the user needs, where they’re confused, and how we can make a complex process feel simple.”
Through Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X Startup Launch program, the team has tested assumptions, gathered customer feedback, and refined its business model as it develops the product.
They’ve already seen real customer demand, and now the focus is on improving the experience and making it more scalable. Long-term, the founders envision DoorTix continuing to be a trusted ticket-buying concierge for high-demand events.
“We’re not just helping someone buy a seat. We’re helping them get to a once-in-a-lifetime memory.”
As fans around the world search for tickets to FIFA World Cup 2026 matches, a team of Georgia Tech students is working to make buying tickets to major events less stressful and more transparent.
]]>“I am very honored and excited to receive the NSF CAREER Award,” says Zhu. “This award will support research by my fantastic team of students and post-doctoral researchers and give me the opportunity to carry out education and outreach programs that expand our impact.”
Since joining Georgia Tech in 2024, Zhu’s research has focused on the mathematical foundations of machine learning and their applications in science and engineering.
With support from the CAREER Award, Zhu and his team will explore the two-way relationship between data and structure in machine learning. They aim to understand how known structures in scientific and engineering problems (e.g., symmetries or physical constraints) can help machine learning models learn more accurately and efficiently from limited data. They will also study how machine learning can uncover hidden structures directly from data, revealing patterns or principles that may not be known in advance.
The project focuses on settings where large amounts of high-quality data are difficult or expensive to obtain, as is often the case in science and engineering. Using mathematical analysis, Zhu and his team will examine how much data is required to accurately learn a model, how structural information can reduce this data requirement, and how much data is needed to reliably identify a model’s underlying structure.
According to Zhu, this approach could reduce the amount of data and time needed to build and test accurate models, leading to more reliable, interpretable, and efficient AI for scientific discovery.
“Such advances align with national AI priorities and help strengthen the mathematical foundations needed for future scientific and engineering applications of AI,” he says.
Zhu believes it is important to help students understand AI, noting that they must learn how to interpret and evaluate its outputs rather than accept them uncritically.
“AI has increasingly become incorporated into many fields of study,” he says. “Institutions must determine how to best integrate it into education while also teaching students how it works. The AI education and outreach components of my project aim to help prepare students for careers at the intersection of mathematics, computing, and science.”
Zhu’s CAREER Award will support educational initiatives at multiple levels, including new graduate and undergraduate courses on machine learning. It will also support a machine learning boot camp for high school students, organized by the School of Mathematics in collaboration with Emory University’s Department of Mathematics. The boot camp seeks to introduce students to foundational ideas in AI and machine learning, with an emphasis on the mathematical principles needed to understand and responsibly use these tools.
]]>Logically this makes sense and has been backed up by past security research. However, researchers at Georgia Tech have found hidden paths in cyber-physical systems that attackers can use to disrupt or even destroy them.
To find these hidden paths before an attacker does, the researchers built a testing tool called ICSFlux. This new tool leans on the physics used by the industrial process and maps out the system to find new threats that were once thought impossible.
ICSFlux was deployed across 11 different programmable logic controllers in six industrial sectors, including chemical manufacturing, water treatment, power grids, aircraft, desalination, and waste processing. The process uncovered twenty genuine safety violations.
In one case drawn from a chemical-plant simulation, an attack path uncovered by the tool drove a reactor past its safe pressure limit and into a simulated explosion. By using nothing but valid operator commands, the team took the reactor from a completely normal and stable state to critical territory.
Because the method relies only on the physics of a process and not on the details of any one controller, the same tool worked across all six sectors without being rebuilt, and it reduced the search space by roughly 50%.
Burak Sahin, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech and the study's lead author, found that by sending a series of perfectly normal, fully authorized commands, intruders can slowly nudge a physical process toward a dangerous state.
“These systems are usually judged safe as long as nobody hacks into them,'' Sahin said. “What we found is that an attacker who can send everyday commands, the same ones a normal operator sends, can patiently steer the process toward a failure. No single command looks wrong, which is exactly why the usual defenses miss it.''
Most existing tools assume an attacker can rewire the controller or change the software inside it. In the real world, those controllers are locked down and cannot be touched. ICSFlux takes the opposite and more realistic view. It treats the controller as a sealed box that cannot be opened and works only with the commands an operator is normally allowed to send.
Rather than measuring how much of a controller's software it has exercised, the usual yardstick for this kind of testing, ICSFlux measures how close the physical system is getting to an unsafe limit and steers its testing in that direction.
“Two different sensor readings can run through the exact same code and still send a reactor in completely different directions,'' Sahin said. “Looking only at the software tells you nothing about whether the physical system is safe. We had to follow the physics, not the code.''
One of the study's most important takeaways emerged when the researchers tightened the safety margins to see whether caution alone would help. Even when every command stayed within approved limits, the way the controller reacted to a steady stream of small adjustments could still cause pressure to overshoot and the reactor to fail. In other words, staying inside the rules was not always enough.
All of the team's experiments were carried out on secured, controlled test beds. The work was conducted with Georgia Tech's Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab, whose research spans the security of cyber-physical systems from industrial programmable logic controllers to marine, automotive, and drone platforms. Georgia Tech's Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory, a team of researchers who work together to further the investigation of advanced cyber crimes and the analysis and prevention of next-generation malware attacks, also contributed to the paper.
The labs are a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Fuzzing the Physical Space: Physics-Aware Testing of Black-Box Industrial Control Systems' was accepted to the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. In addition to Sahin, the team includes Ph.D. students David Oygenblik, Mingxuan Yao, and Yizhi Huang as well as Associate Professors Brendan Saltaformaggio, and Saman Zonouz.
]]>Logically this makes sense and has been backed up by past security research. However, researchers at Georgia Tech have found hidden paths in cyber-physical systems that attackers can use to disrupt or even destroy them.
To find these hidden paths before an attacker does, the researchers built a testing tool called ICSFlux. This new tool leans on the physics used by the industrial process and maps out the system to find new threats that were once thought impossible.
]]>Communications Officer II at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
]]>“It’s a tremendous honor to be recognized alongside such an inspiring group of scientists,” Manafzadeh says. “I’ve always been motivated by big, fundamental questions, and it’s exciting to see that kind of curiosity-driven research celebrated.”
Manafzadeh will join Georgia Tech in August 2026 as an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences. Her research investigates how joints function and how they evolved, using advanced technology to create animations of moving skeletons with sub-millimeter precision.
“My research is aimed at understanding how joints work and where they come from,” she explains. “Physicians can repair ACL injuries and perform hip replacements, but we still don’t fully understand joint mechanics at a fundamental level.” Because joints are a shared feature of virtually all vertebrates, she adds, nearly all movement — from slithering to sprinting to soaring — depends on them.
Manafzadeh first applied these methods to pterodactyls, “reanimating” the extinct animals to study how they flew. Now, her research could also open doors to personalized surgical treatments for people and new designs for bio-inspired robots.
]]>Technical Research Writer / Editor
Georgia Tech College of Sciences
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