Nanoscience and nanotechnology promise clever new ways to target cancer cells, novel materials with amazing properties, smaller and more powerful computers, new approaches for cleaning up the environment and a host of other advances.\
But could the unique properties of nanometer-scale materials be used by rogue nations or organizations to create a global security threat? Margaret E. Kosalexplores that possibility – and potential countermeasures – in her new book, Nanotechnology for Chemical and Biological Defense, published by Springer Science Academic Publishers.
An assistant professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech, Kosal argues that the unique concerns raised by nanotechnology must be part of the threat scenarios considered by the U.S. defense and homeland security communities. Strategies to address the threats could include developing a better understanding of their real potential and fostering improved international cooperation.
“We are moving away from many of the limiting conventional assumptions about warfare to incorporate insurgencies and asymmetrical warfare, including the potential for non-state actors and sub-state actors to appropriate technology in ways they haven’t before,” she said. “Part of the nature of nanotechnology is that it is fundamentally dual use. Much about its applications depends on the intent of the individuals pursuing it.”
Ironically, the mechanisms that make nanotechnology beneficial could also be part of its dark side.
For instance, the ability to target cancer cells by recognizing their specific genetic sequences could also potentially be used to deliver toxins to harm healthy cells. Carbon nanotubes, useful in electronics and other technology areas, could also be used to circumvent vaccines by delivering protein cargoes directly into cells. Magnetic nanoparticles developed to draw therapeutics to diseased areas of the body could also be bombarded with electromagnetic energy to create excessive heat in the brain or other organs.
Of course, such evil application of nanotechnology would require research and development capabilities beyond those of non-Hollywood terror organizations. But as the proliferation of nuclear weapons enabled by Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan demonstrated, state-developed technology can sometimes find its way into the wrong hands.
“We are thinking about a rogue scientist working at some level below official channels to pursue something that could have negative impacts,” explained Kosal. “This is not something that terrorists are going to be using soon, but it is a threat we need to anticipate when looking forward 15 or 20 years.”
Kosal’s book is based on her own independent research, field work and case studies – and on concerns and scenarios developed in a January 2007 workshop she organized and chaired. The event was attended by more than 100 U.S. experts, including scientists and engineers involved in nanoscience and nanotechnology, researchers from defense laboratories, social scientists concerned about policy issues, policy-makers, members of the intelligence community, and “operators” – soldiers, sailors, Marines and others who might actually use the technologies.
The groups considered what the threats might be, what kinds of countermeasures might be needed, and what strategies should be developed to counter the threats. They considered scenarios that have been published in scientific journals, ignoring the “science fantasy” ideas that have been popularized in the general media.
“We need to start developing strategies now to be able to lessen the potential for malfeasant applications of these technologies,” said Kosal, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry and served for two years as a science and technology advisor in the Pentagon’s Office of the Secretary of Defense. “People have thought about this at a very high level, but what we need to do is dive more deeply into it and explore the potential nanotechnology threat in a much more analytical and systematic way.”
The work was supported in part by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Chemical and Biological Technologies Directorate.
Nanoscience and nanotechnology differ from earlier technological revolutions because they are global and interdisciplinary, and therefore cannot be readily restricted through conventional arms control methods, noted Kosal, who is a member of Georgia Tech’s Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy (CISTP). In their first decades, atomic bomb technology and even biotechnology could be limited to just a few nations and their courses set by a handful of scientists and political leaders. But nanotechnology isn’t like that.
“We can’t be sure where the nanotechnology weapons may arise,” Kosal said. “There are programs in every developed nation to pursue nanotechnology, and a lot of developing nations have them, too. The reality of the globalized world is that we can’t just pull together a hundred scientists and engineers to decide what will be the norms for this new technology.”
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Georgia Tech’s Research Horizons magazine.
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]]>With that in mind, many buildings and services will operate at an altered or reduced schedule the next couple weeks.
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The Parking and Transportation Services office will be closed from Saturday, Dec. 22, through Sunday, Dec. 30, and Wednesday, Jan. 1. On Monday, Dec. 31, the office will be open on a limited basis and parking will follow the same rules as during the winter break. The office will resume normal operation, along with enforcement of all parking regulations, on Wednesday, Jan. 2, at 7:30 a.m.
As you prepare to leave campus for the winter break, please be mindful of parking instructions for leaving vehicles on campus and the reduced transit schedule:
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Under the Couch
A low temperature, controllable and stable method has been developed to dope graphene films using self-assembled monolayers (SAM) that modify the interface of graphene and its support substrate. Using this concept, a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has created graphene p-n junctions – which are essential to fabricating devices – without damaging the material’s lattice structure or significantly reducing electron/hole mobility.
The graphene was grown on a copper film using chemical vapor deposition (CVD), a process that allows synthesis of large-scale films and their transfer to desired substrates for device applications. The graphene films were transferred to silicon dioxide substrates that were functionalized with the self-assembled monolayers.
Information about creating graphene p-n junctions using self-assembled monolayers was presented on November 28, 2012 at the Fall Meeting of the Materials Research Society. Papers describing aspects of the work were also published in September 2012 in the journals ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces and the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. Funding for the research came from the National Science Foundation, through the Georgia Tech Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and through separate research grants.
“We have been successful at showing that you can make fairly well doped p-type and n-type graphene controllably by patterning the underlying monolayer instead of modifying the graphene directly,” said Clifford Henderson, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. “Putting graphene on top of self-assembled monolayers uses the effect of electron donation or electron withdrawal from underneath the graphene to modify the material’s electronic properties.”
The Georgia Tech research team working on the project includes faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students from three different schools. In addition to Henderson, professors who are part of the team include Laren Tolbert from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Samuel Graham from the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. The project team also includes Hossein Sojoudi, a postdoctoral fellow, and Jose Baltazar, a graduate research assistant.
Creating n-type and p-type doping in graphene – which has no natural bandgap – has led to development of several approaches. Scientists have substituted nitrogen atoms for some of the carbon atoms in the graphene lattice, compounds have been applied to the surface of the graphene, and the edges of graphene nanoribbons have been modified. However, most of these techniques have disadvantages, including disruption of the lattice – which reduces electron mobility – and long-term stability issues.
“Any time you put graphene into contact with a substrate of any kind, the material has an inherent tendency to change its electrical properties,” Henderson said. “We wondered if we could do that in a controlled way and use it to our advantage to make the material predominately n-type or p-type. This could create a doping effect without introducing defects that would disrupt the material’s attractive electron mobility.”
Using conventional lithography techniques, the researchers created patterns from different silane materials on a dielectric substrate, usually silicon oxide. The materials were chosen because they are either strong electron donors or electron acceptors. When a thin film of graphene is placed over the patterns, the underlying materials create charged sections in the graphene that correspond to the patterning.
“We were able to dope the graphene into both n-type and p-type materials through an electron donation or withdrawal effect from the monolayer,” Henderson explained. “That doesn’t lead to the substitutional defects that are seen with many of the other doping processes. The graphene structure itself is still pristine as it comes to us in the transfer process.”
The monolayers are bonded to the dielectric substrate and are thermally stable up to 200 degrees Celsius with the graphene film over them, Sojoudi noted. The Georgia Tech team has used 3-Aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) and perfluorooctyltriethoxysilane (PFES) for patterning. In principle, however, there are many other commercially-available materials that could also create the patterns.
“You can build as many n-type and p-type regions as you want,” Sojoudi said. “You can even step the doping controllably up and down. This technique gives you control over the doping level and what the dominant carrier is in each region.”
The researchers used their technique to fabricate graphene p-n junctions, which was verified by the creation of field-effect transistors (FET). Characteristic I-V curves indicated the presence of two separate Dirac points, which indicated an energy separation of neutrality points between the p and n regions in the graphene, Sojoudi said.
The group uses chemical vapor deposition to create thin films of graphene on copper foil. A thick film of PMMA was spin-coated atop the graphene, and the underlying copper was then removed. The polymer serves as a carrier for the graphene until it can be placed onto the monolayer-coated substrate, after which it is removed.
Beyond developing the doping techniques, the team is also exploring new precursor materials that could allow CVD production of graphene at temperatures low enough to permit fabrication directly on other devices. That could eliminate the need for transferring the graphene from one substrate to another.
A low-cost, low-temperature means of producing graphene could also allow the films to find broader applications in displays, solar cells and organic light-emitting diodes, where large sheets of graphene would be needed.
“The real goal is to find ways to make graphene at lower temperatures and in ways that allow us to integrate it with other devices, either silicon CMOS or other materials that couldn’t tolerate the high temperatures required for the initial growth,” Henderson said. “We are looking at ways to make graphene into a useful electronic or opto-electronic material at low temperatures and in patterned forms.”
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grants CHE-0822697, CHE-0848833 and CMMI-0927736 and the Georgia Tech Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.
CITATIONS: Sojoudi, Hossein, Creating Graphene p-n Junctions Using Self-Assembled Monolayers, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, dx.doi.org/10.1021/am301138v and Baltazar, Jose, Facile Formation of Graphene P-N Junctions Using Self-Assembled Monolayers, The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, dx.doi.org/10.1021/jp3045737.
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]]>On Dec. 5, Corey Johnson entered two unsecured offices in the Love Building, where he is suspected of stealing three laptops. When confronted, Johnson struck the faculty member and ran out of the building, leaving the laptops behind.GTPDis seeking assistance in determining the whereabouts of Johnson.
GTPD is also requesting assistance to help identify five men in connection with the armed robbery of a student who was working as an on-duty Housing peer leader. On Dec. 5, three suspects were captured on surveillance video at the BP gas station near North Avenue and Spring Street during the time the student was robbed on the Georgia Tech campus. The suspects were seen in a newer model, red Ford Mustang with chrome wheels and a light-colored older model Toyota Camry.
The student reported that after approaching three suspicious males outside of Harrison Residence Hall, one of the suspects brandished a weapon. Although the student was not injured, his belongings were stolen. Later that evening, two of the suspects were captured on surveillance video at a gas station located at the corner of Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard and Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive attempting to use the victim's stolen credit card.
Two of the suspects are described as black males in their late teens to early twenties. The first suspect was wearing a white long-sleeve shirt under a black short-sleeve shirt, dark jeans and dark shoes. The second suspect was wearing a red hooded sweatshirt, dark jeans and brown shoes. The driver of the Mustang is described as a black male in his twenties wearing a gray jacket, red shirt and jeans.
The surveillance video shows the first two suspects inside the Shell station speaking with two males who may know the identity of the robbers.
Anyone who knows the identity or location of these suspects is asked to call Atlanta Crime Stoppers at 404-577-TIPS. Callers can remain anonymous and may be eligible for a reward.
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But a new study highlights the role of “helpful” colleagues – those who, for instance, provide feedback on the papers of other scientists and are willing to serve as a sounding board for new ideas.
Conducted by a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher, the new study reveals that individuals who co-authored papers with a highly helpful scientist experienced a decrease in the quality of papers they authored after the helpful scientist died. Conversely, the deaths of highly productive scientists who were not highly helpful did not influence the subsequent quality of their co-authors’ output.
“The study results suggest that individuals who may have fewer individual achievements but are a major source of support and feedback for the people around them can have a major impact on their colleagues’ careers and help improve the aggregate output of their academic departments,” said Alexander Oettl, an assistant professor in the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech. “In addition, the study implies that helpful scientists may be undervalued and overlooked by a scientific enterprise that rewards individual achievement above all else.”
The research was published in the June 2012 issue of the journal Management Science and was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Martin Prosperity Institute Program on Innovation and Creative Industries. The findings were also the basis for a comment article in the Sept. 27, 2012 issue of the journal Nature.
Using a combination of academic paper publications and citations to capture scientist productivity and the receipt of academic paper acknowledgments to measure helpfulness, Oettl examined the change in the publishing output of co-authors of scientists who died.
Oettl examined more than 400,000 immunology articles and extracted the names of 149 immunologists who died mid-career. Then, he scoured more than 50,000 articles published in The Journal of Immunology between 1950 and 2007 for papers that thanked those scientists in their acknowledgements sections. He also examined papers published by those scientists to collect a list of their co-authors.
Of the 149 deceased scientists, Oettl classified 63 of them as very helpful because they emerged in the top 20 percent of people thanked in all acknowledgements for at least one year of their careers. He categorized 35 of the 63 helpful scientists as also being highly productive, which he defined as being in the top 5 percent for the number of annual citations and high impact factor immunology publications. Of the less helpful investigators, 17 were highly productive and 69 exhibited average productivity.
Oettl found that the deaths of the highly helpful and productive scientists were associated with a 20 percent decrease in the subsequent quality of their co-authors’ publications, whereas the deaths of individuals with high helpfulness but average productivity were associated with a 10 percent decrease in co-author performance. The deaths of scientists with average helpfulness and high productivity had a positive impact on the performance of their co-authors, and the deaths of individuals with both average helpfulness and productivity did not have a statistically significant impact on the performance of their co-authors.
“The results show that the quality of a co-author’s output is most heavily influenced by ties to scientists with high helpfulness and not by ties to scientists who are merely prolific,” noted Oettl. “The study may also indicate that the death of an individual with high productivity but average helpfulness may free resources, such as time, for co-authors, which allows them to be more productive in that scientist’s absence.”
The research also showed that the deaths of immunologists who provided conceptual help – comments, criticism or advice about experiments and manuscripts – had a larger impact on the performance of their co-authors than those who performed tests, provided technical help or shared materials.
This study has important implications for academic and research organizations, according to Oettl. Including helpfulness in the measure of what makes a “star” scientist may affect how organizations determine what types of individuals they should recruit and the ideal composition of personnel in the organization.
“Hiring committees should look beyond an applicant’s publication record and read the recommendations of peers and look for signs that the individual might influence departmental dynamics in a positive way,” added Oettl.
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CITATIONS: Oettl, Alexander, “Reconceptualizing Stars: Scientist Helpfulness and Peer Performance,” Management Science (2012): http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1470 and Oettl, Alexander, “Sociology: Honour the helpful,” Nature (2012): http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/489496a.
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]]>Known as an analog beam-former, the GTRI device is part of the radiometer, which is being tested by NASA on a Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle. The radiometer measures microwave radiation emitted by the sea foam that is produced when high winds blow across ocean waves. By measuring the electromagnetic radiation, scientists can remotely assess surface wind speeds at multiple locations within the hurricanes.
HIRAD could provide detailed information about the wind speeds and rain intensity inside hurricanes without the need to fly manned aircraft through the storms. In addition to the beam-former design, GTRI researchers also provided assistance to NASA with improvements aimed at a potential future, more advanced version of the radiometer.
“Improved knowledge of the wind speed field will enable the National Hurricane Center to better characterize the storm’s intensity,” explained Timothy Miller, Research and Analysis Team Lead for the Earth Science Office at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “Better forecasts of storm intensity and structure will enable better warnings of such important factors as wind strength and storm surge. That would allow businesses and residents to prepare with more confidence in their knowledge of what is coming.”
HIRAD was flown above two hurricanes in 2010 and a Pacific frontal system in 2012. Data it gathered on wind and rain will be provided to the scientific community for use in numerical modeling, and could also guide development of a next-generation system that would provide information on wind direction in addition to measuring wind speed and rain intensity.
“We have verified the instrument concept in terms of sensitivity to wind speed and rain rate,” Miller said. “We have also learned a lot about the factors that need to be considered in developing calibrated images from the flight data. That work is still ongoing.”
GTRI researchers supported development of the radiometer with design of the beam-formers, which are part of the radiometer’s array antenna. The array antenna gathers microwave signals from the ocean and the GTRI-designed devices – several of which are required – form “fan” beams of electromagnetic energy across the ground path of the aircraft’s travel. The resulting signals are then fed into sensitive receivers developed by researchers at the University of Michigan and ProSensing, Inc., a Massachusetts company.
“There are different ways to build antennas to solve this problem, but array antennas provide multi-channel capability and greater sensitivity,” said Glenn Hopkins, a research engineer who headed up the GTRI design work. “Because this system is passive – it doesn’t send out radiation – we need to have maximum sensitivity and a focus on minimizing noise in the system.”
The HIRAD system, also known technically as a microwave synthetic aperture radiometer, is designed to operate in the microwave spectrum, from about 4 gigahertz to 7 gigahertz. Discrete parts of that range are used to enable discrimination between ocean surface emission and that from the rain located between the instrument and the surface.
“On the aircraft, the instrument would be flying a track over the storm, with a multitude of simultaneous beams,” explained Hopkins. “We would be pixelating the surface and could determine what radiation is coming from each area to generate a map of the intensity of the wind speeds as we fly over the storm.”
Beyond supporting the radiometer’s need for high sensitivity and low noise, the component also had to be as small and light as possible to be part of the Global Hawk payload. The GTRI design was manufactured by an outside company, and integrated directly onto the back of the instrument’s antenna. The circuitry is just 20 one-thousandths of an inch thick, printed on flexible circuit materials.
“This project is an example of the kinds of work we have been doing for the Department of Defense, and we’re pleased that this technology can be transitioned to assist with weather prediction and research,” Hopkins said.
As part of a small business innovation research (SBIR) project with Spectral Research, Inc., GTRI researchers also participated in an effort to increase the capability of the HIRAD array by designing a dual polarized array to replace the single polarized array that is part of the existing test system. The dual polarized array operates at the same 4 to 7 gigahertz range as the single polarized array, but provides both polarization channels in the same area.
The dual polarized design exploited fragmented antenna technology developed at GTRI to support this broad range of frequencies.
“One key challenge in the array study was to use the same footprint as the single polarization array,” said Jim Maloney, a GTRI principal research engineer. “Prototype dual polarization arrays were built and measured to confirm the ability of GTRI’s fragmented antenna technology to meet the bandwidth and form factor requirements.”
The Global Hawk can fly at altitudes of more than 60,000 feet, and can stay in the air for as long as 31 hours, allowing it to remain in the hurricane area as much as four times longer than piloted aircraft now used for monitoring hurricanes. It provides data that is more detailed than what satellites could provide.
“A UAV is able to stay over the storm for much longer,” Miller noted. “Compared to a satellite, the UAV observations are of much higher spatial resolution, and depending on the satellite’s orbit, generally of a much longer time period. A satellite instrument would be able to observe storms continually, over a much larger area, but would provide much coarser spatial resolution.”
Development of HIRAD was supported by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The project involved partnerships among NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, NOAA’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Program, the University of Michigan, the University of Central Florida and NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division.
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]]>For those remaining in town, there are plenty of holiday events to enjoy around Atlanta, even on a student budget.
As always, be aware of your surroundings both on and off campus to ensure a safe and enjoyable winter holiday. Help Georgia Tech police by remembering what to do in the case of suspicious activity or incidents: if you see something, say something. GTPD can always be reached at 404-894-2500.
The Institute is closed from Monday, Dec. 24, through Friday, Dec. 28, as well as Tuesday, Jan. 1. Classes resume the following Monday, Jan. 7. All administrative offices are closed, with a few notable exceptions; Georgia Tech Police remain on a 24-hour operation schedule, and the Office of the Dean of Students and Counseling Center (404.894.2575) remain accessible 24 hours a day with staff on call.
The best overall project, as determined by judges’ scores, was a training aid to help tennis players identify racket contact and improve swing and overall performance.
The winning team’s name? The Racketeers, of course. The group consists of five mechanical engineering (ME) majors: Chris Armstrong, Ethan Henderson, Dareal Scott, Steven Ranger and Kevin King. They won $2,000.
The Capstone Design Expo is the culmination of many engineering majors’ undergraduate careers. Students studying mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering (BME), electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and industrial design (ID) team up to create projects, which then compete for awards. This Fall, more than 350 graduating seniors presented their work.
“Capstone Design allows engineering students to learn how to function on multidisciplinary teams to solve problems,” said Laurence Jacobs, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and associate dean for academic affairs. “It also challenges our students to think, not just learn. Through this course they collaborate, lead and participate in teams experiencing true hands-on activities.”
Another winning team was Vertibral Horizon, which was honored for best ME project. The team members (Luke Pollock, Matt Rothberg and Drew Bolduc of ME; Mike Glatzer and Matt Ho of BME) offered a project to reduce effort exerted by surgeons during a spinal corrective procedure.
The design expo showcases the work of engineering majors, but they’re not the only students present. Each year, hundreds of high school students also attend the event to learn from the work and find inspiration.
“To see the culmination of the undergraduate studies of 400 graduating seniors through their hands-on/design/build capstone projects was truly inspiring,” said Craig Forest, an assistant professor in ME. “From the invention studio to the makers club to capstone design, Georgia Tech undergraduates are showing us what they can do with the resources and incentives to pursue invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship.”
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K-12 Award (as determined by votes from the future engineers in the audience):
EPS
Kathy Dinh, BME
Kate Fiorito, BME
Hannah Gollin, BME
People's Choice (as determined by votes from audience members):
Interdisciplinary -
Soneter
Samin Odhwani, ME
Charles Lu, ME
Paul Brideau, ME
Katelyn Vermeyan, ID
Allison Woodward, ID
Monodisciplinary -
Infant Sleep Solutions
Erik Niehaus, ME
Joseph Hickey, ME
David Gregg, ME
Chandan Edirisinghe, ME
Zachary Zalesky, ME
- - - - - - - - -
Awards determined by judges' scores:
ID - Soneter
Samin Odhwani, ME
Charles Lu, ME
Paul Brideau, ME
Katelyn Vermeyen, ID
Allison Woodward, ID
BME - Exposer
Binbin Chen, BME
Lu Ling, BME
Freddy Damen, BME
Charlie Bloodworth, BME
ECE - APS
Ryan Palmer, CmpE
Joshua Dunn, CmpE
Allie DelGiorno, EE
Joey Barrick, EE
Derek Tanner, EE
ME - Vertibral Horizon
Luke Pollock, ME
Matt Rothberg, ME
Drew Bolduc, ME
Mike Glatzer, BME
Matt Ho, BME
Best Overall Project:
Racketeers
Chris Armstrong, ME
Ethan Henderson, ME
Dareal Scott, ME
Steven Ranger, ME
Kevin King, ME
“The process is simultaneously draining and exhilarating,” said Director of Undergraduate Admission Rick Clark. Staff begin reviewing applications as they come in, but often a large influx of applications arrives within days of the deadline. After a minimum of two reads of each application, most are read a third time in a final cohort review.
“We think about the Institute’s goals and go back through to make sure we’re supporting the defined priorities,” he said, citing successful examples such as the increase in female enrollment in recent years. “The last two weeks are the most intense. We have all these kids’ names memorized.”
A fortune cookie, toffee and other cookies currently occupy Clark’s desk – all signs that decision season is in full swing.
“Thinking conservatively, if each applicant comes from a family of four, these decisions easily touch 36,000 to 40,000 people. It keeps in perspective how important the work is.”
All signs say this year’s decision-making has been more efficient than in the past. Twice-weekly Admissions Committee meetings haven’t gone past 7 p.m., and the admissions staff reviewed 6 percent more early action applications than last year.
Part of that increase came from international applicants. Due to the applicants’ high quantity and quality, the Admission office partnered with a third-party company to conduct interviews in China, giving staff additional, personalized material to review during the decision-making process.
When possible, Admission staff try to put a personal touch on a student's acceptance. Megan Hutchins, assistant director, had one applicant whose essay about a love of puzzles provided an opportunity to respond in a meaningful way. The admit will likely first learn of her acceptance online through BuzzPort but, with inspiration from coworker Ashley Brooks, a puzzle crafted from her acceptance letter will go in the mailed acceptance packet.
"It was one way to make it feel special for her and to see we really read her essay and care about the things that matter to her," Hutchins said.
Some applicants will not only get news from Georgia Tech on Saturday, but also from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which issues its early decisions at exactly 12:15 p.m. as well.
“You can see threads on College Confidential about how many kids will have two computer screens open at that moment, or will Skype with friends about the decisions,” said Clark.
This year’s early admission student profile includes a 4.0 average GPA, 1460/2155 SAT score, with a predicted GPA of 3.3 after freshman year at Tech. Some 55 percent of applicants were accepted, 21 percent deferred and 21 percent denied; the rest did not complete their application files.
Some departments might be fractured by the long hours and work of recent months, but the Admission staff members continue to enjoy each other’s company even outside their work.
Chris Briggs, assistant director, serves as commissioner for the office's fantasy football league. "[The league] brings us together and serves as a distraction from the day to day grind," he said.
Clark takes the staff's fellowship as an encouraging sign. “Sometimes when you go through something intense that forces this kind of teamwork, it binds folks together. I can tell they really enjoy what they’re doing.”
The camaraderie will need to carry into the spring; regular decision admissions will be announced March 9. Deferred applicants will have a two-week window to submit a deferral supplement form, which will be available Feb. 1. Those applicants, as well as those whose files were incomplete at the early action deadline, will also be notified on the regular decision date of March 9.
]]>The cell, developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology by Professor Zhong Lin Wang and his research team, was first reported in the journal Nano Letters on August 9, 2012. By eliminating the need to convert mechanical energy to electrical energy for charging a battery, the new hybrid generator-storage cell utilizes mechanical energy more efficiently than systems using separate generators and batteries.
At the heart of the self-charging power cell is a piezoelectric membrane that drives lithium ions from one side of the cell to the other when the membrane is deformed by mechanical stress. The lithium ions driven through the polarized membrane by the piezoelectric potential are directly stored as chemical energy using an electrochemical process.
By harnessing a compressive force, such as a shoe heel hitting the pavement from a person walking, the power cell generates enough current to power a small calculator. A hybrid power cell the size of a conventional coin battery could power small electronic devices – and could have military applications for soldiers who might one day recharge battery-powered equipment as they walked, said Wang, who is a Regents Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering.
The Physics World team selected the project from more than 350 news articles about advances in the physical sciences published on physicsworld.com in 2012. The criteria for judging included:
The full list of advances can be seen here. original Physics World article on the power cell can be read here.
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]]>This year’s AAAS Fellows were announced in the journal Science on November 30, 2012. The new AAAS Fellows from Georgia Tech are:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science. AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes 261 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world.
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]]>VIP was selected by the NAE as one of 29 programs that "have successfully infused real-world experiences into engineering or engineering technology undergraduate education."
Undergraduates who join VIP can work on research with both peers and graduate students. They become members of teams, which focus on multidisciplinary work and can stay together for years. That way, students can devote time to large projects and establish relationships with older students. VIP work also counts toward degrees.
There were 95 nominations for the NAE distinction, and entries were judged on factors such as programs’ creativity and diversity. In assessing the VIP program, NAE observed that its participants "actively interact regarding both technical and managerial advice."
Some of Tech’s recent VIP groups include the Brain Beats team, which investigates human rhythmic ability, and the eDemocracy team, which examines methods for secure voting. One of the highlights of VIP is that it incorporates students from numerous academic fields. The program was established at Georgia Tech in 2008 by Edward J. Coyle, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and director of the Arbutus Center for the Integration of Research and Education.
Two other Tech programs were also nominated for NAE recognition. The Inventure Prize competition, one of the nominees, encourages undergraduates to create an invention either individually or in teams. The first place entry wins $15,000.
The other nominee was the Senior Design project in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). All ISyE seniors participate in this capstone, which allows them to solve design problems for clients in either the corporate or non-profit worlds.
]]>The Georgia Tech Library and CAREing Paws, a local group of therapy teams, are helping students de-stress during dead week by bringing therapy dogs to the library. The dogs will be in the Neely Room Dec. 4–5 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
"This is the first time I’ve smiled all week — well, all month really," said Christine Delacerna, a senior biomedical engineering major from New Jersey, who took a break from studying Tuesday to spend time with the dogs.
CAREing Paws uses nationally registered animal-owner/handler therapy teams who visit schools, libraries and other settings. Economics librarian Ameet Doshi reached out to the group in hopes of helping Tech students cope with the stress of dead week and final exams.
"Therapy dogs have become a trend among many libraries," Doshi said. "In the Atlanta area, Georgia Perimeter College has done it in the past and Emory is doing it this semester." Therapy dogs have also received media attention at schools such as Yale and Dalhousie universities.
Following the therapy dog visits, the Library will host StressBuzzters on Thursday, Dec. 6, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on 2West. Students will receive free snacks, bottled water, tips on reducing stress, stress balls and massages. The event is sponsored in collaboration with the Campus Recreation Center, Office of Health Promotion and the Counseling Center.
]]>Karen Fite, associate director of industry services for the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute, joined panelists from the University of Georgia, Georgia Health Sciences University and Georgia State University in addressing how the state’s research universities are impacting the economy in rural Georgia.
“Since the 1960s, Georgia Tech has reached across the state through a network of regional offices to help communities and companies of all sizes develop and implement technology-driven solutions to problems and to take advantage of new opportunities,” she said. Fite cited several examples from Georgia’s food processing industry of the use of imaging, robotics and sensing technology developed by Georgia Tech scientists and engineers.
Stephen Fleming, Georgia Tech vice president and executive director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute, moderated a panel discussion focused on generating companies and commercial opportunities from university research. He suggested that two economic trends are at play as universities work to spin out startups from research. “According to a Kauffman Foundation study, all net job creation in the United States comes from young companies,” he said. “In addition, big companies are no longer spending billions of dollars on research; it is now being done by universities.”
Fleming asked the panelists what they looked for in starting a company. Anthony Coker, senior director of market and solutions development for Suniva, Inc., said, “We are a solar cell producer and need to be close to our markets, so our manufacturing is located wherever our customers are. For research and development and for our corporate headquarters, however, we wanted to be close to the scientific talent at Georgia Tech.” Suniva’s products are based on the technology developed in the laboratories of Regents’ Professor Ajeet Rohatgi, founder of Suniva and director of Georgia Tech’s federally-funded Center of Excellence for Photovoltaic Research and Education.
Serial entrepreneur David Dodd, CEO of VaxyGen Holdings Inc., agreed with Coker. “For a startup, it is critical to be close to your research team,” he said. “Your real value is in the people who innovate and solve problems.”
University System of Georgia Chancellor Hank Huckaby told the audience of entrepreneurs, academic leaders, scientists and legislators that economic development is one of the top priorities for the state’s 35 public colleges and universities. “As was evident today, we are really doing great things in our schools, and we need to do even more to capture our faculties’ innovations,” he said. “The ideas generated at today’s forum will help us do that.”
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]]>Facebook users can send a message to the page with a person’s name and a compliment about him or her. The page manager, who wished to remain as anonymous as his contributors, posts the messages to the page. Fans follow up by tagging the subject’s name, which notifies them of the compliment.
“Tech has the appearance of being cold and unwelcoming, and I was hoping I could do some part to change that,” he said.
The creator started the page as a study break early Tuesday morning, after seeing similar online communities at the University of Southern California and Emory University.
So far, the page has more than 1,000 likes and has posted more than 60 compliments about those in the Tech community. The page manager said he fields around six to seven submissions per hour, with increases after a compliment is posted and in the evenings.
Though starting it during Dead Week wasn’t the plan, he knew it would be a time when people could use a confidence boost. Response to the page thus far has made it worth the sacrifice of precious study time, and two additional students will soon share the load of posting comments.
“It's been extremely rewarding to see people happy and excited just to see that their hard work and dedication is being recognized,” he said.
On Thursday, one anonymous contributor sent a compliment to all Tech students: “You are the brightest, most hard working bunch of people I know. I wish I could give you all a scholarship — what an awesome bunch of students.”
The compliments idea is not the first to circulate among universities nationwide. In February, Georgia Tech Memes joined Facebook after similar pages existed at other universities.
]]>Thankfully, and with the help of people such as Career Services Director Ralph Mobley, new Tech alumni are getting jobs despite a challenging economy. The job market for graduating students has improved during the past two years and, though he doesn’t claim to be clairvoyant, Mobley believes it will do so for a third year.
Data from Georgia Tech’s Office of Assessment shows that in spring 2012, 67.2 percent of students were employed (and nearly 77 percent had offers) at the time of commencement – up from 63.4 percent in 2011. The percentage from 2012 nearly matched that of the most recent pre-recession high of 2007, when 69.5 percent of students graduated with a job.
“Overall, one can assume engineering and technology will remain strong, but even in those areas, dips and downslides happen,” Mobley said.
What gives Mobley the confidence that 2013 will be an even stronger year? More students have secured interviews and taken offers earlier this year than last.
Austin Harvey, who graduates in December with a degree in biomedical engineering and a job with Abbott Laboratories, is one such student. He found Career Services’ Optimal Interview helpful in his search. This resource lets students record and replay their responses to potential interview questions.
“Not only does it assist in grooming your confidence in responding to common interview questions, but it gives you ample opportunity to record responses to your own set of questions to better structure an approach in specific situational interviews,” he said.
Knowing about the prospective company helps as well. “Simply researching what a company offers and familiarizing yourself with why they believe in what they do – and more specifically how that translates back to you – can be a deciding factor in their understanding of your interest,” Harvey added.
Davina Morrow graduates in May with a degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering and will move to Houston to work for BP. For Morrow, CareerBuzz and the annual Career Fair were integral to landing her job.
“I made sure to apply to all the jobs I was interested in before the Career Fair, because most companies had application deadlines the week of the fair and even had interviews beginning the day after,” she said. Though it’s a crowded environment, Morrow advised students to attend the fair, talk with companies and leave resumes behind.
“Face-to-face interaction is extremely important, and they may even sign you up for an interview on the spot,” she said.
CareerBuzz is an online starting point, but Mobley encourages students to take advantage of the many other Career Services resources, such as career counseling and advisement. Career Services is located in the Bill Moore Student Success Center near Tech Tower.
]]>From Jan. 22–25, students will be able to receive feedback on their interviewing from representatives involved in the hiring process at numerous companies. Both students and employers are expected to prepare for the interview as if it were for an actual position; employers receive the resumes of students they will be interviewing in advance, and students are expected to research the company.
“We try to make sure everyone is prepared in advance so it simulates the actual interview experience as much as possible,” said Kevin Stacia, career specialist at Georgia Tech Career Services. “The format is designed so that once students complete the interview, they can ask questions and get feedback in order to prepare for the spring recruiting season.”
Students can sign up for an interview slot through CareerBuzz from Dec. 15, 2012, through Jan. 15, 2013. Time slots are available on a first-come, first-served basis, and all interviews will take place in the Bill Moore Student Success Center, located near Tech Tower.
At the end of the week, Career Services will partner with Capital One to host a Case Interview Preparation Workshop on Friday, Jan. 25, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Student Success Center. The workshop is limited to 50 attendees, and students may register on a first-come, first-served basis through the “Events” tab in CareerBuzz. Select “Information Sessions,” then “Case Interview Workshop” to RSVP. The event will also have fashion consultants available to advise students on appropriate business attire.
]]>Each fall, SGA brings together staff from Facilities, the Georgia Tech Police Department (GTPD), Student Affairs, Capital Planning and Space Management, Housing and Campus Services to walk campus with students at dusk, identifying and discussing ideas for improving safety.
“The goal is to highlight risks on campus to administrators who can implement solutions to those risks,” said Trey Sides, organizer of this year’s walk and chair of SGA’s Planning and Capital Development Committee.
The path for this year’s walk was developed with the help of organizers from the Student Campus Safety Campaign that took place in September, as well as GTPD. Along with providing education and awareness about various types of safety, the weeklong campaign gave students an opportunity to post sticky notes with comments on safety to a large-scale map on Tech Walk. The map was then digitized into a Google map, providing baseline data for SGA leaders. GTPD also provided a campus crime heat map that helped shape the route and met with students as they planned the Campus Safety Walk.
The walk began at North Avenue and Techwood Drive, meandering through specific points along North Avenue, Cherry Street and Ferst Drive before concluding at Atlantic Drive and 10th Street.
Lighting was a recurring topic during this year’s walk, with students requesting additional lighting near the Office of Human Resources, the Manufacturing Related Disciplines Complex and Atlantic Drive. Short-term lighting will come to Atlantic with the construction of the Engineered Biosciences Building on the west side of the street, but notes were taken for long-term lighting enhancements.
“There are a few places that we strongly feel need to be improved, including the area around the entrance to campus at Means Street and Tech Parkway, lighting around the Instructional Center lawn and the HAWK signal on North Avenue,” Sides said. Students are largely in support of the signal, and GTPD cites a significant decrease in accidents there since its installation, but both parties are aware that additional education is needed on the part of drivers.
Though the walk did not venture off campus into Home Park, Sides mentioned that he hopes administrators can work with the City of Atlanta to add lighting there as well. The area near Woodruff Residence Hall, as well as transportation to get to and from activities at the Student Competition Center and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, were also identified as needing improvement.
Warren Page, senior director in Facilities, and Chuck Rhode, vice president of Facilities, took detailed notes along the way. Page said most issues could be addressed fairly quickly; last year’s list was taken care of within about a month and resulted in fixed and additional lights, added signage for pedestrian safety and trimming trees and shrubs to increase visibility.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
Researchers have measured a bandgap of approximately 0.5 electron-volts in 1.4-nanometer bent sections of graphene nanoribbons. The development could provide new direction to the field of graphene electronics, which has struggled with the challenge of creating bandgap necessary for operation of electronic devices.
“This is a new way of thinking about how to make high-speed graphene electronics,” said Edward Conrad, a professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We can now look seriously at making fast transistors from graphene. And because our process is scalable, if we can make one transistor, we can potentially make millions of them.”
The findings were reported November 18 in the journal Nature Physics. The research, done at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and at SOLEIL, the French national synchrotron facility, has been supported by the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Georgia Tech, the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Partner University Fund from the Embassy of France.
Researchers don’t yet understand why graphene nanoribbons become semiconducting as they bend to enter tiny steps – about 20 nanometers deep – that are cut into the silicon carbide wafers. But the researchers believe that strain induced as the carbon lattice bends, along with the confinement of electrons, may be factors creating the bandgap. The nanoribbons are composed of two layers of graphene.
Production of the semiconducting graphene structures begins with the use of e-beams to cut “trenches” into silicon carbide wafers, which are normally polished to create a flat surface for the growth of epitaxial graphene. Using a high-temperature furnace, tens of thousands of graphene ribbons are then grown across the steps, using photolithography.
During the growth, the sharp edges of trenches become smoother as the material attempts to regain its flat surface. The growth time must therefore be carefully controlled to prevent the narrow silicon carbide features from melting too much.
The graphene fabrication also must be controlled along a specific direction so that the carbon atom lattice grows into the steps along the material’s “armchair” direction. “It’s like trying to bend a length of chain-link fence,” Conrad explained. “It only wants to bend one way.”
The new technique permits not only the creation of a bandgap in the material, but potentially also the fabrication of entire integrated circuits from graphene without the need for interfaces that introduce resistance. On either side of the semiconducting section of the graphene, the nanoribbons retain their metallic properties.
“We can make thousands of these trenches, and we can make them anywhere we want on the wafer,” said Conrad. “This is more than just semiconducting graphene. The material at the bends is semiconducting, and it’s attached to graphene continuously on both sides. It’s basically a Shottky barrier junction.”
By growing the graphene down one edge of the trench and then up the other side, the researchers could in theory produce two connected Shottky barriers – a fundamental component of semiconductor devices. Conrad and his colleagues are now working to fabricate transistors based on their discovery.
Confirmation of the bandgap came from angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements made at the Synchrotron CNRS in France. There, the researchers fired powerful photon beams into arrays of the graphene nanoribbons and measured the electrons emitted.
“You can measure the energy of the electrons that come out, and you can measure the direction from which they come out,” said Conrad. “From that information, you can work backward to get information about the electronic structure of the nanoribbons.”
Theorists had predicted that bending graphene would create a bandgap in the material. But the bandgap measured by the research team was larger than what had been predicted.
Beyond building transistors and other devices, in future work the researchers will attempt to learn more about what creates the bandgap – and how to control it. The property may be controlled by the angle of the bend in the graphene nanoribbon, which can be controlled by altering the depth of the step.
“If you try to lay a carpet over a small imperfection in the floor, the carpet will go over it and you may not even know the imperfection is there,” Conrad explained. “But if you go over a step, you can tell. There are probably a range of heights in which we can affect the bend.”
He predicts that the discovery will create new activity as other graphene researchers attempt to utilize the results.
“If you can demonstrate a fast device, a lot of people will be interested in this,” Conrad said. “If this works on a large scale, it could launch a niche market for high-speed, high-powered electronic devices.”
In addition to Conrad, the research team included J. Hicks, M.S. Nevius, F. Wang, K. Shepperd, J. Palmer, J. Kunc, W.A. De Heer and C. Berger, all from Georgia Tech; A. Tejeda from the Institut Jean Lamour, CNES – Univ. de Nancy and the Synchrotron SOLEIL; A. Taleb-Ibrahimi from the CNRS/Synchrotron SOLEIL, and F. Bertran and P. Le Fevre from Synchrotron SOLEIL.
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Georgia Tech under Grants DMR-0820382 and DMR-1005880, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Partner University Fund from the Embassy of France. The content of the article is the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Science Foundation.
CITATION: Hicks, J., A wide-bandgap metal-semiconductor-metal nanostructure made entirely from graphene, Nature Physics (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NPHYS2487.
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu)
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]]>The $1.13 million pledge to Campaign Georgia Tech will provide scholarships that encourage first-generation college students to take courses in the Ivan Allen College Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and will underwrite complementary study and work abroad programs in Latin America, Asia and Europe.
“Preparing our students to be good global citizens and to lead in an increasingly globalized marketplace is a vital aspect of Georgia Tech’s strategic plan,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “This generous grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation will help us make significant progress toward this goal by focusing resources on study and work abroad opportunities around the world. A company such as Coca-Cola – which has been globally oriented for many decades – well understands how critical this brand of education is today, and we are tremendously grateful for their support.”
The grant is designed to benefit both undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to tuition, fees and study/work abroad opportunities, the funding will also support internships and career development programs.
Joseph Bankoff, chair of The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs said, “Through this grant, we will be able to provide multifaceted and transformational learning experiences for students who otherwise would not have them. They will enter Georgia Tech as first-generation college students and graduate as first-generation global citizens. We are grateful to the Coca-Cola Foundation for its support of this program and its continued support of The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.”
Part of the Coca-Cola Foundation’s initiative to fuel sustainable local solutions for global challenges, the grant will also fund two three-year term professorships in The Sam Nunn School for research in natural resource governance for sustainability. Those faculty will explore the global policy and technical issues concerning access to clean water, alternative energy, environmental protection and economic sustainability.
“Our grants invest in the ingenuity of grassroots partners who contribute to the well-being of communities around the world,” said Ingrid Saunders Jones, chairperson of The Coca-Cola Foundation. “With our support, these partners work to improve the quality of life for their families, their neighbors, their cities and their countries.”
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Born in Canada to African parents and having lived in Ghana, Barcelona, Memphis and Atlanta, Buolamwini truly considers herself a global citizen. Next year, she’ll take her talents to the U.K. where she’ll study Global Governance and Diplomacy and African Studies at the University of Oxford as a 2013 Rhodes Scholar. The Rhodes Scholarship is recognized as the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship award in the world. The Rhodes Scholarship Trust bestows its honor on just 32 U.S. students a year, and each is given the opportunity to pursue a secondary degree at the University of Oxford.
Rhodes is not the first prestigious fellowship program to recognize Buolamwini’s enterprising spirit. She’s also a 2013 Fulbright scholar and will use her grant to improve access to education in Zambia. Her past experience developing web and mobile applications for Atlanta’s Teach for America schools will inform Buolamwini’s efforts with the Zambian Institute for Sustainable Development to create a program that gives students a foundation in information technology, mobile software development and entrepreneurship.
Life at Tech
Coming to Tech as a computer science major and Stamps President’s Scholar in 2008, Buolamwini spent the past four years growing her skills and flourishing in finding ways to employ them. She interned at Yahoo, worked at the Carter Center, founded multiple startup companies and earned numerous competitive scholarships, including the Google Anita Borg Scholarship and the Astronaut Scholarship.
“Having people around Georgia Tech who were affiliated with the startup community really inspired me,” she said. Her first innovative venture at Tech was with the Institute’s InVenture Prize, where Buolamwini was the youngest finalist in 2009. “The most valuable thing was the confidence I gained and realizing I could put something out in the world and make it become a reality. Everything became an opportunity after that.”
"Everything" is the operative word: Buolamwini has researched human-robot interaction to support early diagnosis of autism, been a guest writer for Newsweek and won countless awards for her computing prowess. The former pole vaulter stayed active in student activities, once scoring five touchdowns in a Homecoming powderpuff football game. Ultimately, her various pursuits have been in the name of serving others with technology, motivated by the idea of “compassion through computation.”
But, to those who know her, what makes Buolamwini different is the character behind the laundry list of accomplishments and accolades.
“She has an integrity to herself that is really unusual,” said Merrick Furst, distinguished professor and founder of Flashpoint, Georgia Tech’s startup incubator from which one of Buolamwini’s companies graduated. “It’s not that Joy does one thing well, it’s that her talent is a well, coupled with a remarkable boundless generative energy.”
From Atlanta to Africa
As a technical consultant at the Carter Center, Buolamwini created a mobile surveying solution to digitize a paper-based health assessment system used for working with trachoma in Ethiopia. In just 10 weeks, her team developed the necessary technology and she traveled to Ethiopia to pilot the system against its paper predecessor.
"Assumptions I made while developing the software in the U.S. were often invalidated, leading to changes made under my mosquito net as dawn approached," she said. “I realize[d] I cannot remain in a cultural cocoon centered on technology alone. No initiative can reach maximum impact without understanding the needs of all stakeholders and mechanisms.” The work led to the successful implementation of a survey to 40,000 people that could ultimately serve 17 million in the effort to eradicate trachoma in the region.
“I want to use mobile technology to address grand challenges in education and health while uplifting African nations,” she said. “I also want to encourage more women and underrepresented groups in computer science to not just be consumers of technology, but full participants in its creation.”
As an Alumna
Since graduating from Tech in May, Buolamwini, along with three other Tech alumnae, founded a hair technology company called Techturized. The company creates personalized recommendations, a market need Buolamwini observed through her own experience of “going natural” with her hair. Techturized also highlights the role that hair plays in women’s lives.
“Joy has a unique skill set in understanding the technology as well as the people,” said Randy McDow, executive director of the Stamps Family Charitable Foundation, and director of the President’s Scholarship Program at the time Buolamwini was named a Stamps scholar. True to the name of her freelance web development company, Jovial Designs, “She’s fun to talk to and doesn’t offer a tired or boring view of the world. She really wants to make positive changes and makes you want to be a part of that. She embodies her name so well.”
If it seems as though Buolamwini’s accomplishments never stop, it’s because neither does she.
“I can get exhausted just thinking about what Joy accomplishes, and, for her, she’s just being Joy and the world is getting better,” Furst said.
Buolamwini’s philosophy is that success never happens in isolation. “At Tech, I have been surrounded by so many people who cared to nurture me as a student, an entrepreneur and a leader, while reminding me that reaching out to help others is the greatest achievement one can have.”
Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson connected Buolamwini’s story and the Rhodes Scholarship with Tech’s overarching purpose. “Our goal at Georgia Tech is to prepare innovators and leaders who will use their academic experience to change the world,” he said. “Through the Rhodes Scholarship, Joy will be able to do just that, and we at Georgia Tech are tremendously proud of her accomplishments and potential.”
As she departs for Zambia early next year, Buolamwini will take on an advisory role at Techturized. She will return from Zambia just in time for Sailing Weekend, a tradition among Rhodes Scholars to coordinate their September travel to Oxford. After an initial gathering of winners and past Rhodes Scholars over the weekend, Buolamwini is excited about embracing her new community.
“They’re successful, smart, capable people. They make you feel like the world is going to be OK.”
]]>The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) creates a campus-wide community of investigators and thought leaders capable of using innovation in manufacturing to create more high-value jobs in the U.S., ensure the nation’s global competitiveness and advance economic and environmental sustainability.
“Manufacturing is important to the development of a variety of products, from medical devices to alternative energy solutions to cars, on the large and nano scale,” said Ben Wang, Georgia Tech’s chief manufacturing officer and executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute. “It’s critical to the economic viability and competitiveness of our nation to efficiently move leading-edge research from the lab to the real world.”
Since Georgia Tech was founded in 1888, manufacturing has been ingrained in the curriculum. Also for the last 20 years, the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Research Center has been focusing on developing next-generation technologies.
Under this new initiative, the Manufacturing Research Center has been renamed the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute and has expanded to engage researchers from all of Georgia Tech’s colleges, the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI²) and the Georgia Tech Research Institute. The researchers have joined forces with industry and government experts to help define and solve some of the greatest challenges facing the manufacturing industry today, such as the importance of translational research.
“We aspire to be known globally as the collaborative hub for manufacturing technologies and as the recognized leader in crossing the ‘valley of death,’” Wang said. “By that, we mean to transform the research results by faculty and students into competitive products and services to be made in the U.S. Our success is defined by how fast we can translate these discoveries and innovations into products for our stakeholders, accelerating our readiness and providing translational leadership.”
GTMI will focus on the complete innovation value chain – from raw and recycled resources to prototypes and finished products. It will develop materials, systems, processes, educational offerings and policies that impact manufacturers’ performance in the marketplace.
“GTMI is industry-focused and customer-centric, amplifying Georgia Tech’s reputation globally as the world’s leader in innovation-driven manufacturing,” Wang said.
With roughly 400,000 square feet of space and state-of-the art core facilities for manufacturing research, GTMI will target specific industry needs in manufacturing by forming “collaboratories” – co-located pilot plants or prototype shops where Georgia Tech scientists and engineers work side-by-side with their counterparts from industry, government and other universities.
“By implementing best practices to develop outward-facing, collaboration-based programs of the highest impact, we are focusing on understanding and achieving the value propositions of all stakeholders to better define and deliver offerings to companies, government, other universities and colleges, and non-profits,” Wang said. “By doing so, we will maximize U.S. global competitiveness through accelerated innovation and technology deployment.”
Education is also a priority of the new manufacturing research institute. With top-quality researchers, facilities and technological equipment, GTMI aims to educate and train the workforce of the future to investigate, collaborate and compete successfully through both its on-site programs and via collaborative, manufacturing-based instructional programs in technical colleges. In addition to providing real-world research opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students, GTMI offers a manufacturing certificate program, manufacturing scholarships and student assistantships, and it conducts Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) outreach activities.
GTMI brings together many of Georgia Tech’s world-class innovation activities including:
The launch of GTMI compliments Georgia Tech’s presence in the national discussion on manufacturing. Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson is a member of the White House’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership steering committee and is a member of the Secretary of Commerce’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute is one of several interdisciplinary research institutes at Georgia Tech that bring together a mix of researchers – spanning colleges, departments and individual labs – around a single core research area.
]]>“We are committed to finding the best possible candidates for the Georgia Tech athletic director position,” said search committee chair Stephen P. Zelnak, Jr., “CarrSports Consulting has extensive experience in collegiate athletic administration and as a search consultant.”
Zelnak chairs the committee to replace former athletic director Dan Radakovich, who stepped down on October 29.
The search firm will narrow the list of candidates and identify the top candidates for the committee to interview.
The time table for completing the hiring process is pending.
CarrSports Consulting, LLC is located in Gainesville, Florida.
]]>GE recently announced its plans to purchase 2,000 new Ford C-MAX Energi plug-in hybrids for its fleet. As part of the collaboration, Ford will jointly market GE’s alternative fuel infrastructure solutions to commercial customers and provide new alternative fuel vehicles for use at GE’s Vehicle Innovation Center.
The two companies will also work with researchers at Georgia Tech to study GE employee driving and charging habits, with the goal of improving driving and charging performance in electric vehicles.
To collect data, Georgia Tech researchers will use Ford’s MyFord mobile app that shows a real-time battery charge status and offers “value charging,” which automatically recharges at lower cost, off-peak electricity rates.
“Understanding driving and charging habits is key to advancing vehicle and charging infrastructure,” said Georgia Tech Professor Bert Bras of the Sustainable Design & Manufacturing Laboratory in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “Through access to vehicle data, we can accelerate research and development of new technologies to further improve efficiency, driver satisfaction and environmental benefits.”
Georgia Tech’s findings will be shared with commercial customers to provide insights and help facilitate the deployment of electric vehicles in their own fleets amid a growing electric vehicle infrastructure that now includes more than 10,000 public charging stations across the country.
For GE, the purchase of the 2,000 Ford C-MAX Energi vehicles is another step in the company’s commitment to converting half of its global fleet to alternative fuel vehicles as part of its commitment to ecomagination. The addition of the Ford vehicles brings the number of alternative fuel vehicles in GE’s fleet to more than 5,000 toward its goal of 25,000 vehicles.
“We are focused on providing our customers and our fleet with more economically and environmentally efficient vehicles,” said Mark Vachon, GE vice president of ecomagination. “The Ford C-MAX Energi plug-in hybrid is a great addition to our expanding fleet of alternative fuel vehicles.”
The Ford C-MAX Energi plug-in hybrid provides a 21-mile electric-only range, a 108-mpg city EPA rating and a 620-mile single-tank driving range. GE will begin integrating the Ford C-Max Energi into its fleet this month.
“Ford is launching six new electrified vehicles – a big bet that fuel prices will continue rising and lead to more demand for advanced fuel-efficient vehicles,” said Ken Czubay, Ford vice president, U.S. Marketing, Sales and Service. “We are pleased to partner with GE, a company that is charting a similar course, to promote advanced technology and energy savings.”
As part of the collaboration, Ford will promote GE’s WattStation™ charging station and the CNG in a Box™ natural gas fueling station with its commercial customers. Ford also will supply new alternative fuel vehicles for use at GE’s Vehicle Innovation Center at the headquarters of GE’s fleet management business in Eden Prairie, Minn.
About Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the world's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities, the Institute enrolls 21,000 students within its six colleges. Georgia Tech is the nation's leading producer of engineers as well as a leading producer of female and minority engineering Ph.D. graduates. Holding more than 780 patents and receiving approximately $570 million in sponsored awards, Georgia Tech ranks among the nation's top ten universities (without a medical school) in research expenditures. Visit www.gatech.edu for more information.
About GE
GE (NYSE: GE) works on things that matter. The best people and the best technologies taking on the toughest challenges. Finding solutions in energy, health and home, transportation and finance. Building, powering, moving and curing the world. Not just imagining. Doing. GE works. For more information, visit the company's website at www.ge.com.
About Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company, a global automotive industry leader based in Dearborn, Mich., manufactures or distributes automobiles across six continents. With about 168,000 employees and about 65 plants worldwide, the company’s automotive brands include Ford and Lincoln. The company provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company. For more information regarding Ford and its products worldwide, please visit http://corporate.ford.com.
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External Awards:
Despite the importance of the microbes, relatively few among the thousands of species that make up a typical microbial community have been studied extensively. The relatively unknown organisms within these communities may have genes that could help address critical environmental, energy and other challenges.
“We are all dependent on these microbes,” said Kostas Konstantinidis, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the grant’s principal investigator. “There are many different species and a huge amount of diversity out there. This project will allow us to look at the details of how this diversity is generated, how redundant it is and how these microbes are changing in response to perturbations in the environment.”
The funding, from the NSF’s “Dimensions of Biodiversity” program, will support a collaborative effort involving Konstantinidis and two other Georgia Tech researchers: Eberhardt Voit and Jim Spain. Voit holds the David D. Flanagan Chair in Biological Systems within the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. Spain is a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The research will initially focus on Lake Lanier, a large man-made lake located near Atlanta. Beyond the experimental work, the research will involve extensive mathematical modeling of the complex microbial communities.
“We want to see how the microbial communities of the lake change over time, and how the perturbations affect that,” said Konstantinidis, who holds the Carlton S. Wilder Chair in Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. “We then want to extend our understanding to other ecosystems, such as the Gulf of Mexico.”
The researchers will set up mesocosms – bioreactors – in the laboratory with microbial populations from Lake Lanier. They will feed these populations pollutants such as hydrocarbons, antibiotics and pesticides to see how they respond and how they deal with compounds to which they may not have been exposed.
“Sometimes they may not have the genes to break down the pollutants and may not encode the right enzymes,” Konstantinidis said. “But if you give them enough time, these microbes somehow innovate. We want to understand the genetic mechanisms that allow the microbes to break down a compound that they are seeing for the first time.”
The grant will allow the Georgia Tech researchers to expand knowledge of “rare” microbes, largely unknown organisms that may harbor useful genes.
“We think these unusual microbes may be the key ones,” Konstantinidis said. “Though they may be low in abundance, the whole community may depend on them. When you have a new pollutant, these rare microbes may become more important by providing the genetic diversity needed.”
Extending this understanding will be challenging, however, because few species can be cultured in the laboratory. That difficulty is leading Konstantinidis and his team to develop new tools that allow studying the organisms in the field, without culturing them under laboratory settings. Addressing those challenges may lead to the creation of additional techniques that could benefit other areas of biology, engineering and medicine.
“One of the most common techniques is to take the microbial DNA and decode it,” he explained. “From the DNA, we can tell what the organism is and what it may be doing in the environment.”
But studying DNA brings another set of challenges. The genes are rarely recovered intact based on these genomic techniques, and frequently include only part of the genome or are contaminated by DNA from other species.
“Bioinformatics is a big issue for us, because that is how we can put the pieces together,” Konstantinidis explained. “We have to make sense of pieces of DNA from perhaps thousands of organisms. This is where biology, computing and engineering are merging to find clever ways to accomplish such tasks.”
Part of investigating how the microbial community responds to change will include assessing the effects of rising temperatures. Will global climate change cause increased respiration among the microbes and therefore boost carbon dioxide output, or will temperature change lead the organisms to store carbon, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere?
“A big part of the scientific community is working on questions like this to get a better understanding and better model of how microbial systems will respond,” Konstantinidis said.
Modeling will be important to understand not only how microbial communities will respond to broad climate changes, but also how they might react to such dramatic perturbations as large oil spills.
“From small experiments in the lab, the goal is to eventually model whole ecosystems – how Lake Lanier works or how the Gulf of Mexico works in terms of the microbes that are there,” he said. “We want to have a more predictive model of how these communities that are so diverse will respond to a perturbation like an oil spill or rising tempeartures. With so many thousands of organisms from different species, we need modeling to put it all together.”
This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant DEB-1241046 . The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.
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]]>In the study, the researchers developed a technique to dry and stabilize the measles vaccine – which depends on a live attenuated virus – and showed that it remained effective for at least 30 days after being placed onto the microneedles. They also demonstrated that the dried vaccine was quickly released in the skin and able to prompt a potent immune response in an animal model.
The microneedle technique could provide a new tool for international immunization programs against measles, which killed nearly 140,000 children in 2010. The research was reported online October 5 in the journal Vaccine, and will appear in a special issue of the journal. The research was supported by the Georgia Research Alliance – and indirectly by the Division of Viral Diseases and Animal Resources Branch of the CDC, and by the National Institutes of Health through its support of efforts to develop a microneedle-based influenza vaccine.
“We showed in this study that measles vaccine delivered using a microneedle patch produced an immune response that is indistinguishable from the response produced when the vaccine is delivered subcutaneously,” said Chris Edens, the study’s first author and a graduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Measles immunization programs now use conventional hypodermic needles to deliver the vaccine. Large global immunization programs therefore require significant logistical support because the vaccine must be kept refrigerated, large numbers of needles and syringes must be shipped, and the ten-dose vaccine vials must be reconstituted with sterile water before use.
Because it requires a hypodermic needle injection, measles immunization programs must be carried out by trained medical personnel. Finally, used needles and syringes must be properly disposed of to prevent potential disease transmission or reuse.
Use of microneedle patches could eliminate the need to transport needles, syringes and sterile water, reducing logistical demands. Vaccination could be done by personnel with less medical training, who would simply apply the patches to the skin and remove them after several minutes, making possible door-to-door campaigns similar to those used in polio vaccination. Single-use patches could also reduce the waste of vaccine that occurs when all ten doses in a vial cannot be used.
“A major advantage would be the ease of delivery,” said Mark Prausnitz, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and one of the inventors of the microneedle patch. “Microneedles would allow us to move away from central locations staffed by health care personnel to the use of minimally-trained personnel who would go out to homes to administer the vaccine.”
Many countries in the Western Hemisphere have eliminated endemic transmission of the disease, though travelers often serve as sources for imported cases. However, measles remains the leading cause of vaccine-preventable death among children elsewhere in the world, prompting interest in alternative vaccination techniques.
“Measles is extremely infectious, and we need an immunization coverage rate of around 95 percent to interrupt its transmission,” said Dr. Paul Rota, Measles Laboratory Team Lead of CDC’s Division of Viral Diseases and one of the study’s co-authors. “Microneedles represent a real potential game-changer in developing strategies to get high global coverage for a measles vaccine.”
In their study, the CDC-Georgia Tech team first faced the challenge of converting a liquid vaccine to a formulation that could be readily applied to stainless steel microneedles and dried for packaging. The work was made more difficult by the fact that the vaccine contains an attenuated live virus whose integrity had to be maintained.
The researchers began by studying materials that could be combined with the vaccine to improve its stability in dry form. Ultimately, they obtained the best results by adding a sugar known as trehalose to the liquid vaccine. That formulation was applied to the microneedles – which were about 750 microns long – by dipping them into the solution and allowing the liquid to dry. The vaccine dose on the microneedles was controlled by the number of times the microneedles were dipped into the solution.
Cotton rats (Sigmodon hispidus) used in the study were divided into seven groups of five animals each for the testing. The comparison showed that vaccination with the microneedle technique produced an immune response that was statistically indistinguishable from that produced by vaccination with the hypodermic needles.
“The two major accomplishments of this study are that the vaccine can be stabilized on microneedles, and that it could dissolve in the skin to provide a good immune response,” Rota said.
To advance the microneedle technique, the researchers are now working to improve the stability of the dry vaccine with the goal of eliminating the need for refrigeration. They are also studying the use of polymer-based microneedles that would fully dissolve in the skin, removing the need to dispose of potentially infectious waste.
Ultimately, a microneedle-based measles vaccine will need to be evaluated for safety and efficacy in a non-human primate model and in several clinical trials before it can be used routinely in humans.
Microneedles are also being studied for administration of vaccines against influenza, polio, rotavirus, tuberculosis, and hepatitis B. The microneedle measles vaccine would likely find its first use in the developing world as part of measles elimination campaigns, and would probably not replace the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine used in the United States.
“This represents a different direction for us, which is campaign-mode global health vaccination,” said Prausnitz. “I see the greatest impact of the measles patch being in developing-country vaccination programs where the logistical advantages of this simple-to-use technology will have the most public health benefit.”
In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Marcus L. Collins and Jessica Ayers, both from the CDC.
This research is supported by the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) with indirect support from the Division of Viral Diseases and Animal Resources Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH, CDC or GRA.
Mark Prausnitz is an inventor on patents and has a significant financial interest in a company that is developing microneedle-based products. This potential conflict of interest has been disclosed and is being managed by Georgia Tech and Emory University.
CITATION: Edens C., et al. “Measles vaccination using a microneedle patch,” Vaccine (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.09.062
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]]>Tzegaegbe is Georgia Tech's 10th Marshall Scholar and the only Tech student to receive the scholarship this year.
Tzegaegbe plans to use the scholarship to pursue his doctorate in civil engineering at University College London beginning next October. The scholarship will pay for all education-related expenses during his two years in London.
“The topic for my doctorate is undecided at this point but will likely focus on evaluating best practices in context-sensitive design for major transportation infrastructure projects in developing countries,” he said. “My hope is to work with professors in the Bartlett School of Planning to learn more about how to plan infrastructure in developing countries.”
Tzegaegbe earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 2011 and is currently a second-year graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Infrastructure Research Group. He is currently working on a dissertation entitled “Regulating the Informal Transit Sector in Post-BRT African Cities.” This work is a continuation of the research he began as an undergraduate through the President’s Undergraduate Research Award (PURA).
Born to a Nigerian father and Israeli mother, Tzegaegbe is the first in his family to attend college. He was decidedly humbled by the award, which was announced this week.
“My parents might be the only people more excited than I about the news,” he said. “Both of my parents immigrated to America just before I was born, so their sacrifices and hard work have always been, and continue to be, a major motivation for me. I know that coming to Georgia Tech, and now pursuing my doctorate with this scholarship, would not have been possible without their support, encouragement and sacrifices.”
Tzegaegbe is no stranger at Tech where his athletic abilities, community activism and intellectual prowess have earned him a reputation as a model student. Named Mr. Georgia Tech at the 2011 Homecoming Game, Tzegaegbe has won numerous awards for leadership, including the 2011 National Society for Black Engineers Distinguished Engineer of the Year, the 2011 Omicron Delta Kappa National Leader of the Year and the 2011 Alpha Phi Alpha Regional Leader of the Year. He has been named an Academic All-American Diver and was a two-year letterman on Tech’s Division I Swimming and Diving Team. Prior to winning the Marshall Scholarship, Tzegaegbe received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship.
“We are proud, but we cannot be surprised by this honor,” said his mentor, Dr. Reginald DesRoches, the Karen and John Huff Chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Even among the very brightest students who come to Georgia Tech, Jacob is a stand-out. He is academically focused and driven, and is quite aware of the larger implications of his work. Moreover, he is committed to serving the Georgia Tech and Atlanta communities through his numerous service activities.”
With more than two years of additional studies ahead of him, Tzegaegbe has some time to settle on a specific career path. He has a good idea of what he’d like to pursue, however.
“In my time at Georgia Tech, I have developed a deep appreciation for the impact that infrastructure can have on improving the quality of life of citizens. This scholarship will allow me to further my understanding of how to develop cities that can sustainably transport people and goods while providing a foundation for economic development.”
As Tzegaegbe works to further understand these issues, he'll carry on part of the Institute's mission through his studies.
“At Georgia Tech, we believe we are designing the future every day, and Jacob will be doing just that as he pursues civil engineering and urban development as a Marshall Scholar,” said President G. P. "Bud" Peterson.
Named in honor of the late U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the Marshall Scholarships were established by an Act of Parliament in 1953 to commemorate the humane ideals of the Marshall Plan. Tzegaegbe is one of 34 Marshall Scholars for 2013, and the only one from a Georgia college or university.
Kathleen Moore, communications manager, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, contributed to this story.
]]>A new online tool takes the guesswork out of developing individualized catch-up immunization schedules by allowing parents and health care providers to easily create a schedule that ensures missed vaccines and future vaccines are administered according to approved guidelines.
“The immunization schedule is complex,” said Larry Pickering, executive secretary of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a collaborator on the project. “By using the online immunization scheduler, parents can ensure that their children stay current on all recommended vaccines, and they can also obtain useful information about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases.”
The online catch-up immunization scheduling tool, which was developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is available at https://www.vacscheduler.org/. Since the new tool launched in January 2012, the site has recorded nearly 63,000 visits, 22 percent of them repeat visitors. Nearly half of the visitors identified themselves as health care providers.
The new online tool replaced a downloadable software program that was released by Georgia Tech and the CDC in 2008. The original software was designed by Professor Pinar Keskinocak and former graduate student Faramroze Engineer from the Georgia Tech Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) converted the software program into the new online tool and adapted it to show different views tailored for parents and health care professionals.
“We’ve resolved several issues that existed with the downloadable catch-up immunization scheduling program by creating the online tool,” explained Keskinocak. “For instance, some physicians told us that they were not able to download the original software program to their work computers because of information technology security restrictions and some users expressed concern because the program had to be downloaded again whenever updates to the vaccination rules were issued.”
The online tool removes the challenging task of simultaneously considering complex rules, guidelines and discretionary considerations when creating a catch-up schedule. A physician or caregiver simply inputs a child’s date of birth and previous immunization dates, and selects whether to administer the vaccines as soon as possible or to administer the vaccines when recommended. Then the program displays a personalized schedule of the recommended dates to administer all future vaccines, which can be saved to the user’s computer.
“I have found the online scheduling tools to be very user friendly and helpful,” said Thomas J. Steiner, the pediatric lead physician with Kaiser Permanente Gwinnett, in Duluth, Ga. “One of the most useful aspects is the fact that after the patient’s immunizations are entered, you can print a ‘catch up’ schedule which can be given to the patient and scanned into the patient’s chart.”
Vaccines included in the scheduler are those required between birth and six years of age: Hepatitis A and B, Rotavirus, Diphtheria/Tetanus/Pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b, Pneumococcal, Polio, Measles/Mumps/Rubella, Varicella (Chickenpox).
The scheduler follows the guidelines developed and revised each year by ACIP in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians. These guidelines include the feasible number, timing and spacing of doses of each vaccine based on the child’s age, the number of doses and the age at which each dose was administered.
In addition, each dose of each vaccine has a minimum, maximum and recommended age for administration, and there are minimum and recommended gaps between doses. These gaps as well as future administrations of a particular vaccine may vary depending on the age of the child and the age at which previous doses were administered.
If a child requires more than one live vaccine to be administered, there are two options: administer all live vaccines on the same day or wait 28 days between live vaccine injections. There also may be discretionary considerations such as limiting the number of simultaneous administrations a child receives or the number of visits required to complete the series for all vaccines.
GTRI researchers converted the downloadable program into software that could run online. While doing so, they added the capability to show slightly different information depending on whether the visitor was a health care professional or a parent.
“We can have the same algorithm and recommendation rules, but the interface can vary slightly based on the audience,” said Sheila Isbell, a GTRI research scientist who led the software conversion effort. “If the visitor is a parent, we can show parent-friendly footnotes instead of physician-specific ones and provide more basic information about the vaccines and the importance of completing the immunization regimes.”
As part of the redesign for online operation, the researchers also separated the information that are likely to be changed and housed it in a database that would be easier to update as recommendations change. Housing the rules in a database could also allow the system to be used in other countries where vaccination schedules differ from those of the United States.
For the future, the GTRI team is creating a version that combines child and adolescent schedules to allow it to serve persons up to 18 years of age. A version designed for mobile devices is also under development.
In addition to Isbell, GTRI researchers Scott Appling, Therese Boston, Josh Cothran, Moon Kim and Arya Irani also contributed to the software conversion project, which was supported by GTRI’s Independent Research and Development program.
Beyond advising on vaccination schedules, the tool may also encourage interactions between parents and physicians.
“By using the scheduler, parents will enhance their knowledge of vaccines and the diseases they prevent, and receive assistance in formulating questions that can be discussed with their child’s physicians and nurses, resulting in more productive interactions,” said Pickering, who is also a professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine.
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]]>The three new awards are for projects involving solar fuel generation, power generation from vortices of solar heated air and energy storage.
“Georgia Tech is one of the leading recipients of ARPA-E awards in the nation and these new awards demonstrate Georgia Tech’s continued prominence across the entire energy space in developing transformative energy solutions,” said Tim Lieuwen, director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute.
Energy researchers at Georgia Tech have major strengths in fuels, power generation, distribution and transmission, efficient utilization, policy and economics.
Currently, the Institute is involved in nine projects funded by ARPA-E that cut across the energy space, including carbon capture, smart grid, high-efficiency heat extraction, power conversion and distribution.
The Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech is an interdisciplinary umbrella organization that brings together a variety of experts from diverse fields at Tech to identify integrated solutions that increase the sustainability, affordability and reliability of the entire energy cycle – from generation to distribution to use.
Georgia Tech’s three ARPA-E grants were among 66 cutting-edge research projects announced Nov. 28 by Energy Secretary Steven Chu as part of the department’s “OPEN 2012” program. ARPA-E seeks out transformational, breakthrough technologies that show fundamental technical promise but are too early for private-sector investment.
“With ARPA-E and all of the Department of Energy’s research and development efforts, we are determined to attract the best and brightest minds at our country’s top universities, labs and businesses to help solve the energy challenges of this generation,” Chu said.
]]>The evaluation process for selected courses is expected to begin later this month, although the specific classes haven’t been identified.
The Georgia Institute of Technology announced a partnership with Coursera last summer. Registration is open for eight classes led by Georgia Tech professors, and more than 141,000 are already enrolled.
"Today's announcements by Coursera and ACE to initiate credit equivalence evaluation is an exciting and natural progression of the ongoing experimentation with MOOCs,” said Georgia Tech Provost Rafael Bras. “Georgia Tech is proud to be among the pioneering leaders in this experiment. We seek to make quality content available to many around the world and to improve our outstanding residential education experience. At the same time, we will continue to address outstanding issues such as assessment, integrity and appropriate business models."
To read the ACE press release, click here.
]]>]]>
Called Partnership to Enhance General Aviation Safety, Accessibility, and Sustainability (PEGASAS), the Center of Excellence will concentrate research and development efforts on general aviation safety issues including airport technology, propulsion and structures, airworthiness, flight safety, fire safety, human factors, system safety management and weather.
Along with Georgia Tech, PEGASAS will be led by Purdue University and Ohio State University as core integration members. Core team members include the Florida Institute of Technology, Iowa State University and Texas A&M University. PEGASAS affiliate members are: Arizona State University, Florida A&M, Hampton University, Kent State University, North Carolina A&T State University, Oklahoma State University, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale), Tufts University, Western Michigan University and University of Minnesota, Duluth.
“The new FAA Center of Excellence will reenergize and push the envelope of the general aviation sector while improving safety. We are excited and honored to be an integral part of this coalition of universities,” said Dimitri Mavris, Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis and Director of the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.
Mavris, who led the proposal effort for Georgia Tech with Hernando Jimenez, will act as co-director for PEGASAS at Georgia Tech and as one of the center’s coordinators for research. “The team of Georgia Tech aerospace engineering researchers for PEGASAS brings forth abundant expertise and state-of-the-art capabilities across the center’s areas of research," Mavris said.
The team is comprised of aerospace engineering professors Lakshmi Sankar, Massimo Ruzzene, Eric Johnson, Vitali Volovoi, Julian Rimoli and Karen Feigh as well as research engineers Hernando Jimenez, Jimmy Tai, Michelle Kirby, Holger Pfaender and several other ASDL research faculty.
“The FAA continues its goal of working to reduce general aviation fatalities by 10 percent over a 10-year period, from 2009 to 2018,” said Acting FAA Administrator Michael Huerta in a statement released by the FAA. “The Center of Excellence program is a valuable tool in providing the critical data we need to reduce those accidents.”
The FAA’s Center of Excellence program is a cost-sharing research partnership between academia, industry and the federal government. The FAA plans to invest a minimum of $500,000 per year during the first five years of the new 10-year agreement with PEGASAS.
]]>Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory
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]]>During a suspension, a chapter ceases any organizational activities, including any planned social functions at its campus residence. The investigation, assigned to the Dean of Students’ Office of Student Integrity, is ongoing.
]]>Normally, the summer months provide a lull in activity for the office, but this summer, the lull never came. When Denise Johnson-Marshall, assistant dean and director of Disability Services, arrived at Tech 10 years ago, 184 students were registered with the office, or about 1 percent. This year, it’s 565, nearly 3 percent.
“You can guess about 10 percent of any population has some sort of disability, so we are low on that scale, but high for us,” she said.
The office serves students with needs both mental and physical, temporary and permanent. Most students served have some kind of ADD or ADHD, but Johnson-Marshall has also seen more chronic health-related illnesses such as autoimmune diseases, as well as psychological disorders and Asperger’s.
The increased use of Disability Services likely has numerous causes. The office has boosted its outreach to new students by holding open houses at FASET orientation, and faculty members are more frequently referring students. Johnson-Marshall has also seen enhanced communication with high school counselors trying to improve the process of transitioning students who were aware of their disabilities in high school.
“Most students have an inkling that something is going on before they get to college, though some needs do emerge or manifest once they’re here,” she said. Disability Services works with the Counseling Center to screen and assess students when they apply for services if they have not been previously diagnosed.
Even with the increase, Johnson-Marshall hopes more students will continue to register. The competitive environment of both Georgia Tech and the science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines, however, may hinder some students from freely admitting their needs.
“We want students to be judged by what they can do, not what they can’t. I’d rather see them fail because they didn’t study than because they didn’t have an accommodation they needed.” Accommodations could include a few extra minutes to take an exam or a testing location other than the regular classroom.
In the realm of physical assistance, Disability Services helps coordinate resources for students to overcome physical limitations, whether they’re permanent or caused by a stint on crutches. The turnaround time for receiving temporary services is about 48 hours after applying. For longer-term needs, both mental and physical, applications are processed in about 15 business days.
Students who don’t need the resources of Disability Services could consider becoming employees. The office, which is part of the Division of Student Affairs, hires more than 130 students each semester to serve as note takers for students with disabilities. Prospective note takers may apply online at the beginning of each semester.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
Based on electron beam-induced deposition (EBID), the work is believed to be the first to connect multiple shells of a multi-walled carbon nanotube to metal terminals on a semiconducting substrate, which is relevant to integrated circuit fabrication. Using this three-dimensional fabrication technique, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology developed graphitic nanojoints on both ends of the multi-walled carbon nanotubes, which yielded a 10-fold decrease in resistivity in its connection to metal junctions.
The technique could facilitate the integration of carbon nanotubes as interconnects in next-generation integrated circuits that use both silicon and carbon components. The research was supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and in its early stages, by the National Science Foundation. The work was reported online October 4, 2012, by the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology.
“For the first time, we have established connections to multiple shells of carbon nanotubes with a technique that is amenable to integration with conventional integrated circuit microfabrication processes,” said Andrei Fedorov, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “Connecting to multiple shells allows us to dramatically reduce the resistance and move to the next level of device performance.”
In developing the new technique, the researchers relied on modeling to guide their process parameters. To make it scalable for manufacturing, they also worked toward technologies for isolating and aligning individual carbon nanotubes between the metal terminals on a silicon substrate, and for examining the properties of the resulting structures. The researchers believe the technique could also be used to connect multi-layered graphene to metal contacts, though their published research has so far focused on carbon nanotubes.
The low-temperature EBID process takes place in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) system modified for material deposition. The SEM’s vacuum chamber is altered to introduce precursors of the materials that researchers would like to deposit. The electron gun normally used for imaging of nanostructures is instead used to generate low energy secondary electrons when the high energy primary electrons impinge on the substrate at carefully chosen locations. When the secondary electrons interact with hydrocarbon precursor molecules introduced into the SEM chamber, carbon is deposited in desired locations.
Unique to the EBID process, the deposited carbon makes a strong, chemically-bonded connection to the ends of the carbon nanotubes, unlike the weakly-coupled physical interface made in traditional techniques based on metal evaporation. Prior to deposition, the ends of the nanotubes are opened using an etching process, so the deposited carbon grows into the open end of the nanotube to electronically connect multiple shells. Thermal annealing of the carbon after deposition converts it to a crystalline graphitic form that significantly improves electrical conductivity.
“Atom-by-atom, we can build the connection where the electron beam strikes right near the open end of the carbon nanotubes,” Fedorov explained. “The highest rate of deposition occurs where the concentration of precursor is high and there are a lot of secondary electrons. This provides a nanoscale sculpturing tool with three-dimensional control for connecting the open ends of carbon nanotubes on any desired substrate.”
Multi-walled carbon nanotubes offer the promise of higher information delivery throughput for certain interconnects used in electronic devices. Researchers have envisioned a future generation of hybrid devices based on traditional integrated circuits but using interconnects based on carbon nanotubes.
Until now, however, resistance at the connections between the carbon structures and conventional silicon electronics has been too high to make the devices practical.
“The big challenge in this field is to make a connection not just to a single shell of a carbon nanotube,” said Fedorov. “If only the outer wall of a carbon nanotube is connected, you really don’t gain much because most of the transmission channel is under-utilized or not utilized at all.”
The technique developed by Fedorov and his collaborators produces record low resistivity at the connection between the carbon nanotube and the metal pad. The researchers have measured resistance as low as approximately 100 Ohms – a factor of ten lower than the best that had been measured with other connection techniques.
“This technique gives us many new opportunities to go forward with integrating these carbon nanostructures into conventional devices,” he said. “Because it is carbon, this interface has an advantage because its properties are similar to those of the carbon nanotubes to which they are providing a connection.”
The researchers don’t know exactly how many of the carbon nanotube shells are connected, but based on resistance measurements, they believe at least 10 of the approximately 30 conducting shells are contributing to electrical conduction.
However, handling carbon nanotubes poses a significant challenge to their use as interconnects. When formed through the electric arc technique, for example, carbon nanotubes are produced as a tangle of structures with varying lengths and properties, some with mechanical defects. Techniques have been developed to separate out single nanotubes, and to open their ends.
Fedorov and his collaborators – current and former graduate students Songkil Kim, Dhaval Kulkarni, Konrad Rykaczewski and Mathias Henry, along with Georgia Tech professor Vladimir Tsukruk – developed a method for aligning the multi-walled nanotubes across electronic contacts using focused electrical fields in combination with a substrate template created through electron beam lithography. The process has a significantly improved yield of properly aligned carbon nanotubes, with a potential for scalability over a large chip area.
Once the nanotubes are placed into their positions, the carbon is deposited using the EBID process, followed by graphitization. The phase transformation in the carbon interface is monitored using Raman spectroscopy to ensure that the material is transformed into its optimal nanocrystalline graphite state.
“Only by making advances in each of these areas can we achieve this technological advance, which is an enabling technology for nanoelectronics based on carbon materials,” he said. “This is really a critical step for making many different kinds of devices using carbon nanotubes or graphene.”
Before the new technique can be used on a large scale, researchers will have to improve their technique for aligning carbon nanotubes and develop EBID systems able to deposit connectors on multiple devices simultaneously. Advances in parallel electron beam systems may provide a way to mass-produce the connections, Fedorov said.
“A major amount of work remains to be done in this area, but we believe this is possible if industry becomes interested,” he noted. “There are applications where integrating carbon nanotubes into circuits could be very attractive.”
CITATION: Songkil Kim, et.al, Fabrication of an Ultra-Low-Resistance Ohmic Contact to MWCNT-Metal Interconnect Using Graphitic Carbon by Electron Beam Induced Deposition (EBID), IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TNANO.2012.2220377
This research has been supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) under GRC grant 2008OJ1864.1281 and in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant DMI 0403671. The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF or the SRC.
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]]>On Tuesday, Nov. 20, Gates will address Tech students by video from Seattle, speaking for 5-10 minutes before opening the floor for an extended live question-and-answer session.
“Mr. Gates has such an incredible background in science, technology, humanities and the arts,” said John Miller, the fourth-year industrial and systems engineering major spearheading the Talks@Tech project. “His experiences founding Microsoft and creating the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will provide insight for the innovative, intellectual and ambitious students at Georgia Tech.”
Students planning on attending should RSVP online for the talk, which will begin at 6 p.m. in Room 152 of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, with overflow in Room 144. Students are encouraged to arrive at 5:45 p.m. for seating. Attendees can submit questions ahead of time through the comments field of the online event listing or ask them during the event.
Miller and his fellow organizers hope to use Talks@Tech to engage the community through distinguished speakers and topical conversations that go beyond lectures, providing a place for discussion-based learning.
“We want students to be engaged in conversations that they would otherwise not be able to have,” said Miller.
The Talks@Tech initiative was born out of a student-led effort, with faculty and staff providing guidance along the way through a steering committee. The group also hopes to organize and centralize various prestigious speakers around campus at talks.gatech.edu.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
This patient-specific information may be helpful in developing personalized approaches to treat these tissue-destructive diseases.
“We measured significant variability in the amount of cathepsins produced by blood samples we collected from healthy individuals, which may indicate that a one-size-fits-all approach of administering cathepsin inhibitors may not be the best strategy for all patients with these conditions,” said Manu Platt, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
The study was published online on Oct. 19, 2012 in the journal Integrative Biology. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Georgia Cancer Coalition, Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and the Emory/Georgia Tech Regenerative Engineering and Medicine Center.
Platt and graduate student Keon-Young Park collected blood samples from 14 healthy individuals, removed white blood cells called monocytes from the samples and stimulated those cells with certain molecules so that they would become macrophages or osteoclasts in the laboratory. By doing this, the researchers recreated what happens in the body—monocytes receive these cues from damaged tissue, leave the blood, and become macrophages or osteoclasts, which are known to contribute to tissue changes that occur in atherosclerosis, cancer and osteoporosis.
Then the researchers developed a model that used patient-varying kinase signals collected from the macrophages or osteoclasts to predict patient-specific activity of four cathepsins: K, L, S and V.
“Kinases are enzymes that integrate stimuli from different soluble, cellular and physical cues to generate specific cellular responses,” explained Platt, who is also a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar. “By using a systems biology approach to link cell differentiation cues and responses through integration of signals at the kinase level, we were able to mathematically predict relative amounts of cathepsin activity and distinguish which blood donors exhibited greater cathepsin activity compared to others.”
Predictability for all cathepsins ranged from 90 to 95 percent for both macrophages and osteoclasts, despite a range in the level of each cathepsin among the blood samples tested.
“We were pleased with the results because our model achieved very high predictability from a simple blood draw and overcame the challenge of incorporating the complex, unknown cues from individual patients’ unique genetic and biochemical backgrounds,” said Platt.
According to Platt, the next step will be to assess the model’s ability to predict cathepsin activity using blood samples from individuals with the diseases of interest: atherosclerosis, osteoporosis or cancer.
“Our ultimate goal is to create an assay that will inform a clinician whether an individual’s case of cancer or other tissue-destructive disease will be very aggressive from the moment that individual is diagnosed, which will enable the clinician to develop and begin the best personalized treatment plan immediately,” added Platt.
Weiwei A. Li, who received her bachelor’s degree from the Coulter Department in 2010, also contributed to this study.
Research reported in this publication was supported in part by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award number UL1TR000454 and the Office of the Director of the NIH under award number 1DP2OD007433. The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigators and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
CITATION: Park, Keon-Young et al., “Patient specific proteolytic activity of monocyte-derived macrophages and osteoclasts predicted with temporal kinase activation states during differentiation,” Integrative Biology (2012): http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C2IB20197F.
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]]>For those wanting to balance required courses with an elective or two, they can look to any of Tech’s colleges. Each one offers opportunities for students to take classes outside their major to help round out their time at Tech. Check out some options being taught next spring that are open to all majors and have no prerequisites (and, as always, be sure to discuss your schedule with your academic advisor):
Introduction to the Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Revolution (COE 3002): This course will develop the general scientific and engineering underpinnings of microelectronics and nanotechnology, and examine how this new technological revolution is influencing a broad array of interdisciplinary fields and civilization as a whole. (Taught by John D. Cressler. Non-ECE major seats open Nov. 9.)
History of Sport in America (HTS 2813): This course will examine the American sporting experience from the colonial period through the 21st century, with a focus on how sports have shaped American culture. (Taught by John M. Smith.)
Engineering Psychology (PSYC 2270): Engineering psychology is presented as an integral component in the design and evaluation of human-machine systems. Applied problems and general methodological questions are examined. (Instructor TBD.)
Tech Law and Ethics (MGT 3608): This class will examine some of the ethical, legal, and social issues associated with computers, information systems, and public and private networks including the Internet. (Taught by Wade Morgan Chumney.)
History of Modern Industrial Design (ID 2202): This class looks at the history and development of industrial design from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present. (Taught by Joyce D. Medina.)
Sustainability and Environmental Policy (PUBP 6327): One of many sustainability courses at Tech, this course explores the theory and practice of sustainable development, surveying areas of consensus and controversy in emerging thought on sustainability. (Taught by Bryan G. Norton.)
User Interface Design (CS 3750): Human computer interface is considered in terms of user-system compatibility. Concepts in human factors and interface design are covered in relation to capabilities of both humans and computers. (Taught by James D. Foley or Edward C. Clarkson.)
Some courses will be restricted by major until a certain date, but will eventually open to all students.
]]>When Zinn joined Georgia Tech in 1965, it was still building its reputation as one of the country’s foremost engineering centers. Zinn took it upon himself to mentor younger faculty members and recruit new ones to the program. He also helped establish partnerships with businesses and individuals outside Tech.
Now, the Ben T. Zinn Combustion Laboratory honors his service to the Institute.
"Ben is a pioneer who left his mark on academia in his field," said Georgia Tech President G.P. Bud Peterson. "He is the first U.S. combustion faculty member incorporating basic science into technology development -- studying fundamental problems at practical device operating conditions. We are pleased to dedicate this facility today and to honor Ben Zinn for his contributions to Georgia Tech and to the field of combustion and energy."
At 13,000 square feet, the lab offers plenty of workspace. Its features include four high-pressure test areas for conducting large-scale combustion experiments, as well as an instrument calibration room, a small machine shop, and a tool room.
Zinn, who gave remarks at the dedication ceremony, became a Regents’ Professor in 1973. That distinction is the most prestigious one bestowed by the state university system.
His research fields include control of combustion processes and combustion instabilities in rocket motors, and he has published hundreds of papers. Zinn is also the co-holder of seven patents.
]]>Twenty percent of Tech students hail from more than 100 countries outside the U.S. Around 40 percent of students participate in an international experience during by working, studying or researching abroad and, at this time, nearly 1,000 students are pursuing the International Plan. The Institute has hosted 150 exchange students during the last academic year.
On Thursday, Oct. 25, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signed a proclamation deeming Nov. 12-16 International Education Week. The joint initiative of the U.S. Department of State and Department of Education aims to highlight the growing importance of international education and exchange from both inbound (international students in the U.S.) and outbound (study abroad) perspectives.
Tech’s Office of International Education invites you to attend activities throughout the week to celebrate and acknowledge the importance of international education on campus.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
“The power of partnership is a theme that permeates all of Georgia Tech, and Campaign Georgia Tech is a sterling example,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. The outstanding support that we have and continue to receive from our Georgia Tech alumni and our other partners is helping us realize the goals outlined in our 25-year Strategic Plan, and to achieve a level of excellence that would otherwise not be possible.”
Within the total, $5 million was given for unrestricted current operations and $1 million for unrestricted endowment, with the balance for restricted purposes. By use, $56 million was directed for current operations, $27 million for permanent endowment, and $35 million for facilities and equipment. Programmatically, highlights included $42 million designated for the College of Engineering, $15 million for the newly-named Scheller College of Business and $19 million for intercollegiate athletics. The largest sources of funding came once again from alumni and corporations, providing $46 million and $45 million respectively to the total. Once again, alumni participation is anticipated to be among the highest within all public universities nationwide. Current and emeritus trustees of the Georgia Tech Foundation provided $13 million in gifts during the twelve-month period. The highlight of the year was the announcement of the extraordinary commitment by Ernest Scheller, Jr., a 1952 alumnus, for which the College of Business was named.
Campaign Georgia Tech continued its progress toward its expanded goal of $1.5 billion, crossed the $1 billion mark, and keeping pace at an average rate of nearly $3 million per week. John F. Brock, chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises and a 1970 Chemical Engineering graduate of Georgia Tech and Mary R. Brock, co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, co-chair the $1.5 billion comprehensive campaign, which will conclude in 2015.
According to Tech’s Vice President for Development, Barrett H. Carson, “Despite the uncertainty of the financial markets regionally, nationally and internationally, philanthropy to the Institute continues strong across all constituencies. And the Institute’s strategic plan provides the roadmap.” Looking forward, Carson added, “Facilities construction, endowed faculty chairs and professorships, and endowed undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships remain at the core of philanthropic objectives.”
While the Institute will be celebrating the opening of the new facilities this fiscal year – the McCamish Pavilion, the Byers Tennis Complex, and the Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions Building – the university will be breaking ground on the most expensive building ever constructed on the Georgia Tech campus – the $113 million Engineered Biosystems Building – for which fundraising is actively underway to complement State funding. The facility will allow Tech to expand its world class activities in the biotechnology arena and will provide an economic boost to the State by fueling Georgia’s growing biotechnology industry.
As of June 30, 2012, the market value of the consolidated endowments held by the Georgia Institute of Technology and its associated foundations remained stable at $1.6 billion (unaudited).
]]>Last spring, SOS took its community garden from a nook on East Campus to the new West Campus location. In a few weeks, the group will have its inaugural fall crop.
Stephanie Kehl, vice president of SOS and a second-year chemical engineering major, oversees the garden – equipped with a “green thumb” acquired by watching her dad take up gardening in recent years. She and others who tend the garden hope to provide both food and knowledge to the community.
“People are confused about where their food comes from, but it’s something you should know,” Kehl said, who hopes the Tech community can learn more about their foods’ sources by participating in the garden.
Those who take up tools in the SOS garden will be able to take whatever produce they want, and SOS will donate leftovers to a soup kitchen. Most of the garden’s seeds have been purchased online, thanks to funds from the Student Government Association and Student Foundation, and a few came from the Kehl family garden in Rome, Ga. The garden is tended almost entirely by students, but SOS is looking for more involvement from the entire campus community.
“Faculty and staff have the ability to support the community garden by providing continuity and historical perspective as the garden achieves a longer history on campus,” said Chrissy Spencer, academic professional on the faculty in the School of Biology and a faculty mentor for the garden. Spencer has a personal interest in sustainable and local food production and has taught seminars on current literature around those topics; she currently teaches evolution, ecology and genetics.
“While these inform my own personal motivations, there are lots of reasons why faculty and staff should support and enjoy a community garden on our urban campus, such as the delicious produce to take home and eat.”
SOS participants gather to tend the garden about once a week. It’s home to more than a dozen crops – all grown without chemical fertilizers – giving gardeners an array of take-home options.
“Diversification is more interesting than having just one variety,” Kehl said. She expects most crops to last until at least the first frost of the season. Gardeners recently pulled up radishes and will soon harvest cabbage and spinach.
SOS will host a Fall Festival at the garden on Friday, Nov. 16, giving the community a chance to see what goes on and even plant something of their own. More details will be forthcoming at sos.gatech.edu.
In the future, SOS plans to fence off and add signage to the garden to make it more distinct. SOS also intends to construct a toolshed for supply storage, and members have discussed starting a campus Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program once the garden is more established.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
Through identifying, analyzing, and prioritizing risks within a company or organization, participants will learn how to successfully plan and implement risk response plans, and create a smoother and efficient work flow. The course serves as an introduction to the procurement management process and is a requirement towards the Georgia Tech Project Management Certificate. Participants learn the specific processes of risk management and procurement management as defined by the Project Management Institute in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), which is considered the recognized standard for the industry.
“The course prepares students for the PMP exam as well as helping them become a better project manager,” says Jim Consuegra, academic program director of Information Technology, Georgia Tech Professional Education. “Participants will learn how to reduce the negative unknowns in projects and enhance opportunities by using effective risk management practices."
Project management is the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to execute projects effectively and efficiently. It’s a strategic competency for organizations, enabling them to tie project results to business goals and, better compete in their markets. The course is taught by Certified Project Management Professionals with extensive experience establishing project management and system development life-cycle methodologies in large organizations.
For more information or to register for the course, visit:
www.gtpe.gatech.edu/pm-risk-procurements
For a list of all upcoming Georgia Tech Professional Education courses in Savannah, visit: http://www.gtpe.gatech.edu/gts-fall.
]]>The Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) launched the three-year initiative to develop a platform for creating and sharing apps, augmented reality experiences and other technological solutions.
“We view this as a living laboratory for inventing the future of the university,” said Beth Mynatt, director of IPaT.
During its first year, GT Journey will launch a student activity center for location-based apps and data services. The GT Journey support team will provide development tools and data, such as GTmob and Argon, and a physical App Lab where students of all majors and levels of expertise can work and collaborate.
In the future, GT Journey will recruit students and alumni to contribute ideas for applications and services. The eventual goal is to develop a thriving online ecosystem of applications, experiences and crowd-sourced content by drawing on the Tech community’s ideas, data and talent.
For now, developers can get started by building on GTmob, and even nondevelopers can contribute content to augmented reality campus tours and submit ideas to GT Journey.
Further opportunity exists for students to promote their creations in next month’s Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC). Participants will work with campus experts who provide data and domain knowledge, and winners will be able to put their apps or experiences into production for use by the campus community. The deadline to submit to the fall competition is Thursday, Nov. 1.
]]>Matt Sanders
Office of Information Technology
Taking a short hop before a big jump could allow spring-based “pogo-stick” robots to reduce their power demands as much as ten-fold. The formula for the two-part jump was discovered by analyzing nearly 20,000 jumps made by a simple laboratory robot under a wide range of conditions.
“If we time things right, the robot can jump with a tenth of the power required to jump to the same height under other conditions,” said Daniel Goldman, an assistant professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “In the stutter jumps, we can move the mass at a lower frequency to get off the ground. We achieve the same takeoff velocity as a conventional jump, but it is developed over a longer period of time with much less power.”
The research was reported October 26 in the journal Physical Review Letters. The work was supported by the Army Research Laboratory’s MAST program, the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the GEM Fellowship.
Jumping is an important means of locomotion for animals, and could be important to future generations of robots. Jumping has been extensively studied in biological organisms, which use stretched tendons to store energy.
The Georgia Tech research into robot jumping began with a goal of learning how hopping robots would interact with complicated surfaces – such as sand, granular materials or debris from a disaster. Goldman quickly realized he’d need to know more about the physics of jumping to separate the surface issues from the factors controlled by the dynamics of jumping.
Inspired by student-directed experiments on the dynamics of hopping in his nonlinear dynamics and chaos class, Goldman asked Jeffrey Aguilar, a graduate student in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, to construct the simplest jumping robot.
Aguilar built a one-kilogram robot that is composed of a spring beneath a mass capable of moving up and down on a thrust rod. Aguilar used computer controls to vary the starting position of the mass on the rod, the amplitude of the motion, the pattern of movement and the frequency of movement applied by an actuator built into the robot’s mass. A high-speed camera and a contact sensor measured and recorded the height of each jump.
Aguilar and Goldman then collaborated with theorists Professor Kurt Wiesenfeld and Alex Lesov, from the Georgia Tech School of Physics, to explain the results of the experiments.
The researchers expected to find that the optimal jumping frequency would be related to the resonant frequency of the spring and mass system, but that turned out not to be true. Detailed evaluation of the jumps showed that frequencies above and below the resonance provided optimal jumping – and additional analysis revealed what the researchers called the “stutter jump.”
“The preparatory hop allows the robot to time things such that it can use a lower power to get to the same jump height,” Goldman explained. “You really don’t have to move the mass rapidly to get a good jump.”
The amount of energy that can be stored in batteries can limit the range and duration of robotic missions, so the stutter jump could be helpful for small robots that have limited power. Optimizing the efficiency of jumping could therefore allow the robots to complete longer and more complex missions.
But because it requires longer to perform than a simple jump, the two-step jump may not be suitable for all conditions.
“If you’re a small robot and you want to jump over an obstacle, you could use low power by using the stutter jump even though that would take longer,” said Goldman. “But if a hazard is threatening, you may need to generate the additional power to make a quick jump to get out of the way.”
For the future, Goldman and his research team plan to study how complicated surfaces affect jumping. They are currently studying the effects of sand, and will turn to other substrates to develop a better understanding of how exploration or rescue robots can hop through them.
Goldman’s past work has focused on the lessons learned from the locomotion of biological systems, so the team is also interested in what the robot can teach them about how animals jump. “What we have learned here can function as a hypothesis for biological systems, but it may not explain everything,” he said.
The simple jumping robot turned out to be a useful system to study, not only because of the interesting behaviors that turned up, but also because the results were counter to what the researchers had expected.
“In physics, we often study the steady-state solution,” Goldman noted. “If we wait enough time for the transient phenomena to die off, then we can study what’s left. It turns out that in this system, we really care about the transients.”
This research is supported by the Army Research Laboratory under cooperative agreement number W911NF-08-2-004, by the Army Research Office under cooperative agreement W911NF-11-1-0514, and by the National Science Foundation under contract PoLS PHY-1150760. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Army Research Laboratory, the Army Research Office or the National Science Foundation.
CITATION: Aguilar, Jeffrey et al., “Lift-off dynamics in a simple jumping robot,” Physical Review Letters (2012): http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v109/i17/e174301
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu)
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]]>Scientists at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified grid cells, neurons that fire in repeating triangular patterns as the eyes explore visual scenes, in the brains of rhesus monkeys.
The finding has implications for understanding how humans form and remember mental maps of the world, as well as how neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s erode those abilities. This is the first time grid cells have been detected directly in primates. Grid cells were identified in rats in 2005, and their existence in humans has been indirectly inferred through magnetic resonance imaging.
Grid cells’ electrical activities were recorded by introducing electrodes into monkeys’ entorhinal cortex, a region of the brain in the medial temporal lobe. At the same time, the monkeys viewed a variety of images on a computer screen and explored those images with their eyes. Infrared eye-tracking allowed the scientists to follow which part of the image the monkey’s eyes were focusing on. A single grid cell fires when the eyes focus on multiple discrete locations forming a grid pattern.
“The entorhinal cortex is one of the first brain regions to degenerate in Alzheimer’s disease, so our results may help to explain why disorientation is one of the first behavioral signs of Alzheimer’s,” said senior author Elizabeth Buffalo, PhD, associate professor of neurology at Emory University School of Medicine and Yerkes National Primate Research Center. “We think these neurons help provide a context or structure for visual experiences to be stored in memory.”
“Our discovery of grid cells in primates is a big step toward understanding how our brains form memories of visual information,” said first author Nathan Killian, a graduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “This is an exciting way of thinking about memory that may lead to novel treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.”
In the experiments in which rats’ grid cells were identified, the cells fired whenever the rats crossed lines on an invisible triangular grid.
“The surprising thing was that we could identify cells that behaved in the same way when the monkeys were simply moving their eyes,” Buffalo said. “It suggests that primates don’t have to actually visit a place to construct the same kind of mental map.”
Another aspect of grid cells not previously seen with rodents is that the cells’ responses change when monkeys are seeing an image for the second time. Specifically, the grid cells reduce their firing rate when a repeat image is seen. Moving from the posterior (rear) toward the anterior (front) of the entorhinal cortex, more neurons show memory responses.
“These results demonstrate that grid cells are involved in memory, not just mapping the visual field,” Killian said.
Consistent with previous reports on grid cells in rats, Killian and Buffalo observed “theta-band” oscillations, where grid cells fire in a rhythmic way, from 3 to 12 times per second. Some scientists have proposed that theta oscillations are important for grid cell networks to be generated in development, and also for the brain to put together information from the grid cells. In the monkeys, populations of neurons exhibited theta oscillations that occurred in intermittent bouts, but these bouts did not appear to be critical for formation of the spatial representation.
Vision is thought to be a more prominent sense for primates (monkeys and humans) compared with rodents, for whom touch and smell are more important. While grid cells in rodents and primates were detected in different types of experiments, Buffalo says that it doesn’t mean grid cells necessarily have a different nature in primates.
“We are now training a monkey to move through a virtual 3-D space. My guess is that we’ll find grid cells that fire in similar patterns as the monkey navigates through that space,” she said.
Buffalo says future experiments could examine how monkeys navigate in real space, including changes in head or body orientation, to determine how grid cells respond.
The research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH093807, R01MH080007, MH082559) and the NIH Director’s Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (P51OD11132).
Reference:N.J. Killian, M.J. Jutras, and E.A. Buffalo. A map of visual space in the primate entorhinal cortex. Nature (2012).
Media contact: Lisa Newbern, lisa.newbern@emory.edu, 404-727-7709.
Writer: Quinn Eastman
]]>
Emory University
(404) 727-7709
]]>“Since he came to Georgia Tech in 2006, Dan has overseen a significant expansion of our athletics facilities,” Peterson said. “Under his leadership, our student-athletes have continued to excel, winning both conference and national championships. It has been a pleasure to work with him, and we wish Dan and his wife, Marcie, the very best in his new position.”
Associate Athletics Director Paul Griffin has agreed to serve as acting athletics director. Georgia Tech will conduct a national search to fill the director of athletics position.
“We are all thankful to Dan for his leadership and grateful that Paul Griffin has agreed to continue the strong leadership of our Athletics Department. This will provide the kind of continuity we will need as we look ahead to the future of athletics at Georgia Tech,” Peterson said.
]]>It is slated to be the largest Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) meeting in history with a record number of abstracts submitted, 919 oral presentations and 1550 poster presentations, representing the broadest range of research tracks to date. More than 200 research presentations at the conference, including 122 oral and 85 posted presentations, will come from the growing partnership between the Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering.
The two schools formed the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering in 1997 and today the department’s undergraduate and graduate programs in biomedical engineering are ranked second in the nation, according to the most recent rankings from U.S. News & World Report.
Conference Highlights include:
Hanjoong Jo, Ada Lee and Pete Correll Professor in Biomedical Engineering in the Coulter Department, serves as this year’s conference chair. Coulter Department Associate Professor Julia Babensee is the program chair.
]]>Venture Atlanta, Georgia’s largest investor showcase, brings together entrepreneurs with venture capitalists, bankers, angel investors and others who can help them raise the capital they need to grow. Over the two days of the conference, the early stage and growth stage companies, representing a diverse mix of technologies, told their stories to more than 750 conference participants.
Launched in 2007, Venture Atlanta is a collaboration of the Atlanta CEO Council, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and the Technology Association of Georgia.
ATDC companies on stage at the conference were: Aptidata Corporation, Badgy, Clinigence, CollectorDASH, Emcien, EndGame Systems, LiquidText, Lucena Research, MessageGears, Mowgli, Pindrop Security, Rigor, SalesLoft, Springbot, SynkUp and Sytheros Communications.
The first recent success came with the apprehension of Terrance Watley (also known as "Boo Boo"), the second suspect sought in the July armed robbery in the North Avenue Apartments. Working with Crime Stoppers, the service that provides rewards for information leading to arrests, GTPD received tips that Watley was in the Decatur area. GTPD then contacted the DeKalb County Fugitive Squad, and, about 27 hours later, Watley was located outside an apartment complex in the southwest part of the county.
“This was one of the first times we’ve used Crime Stoppers, and it was very beneficial in this case,” said Hembree, who serves as commander of GTPD’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID). Five other officers work in CID, and all had a hand in this particular case. “We did a lot of good police work and a lot of video review. It was truly a team effort.”
During the investigation, GTPD also worked with the Atlanta Police Department, College Park Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“We want the criminal element to know we will exhaust all our means in investigations,” Hembree said. “We take it personally when someone goes after our students.”
In another investigation, Dennis Barry, Thaddeus Howard and Darryl McCrary were arrested for involvement in various incidents of stolen belongings from the Campus Recreation Center (CRC) and its neighboring fields. McCrary is what Lieutenant Carla Cook calls a “career criminal” and has a history of theft in workout facilities and universities. Police used video footage and undercover patrols to catch McCrary in the act and tracked purchases he made with stolen credit cards to the Target at Atlantic Station.
Despite getting a few of Georgia Tech’s most wanted off the streets, police continue to urge students not to give criminals the chance to commit crimes of opportunity.
“If you go to the CRC, please use the lockers and lock your stuff up so these guys can’t pick it up,” Hembree said. Most instances of belongings stolen around campus have occurred when items have been left either unattended or in an unsecured locker. Those using the CRC facilities can rent a locker for the semester that comes with a combination lock or may bring their own lock for one-day locker use. Locks are also available for purchase in CRC vending machines.
]]>A research team led by Professor Mike Stilman at the Georgia Institute of Technology hopes to change that by giving robots the ability to use objects in their environments to accomplish high-level tasks. The team recently received a three-year, $900,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research to work on this project.
“Our goal is to develop a robot that behaves like MacGyver, the television character from the 1980s who solved complex problems and escaped dangerous situations by using everyday objects and materials he found at hand,” said Stilman, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. “We want to understand the basic cognitive processes that allow humans to take advantage of arbitrary objects in their environments as tools. We will achieve this by designing algorithms for robots that make tasks that are impossible for a robot alone possible for a robot with tools.”
The research will build on Stilman’s previous work on navigation among movable obstacles that enabled robots to autonomously recognize and move obstacles that were in the way of their getting from point A to point B.
“This project is challenging because there is a critical difference between moving objects out of the way and using objects to make a way,” explained Stilman. “Researchers in the robot motion planning field have traditionally used computerized vision systems to locate objects in a cluttered environment to plan collision-free paths, but these systems have not provided any information about the objects’ functions.”
To create a robot capable of using objects in its environment to accomplish a task, Stilman plans to develop an algorithm that will allow a robot to identify an arbitrary object in a room, determine the object’s potential function, and turn that object into a simple machine that can be used to complete an action. Actions could include using a chair to reach something high, bracing a ladder against a bookshelf, stacking boxes to climb over something, and building levers or bridges from random debris.
By providing the robot with basic knowledge of rigid body mechanics and simple machines, the robot should be able to autonomously determine the mechanical force properties of an object and construct motion plans for using the object to perform high-level tasks.
For example, exiting a burning room with a jammed door would require a robot to travel around any fire, use an object in the room to apply sufficient force to open the stuck door, and locate an object in the room that will support its weight while it moves to get out of the room.
Such skills could be extremely valuable in the future as robots work side-by-side with military personnel to accomplish challenging missions.
“The Navy prides itself on recruiting, training and deploying our country’s most resourceful and intelligent men and women,” said Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). “Now that robotic systems are becoming more pervasive as teammates for warfighters in military operations, we must ensure that they are both intelligent and resourceful. Professor Stilman’s work on the ‘MacGyver-bot’ is the first of its kind, and is already beginning to deliver on the promise of mechanical teammates able to creatively perform in high-stakes situations.”
To address the complexity of the human-like reasoning required for this type of scenario, Stilman is collaborating with researchers Pat Langley and Dongkyu Choi. Langley is the director of the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise (ISLE), and is recognized as a co-founder of the field of machine learning, where he championed both experimental studies of learning algorithms and their application to real-world problems. Choi is an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kansas.
Langley and Choi will expand the cognitive architecture they developed, called ICARUS, which provides an infrastructure for modeling various human capabilities like perception, inference, performance and learning in robots.
“We believe a hybrid reasoning system that embeds our physics-based algorithms within a cognitive architecture will create a more general, efficient and structured control system for our robot that will accrue more benefits than if we used one approach alone,” said Stilman.
After the researchers develop and optimize the hybrid reasoning system using computer simulations, they plan to test the software using Golem Krang, a humanoid robot designed and built in Stilman’s laboratory to study whole-body robotic planning and control.
This research is sponsored by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research, through grant number N00014-12-1-0143. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research.
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While breaks are great times to visit family or friends, they’re also great opportunities to enjoy campus and Atlanta with fewer obligations. There are plenty of events going on throughout the weekend that fit into a student budget, but it’s also a chance to enjoy campus or the city at times that you’d normally be consumed with books, research or work.
Since this year's Homecoming celebration is the same weekend as many Halloween activities, fall break might be the best time to enjoy frightening festivities.
A few ideas for those sticking around town for the long weekend and who may want to reserve a little time for leisure:
Friday
Saturday
Saturday and Sunday
Tuesday
All Week
The observed frequency and intensity of blackbody radiation is affected by interaction between temperature, humidity, distance from the radiating object and other parameters. Traditional textbooks rely on a series of charts to show how these variables affect the emissions, making the concept potentially difficult to understand.
Researchers have now created an iPad application that illustrates the relationship between these parameters, allowing students to explore the interactions and visually determine the impacts of changes. Known as iBlackbody, the application was originally produced as part of a handbook for electro-optical engineers, who must understand the impact of blackbody radiation in their defense and atmospheric sensing research. The program has since been made available to educators and students.
“We have built a tool that allows users to experiment with these parameters to see how the blackbody curve changes based on temperature, humidity, haze conditions, distance and other factors,” said Leanne West, a principal research scientist at GTRI. “The program puts the equations into action so you can see the results from changing variables.”
Using sliders on the screen, users can change the parameters in discrete values that are programmed into the application. For instance, the application allows users to see the impact of temperatures as low as minus 333 degrees Fahrenheit, and as high as 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit.
Available in the iTunes store, iBlackbody is the first iPad application to illustrate the concept of blackbody radiation. It is part of a series of programs and games that GTRI scientists and K-12 education specialists are developing to illustrate science and technology topics that can be difficult to understand using traditional teaching methods.
“We think this is a much better learning tool for anyone attempting to understand blackbody radiation,” said West, a former high school physics and physical sciences teacher. “Using the iPad can really help to bring concepts to life for students and anyone else interested in this topic. Seeing how equations change as input variables change aids in the understanding of the equation and what it is trying to tell you.”
Funds generated by the sale of the app – which is available for 99 cents – will go back into improving it and building other iPad programs, West added. The app was written primarily by Brian Parise, a GTRI research scientist.
The project was supported by SENSIAC, the military sensing organization based at Georgia Tech. The iBlackbody application was originally produced as part of a project converting a traditional handbook on infrared radiation into an electronic book. The application replaces text and a series of charts in the first chapter of the handbook.
“People enjoyed using this application and they saw its potential beyond the handbook,” said West. “What was meant to be just a module within the e-book turned into its own iTunes application.”
Blackbody radiation has a characteristic and continuous frequency spectrum that depends on the temperature of the object emitting it, a phenomenon described mathematically by Planck’s radiation law. The spectrum shifts to higher frequencies as the temperature of the object increases. At room temperature, most of the emissions from a blackbody are in the infrared region, which is not visible to the human eye, which is why the object appears to be black. At higher temperatures, blackbodies can produce visible emissions that range in color from red to blue-white.
A blackbody absorbs all of the electromagnetic energy that it encounters, and then emits it back into the environment. When a blackbody is at a uniform temperature, its emissions have a characteristic frequency distribution that depends on the temperature.
For the future, West hopes to produce other iPad applications, as well as games, intended to teach physics principles.
“Tablet computers are becoming important teaching tools that are playing a larger and larger role in education,” she added. “We want to contribute to future generations understanding the science and engineering concepts that are important to the research we do.”
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]]>Research News & Publications Office
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]]>The announcement was made in Atlanta at the eighth annual A3C Festival, the largest hip-hop festival in the Southeast.
“Young Guru brings a new level of creativity and professional musical expertise to EarSketch,” said Brian Magerko, an assistant professor in the Ivan Allen College School of Literature, Media and Communication. “Atlanta high school students will have a chance to learn about computer science with help from one of the biggest producers in hip-hop.”
“I knew early in my career that giving back and teaching young people were my passions,” said Keaton. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for professionals taking me under their wing and teaching me the craft. EarSketch is the program that will spark the next great computer or music mind. I’m sure of it. This is why I wanted to be involved.”
EarSketch is a National Science Foundation-funded initiative that was created to encourage high school students to consider computer science careers. The program, now in its second year, is focused on minorities and girls, but with an approach that is intended to have broad appeal. EarSketch utilizes the Python programming language and Cockos’ Reaper, a digital audio workstation program similar to those used in recording studios throughout the music industry.
EarSketch was developed and is overseen by Magerko and Jason Freeman, an associate professor in the College of Architecture’s School of Music.
“Young people don’t always realize that computer science and programming can be fun,” said Freeman. “Students are using EarSketch to remix samples and loops to express their own creative musical ideas as they learn computer science principles.”
EarSketch had its first test run by Atlanta-area high schoolers during a Georgia Tech summer camp in July. The software and curriculum will be piloted this spring at Lanier High School in Gwinnett County as part of Lanier’s music technology program.
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With peers from Tech and other universities, Lupuloff started Why Gen Weekly, a website devoted to educating students about politics.
“It’s for and by college-aged students and is done in a simple way,” said Lupuloff. New content each week is devoted to a specific political issue, with a news section complemented by columns from conservative, liberal and libertarian students. Articles are kept concise because Lupuloff knows students are busy. The site's name comes from the "Generation Y" moniker given to the college-aged demographic and the spirit of inquiry Lupuloff hopes to inspire.
“I learned that the majority of my friends and peers aren’t that informed, and our age group isn’t as active as it should be,” he said. “In the 2008 election, nearly 50 percent of the college-aged demographic voted, but that’s not enough.”
Andrés Celedón believes it’s important for students to be politically aware regardless of voting status. The fourth-year public policy major from Colombia is not eligible himself, but that hasn’t stopped him from being involved with Georgia Tech College Republicans (GTCR) and campaigning for his party’s candidates, including presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
“There’s no excuse not to vote if you’re eligible,” Celedón said. “You should do your own research or get in touch with GTCR or College Democrats at Georgia Tech to learn about the issues.”
On Monday, Oct. 29, GTCR, the African American Student Union and Jackets for Obama will collectively host a debate on which party should be more appealing to minorities. A week prior, at its Monday, Oct. 22 meeting, GTCR will host a guest speaker to discuss a proposed charter schools amendment, which Georgia voters will also make their voices heard on come Nov. 6. An amendment regarding multiyear lease agreements for the General Assembly will be on Georgia’s Nov. 6 ballot as well.
In all their efforts, students are encouraging their classmates to become educated on current politics and decide on a candidate.
“Issues that may not seem like a big deal now are going to be big once you enter the workforce,” said Andrew Mullins, GTCR chairman.
Students can keep up with Why Gen Weekly as it posts new content each Monday at 5 p.m., as well as on Facebook and Twitter. Wreck the Vote will gather students for the last presidential debate viewing party on Monday, Oct. 22, at 9 p.m. in the Student Center Theater.
]]>Nearly 16 percent of the companies responding to the survey said work had been transferred to them from outside Georgia, compared to slightly more than 14 percent that lost work to out-of-state facilities. The percentage of companies receiving work from facilities outside Georgia grew from just 11 percent the first year the question was asked in 2005, while the percentage of companies losing work fell from slightly more than 17 percent.
“We have finally seen a crossing of the lines so that more companies are benefitting from in-sourcing than are losing to outsourcing,” said Jan Youtie, director of policy research services in the Enterprise Innovation Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It’s not a huge difference at this point, but it is a positive and consistent trend for the manufacturing community.”
The in-sourced work most commonly came from other facilities in the United States, though a growing percentage of companies reported production transferred to them from outside the United States. The percentage of companies benefitting from this “on-shoring” trend grew to 4.3 percent from 2.6 percent in 2005.
“This may be about the total cost of manufacturing,” said Youtie, who also holds a faculty position in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy. “Companies are taking a hard look at aspects of production they formerly assumed were cheaper overseas. There are costs involved in outsourcing that may not have been considered before, such as logistics and regulatory issues. Rising foreign labor costs may be another factor.”
Technology-driven companies and those that compete on the basis of innovation are more likely than other firms to benefit from in-sourcing. Larger companies are somewhat more likely to receive work from outside the state than are smaller firms. In some cases, companies both gained work from outside Georgia and lost work to outside facilities.
“The growing need for new technology has also created an interesting convergence between different sectors in Georgia’s manufacturing industry,” said Adam Beckerman, partner-in-charge of the manufacturing and distribution group at Habif, Arogeti & Wynne, LLP. “For example, a piece of robotic equipment that is being used to attach car doors at an automotive production plant happens to be the same equipment that is being used to hold chickens at a nearby food production facility. In coming years, we will see more of these multi-purpose technologies and pieces of equipment having a positive impact on various sectors of the manufacturing industry.”
The Georgia Manufacturing Survey is conducted every two or three years to assess the use of modern manufacturing technology, practices and techniques by Georgia industry. It was conducted by Georgia Tech researchers in collaboration with Kennesaw State University, the Georgia Department of Labor, and the Atlanta accounting firm Habif, Arogeti and Wynne, LLP, a Georgia-based tax, accounting and business advisory firm. The 2012 survey was conducted from February to May of 2012, and received responses from 528 companies that had 10 or more employees.
The survey also asked about a broad range of competitiveness and productivity issues, and focused on current and planned technology use. More than half of the respondents reported using enterprise resource planning, computer-aided design and preventive-predictive maintenance technology. Inventory-focused technologies such as bar-code readers and radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems led the list of future priorities, with 21 percent of companies planning to purchase readers and 18 percent planning RFID investments.
While industrial robots have captured public attention, they aren’t high on the shopping lists of Georgia companies. About 13 percent of the firms surveyed use robots now, but only 5 percent say they plan to add them. About 9 percent of companies employ advanced materials in their manufacturing, while approximately 6 percent use additive manufacturing – technology for building parts directly from computer-aided design systems.
Although concerns are raised about the role of technology in reducing manufacturing employment, the Georgia Manufacturing Survey did not find a strong relationship between technology adoption and employment decline. Manufacturers using production technologies and techniques were more than 40 percent more likely to have added employment rather than to have reduced employment. A model that controls for sales, capital, industry, year of establishment and other factors found that greater technology use is positively associated with higher employment, noted Phil Shapira, co-director of the survey and a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and a professor of innovation, management and policy at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
“One caveat is that the model does not represent manufacturers that went out of business due to technological or other factors,” he said. “That said, job losses related to technology substitution may have been offset by employment gains due to greater competitiveness.”
Though many companies responding to the 2010 survey said they were interested in sustainability, that didn’t translate into dramatic action in the 2012 survey. For instance, only 8 percent of Georgia manufacturers have produced an emissions inventory or carbon footprint of their facilities.
“We saw that companies followed through on plans for waste elimination and efforts to reduce pollution, but we didn’t see an increase in the re-use of materials, remanufacturing, less shipping or more use of renewable energy,” Youtie said. “The basic entry points for sustainability are there, but some areas haven’t seen much progress.”
As in past years, the study compared profitability of companies with different competitive strategies. The return on sales for companies competing on the basis on innovative products, processes or services was twice that of companies competing on the basis of low price. Innovative companies also pay higher wages than companies using other strategies.
“We see that science-based industries are more likely to prioritize innovation as a strategy,” explained Shapira. “Industries such as food and apparel are less likely to compete that way. No group has a large percentage of firms competing on innovation, though companies in any industry can use innovation.”
Seventeen percent of Georgia manufacturers chose low price as their primary competitive strategy, compared to less than 10 percent that compete through innovation or the use of new technology. The most popular competitive strategy was high quality.
Other survey findings included:
The results show the challenges facing Georgia manufacturers.
“Innovation, advanced technology and sustainability play crucial roles in helping manufacturers achieve competitiveness and maintain it for the future,” the authors wrote. “Manufacturers increasingly must operate using efficient and productive technologies, and with finite resources and greater awareness of environmental impacts.”
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]]>Georgia Tech’s efforts in addressing such needs have traditionally received recognition from various sources. Diverse Issues in Higher Education, for instance, ranks the University No. 1 in multiple categories: engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded to all minority students, engineering doctoral degrees awarded to African Americans, engineering doctoral degrees awarded to Hispanics and engineering doctoral degrees awarded to all minority students. Hispanic Business Magazine also recently named Georgia Tech No. 1 among engineering graduate schools.
Dr. Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at Georgia Tech, accepted the award during NACME’s Awards Dinner and Celebration, and thanked all of the individuals and departments at Georgia Tech – from Enrollment Services to the College of Engineering – dedicated to attracting and supporting underrepresented students as they pursue careers in engineering.
“I am proud that our efforts to improve diversity span the full spectrum,” Bras said. “We work with all age groups to cultivate a diverse pipeline by increasing engineering awareness in the K-12 arena and exposing students to real-world, hands-on engineering experiences; we work with high school students; we celebrate our minority students and their accomplishments; and we have programs to promote graduate education – particularly in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields – among women and underrepresented minorities.”
Bras added that Georgia Tech remains committed to its goals of diversity and inclusiveness and to providing the best education to all students.
“The support and recognition of great organizations like NACME is very much appreciated,” he said.
Here’s a rundown of events happening during the next several days, but you can learn more about each of them at homecoming.gatech.edu or from the 2012 Rulesbook (PDF).
Wednesday, Oct. 17:
Thursday, Oct. 18:
Friday, Oct. 19:
Sunday, Oct. 21:
Monday, Oct. 22:
Tuesday, Oct. 23:
Wednesday, Oct. 24:
Thursday, Oct. 25:
Friday, Oct. 26:
Saturday, Oct. 27:
Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
“Georgia Tech students and alumni are among the most highly qualified in the STEM fields and are able to help alleviate this problem,” said Georgia Tech Pre-Teaching Advisor Susan Belmonte. “They have the chance to have a positive influence on the lives of students.”
Tech students who are interested in teaching can look to the Teach for Georgia program to help them take up Belmonte’s challenge, and can learn more about both Teach for Georgia and Teach for America, the national program after which Teach for Georgia is modeled, at an information session on Thursday, Nov. 1.
Made possible through a grant that’s part of the Georgia Department of Education’s Georgia Race to the Top Fund, Teach for Georgia places students or recent graduates in teaching jobs in counties that need educators with STEM backgrounds and provides participants funding for the certification exams and education needed to become state-certified teachers. In addition to covering education costs, Teach for Georgia gives participants funds for materials, supplies and professional development, as well as tuition-free summer training and support via a mentor and coach, throughout the two-year commitment. In exchange, a recipient commits to remain teaching in the selected rural Georgia county for two years. While Teach for Georgia does not reserve positions for candidates, it works directly with those in individual counties who make hiring decisions.
Georgia teachers are required to pass the Georgia Assessment for the Certification of Educators (GACE) and complete a state-approved certification program; options include earning a Master of Arts in Teaching or completing a non-degree program such as the Georgia Teacher Academy for Preparation and Pedagogy (GaTAPP), both of which lead to full state certification. Prospective teachers can complete these requirements within a designated time frame after starting in the classroom.
Georgia Tech’s championing of Teach for Georgia aligns with its focus on establishing initiatives to serve the state and other partners, including those in K-12 STEM education, outlined in its strategic plan.
Basic eligibility requirements for Teach for Georgia include:
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis on the 15th of each month through March 2013. Additional information is available at preteaching.gatech.edu/teachforgeorgia or by contacting Belmonte.
The Nov. 1 information session will take place in Room 323 of the Clough Commons at 11 a.m.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
The Bicycle Infrastructure Improvement Committee (BIIC) crafted events with both current and potential cyclists in mind throughout the week of Oct. 22-26. Additional information for all events can be found at bike.gatech.edu.
All Week
Monday and Wednesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Saturday
Prizes will be distributed throughout the week, including t-shirts, gift cards to local businesses and bike-related gear.
The BIIC has implemented many changes on campus since its formation in 2010, including the recent installation of a special bike intersection connection at 5th and West Peachtree Streets outside the College of Business. The group also manages bike.gatech.edu, an online resource for all things bike-related at Tech.
“Our number one goal is always more cyclists. It saves the university money, and it’s a healthier and more environmental commute,” said Johann Weber, chair of the BIIC. One of this year's goals is to address ongoing challenge and conflict areas around campus, some of which will be discussed at Thursday's Town Hall. The BIIC also hopes to continue progress on constructing a bike master plan and coordinating with surrounding neighborhoods to make Tech more accessible for bike commuters.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
The award was announced Sept. 27 by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of its Nuclear Energy University Programs.
Georgia Tech’s three-year project will engage universities, industry partners and international organizations to develop a novel concept of a light water reactor with inherent safety features.
Bojan Petrovic, Georgia Tech professor of nuclear and radiological engineering, will lead the research team using a “safety-by-design” approach to eliminate the potential for accidents, together with passive safety systems to ensure the plant’s continued safe operation even under hypothetical emergency conditions. The design will also incorporate lessons learned from events at Fukushima Daiichi plant following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March 2011. The new reactor will be designed to safely withstand such events.
“This research will strengthen the technical basis to support deployment of novel reactors with inherent safety and improved economics and provide long-term energy security and independence,” Petrovic said.
Specifically, the team aims to improve safety features using integral system configuration, a novel decay heat removal system, robust fuel with increased accident resilience and seismic isolators in earthquake-prone areas. Researchers will also design instrumentation and monitoring that will ensure the plant status is reliably known in normal and emergency situations, including post-accident conditions.
The research team includes University of Michigan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, University of Tennessee, University of Idaho, Morehouse College, Idaho National Laboratory, Westinghouse Electric Company, Polytechnic of Milan, University of Cambridge, Southern Nuclear Company and an independent consultant.
In total, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it is investing $13 million for university-led nuclear innovation projects at Georgia Tech as well as the University of Tennessee and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The goal of the projects is to support nuclear energy research and development and student investment at universities across the country, ensuring that secure, safe and efficient nuclear energy is part of the nation’s energy portfolio.
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Abstracts for this year's Georgia Tech Research & Innovation Conference (GTRIC), which will take place Feb. 11-12, 2012, are now being accepted. Information about the conference and instructions for submitting abstracts may be found online from Graduate SGA. The deadline for submission is Tuesday, Oct. 16.
As in the past, the conference has both a research presentation and an innovation component. There are significant prizes for the winning research posters: five $5,000 one-year fellowships for PhD students and up to 30 grants (up to $1,500 each) supporting student travel to professional meetings. The Institute of Paper Chemistry also will provide a first and second place prize of $10,000 and $5,000 respectively for research related to paper chemistry.
The innovation component, sponsored by the Enterprise Innovation Institute, offers the opportunity to win the $15,000 Edison Prize that supports commercialization of the innovation.
Additional dates and requirements for submission are available from the graduate Student Government Association at www.sga.gatech.edu/graduate/GTRIC.
]]>The magazine collected median pay figures from two pools of alumni: recent graduates and those 15 years out from obtaining their degrees. This was compared with the actual cost of tuition. From this information, SmartMoney created a "Payback Score," reflecting an actual return on tuition investment.
According to the magazine’s analysis, Georgia Tech graduates from the class of 2009 have a median starting salary of $59,000, representing 67 percent of what they paid in tuition. Graduates in their 30s average $102,000 a year, more than three times their tuition cost.
For a complete list of schools, visit the SmartMoney website.
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Influencing the macrophages immediately after injury may affect the whole cascade of biochemical events that occurs after nerve damage, potentially eliminating the need to directly stimulate the growth of axons using nerve growth factors. If the results of this first-ever study can be applied to humans, they could one day lead to a new strategy for treating peripheral nerve injuries that typically result from trauma, surgical resection of tumors or radical prostectomy.
“Both scar formation and healing are the end results of two different cascades of biological processes that result from injuries,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and member of the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine Center at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “In this study, we show that by manipulating the immune system soon after injury, we can bias the system toward healing, and stimulate the natural repair mechanisms of the body.”
Beyond nerves, researchers believe their technique could also be applied to help regenerate other tissue – such as bone. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and reported online Sept. 26, 2012, by the journal Biomaterials.
After injury, macrophages that congregate at the site of the injury operate like the conductor of an orchestra, controlling processes that remove damaged tissue, set the stage for repair and encourage the replacement of cells and matrix materials, said Nassir Mokarram, a Ph.D. student in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. Converting the macrophages to a “pro-healing” phenotype that secretes healing compounds signals a broad range of other processes – the “players” in the symphony analogy.
“If you really want to change the symphony’s activity from generating scarring to regeneration of tissue, you need to target the conductor, not just a few of the players, and we think macrophages are capable of being conductors of the healing symphony,” said Mokarram.
Macrophages are best known for their role in creating inflammation at the site of injuries. The macrophages and other immune system components battle infection, remove dead tissue – and often create scarring that prevents nerve regeneration. However, these macrophages can exist in several different phenotypes depending on the signals they receive. Among the macrophage phenotypes are two classes – M2a and M2c – that encourage healing.
Bellamkonda’s research team used an interleukin 4 (IL-4) cytokine to convert macrophages within the animal model to the “pro-healing” phenotypes. They placed a gel that released IL-4 into hollow polymeric nerve guides that connected the ends of severed animal sciatic nerves that had to grow across a 15 millimeter gap to regenerate. The IL-4 remained in the nerve guides for 24 hours or less, and had no direct influence on the growth of nerve tissue in this short period of time.
Three weeks after the injury, the nerve guides that released IL-4 were almost completely filled with re-grown axons. The treated nerve guides had approximately 20 times more nerve regeneration than the control channels, which had no IL-4-treated macrophages.
Research is now underway to develop the technique for determining how soon after injury the macrophages should be treated, and what concentration of IL-4 would be most effective.
“We believe immune cells are the ‘master knobs’ that modulate the biochemical cascade downstream,” Mokarram said. “They are among the ‘first-responders’ to injury, and are involved for almost the whole regeneration process, secreting several factors that affect other cells. With IL-4, we are doing something very early in the process that is triggering a cascade of events whose effects last longer.”
Tissue engineering approaches have focused on encouraging the growth of nerve cells, using special scaffolds and continuous application of nerve growth factors over a period of weeks. Instead, the Bellamkonda group believes that influencing the immune system soon after injury could provide a simpler and more effective treatment able to restore nerve function.
“Beyond neural tissue engineering, the implications of this approach can be significant for other types of tissue engineering,” said Mokarram. “Neural tissue may be just a model.”
As part of their paper, the researchers defined a state they termed “regenerative bias” that predicts the probability of a regenerative outcome. The Bellamkonda group discovered that when it quantified the ratio of healing macrophages to scar-promoting macrophages at the site of injury early after the injury, the ratio – or regenerative bias – predicted whether or not the nerve regenerated after many weeks.
“The significance of this finding is that IL-4 and other factors may be used to make sure the regenerative bias is high so that nerves, and perhaps other tissues, can regenerate on their own after injury,” Bellamkonda said.
The research team also included Alishah Merchant, Vivek Mukhatyar and Gaurangkumar Patel, all from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health under grants NS44409, NS65109 and 1R41NS06777. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National lnstitutes of Health.
CITATION: Mokarram N, et al., Effect of modulating macrophage phenotype on peripheral nerve repair, Biomaterials (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biomaterials.2012.08.050
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75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 309
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
]]>Research News & Publications Office
(404) 894-6986
]]>As part of their summer work with the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), Amy Ingles and Denise Smith, civil engineering students, and Johann Weber, a public policy student, were asked to teach high school students participating in Clark Atlanta University’s Summer Transportation Institute how transportation planning works in metro Atlanta.
With Terminus, players are paired off and given a fictitious district within a larger metro area, economic and demographic background on the district, a budget and a stack of cards representing options for transportation infrastructure projects for their district. Options include projects such as road repairs, highway interchanges, light rail lines, buses or multiuse paths.
“Personalities make a big difference, and the kids brought their perceptions of infrastructure with them when they played,” said Weber. He said that one student was dismayed to learn that projects he favored would not be the ones most beneficial for his community. The cost of a project varies depending on the region, as well as how many points it would earn the district in each of three categories: economic, environment and equity.
“People approach it in different ways, but it was really fun and well-received,” Weber said.
The ARC has participated in the Clark Atlanta University program for a number of years, but, this year, wanted to revamp how it presented the topic of transportation planning to students.
“Last year, our senior folks felt they wanted something a little more fun and interactive than in the past,” said Byron Rushing, an ARC bicycle and pedestrian planner who worked with the Tech interns on the project. The idea of Terminus was largely based on the format of the regional roundtable for the TSPLOST vote that took place in July. The referendum may have died at the polls this summer, but its lessons live on in Terminus.
“We liked the idea because it was already kind of a competitive game in real life to come up with the funding list, so we tried to boil that down to be super simple for high schoolers,” Rushing said. Though students didn’t necessarily have to understand all the nuances of every project to play, the game creators did want a realistic outcome. “We tried to put it in enough of a framework that it was logical how the projects worked out. Having [Johann] certainly helped with that, since he could conceive all the different ways projects could work for each district.”
Debriefing with the students after the game, both Rushing and his colleague Nathan Soldat, an ARC senior transit planner, were pleasantly surprised.
“Some of the questions got more technical and were based off the cards from the game; they were not afraid to ask if they didn’t know what a term was,” Soldat said.
The ARC plans to continue using Terminus with high school students through its Mock Atlanta Regional Commission (MARC) program, which is similar to a Model United Nations. “The kids who come are already interested in that field of study, so that group may be even more engaged and informed,” Soldat said.
Terminus is now copyrighted to the ARC, and Weber also submitted it for presentation at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. He has also presented the idea to Georgia Tech faculty who may be able to incorporate it into their curriculum.
“We really just want to expose more people to transportation planning,” Weber said.
]]>Kristen Bailey, Institute Communications
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In addition, Georgia Tech ranked ninth on the list of the world’s top engineering and technology universities and third on the list of public U.S. engineering and technology universities.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings use 13 separate performance indicators to examine a university’s strengths against all of its core missions – teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. All data are collected, analyzed and verified by global data provider Thomson Reuters.
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“Because we’re in a red state, the governor nominates to the Republican convention, but I don’t think anyone, regardless of political party, would turn down such a chance,” said Hipp, a fourth-year public policy major from Macon.
Her experience included distributing convention materials, leading chants within the arena and managing logistics to aid the convention’s operation, as well as being tweeted by Mitt Romney and brushing elbows with celebrities in news and politics.
“I talked to Diane Sawyer and stood 3 feet from a presidential nominee. I’m a news hound, so I was like a 5-year-old there. Being part of the process was amazing,” she said.
As the only Yellow Jacket to participate in the 2012 RNC page program, her collegiate affiliation was met with surprise.
“Everyone was impressed, I think because Tech students are usually so focused on academics that we aren’t always as politically involved. But I think that’s starting to change.”
Last week, hundreds of students attended an outdoor viewing party of the first presidential debate hosted by Wreck the Vote, a student-run campaign organized to register students to vote and encourage them to actually cast their votes. Hipp has even seen interest among international students who may not be eligible to vote but want to be more aware of U.S. politics and processes.
“I follow politics for the people, not the party,” said Hipp, who calls her own political leanings undefined. She urges those who, like her, aren’t aligned with either the Republican or Democratic party to still research the candidates and decide who they think is better suited to be president.
“You may not be enthusiastic every time [you vote], but find out which candidate best fits what it is you want the future to look like. If you don’t cast a vote, you’re not taking charge of where the future is headed. Our system may be flawed, but I still think it’s the best.”
Hipp also urges students to file absentee ballots if needed; she filed her own first ballot as a registered voter from Metz, France, while studying abroad at Georgia Tech-Lorraine.
]]>Neither had campaigning experience, but after working as a White House information technology intern last fall for presidential correspondence – which included the privilege of reading much of the president’s mail – Cook, a fifth-year international affairs and Spanish major, returned to Tech inspired. She was ready to motivate others to engage in the political process and even made her case in a March editorial for the Technique.
“Apathy on our campus isn’t appropriate when, in many cases, we are going to be implementing [government] policies,” Cook said. During the spring, she worked with Obama for America to start the campus campaign group, Jackets for Obama, and was a planning committee volunteer at the Democratic National Convention in September.
Narayanan, a fifth-year mechanical engineering major who became a U.S. citizen last year, feels voting and civic engagement is an act of civic duty and a way to give back as a citizen, especially for Tech students.
“Students in science and engineering tend to feel isolated from the political world, even though it has an effect on their work,” he said. “This election will likely affect your career in some way. Students need to recognize that, acknowledge it and become active.”
Georgia’s electoral votes are predicted to go to the Republican Party, but the Obama campaign sees Georgia as a support state for Florida, which has more electoral votes and a more volatile voting history. To garner votes and volunteers, targeting a strategic list of eligible voters, the campaign uses phone banking to make calls and talk with people about their voting decision. Another tactic is going door to door to talk with voters in person, or canvassing, which has also been statistically shown to drive votes.
Working for the campaign in Florida has enabled Cook and Narayanan to meet students from other universities and even campaign on their campuses, giving them a chance to compare Tech’s political climate to that of other universities.
“I was surprised to hear how many students said they were already registered, and how many were willing to register at their school address to be able to vote there,” Cook said of campaigning at the University of Florida. Narayanan noticed a leadership focus among political science students, but also attributed student awareness to Florida’s highly charged political climate.
Though Florida students may be voting in a more contested state, student votes count no matter the geography.
“Georgia Tech is so highly recognized on an international basis, and we should be able to be educated and speak out on the issues,” said Cook, who hopes to continue to garner volunteers and encourage students to vote. “Now’s the time to get involved. We still have about 30 days, and a lot can change.”
For students interested in the Democratic Party, Jackets for Obama will travel to Florida over fall break to continue campaign work with Break for Barack.
“After being involved in a campaign, I think everyone should do it at least once in their lifetime,” Narayanan said. “You get an unfiltered view of the political system, and you see the campaign’s strategies and how they view the electorate. It gives you tools to be a more informed voter.”
]]>One of the tools—a system that uses special gaze-tracking glasses and facial-analysis software to identify when a child makes eye contact with the glasses-wearer—was created by combining two existing technologies to develop a novel capability of automatic detection of eye contact. The other is a wearable system that uses accelerometers to monitor and categorize problem behaviors in children with behavioral disorders.
Both technologies already are being deployed in the Center for Behavior Imaging’s (CBI) ongoing work to apply computational methods to screening, measurement and understanding of autism and other behavioral disorders.
Children at risk for autism often display distinct behavioral markers from a very young age. One such marker is a reluctance to make frequent or prolonged eye contact with other people. Discovering an automated way to detect this and other telltale behavioral markers would be a significant step toward scaling autism screening up to much larger populations than are currently reached. This is one goal of the five-year, $10 million “Expeditions” project, funded in fall 2010 by the National Science Foundation under principal investigator and CBI Director Jim Rehg, also a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.
The eye-contact tracking system begins with a commercially available pair of glasses that can record the focal point of their wearer’s gaze. Researchers took video of a child captured by a front-facing camera on the glasses, worn by an adult who was interacting with the child. The video was then processed using facial recognition software available from a second manufacturer. Combine the glasses’ hard-wired ability to detect wearer gaze with the facial-recognition software’s ability to detect the child’s gaze direction, and the result is a system able to detect eye contact in a test interaction with a 22-month-old with 80 percent accuracy. The study was conducted in Georgia Tech’s Child Study Lab (CSL), a child-friendly experimental facility richly equipped with cameras, microphones and other sensors.
“Eye gaze has been a tricky thing to measure in laboratory settings, and typically it’s very labor-intensive, involving hours and hours of looking at frames of video to pinpoint moments of eye contact,” Rehg said. “The exciting thing about our method is that it can produce these measures automatically and could be used in the future to measure eye contact outside the laboratory setting. We call these results preliminary because they were obtained from a single subject, but all humans’ eyes work pretty much the same way, so we’re confident the successful results will be replicated with future subjects.”
The other new system, developed in collaboration with the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta and Dr. Thomas Ploetz of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, is a package of sensors, worn via straps on the wrists and ankles, that uses accelerometers to detect movement by the wearer. Algorithms developed by the team analyze the sensor data to automatically detect episodes of problem behavior and classify them as aggressive, self-injurious or disruptive (e.g., throwing objects).
Researchers first developed the algorithms by putting the sensors on four Marcus clinic staff members who together performed some 1,200 different behavior instances, and the system detected “problem” behaviors with 95 percent accuracy and classified all behaviors with 80 percent accuracy. They then used the sensors with a child diagnosed along the autism spectrum, and the system detected the child’s problem-behavior episodes with 81 percent accuracy and classified them with 70 percent accuracy.
“These results are very promising in leading the way toward more accurate and reliable measurement of problem behavior, which is important in determining whether treatments targeting these behaviors are working,” said CSL Director Agata Rozga, a research scientist in the School of Interactive Computing and co-investigator on the Expeditions award. “Our ultimate goal with this wearable sensing system is to be able to gather data on the child’s behavior beyond the clinic, in settings where the child spends most of their time, such as their home or school. In this way, parents, teachers and others who care for the child can be potentially alerted to times and situations when problem behaviors occur so that they can address them immediately.”
“What these tools show is that computational methods and technologies have great promise and potential impact on the lives of many children and their parents and caregivers,” said Gregory Abowd, Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and a prominent researcher in technology and autism. “These technologies we are developing, and others developed and explored elsewhere, aim to bring more effective early-childhood screening to millions of children nationwide, as well as enhance care for those children already diagnosed on the autism spectrum.”
Both technologies were presented in early September at the 14th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012). Among the other devices under study at CSL are a camera/software system that can track children’s facial expressions and customized speech analysis software to detect vocalization patterns.
For more information on behavioral imaging, visit the Georgia Tech/NSF website on computational behavioral science at http://www.cbs.gatech.edu. For information or to volunteer for one of CBI’s ongoing studies, visit the Child Study Lab website at http://childstudy.hsi.gatech.edu.
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The researchers' aim is to enhance a human operator's ability to perform precise tasks using a multi-jointed robotic device such as an articulated mechanical arm. The new approach has been shown to be easier and faster than older methods, especially when the robot is controlled by an operator who is watching it in a video monitor.
Known as Uncalibrated Visual Servoing for Intuitive Human Guidance of Robots, the new method uses a special implementation of an existing vision-guided control method called visual servoing (VS). By applying visual-servoing technology in innovative ways, the researchers have constructed a robotic system that responds to human commands more directly and intuitively than older techniques.
"Our approach exploits 3-D video technology to let an operator guide a robotic device in ways that are more natural and time-saving, yet are still very precise," said Ai-Ping Hu, a senior research engineer with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). "This capability could have numerous applications – especially in situations where directly observing the robot's operation is hazardous or not possible – including bomb disposal, handling of hazardous materials and search-and-rescue missions."
A paper on this technology was presented at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in St. Paul, Minn.
For decades articulated robots have been used by industry to perform precision tasks such as welding vehicle seams or assembling electronics, Hu explained. The user develops a software program that enables the device to cycle through the required series of motions, using feedback from sensors built into the robot.
But such programming can be complex and time-consuming. The robot must typically be maneuvered joint by joint through the numerous actions required to complete a task. Moreover, such technology works only in a structured and unchanging environment, such as a factory assembly line, where spatial relationships are constant.
The Human Operator
In recent years, new techniques have enabled human operators to freely guide remote robots through unstructured and unfamiliar environments, to perform such challenging tasks as bomb disposal, Hu said. Operators have controlled the device in one of two ways: by "line of sight" – direct user observation – or by means of conventional, two-dimensional camera that is mounted on the robot to send back an image of both the robot and its target.
But humans guiding robots via either method face some of the same complexities that challenge those who program industrial robots, he added. Manipulating a remote robot into place is generally slow and laborious.
That's especially true when the operator must depend on the imprecise images provided by 2-D video feedback. Manipulating separate controls for each of the robot's multiple joint axes, users have only limited visual information to help them and must maneuver to the target by trial and error.
"Essentially, the user is trying to visualize and reconstruct a 3-D scenario from flat 2-D camera images," Hu said. "The process can become particularly confusing when operators are facing in a different direction from the robot and must mentally reorient themselves to try to distinguish right from left. It's somewhat similar to backing up a vehicle with an attached trailer – you have to turn the steering wheel to the left to get the trailer to move right, which is decidedly non-intuitive."
The Visual Servoing Advantage
To simplify user control, the Georgia Tech team turned to visual servoing (a term synonymous with visual activation). Visual servoing has been studied for years as a way to use video cameras to help robots re-orient themselves within a structured environment such as an assembly line.
Traditional visual servoing is calibrated, meaning that position information generated by a video camera can be transformed into data meaningful to the robot. Using these data, the robot can adjust itself to stay in a correct spatial relationship with target objects.
"Say a conveyor line is accidently moved a few millimeters," Hu said. "A robot with a calibrated visual servoing capability can automatically detect the movement using the video image and a fixed reference point, and then readjust to compensate."
But visual servoing offers additional possibilities. The research team – which includes Hu, associate professor Harvey Lipkin of the School of Mechanical Engineering, graduate student Matthew Marshall, GTRI research engineer Michael Matthews and GTRI principal research engineer Gary McMurray -- has adapted visual-servoing technology in ways that facilitate human control of remote robots.
The new technique takes advantage of both calibrated and uncalibrated techniques. A calibrated 3-D "time of flight" camera is mounted on the robot – typically at the end of a robotic arm, in a gripping device called an end-effector. This approach is sometimes called an eye-in-hand system, because of the camera's location in the robot's "hand."
The camera utilizes an active sensor that detects depth data, allowing it to send back 3-D coordinates that pinpoint the end-effector's spatial location. At the same time, the eye-in-hand camera also supplies a standard, uncalibrated 2-D grayscale video image to the operator's monitor.
The result is that the operator, without seeing the robot, now has a robot's-eye view of the target. Watching this image in a monitor, an operator can visually guide the robot using a gamepad, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a first-person 3-D video game.
In addition, visual-servoing technology now automatically actuates all the joints needed to complete whatever action the user indicates on the gamepad – rather than the user having to manipulate those joints one by one. In the background, the Georgia Tech system performs the complex computation needed to coordinate the monitor image, the 3-D camera information, the robot's spatial position and the user's gamepad commands.
Testing System Usability
"The guidance process is now very intuitive – pressing 'left' on the gamepad will actuate all the requisite robot joints to effect a leftward displacement," Hu said. "What's more, the robot could be upside down and the controls will still respond in the same intuitive way – left is still left and right is still right."
To judge system usability, the Georgia Tech research team recently conducted trials to test whether the visual-servoing approach enabled faster task-completion times. Using a gamepad that controls an articulated-arm robot with six degrees of freedom, subjects performed four tests: they used visual-servoing guidance as well as conventional joint-based guidance, in both line-of-sight and camera-view modes.
In the line-of-sight test, volunteer participants using visual-servoing guidance averaged task-completion times that were 15 percent faster than when they used joint-based guidance. However, in camera-view mode, participants using visual-servoing guidance averaged 227 percent faster results than with the joint-based technique.
Hu noted that the visual-servoing system used in this test scenario was only one of numerous possible applications of the technology. The research team's plans include testing a mobile platform with a VS-guided robotic arm mounted on it. Also underway is a proof-of-concept effort that incorporates visual-servoing control into a low-cost, consumer-level robot.
"Our ultimate goal is to develop a generic, uncalibrated control framework that is able to use image data to guide many different kinds of robots," he said.
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 309
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: Rick Robinson
Research News & Publications Office
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]]>Students and student organizations are encouraged to use Tech logos and trademarks, and are simply asked to gain approval first. To help students navigate the use of Buzz, the Ramblin’ Wreck, the interlocking GT and other Tech-related images, Institute Communications has created the Student Licensing Guide. This guide covers many basic questions, such as how to get approval for artwork and how to find a company to make your product.
Of course, a guide doesn’t replace human interaction and won’t necessarily answer all your questions. Whether designing an organization logo to use on a website or a T-shirt for an annual event, Institute Communications is here to help you create something to represent your organization while maintaining the integrity of Georgia Tech’s visual identity, and you can contact us anytime.
Looking for other resources for your student organization? The Special Events and Protocol team offers an Event Planning Toolbox with checklists and templates to help you get started. Want to promote your event to campus? Check the Student Communications Resources to see which avenues are best for what you’ve got going on.
The Student Licensing Guide is available online and for download as a pdf.
]]>Aimee Anderson
Licensing
Each day Oct. 1–5, WREK 91.1 FM, Georgia Tech’s student radio station, will feature an interview with a prominent campus personality – be it a faculty member, staff member or alumnus – as part of a series on leadership.
“Each of the speakers has created an impact on our campus in some way, shape or form,” said Katie Flint, WREK news director. “These individuals are perfect examples of what leaders are, and they have made Georgia Tech a better place as a result.”
Guests for the series include:
Flint hopes the series motivates students to become active leaders in their own ways on campus. Among other subjects, interviewees will talk about finding a balance between academics and leadership that can help students find success both in college and their lives thereafter.
“We hope to establish this series for incoming and returning students to listen to for years to come,” Flint said. “It’s a great way to show students that they can be great students, but also great leaders, because that is what employers are ideally searching for.”
Interviews will air several times a day at 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., and will also be posted online at facebook.com/wreknews.
For the interview with Peterson, students will have a chance to submit questions for potential inclusion via WREK’s Facebook page. Listeners should submit questions by Wednesday, Oct. 3.
]]>Katie Flint
WREK Radio
The Center (abbreviated CeGP), created in partnership with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), will facilitate research and academic collaborations, personnel exchanges and industry partnerships between the two institutions. KFUPM provided an initial investment of $8 million in funding for research on the Atlanta campus for six years, mirroring a similar effort on KFUPM’s campus in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Associate Professor Ghassan AlRegib in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering will direct the Center in Atlanta, and Associate Professor and Chair of the KFUPM Department of Electrical Engineering Ali Al-Sheikhi will direct the Center in Dhahran. Research will focus on applying advanced signal processing theories to energy-related signals and systems, with an emphasis on seismic data acquisition, processing, imaging and interpretation.
“We’ll be applying advanced digital signal processing to geo signals such as seismic data, with the goal of reducing the false alarm rate for drilling,” said AlRegib. A primary goal of the research is to improve the accuracy of drilling and reduce its cost; a secondary goal will be to make other overall decisions about drilling, such as how it could be automated or less labor intensive.
“Eventually we’d like to expand into other types of energy, such as smart grid, applying digital signal processing to smart grids, making them more intelligent and collecting more intelligent information,” added AlRegib.
Besides the research focus within the Center, the educational track is of critical importance. The Center will have a number of educational projects with a focus on creating new courses that emphasize innovation and research, as well as student training for the job market.
Other objectives of the collaboration include creating a hub for seismic processing and energy informatics, producing industry standard inventions and technologies, and creating an international industry consortium with a focus on innovative signal processing. Some expected outcomes are new patents, ventures, software packages and textbooks.
The industrial participation in the Center’s operation is another key element where scientists from related industries will be approached to participate in different activities at the Center at both locations.
Groups at both Tech and KFUPM will assist in overseeing operations and providing recommendations to AlRegib and Al-Sheikhi. Tech’s committee is initially composed of AlRegib; Steve McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; James McClellan, chair of the School’s Digital Signal Processing Technical Interest Group and John and Marilu McCarty Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering; and Larry Jacobs, professor and associate dean of the College of Engineering.
The agreement to create the Center, which was signed in August, comes after two years of visits and collaboration, beginning in 2010 with a joint workshop in Dhahran. In April, Provost Rafael Bras served as a keynote speaker at KFUPM’s 50th anniversary celebrations. In addition, Tech hosts KFUPM exchange students, primarily in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Institute President G. P. “Bud” Peterson recently accepted an offer to serve on KFUPM’s International Advisory Board.
Both schools will continue to host each other’s students, faculty, and researchers and conduct biannual joint workshops.
“The students at KFUPM come from the top one percent of applicants in Saudi Arabia,” said AlRegib. “It’s the leading engineering school in Saudi Arabia and is selective.”
Much like Georgia Tech, KFUPM’s engineering focus is complemented by its focus on science and management. KFUPM is strategically located in proximity to the country’s industrial cities and oilfields.
]]>For the past century, the thousands of students who have excelled during their co-op assignments and in their careers have served as a testament to the program’s impact. A prime example is Sarah Rieger, a 2010 Aerospace Engineering graduate.
“While working in the Orbit Flight Dynamics group at Johnson Space Center in Houston, I had the opportunity to train for a supporting position in Mission Control,” said Rieger, who now works with NASA. “I also was able to complete the certification of a program that is now used by the flight dynamics officer. After I came back to school, I saw the benefits of the skills that I learned in Houston. I noticed that organization and time management came much more easily to me than they did before co-oping. I also had an even stronger motivation to do well in my classes.”
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of Tech’s Co-op Program, the largest totally optional program and fourth oldest program of its kind in the nation. The program is consistently included in U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Colleges Internships/Co-ops” list. Co-op is a part of Tech’s Division of Professional Practice (DOPP), which also includes the Graduate Co-op, Internship and Work Abroad programs.
“I believe in learning with a purpose,” said Patrick R. Antony, executive director of DOPP. “To apply knowledge to practical solutions that make the world a better place is the cornerstone of what Georgia Tech does. Many successful alumni owe their professional and personal success to the program, as they would not have been able to afford their education at Tech without it. We look forward to the entire Georgia Tech community participating in the celebration of a century of cooperative education, which is just a tremendous milestone.”
The 100th anniversary celebration — which will begin in fall 2012 — will consist of a yearlong series of events, kicking off with a 100th Birthday Bash on Sept. 18 from 11 a.m. to noon at Clough Commons. The year of celebratory events is being planned and managed by Thomas M. Akins, who retired in 2010 as DOPP executive director following a Georgia Tech career of more than three decades.
“I am looking forward to coordinating this significant event in Georgia Tech’s history,” Akins said. “As part of the effort, there will be a strong campaign to create endowment funds for the continued successful operation of Co-op and the other programs within the Division of Professional Practice. The goal is to raise over $5 million to ensure that students will be able to take full advantage of all types of experiential education, thus better preparing them for life after graduation from Tech. With state funds shrinking and the cost of attending college rising at an alarming rate, there is a critical need to assist students in a meaningful way.”
]]>Soon, parents may be able to skip the doctor’s visit and receive a diagnosis without leaving home by using Remotoscope, a clip-on attachment and software app that turns an iPhone into an otoscope.
Pediatricians currently diagnose ear infections using the standard otoscope to examine the eardrum. With Remotoscope, parents would be able to take a picture or video of their child’s eardrum using the iPhone and send the images digitally to a physician for diagnostic review.
Wilbur Lam, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, along with his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the device with plans to commercialize it. A clinical trial for the Remotoscope is currently under way at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta to see if the device can obtain images of the same diagnostic quality as what a physician sees with a traditional otoscope.
“Ultimately we think parents could receive a diagnosis at home and forgo the late-night trips to the emergency room,” said Dr. Lam, who is also a physician at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Emory School of Medicine. “It’s known that kids who get ear infections early in life are at risk for recurrent ear infections. It can be a very big deal and really affect their families’ quality of life.”
Remotoscope's clip-on attachment uses the iPhone's camera and flash as the light source. It also relies on a custom software app -- enhanced by Brian Parise, a research scientist with Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Landmarc Research Center -- that provides automatic zoom and crop, image preview and auto calibration. The iPhone’s data transmission capabilities seamlessly send images and video to a doctor's inbox or to the patient's electronic medical record.
The device has the potential to save money for both families and healthcare systems, Dr. Lam said. Ear infections, or otitis media, affect 75 percent of children by age 6, making it the most common diagnosis for preschoolers. They result in more than 15 million office visits per year in the United States and thousands of prescriptions for antibiotics, which are sometimes not needed.
At the initial visit with a patient, physicians say it is difficult to differentiate between ear infections caused by viruses, which resolve on their own, and those caused by bacteria, which would require antibiotics.
“As pediatricians will likely only see the child once, they often err on the side of giving antibiotics for viral infections rather than risk not giving antibiotics for a bacterial infection, which can lead to complications,” Dr. Lam said. “So, we are currently over-treating ear infections with antibiotics and consequently causing antibiotic resistance.”
Lam said Remotoscope may be able to change physicians’ prescription patterns of antibiotics for ear infections. Receiving serial images of a child’s ear over several days via the Remotoscope could allow physicians to wait and see if a child’s infection improves or whether antibiotics are warranted.
The Food and Drug Administration, through the Atlanta Pediatric Device Consortium, is partially funding the clinical trial. Andrea Shane, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics in Emory School of Medicine and a physician at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, is principal investigator of the study.
Fourth-year Emory medical student Kathryn Rappaport, who is part of the research team, is helping recruit families who come into the emergency department at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta hospitals for treatment of ear infection-type symptoms. Once a family agrees to be in the trial and the child has seen the emergency room doctor, Rappaport takes video of the child’s ear with Remotoscope and a traditional otoscope linked to a computer. Next, a panel of physicians will review the quality of the samples, make a diagnosis from the Remotoscope video and see if it matches the original diagnosis by the ER doctor.
As part of the clinical trial, Rappaport is also conducting a survey asking parents their opinions on using the device.
“A lot of parents said they would want to use it, which surprised me because I think it could be scary to look in someone’s ear and because I think parents would be afraid they could hurt their child,” Rappaport said. “Parents are enthusiastic and ask me where they can get it, but we’re not there yet.”
The research team hopes to publish the trial’s results by the end of the year and then study whether the Remotoscope enables physicians to implement the “watchful waiting” plan rather than prescribing antibiotics right away.
Remotoscope has had a long journey with many players to get to where it is today. Dr. Lam and a colleague, Erik Douglas, started the project while doctoral students at UC, Berkeley. The two researchers went on to create the startup CellScope Inc., which aims to commercialize Remotoscope once clinical studies are complete and the device has FDA approval.
In 2011, when Dr. Lam joined the faculty at Georgia Tech and Emory, he brought the project with him to Atlanta. Today resources from both institutions, as well as Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Atlanta Clinical & Translational Science Institute, are being used to take the medical device to the next level.
The Remotoscope is one of nine medical device projects supported by the Atlanta Pediatric Device Consortium, which is a partnership among Georgia Tech, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University. The consortium, one of four in the U.S., provides assistance with engineering design, prototype development, pre-clinical and clinical studies and commercialization for pediatric medical devices.
“The whole goal is to create, develop and commercialize pediatric medical devices specifically for kids,” Dr. Lam said. “Kids are not just small adults. Physiologically they are different. So to only have medical devices scaled down from adult ones creates this void where there are many diseases that affect only the pediatric population but there are not any available devices to treat them.”
Dr. Wilbur Lam owns equity interest in CellScope Inc., and serves in a fiduciary role for the company. Dr. Lam is a co-inventor of the Remotoscope, which is licensed to CellScope for the purposes of development and commercialization, and he is entitled to royalties derived from CellScope’s sale of products related to the research described in this press release. The terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by Georgia Tech and Emory University in accordance with their conflict of interest policies.
]]>Boston spoke about the need for continued support of the 8(a) Business Development Program, an initiative for businesses owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals. Boston said that businesses participating in the program annually produce 124,000 jobs and $5.5 billion in revenue.
Click here to see the roundtable session.
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WREK 91.1 FM is partnering with Toyota Free Yr Radio, a project that supports independent radio stations across the country. WREK will broadcast live from Music Midtown on Friday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday from Noon to 8 p.m.; festival attendees can visit the Free Yr Radio Broadcast Stage on the southwest edge of the festival grounds.
The fundraising element comes from virtual support: Simply tweet a few words about independent radio and include the hashtag #ToyotaGiving. Every tweet through Saturday, Sept. 22, will yield a $2 donation to WREK, up to $2,000. Donations will also be made for Instagram photos that include the same hashtag.
WREK broadcasts at 91.1 FM or wrek.org.
]]>Now, Georgia Tech faculty members and graduate students who have a research interest in the physics of living systems will have the opportunity to interact with national and international peers and collectively help define the field’s research agenda. In the physics of living systems field, researchers explore the most fundamental physical processes that living systems use to perform their functions in dynamic and diverse environments.
Georgia Tech will receive $1.2 million from the NSF over the next five years to support its network activities.
“We are very excited that graduate students at Georgia Tech will be able to easily interact with other scientists in the field, share training strategies and locate potential research collaborations that could influence the physics of living systems field in the future,” said Daniel Goldman, a principal investigator on the project and an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics.
Additional principal investigators contributing to the network include Georgia Tech School of Physics Assistant Professors Jennifer Curtis and Harold Kim; School of Biology Associate Professor Joshua Weitz, who also holds an adjunct appointment in the School of Physics; and Assistant Professor David Hu, who holds a joint appointment in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biology. School of Physics Professor Kurt Wiesenfeld will serve as a senior adviser for the network.
Georgia Tech will join 11 U.S. institutions and organizations from Brazil, France, Germany, Israel, Singapore and the United Kingdom in the network, which is also an NSF Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) pilot project. SAVI is an innovative concept designed to foster interaction among scientists, engineers and educators around the globe to solve important societal challenges.
Through this program, Georgia Tech faculty members and graduate students will have the opportunity to visit peers at other research institutions in the network, which will expand their perspectives on how to approach difficult research topics and create collaborative ties between groups at the various sites. To further engage with other researchers in the network, Georgia Tech will host an annual meeting with network members from the other institutions and participate in monthly webinars. In addition, graduate students participating in the network will gain access to career opportunities that they might not have had otherwise.
All of the institutions in the Physics of Living Systems Student Research Network stress the use of both theoretical and experimental physics to further the understanding of biology and biomedicine.
“Georgia Tech brings to the network a strength in nonlinear science, with research programs dedicated to combining physical and biological realism at multiple scales within the same study and understanding the interaction between biological systems and their environments,” noted Goldman.
At Georgia Tech, researchers in this field seek to understand how physics can inform questions of structure, function and dynamics in biological systems. They are also studying fundamental physics questions posed by biological systems. At the heart of the effort is a philosophy that many biological systems cannot be understood without study of their interaction with the environment.
Goldman and Hu both work to reveal principles of organism locomotion on complex substrates such as granular media and vertical surfaces. Curtis studies the mechanics of cell-substrate adhesive interaction and Kim measures gene regulation in the context of the physical structure of the chromosome. Weitz studies the evolutionary ecology of microbial and viral communities, and Wiesenfeld uses nonlinear dynamic modeling to investigate the role of stochastic environments in biological systems.
“Recognition by the NSF of our growing program in biophysics is especially welcome,” said Paul Houston, dean of the Georgia Tech College of Sciences. “Being a node in the Physics of Living Systems Student Research Network will allow Georgia Tech to connect our graduate student and faculty research to that of an international group of scientists studying how physics can enhance our understanding of biology.”
Georgia Tech plans to use this program as the foundation to create a hub in the southeastern United States for physics of living systems research, said Goldman.
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 309
Atlanta, Georgia 30308
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: Abby Robinson
Research News & Publications Office
(404) 894-6986
]]>In anticipation of the November presidential election, members of the Student Government Association (SGA) and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. are spearheading a campaign encouraging students to engage in political discourse, register to vote and hit the polls Nov. 6.
Students will be able to register to vote via mobile registration sites hosted by their peers this week on Tech Walk.
“As students, just because we are busy with classes, work or extracurricular involvement, our views and ideas will not be represented in the American democratic system if we never speak out at the polls,” said Graham Goldberg, student lobby board chair for the undergraduate SGA. “Registering to vote is definitely a step in the right direction, but you ultimately have to cast a ballot to make a difference,” said Goldberg.
Tuesday night, the undergraduate SGA will host an open forum at 7:30 p.m. in Room 117 of the Student Services (Flag) Building prior to its regular meeting. All are invited to attend to hear from state politicians from state representatives – not about party platforms but about the importance of college students voting.
The Georgia deadline to register to vote in the November election is Tuesday, Oct. 9. Those unsure of where they’re registered, but know it’s in the state of Georgia, can visit the Georgia Secretary of State’s My Voter Page to find their precinct. Alternatively, students may file absentee ballots if they don’t want to register in the Atlanta area or have reason to want to vote at home, such as if their home precinct has what they believe will be a more contested race.
Viewing events for the upcoming presidential debates will provide a common place for students to watch and prepare to cast an educated ballot. Debates are scheduled for Oct. 3, 11, 16 and 22; all events will be held in the Student Center Theater, with the exception of the Oct. 3 viewing, which will take place outdoors at the Campanile.
The Wreck the Vote campaign kicked off Saturday with a tailgate and mobile voter registration drive prior to the football game against Miami. College Republicans, College Democrats, the Student Center Programs Council, Jackets for Obama and the African American Student Organization are also collaborating with SGA and Alpha Phi Alpha on this campaign.
]]>On Thursday, Sept. 27, students may attend this semester's Georgia Tech Night at the Woodruff Arts Center and visit the High Museum and enjoy a performance at the Alliance Theatre; due to recent negotiations between the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Musicians' Union, there will be no symphony performance. Alliance Theatre performances are ticketed, and tickets are available upon arrival at the Arts Center on a first-come, first-served basis.
Stingers will run between the Student Center and the Arts Center from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., with a final departure from the Arts Center to campus at 10:30 p.m. Parking is available at the Woodruff Arts Center parking deck, or students may take MARTA to the Arts Center transit station.
Students will also have the opportunity to purchase a student pass to the Woodruff Arts Center, enabling them to attend unlimited events from the High, Alliance and Symphony for just $20 a year. This semester, the Student Government Association began funding a weekly shuttle from campus to the Arts Center on Thursday evenings, departing from the Student Center Transit Hub.
]]>In 1952, Diane Michel and Elizabeth Cofer Herndon enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In the six decades since Michel and Herndon arrived, women at Tech have transformed and improved the Institute in classrooms, labs, athletics and international prestige.
This year’s freshman class set a record for being 35 percent female, with the overall student female population at 30 percent. Women on campus find solidarity in groups such as Women in Engineering, Women in Computing, the Society of Women Engineers, the Society of Women in Business, the Faculty Women’s Club and Greek letter organizations. The Institute’s Center for the Study of Women, Science and Technology threads its focus through an academic minor and a living-learning housing community.
When Karen Feigh came to Tech as an undergraduate in 1997, there was one female professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering from which she earned her bachelor’s degree. Now an associate professor in the School herself, she is one of three women on the aerospace faculty – a 300 percent increase, but a reflection of the gains still possible.
“In the past five years I’ve been a faculty member, the number and quality of women being hired on campus has been incredibly high,” Feigh said. That trend, she believes, will be key to continued increases in female faculty and students. Current women in leadership roles include School of Interactive Computing Chair Annie Antón, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Chair Jane Ammons, Director of the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship Terry Blum and Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Jacqueline Royster. In 2011, Archie Ervin assumed the new role of Vice President for Institute Diversity to keep the goal of a diverse, high-achieving campus at the top of the Institute’s strategic efforts.
Cassie Mitchell, a research engineer in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, not only earned her PhD from the Institute in 2009 and researches solutions for neurological injury and disease, but also competed in this year’s London Paralympic Games as part of the U.S. Track and Field team. She was one of three female Jackets to participate in the 2012 games.
In the past eight years, women have out-earned men in prestigious fellowships, including Andrea Barrett’s 2010 Hertz Fellowship, lauded as a pinnacle honor for graduate students and valued at nearly $250,000.
Young alumnae also pursue entrepreneurship, founding companies such as Techturized, a startup celebrating African American women with natural hair, which was created by Candace Mitchell.
Three women have represented Tech not only on an international stage, but an interplanetary one: alumnae Nancy “Jan” Davis, Sandra Magnus and Susan Still have spent a cumulative 205 days in space serving NASA missions.
Perhaps because of the immense historical accomplishments of Tech women, Feigh has never felt out of place as a woman.
“I came back as a grad student and then a faculty member because I felt like I found my people. The overriding passion in our lives was research, questions, knowledge, engineering, the ability to be highly analytical; the fact that I’m a woman has always been secondary.” It helps that women at Tech leave a legacy for each other – Feigh is the proud inheritor of regalia that once belonged to Helen Grenga, the first full tenured female engineering professor and former director of the office of graduate studies and research.
In 1998, Tech opened its Women’s Resource Center and began growing its female leaders annually with the Women’s Leadership Conference. This year’s conference will be Nov. 2-3 and is open to all. Learn more at gtwlc.com.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
WitsOn is a pilot program that will run for six weeks beginning Oct. 1. Tech is serving as a lead institution with sponsors Harvey Mudd College and Piazza, an online tool that enables conversation between students and faculty. Already 18 faculty members from Georgia Tech have signed up to participate as mentors, along with 120 other faculty from across the country. Mentors will come from industry and academia and speak from personal experience about issues relevant to the student participants.
Each week, WitsOn will feature a lead mentor responding on video to questions posed by students. Other support mentors, of whom there are more than 15 from Tech, will then add their answers, and discussion among the mentors and students will continue via Piazza. The online mentorship will be for approximately an hour each week.
Those interested in enrolling in the free mentoring course should visit piazza.com/witson-apply or contact a faculty member to be added by Monday, Sept. 10. To enroll a student, faculty can visit piazza.com/witson and enter the requesting student’s email address. Students enrolled by a faculty member will receive a notification that they have been added.
]]>To serve those students, the Language Institute offers free writing and presentation assistance to all students. A pilot last fall confirmed the need for the service, which has grown during the past year.
Students work one-on-one with an instructor in 30-minute sessions. Sessions focus on writing tasks such as course papers; journal papers; proposals; dissertation or thesis chapters; resumes and cover letters; teaching and reserach statements; and personal biographies. Speaking assistance includes PowerPoint presentation formatting and writing; basic pronunciation evaluations; field-specific vocabulary lessions; teaching or presentation practice; video recording and feedback; and interviewing skills.
“When I came to Tech for digital media, the literature expectations were much higher, and I didn’t have as much experience since my background was in graphic design and art,” said Hye Yeon Nam, a digital media PhD student from South Korea who took advantage of the Language Institute's services last year. “I wanted to improve my skills because it’s important to communicate with my students and other people in my field.”
Nam met with an instructor on a weekly basis and has recommended the service to numerous friends and classmates. Though other classes were helpful, Nam improved the most from the one-on-one time, for which she would have paid a significant amount per hour outside of Tech.
“The best part about working with students is sending them away feeling as if they have learned what kinds of problems they have, how they can improve their writing and what makes good writing,” said Jane Chisholm, a Language Institute instructor. She’s also able to serve as a source for editing students’ writing outside of their professors and advisors, providing a relief for faculty as well.
Those interested in participating in a session can sign up online at gatech.mywconline.com. All sessions take place in Room 120 of the O'Keefe Building or Room 466B of the Clough Commons.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
Classes are offered at two levels: Beginner/Low Intermediate, and Intermediate/Advanced. Beginner/Low Intermediate level class selections include Everyday Conversation and a Reading Club. Intermediate/Advanced classes include American Pronunciation and Improving Oral Skills. All classes take place during weekdays from 10 a.m. to Noon and are $100 for the semester.
The Language Institute is located in the O’Keefe Building, at the corner of Fifth Street and Techwood Drive. Full course descriptions are available on the attached flier. To register, download, complete and submit the registration form to the front desk of O’Keefe.
Fall 2012 Schedule
Beginner/Low Intermediate:
Intermediate/Advanced Classes:
Georgia Tech worked with local education authorities, charter schools, other institutions of higher education, businesses and nonprofit organizations to develop or implement high-impact programs aimed at producing positive outcomes for students.
The four Georgia Tech-affiliated grant recipients are:
Written by Institute Communications student assistant Vett Vandiver. Portions were taken from the Office of the Governor's official press release.
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“Our investigators tirelessly worked on this case,” said Captain Mickey Hembree. “We were able to generate leads through Crime Stoppers and to identify two suspects responsible for the armed robbery that occurred back on July 1, 2012.”
Terry was charged by GTPD while already in Fulton County Jail on unrelated charges.
GTPD is continuing to work with Crime Stoppers and other law enforcement agencies to track down Terrance Watley, who is also known as “Boo Boo.” Those with information on the location of Watley should contact the Georgia Tech Police Department at 404-894-2500 or Crime Stoppers at 404-577-8477 (TIPS).
“Through the investigation, we’ve learned that these two individuals accessed the building by tailgating in behind students,” said Hembree. “The Georgia Tech Police Department has teamed up with Georgia Tech Housing Office on an educational campaign to make students aware of the dangers of tailgating.”
This week GTPD is also partnering with student leaders to educate the campus on good safety behaviors as well as resources available for students to help keep them safe.
]]>The committee proposed a four-year transition plan that will embed the construction curriculum within the Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering degree. Graduate programs and research initiatives within the School of Building Construction will continue.
Current students will not be affected by the change, as they will be able to complete the Bachelor of Science in Building Construction as planned or pursue the Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering. To help clarify further, the School has put together a set of commonly asked questions as a resource.
As one of the nation’s top civil engineering programs, the change is expected to bridge natural synergies between engineering, construction and architecture, allowing for a more holistic learning experience.
A joint advisory board will lead this transition and seek approval from the Institute and the University System of Georgia Board of Regents where applicable.
]]>Reaction has been positive since the account was launched on August 17. The new concept is maintained and monitored by Institute Communications student assistant Vett Vandiver, a fourth-year Science, Technology and Culture undergrad. She not only retweets posts that relate to campus life, but also responds and provides tips as students return for the fall semester.
While Vandiver is currently the only student monitoring the account, @GTStudents will eventually be managed by other students. A different person will oversee the account for a specified period of time, tweeting about classes, campus life and anything else his or her peers may find interesting. The new social media tool adds a creative perspective to Tech’s social media presence, providing additional student insight that the primary Georgia Tech Twitter feed cannot always provide.
“This is an innovative way to get more students involved in campus life as an opt-in, as opposed to the usual mass emails,” said Eran Mordel, undergraduate student government president.
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Working with collaborators at Tufts University, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology identified genetic deficiencies associated with the instability of the repeats in four different classes of genes that control replication, transcription initiation, checkpoint response and telomere maintenance. They were surprised to find that the GAA/TTC repeats could promote gene expression in yeast, suggesting that the repeats may play both positive and negative roles in cells.
While the study examined the repeat metabolisms in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the researchers believe their discoveries may have implications for human disease because many components of genetic machinery have been conserved in evolution.
The study was reported online Sept. 6 in the journal Molecular Cell. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The expansions occur in GAA/TTC sequences located on the FXN gene that plays a vital role in cell metabolism. Patients with Friedreich’s ataxia can have as many as 1,700 copies of the nucleotide sequence, compared to fewer than 65 copies in individuals without the genetic expansion. Although not yet observed in humans, in yeast the expanded repeats can cause chromosomal fragility, which – despite cellular repair mechanisms – can produce errors resulting in dramatic genomic rearrangements.
“How these expansions happen is a very mysterious process, and we do not know why some people get the disease and some people do not,” said Kirill Lobachev, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biology. “We are trying to develop a simplistic way to determine what individuals may be predisposed to the disease and to find the genotypes where these expansions occur with great frequency.”
At the core of the study was detailed screening of the yeast’s entire genome, some 6,000 genes in all. Conducted by graduate research assistant Yu Zhang, the exhaustive assay identified 33 genes associated with the repeats fragility and expansions.
The connection between genomic expansion and genes that initiate transcription came as a surprise.
“We found that these repeats can recruit transcription initiation factors and induce transcription,” said Lobachev. “The repeats seem to work as non-traditional promoters for an abnormal type of transcription. It turns out that this ability to drive transcription is a significant factor in their instability. That makes this a more complicated story for sure, however, it also opens new avenues to examine the repeats.”
The ability of the repeats to affect the activity of genes may indicate a broader effect on the genome, and if the effect is also seen in humans, could account for some of the subtle differences between individuals.
“By some estimates, there may be a thousand locations in our chromosomes where these repeats can expand,” said Lobachev. “Probably each person differs in the number of repeats in specific locations. This is important because of their ability to change gene expression.”
Among the next steps in the research is to determine how the expansions occur in cells that aren’t dividing, such as neurons. The genetic mechanisms involved in cell replication offer clear opportunities for repeat expansions, but the mechanism for repeat amplification in non-dividing cells remains a mystery. The researchers believe the finding that GAA/TTC repeats can promote transcription provides clues for understanding what is going on in terminally differentiated cells.
Why repeats with the detrimental ability to expand have remained a part of the genomes also remains a question. Genetic processes that hinder an organism’s competitiveness are normally eliminated during the process of evolution.
“Perhaps these repeats play a positive role in the cell when they are small, but because of their ability to expand, they sometimes get out of control and become larger,” Lobachev said.
The findings reported in the yeast, which is commonly used in wine-making and brewing, may help chart a new course in human studies. Scientists often begin genetic research with simpler organisms such as yeast, and use the findings to provide direction for examining similar mechanisms in humans.
“A lot of the processes that are going on in our cells and in yeast cells are the same,” Lobachev noted. “These processes are highly conserved throughout evolution. The history of biology tells us that most probably what we find in yeast is going to turn out to be true in humans.”
Lobachev hopes the study will lead to new research, both in yeast genetics and humans.
“We have built a map for future analysis so that when people sequence the genome and find deficiencies in particular genes, that will be a clear prediction that individuals with those deficiencies will be predisposed to instability,” Lobachev said. “There are now several directions for us and other labs to pursue to see what is really happening here.
In addition to those already mentioned, the study’s authors also included Alexander Shishkin, Dana Marcinkowski-Desmond and Sergei Mirkin from Tufts University, and Yuri Nishida, Natalie Saini and Kirill Volkov from Georgia Tech.
This work was supported by award number R01GM0825950 from NIGMS/NIH and MCB-0818122 from the NSF. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIGMS/NIH or the NSF.
CITATION: Zhang et al., Genome-wide Screen Identifies Pathways that Govern GAA/TTC Fragility and Expansions in Dividing and Nondividing Yeast Cells, Molecular Cell (2012): (dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2012.08.002)
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 309
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
Research News & Publications Office
(404) 894-6986
]]>In the state of Georgia, 42 percent of the population holds some form of a college degree; the governor is hoping to raise that number to 60 percent by 2020. To reach that goal, the state’s public and private colleges will need to produce an additional 250,000 graduates.
The overall goal of Georgia Tech’s Complete College Georgia plan is to reach and consistently maintain an 80 percent six-year graduation rate before gradually increasing this rate to 84 percent, the average of Tech’s national peers. The team that developed the plan was established by President Bud Peterson and Provost Rafael Bras and included faculty and administrators from Undergraduate Education, Learning Excellence, Student Affairs, the Office of Minority Education Development (OMED), Enrollment Services, Government and Community Relations, Professional Education, the Office of the President, and the Office of Institutional Research and Planning (IRP).
The committee used a demographic analysis of Tech’s undergraduate student population to examine common characteristics among enrolled students who want to graduate from Georgia Tech but are ultimately unsuccessful. The analysis helped the committee begin to identify factors that may be impeding success.
“At Georgia Tech, our retention and graduation rates are among the highest in the state ,” said Steven Girardot, assistant vice provost for undergraduate education and a member of the committee. “but having the detailed statistical analyses that IRP provides has allowed us to set goals and strategies for how we can make improvements.”
]]>“This age, during college, is the prime age for emotional or mental health concerns to emerge,” said Ruperto Perez, director of the Georgia Tech Counseling Center. “We see students who may have had a predisposition for certain issues, maybe in their family, but they are coming in for the first time because they notice signs in themselves or someone notices it in them.”
The Counseling Center begins its semesterly Stress Management Series this Thursday, offering weekly casual discussions open to students, faculty and staff to talk about various stress factors and coping methods. This is one way the Center provides opportunities to help the Tech community manage stress.
In comparing Tech students who have visited the Counseling Center to those at universities around the country, Tech students report more academic distress than their peers.
“It points to the academic rigor here, but often the rigor is what brings them in and then reveals other underlying issues,” said Perez. Tech students also tend to internalize stress, trying to push through without help, which can lead to distress and more serious issues such as depression and anxiety, the top two consistently present concerns observed by Counseling Center staff.
“We try to emphasize that now is a good time to start to develop a plan for how to manage and cope with stress. Whether it’s going to the CRC on a regular basis, or getting involved socially and developing a support system, it’s important to try to be proactive in making those plans to avert and cope with stress.”
If students notice something in a friend, or faculty and staff notice something in a student, Perez encourages them to first address it with the person: Express your concern and explain what you’re seeing, and ask if there is anything you can do to help. The Counseling Center is available for consultation for those who are concerned about someone and may want tips on how to deal with the situation. Students with issues that warrant involvement beyond their existing community should visit the Counseling Center or Office of the Dean of Students.
Some signs that might indicate that intervention may be warranted in a student’s life include: social withdrawal from friends and family, detachment or not wanting to talk for an extended period, and gradual or dramatic changes in sleeping and eating habits. Irritability and sudden angry outbursts for seemingly no apparent reason can also be signs of distress. Perez encourages faculty, staff and students to further familiarize themselves with possible signs through videos on the Center’s website. The Center is open for appointments and consultations Monday–Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a counselor on call 24/7 at 404-894-2575. The weekly Stress Management Series continues throughout the semester.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
The Dream Mile, started by Tech students, is one of a series of Dream Mile races that take place across the country. The Atlanta race benefits Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Vibha, a nonprofit that aims to educate and empower underprivileged children through projects in education, vocational training, rescue and rehabilitation in the U.S. and India.
Last year, the race saw about 1,400 runners raise more than $75,000. Music and carnival-style games will be available after the race, and all race participants receive a t-shirt, official chip timing and refreshments.
This year, participants can choose from a 5K walk, 5K run or 10K run. In the past the race has been held on campus, but relocated this year to a new, expanded route in Johns Creek. Registration ranges from $25-$35 depending on the race and date registered.
The 2012 Dream Mile begins at 7 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 22. To register, visit www.thedreammile.org/atlanta and register through Active.com.
]]>As Director of the College of Computing’s Socially Intelligent Machines research lab, Thomaz ‘s research focuses on all aspects of human-robot interaction and, specifically, on machines that learn new tasks and goals from ordinary people in everyday environments. This research works from the assumption that machines meant to learn from people can better take advantage of the ways in which people naturally approach teaching.
Through the development of new computational models, Thomaz is working to build machines that participate in social learning environments. As a result, she has improved the performance of a machine's learning behavior through attention to human interaction and improving the experience of the human teacher by designing interactive learning algorithms based on how people teach, in order to develop a smooth human-robot relationship. Thomaz’s work with robotics opens up a wider world of personal robotics, in which machines are doing anything their owners can program them to do—without actually being programmers.
In 2009, Thomaz was awarded the prestigious “MIT Tech Review 2009 Young Innovators Under 35” for her work in robot-human interaction and the development of Simon. Additionally, she has been named a College of Computing Professor of Excellence for her outstanding contributions to the Institute and to her field of study. Thomaz holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
404-385-4015
]]>At the heart of the self-charging power cell is a piezoelectric membrane that drives lithium ions from one side of the cell to the other when the membrane is deformed by mechanical stress. The lithium ions driven through the polarized membrane by the piezoelectric potential are directly stored as chemical energy using an electrochemical process.
By harnessing a compressive force, such as a shoe heel hitting the pavement from a person walking, the power cell generates enough current to power a small calculator. A hybrid power cell the size of a conventional coin battery can power small electronic devices – and could have military applications for soldiers who might one day recharge battery-powered equipment as they walked.
“People are accustomed to considering electrical generation and storage as two separate operations done in two separate units,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We have put them together in a single hybrid unit to create a self-charging power cell, demonstrating a new technique for charge conversion and storage in one integrated unit.”
The research was reported Aug. 9, 2012 in the journal Nano Letters. The research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The power cell consists of a cathode made from lithium-cobalt oxide (LiCoO2) and an anode consisting of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanotubes grown atop a titanium film. The two electrodes are separated by a membrane made from poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) film, which generates a piezoelectric charge when placed under strain. When the power cell is mechanically compressed, the PVDF film generates a piezoelectric potential that serves as a charge pump to drive the lithium ions from the cathode side to the anode side. The energy is then stored in the anode as lithium-titanium oxide.
Charging occurs in cycles with the compression of the power cell creating a piezopotential that drives the migration of lithium ions until a point at which the chemical equilibrium of the two electrodes are re-established and the distribution of lithium ions can balance the piezoelectric fields in the PVDF film. When the force applied to the power cell is released, the piezoelectric field in the PVDF disappears, and the lithium ions are kept at the anode through a chemical process.
The charging cycle is completed through an electrochemical process that oxidizes a small amount of lithium-cobalt oxide at the cathode to Li1-xCoO2 and reduces a small amount of titanium dioxide to LixTiO2 at the anode. Compressing the power cell again repeats the cycle. When an electrical load is connected between the anode and cathode, electrons flow to the load, and the lithium ions within the cell flow back from the anode side to the cathode side.
Using a mechanical compressive force with a frequency of 2.3 Hertz, the researchers increased the voltage in the power cell from 327 to 395 millivolts in just four minutes. The device was then discharged back to its original voltage with a current of one milliamp for about two minutes. The researchers estimated the stored electric capacity of the power cell to be approximately 0.036 milliamp-hours.
So far, Wang and his research team – which included Xinyu Xue, Sihong Wang, Wenxi Guo and Yan Zhang – have built and tested more than 500 of the power cells. Wang estimates that the generator-storage cell will be as much as five times more efficient at converting mechanical energy to chemical energy for as a two-cell generator-storage system.
Much of the mechanical energy applied to the cells is now consumed in deforming the stainless steel case the researchers are using to house their power cell. Wang believes the power storage could be boosted by using an improved case.
“When we improve the packaging materials, we anticipate improving the overall efficiency,” he said. “The amount of energy actually going into the cell is relatively small at this stage because so much of it is consumed by the shell.”
Beyond the efficiencies that come from directly converting mechanical energy to chemical energy, the power cell could also reduce weight and space required by separate generators and batteries. The mechanical energy could come from walking, the tires of a vehicle hitting the pavement, or by harnessing ocean waves or mechanical vibrations.
“One day we could have a power package ready to use that takes advantage of this hybrid approach,” Wang said. “Almost anything that involves mechanical action could provide the strain needed for charging. People walking could be generating electricity as they move.”
This research was supported by DARPA (HR0011-09-C-0142); the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (DE-FG02-07ER46394), the National Science Foundation (CMMI-0403671), and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KJCX2-YW-M13). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of DARPA, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Energy or the National Science Foundation.
Citation: Xinyu Xue, Sihong Wang, Wenxi Guo, Yan Zhang and Zhong Lin Wang, Hybridizing Energy Conversion and Storage in a Mechanical-to-Electrochemical Process for Self-Charging Power Cell, Nano Letters. DOI: 10.1021/nl302879t
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 309
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
]]>
Research News & Publications Office
(404) 894-6986
]]>“Ethier’s recruitment adds new dimensions to the Coulter Department’s international reputation in biomedical engineering and biomechanics and we are delighted to welcome him to Atlanta,” said Larry McIntire, Wallace H. Coulter Chair and Professor.
Ethier’s research has the potential to create a new paradigm for treating glaucoma, the second most common cause of blindness. His glaucoma research focuses on biomechanics of aqueous humor drainage in the normal and glaucomatous eye, and the mechanical and cellular response of optic nerve tissues to intraocular pressure. Additionally, Ethier studies the hemodynamic basis of arterial disease and mechanobiology of osteoarthritis.
“Dr. Ethier’s strengths in applying his expertise in biomechanics to the understanding of glaucoma, arterial disease and osteoarthritis are world-class,” said C. Michael Cassidy, President and CEO of the Georgia Research Alliance. “We anticipate that his work will lead to new treatments for these conditions that affect so many worldwide.”
Ethier comes to Georgia from Imperial College London, where he was Professor and Head of the Department of Bioengineering. He also directed the $17 million Medical Engineering Solutions in Osteoarthritis Center of Excellence, one of four Wellcome Trust/Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Centers in the UK. In addition, he directed the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College.
After earning his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ethier joined the faculty of the University Toronto in 1986, where he built a strong program in biomaterials and biomedical engineering. In 2007, he was recruited to Imperial College London.
Ethier has published widely and has an extensive history of consulting with industry. He is the co-author of Introductory Biomechanics, a textbook widely used in the U.S., Canada and Europe. He is a Fellow of International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineering.
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About GRA
A model public-private partnership between Georgia universities, business and state government, the Georgia Research Alliance helps build Georgia’s technology-rich economy in three major ways: through attracting Eminent Scholars to Georgia’s research universities; through investing in sophisticated research tools; and through converting research into products, services and jobs that drive the economy. To learn more about GRA, visit www.gra.org.
About the Coulter Department
The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering is a joint program of the Emory University School of Medicine and the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering. The Coulter Department’s mission is to shape and advance the discipline of biomedical engineering through innovative research and inspiring education, with the goal of comprehensive integration of engineering methods into the mainstream of health care. The program is ranked second in both undergraduate and graduate programs by U.S. News & World Report. To learn more, visit www.bme.gatech.edu.
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404-332-9770, ext. 24 krobichaud@gra.org
Adrianne Proeller, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University
404-894-2357, adrianne.proeller@bme.gatech.edu
]]>Students, faculty and members of the general public learned more about issues of cyberspace, such as fraud and identity theft, as well as jobs available in the field of critical infrastructure protection.
Panelists spoke of the “many companies that want to hire Georgia Tech students to build systems that are crucial to critical infrastructure and that will think about public safety and security while doing so.”
The sessions allowed students to ask questions about specific job opportunities while gaining knowledge about the ever-changing field of cyber security from a Secret Service agent and DHS directors.
Written by Vett Vandiver, Communications and Marketing Student Assistant
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Housing’s biggest concern going into the new year is the kind of tailgating that allows those who aren’t members of the Tech community to follow residents into dorms.
“Because most of us were raised to hold the door open for the person behind us, instinct takes over,” said Dan Morrison, director of Residence Life. “However, we hope to educate students that this behavior actually makes everyone in a residential community vulnerable.”
At the same time, Housing staff and the Georgia Tech Police Department recognize that students may feel they’re being rude, or may find themselves in the uncomfortable position of closing a door in someone’s face. So, GTPD encourages students to call police (at 404.894.2500) to investigate the situation if they have been followed into a residence hall by someone suspicious.
“We realize you may not be able to keep someone from coming in behind you all the time, and students may not feel comfortable confronting people,” said Deputy Chief of Police Robert Connolly. “Just call us, and we’ll look into it. We’d rather have the call and it turn out to be nothing than have students say nothing.”
Tailgating led to an incident in North Avenue Apartments in July, when two armed suspects tailgated into the building behind a resident and entered a room on the seventh floor, stealing a resident’s cell phone, laptop and wallet.
Though most who tailgate are legitimate residents who just don’t want to get out their BuzzCards, Housing has caught intruders who have dressed to look like students, with backpacks and baseball caps, to gain access to residence halls. Students can help each other by always having their card out for entry, showing fellow residents that they are neighbors, not a potential threat.
In an additional move to help prevent tailgating, Housing has turned off the automatic doors many are accustomed to around campus. Previously, many doors stayed open for 15 seconds to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now, only those registered with the Office of Disability Services will have their BuzzCards activated to keep the doors open, providing the extra time only for those with a need.
Faculty and staff should also be mindful of tailgating as they come and go from campus buildings after regular business hours. Many buildings are open during the day but become accessible by BuzzCard only in the evening. During those evening hours, allowing tailgating can negate the security that BuzzCard access provides.
Tailgating isn’t an issue just for Georgia Tech. During the recent filming of “The Internship” on campus, when several Tech buildings were transformed into Google’s headquarters, signs on the doors of the Clough Commons and Klaus Computing Building cautioned against tailgating — apparently Google worries about this, too.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
“We know the administration and police department are doing a lot, and we thought it was time the students did something — for the students, by the students,” said Evelyn Murray, a fifth-year computational media major and one of the campaign’s leaders. The campaign arose out of conversations at the annual Student Leader Retreat held in January.
The home base for campaign activity will be on Tech Walk, where students will be able to share feedback on campus safety, as well as learn more about where and how crime occurs near campus. A 10-by-10-foot map on Tech Walk will provide a place for students to mark what areas of campus feel less safe and suggest improvements. Computers will also be on-site for students to register for Jacket Guardian, as well as register laptops and bicycles with GTPD.
An “If I Were a Thief” campaign will highlight the issue of students leaving their belongings vulnerable to theft. WRECKless, a student group that organizes non-alcoholic parties, will throw a party Friday, and the Interfraternity Council will host a Party Done Right to share information on and practice Tech’s alcohol and party policies.
“We’re encouraging all student organizations to be involved however they see fit,” Murray said. Organizations can still get involved in the week’s events by contacting Murray, Mike Mosgrove or Hunter Hammond. The organizers hope to be able to identify future campus projects that will help make students feel safer and make the week a recurring event.
Stop by Tech Walk from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. to participate and give your opinions on improving campus safety. For more details on the week’s events, visit the campaign’s website.
]]>
Kristen Bailey
Institute Communications
Thursday marks the first official open day of fall campus housing for freshmen, which means students will converge on campus with parents, futons and minifridges in tow. Heavier traffic and congested paths and roadways will likely result and continue into Friday. Move-in activities will progress throughout the weekend, with upperclassmen and graduate students arriving Saturday and Sunday. Watch for new students and their families as you make your way both in vehicles and on foot, leaving yourself a few extra minutes of travel time as you traverse campus. More importantly, if you see folks looking lost, take a moment to see if they need help getting somewhere and welcome them to Georgia Tech.
Other campus activity this week
As students move in, filming for “The Internship” continues in the center of campus and will wrap up at the end of the week. Filming may affect regular activities in and around the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, Ford Environmental Science and Technology building and Klaus Advanced Computing Building; please be mindful as you visit these areas that it may not be business as usual for a few more days.
The Greek sector will resume activity this week, as sororities begin recruitment on Thursday and offer bids to new members a week later on Thursday, Aug. 23. Fraternities will also welcome new members during fall rush from Aug. 16–23.
Campus services will begin to resume regular operations for the academic year over the course of the week, with all dining locations reopening by Aug. 20. Visit campusservices.gatech.edu for a full schedule of opening days and hours.
As always, for a more thorough overview of what’s going on around campus, visit gatech.edu/calendar.
]]>Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is one of three companies that will receive hundreds of millions of dollars to further develop its commercial human spacecraft system, NASA announced earlier this month.
SNC has turned to Georgia Tech for expertise on how to ensure the smoothest possible re-entry for its spacecraft, the Dream Chaser, which is reminiscent of NASA’s space shuttle.
Robert Braun, Georgia Tech professor of space technology, and his research team – Research Engineer Jenny Kelly and engineering graduate students Zach Putnam and Mike Grant – are working with SNC on the design of an advanced guidance algorithm that will make the most of the Dream Chaser’s superior aerodynamic performance during re-entry and landing.
Of the three companies selected by NASA to develop spaceships to taxi astronauts to and from the International Space Station, Sierra Nevada Corporation is the only one with a winged vehicle. It is designed to launch vertically and land on a runway, similar to the Space Shuttle. Boeing and SpaceX are developing capsules that would land in a body of water.
Because the Dream Chaser is similar to the Space Shuttle, it could land using the same guidance algorithm the shuttle used. However, that algorithm, like the shuttle, is based on technology that is more than 40 years old; it does not take advantage of the onboard computing available for today’s space systems.
“The shuttle was built in the 1970s, and its designers didn’t have the onboard computing capabilities we have today,” Braun said. “The Dream Chaser can capitalize on an advanced entry guidance algorithm matched to its aerodynamic and onboard computing capability.”
Braun and his team took the Dream Chaser’s aerodynamic configuration, control surfaces and mass properties into account when developing the algorithm. To date, the algorithm runs a computer simulation that allows SNC engineers to tweak aspects of the spacecraft design based on scenarios such as variable atmospheric conditions to perfect the landing process.
The result is an algorithm that “allows the vehicle to fly how it was meant to fly,” Putnam said.
Georgia Tech engineers delivered an early prototype of the software to the SNC team this month for detailed evaluation and testing.
Zachary Krevor, a Georgia Tech graduate who is SNC’s principal systems engineer with the flight dynamic and performance group, was eager to see the results.
“This is important for us because we feel the algorithm could have performance benefits for our vehicle and make it robust to atmospheric disturbances while ensuring we have a ‘low g’ re-entry,” he said. “Capsules do not have the ‘low g’ re-entry that is so important for both astronauts and sensitive science payloads.”
For the students, the project provides real-world experience in the nascent commercial space industry.
“To be able to participate in the new era of commercial flight is very exciting,” Grant said. “It has been a great learning experience to see how commercial space companies work and a real thrill to contribute in a meaningful way to the potential flight of this new space flight system.”
Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser received an award of $212.5 million from NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability Program on August 3 that will allow the company to complete development of the system and transport crews to space as early as 2016. An approach and landing test for the Dream Chaser is scheduled for later this year.
About Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Systems
Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Systems business area, headquartered in Louisville, Colo., designs and manufactures advanced spacecraft, space vehicles, rocket motors and spacecraft subsystems and components for the U.S. government, commercial customers and the international market. SNC Space Systems has more than 25 years of space heritage and has participated in more than 400 successful space missions through the delivery of more than 4,000 systems, subsystems and components. During its history, SNC Space Systems has concluded more than 70 programs for NASA and more than 50 other clients. For more information about SNC Space Systems, visit www.sncspace.com.
]]>“Dean Houston has been an extraordinary leader of the sciences at Georgia Tech," said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at Georgia Tech. “He has been an effective leader that leverages our strengths in the sciences and engineering via strategic partnerships and collaborations."
“I’m delighted and honored to have had the opportunity to lead Georgia Tech’s College of Sciences,” said Houston. “We have reached an unprecedented level in terms of research support, faculty talent and teaching achievement, so it is a good time to pass the baton to a new leader.”
Houston said the interdisciplinary nature of the Institute is what drew him to Tech.
“For an Institute to be a place where people can both make new discoveries and build technology that makes use of those findings, there needs to be good communication between scientists and engineers. This seems to happen seamlessly at Georgia Tech,” said Houston. “I’m proud to say I’ve been a part of this spirit of collaboration for the past six years.”
Since arriving, Houston has built up the biosciences, placing an emphasis on biophysics, biochemistry, math biology and molecular biology. In addition, he has been instrumental in expanding the areas of astrophysics and planetary sciences and has placed more emphasis on material sciences, like graphene.
Houston also has improved the education of undergraduates in the sciences at Tech. During his term, the number of science students increased, particularly in the new biochemistry major, and they have been increasingly recognized by outside honors and fellowships. In addition, he both emphasized and rewarded faculty teaching and mentoring.
This summer, he introduced two new positions to the college to focus on undergraduate education. Jennifer Leavey, a new senior academic professional, will bring an interdisciplinary focus to the freshman and sophomore science labs; Director of Diversity Keith Oden, will encourage students to take advantage of research opportunities with faculty.
Georgia Tech has engaged a higher education search firm, R. William Funk & Associates, to provide support in conducting an international search for a new dean.
]]>Office of the Provost
404-894-6398
]]>In his speech, Peterson spoke of the power of partnership.
“Georgia Tech, the City of Atlanta, the State of Georgia and the Department of Commerce all share the same goals of expanding the entrepreneurial eco-system,” said Peterson. “We are continuing to initiate and foster programs designed to strengthen these efforts.”
Other attendees included Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Invest Atlanta President and CEO Brian McGowan and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director David Kappos, as well as local entrepreneurs.
Click here to see a recording of the event.
Written by Vett Vandiver, Student Communications Assistant
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Now, scientists have demonstrated an automated system that uses artificial intelligence and cutting-edge image processing to rapidly examine large numbers of individual Caenorhabditis elegans, a species of nematode widely used in biological research. Beyond replacing existing manual examination steps using microfluidics and automated hardware, the system’s ability to detect subtle differences from worm-to-worm – without human intervention – can identify genetic mutations that might not have been detected otherwise.
By allowing thousands of worms to be examined autonomously in a fraction of the time required for conventional manual screening, the technique could change the way that high throughput genetic screening is carried out using C. elegans.
Details of the research were reported August 19th in the advance online publication of the journal Nature Methods. The research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
“While humans are very good at pattern recognition, computers are much better than humans at detecting subtle differences, such as small changes in the location of dots or slight variations in the brightness of an image,” said Hang Lu, the project’s lead researcher and an associate professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This technique found differences that would have been almost impossible to pick out by hand.”
Lu’s research team is studying genes that affect the formation and development of synapses in the worms, work that could have implications for understanding human brain development. The researchers use a model in which synapses of specific neurons are labeled by a fluorescent protein. Their research involves creating mutations in the genomes of thousands of worms and examining the resulting changes in the synapses. Mutant worms identified in this way are studied further to help understand what genes may have caused the changes in the synapses.
One aspect the researchers are studying is why synapses form in the wrong locations, or are of the wrong sizes or types. The differences between the mutants and the normal or “wild type” worms indicate inappropriate developmental patterns caused by the genetic mutations.
Because of the large number of possible genes involved in these developmental processes, the researchers must examine thousands of worms – perhaps as many as 100,000 – to exhaust the search. Lu and her research group had earlier developed a microfluidic “worm sorter” that speeds up the process of examining worms under a microscope, but until now, there were two options for detecting the mutants: a human had to look at each animal, or a simple heuristic algorithm was used to make the sorting decision. Neither option is objective or adaptable to new problems.
Lu’s system, an optimized version of earlier work by her group, uses a camera to record three-dimensional images of each worm as it passes through the sorter. The system compares each image set against what it has been taught the “wild type” worms should look like. Worms that are even subtly different from normal can be sorted out for further study.
“We feed the program wild-type images, and it teaches itself to recognize what differentiates the wild type. It uses this information to determine what a mutant type may look like – which is information we didn’t provide to the system – and sorts the worms based on that,” explained Matthew Crane, a graduate student who performed the work. “We don’t have to show the computer every possible mutant, and that is very powerful. And the computer never gets bored.”
While the system was designed to sort C. elegans for a specific research project, Lu believes the machine learning technology – which is borrowed from computer science – could be applied to other areas of biology that use model genetic organisms. The system’s hardware and software are currently being used in several other laboratories beyond Georgia Tech.
“Our automated technique can be generalized to anything that relies on detecting a morphometric – or shape, size or brightness difference,” Lu said. “We can apply this to anything that can be detected visually, and we think this could be expanded to studying many other problems related to learning, memory, neuro-degeneration and neural developmental diseases that this worm can be used to model.”
Individual C. elegans are less than a millimeter long and thinner than a strand of hair, but have 302 neurons with well-defined synapses. While research using single cells can be simpler to do, studies using the worms are good in vivo models for many important processes relevant to human health.
Other researchers who contributed to this paper include student Jeffrey Stirman from Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary program in bioengineering, Professor James Rehg from Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, and three researchers from the Department of Biology at Stanford University’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Chan-Yen Ou, Peri Kurshan, and Professor Kang Shen.
The autonomous processing facilitated by the new system could allow researchers to examine more animals more rapidly, potentially opening up areas of study that are not feasible today.
“We are hoping that the technology will really change the approach people can take to this kind of research,” said Lu. “We expect that this approach will enable people to do much larger scale experiments that can push the science forward beyond looking what individual mutations are doing in a specific situation.”
The project described was supported by Award Numbers R01GM088333, R21EB012803 and R01AG035317 from the National Institutes of Health. This material is also based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CAREER CBET-0954578. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National lnstitutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.
Citation: Matthew Crane, Jeffrey Stirman, Chan-Yen Ou, Peri Kurshan, James Rehg, Kang Shen & Hang Lu, Autonomous screening of C. elegans identifies genes implicated in synaptogenesis, DOI: 10.1038/NMETH.2141
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]]>Mentor Jackets matches students with Tech alumni for mentoring, networking and building relationships with others in the Tech community.
“For figuring out where I want to work or who I need to meet, it’s been extremely helpful,” said Kristin Watkins, a fourth-year business administration major going into her third year with a mentor. “Before I was involved, people always told me the Georgia Tech network was so great, but I wasn’t really connected to it and didn’t feel I had an outlet to go to — that’s what Mentor Jackets does.”
Mentor Jackets uses an internal software program to match students and alumni based on academic majors, student involvement, areas of expertise, degrees earned, hometowns and other skills and interests. Mentors may be located in Atlanta or anywhere else in the world. The program encourages them to communicate on a regular basis in whatever form works best for them, whether via email, phone or in person.
“Students really get it and understand that a relationship with an alum can help their career advancement,” said Bill Todd, professor of the practice and executive director of health care initiatives in the Scheller College of Business. “This is perhaps the most appropriate and meaningful way for an alumnus to get engaged in their alma mater.”
Mentor Jackets also hosts more structured events throughout the year, such as speed networking, guest speakers and beginning and end-of-year celebrations. Participants can meet other mentors and mentees, enabling mentees to practice skills they’re honing and mentors to meet fellow alumni and find new ways to get involved.
“Recruiting top students is macro — it’s big picture. What I really enjoy about the mentorship program is it’s so micro — it’s one person, and you can really see the results reflected in an individual,” Todd said.
Watkins hopes to be on the other side of the mentor-mentee relationship when she becomes an alumna next spring.
“It’s been a great experience. It’s nice to actually get some exposure to people who have made it through Tech and gone through the same thing that you have.”
To participate, students must be members of SAA, which they can join for $10 a year. The $10 registration provides year-round programming focused on career development, networking and becoming engaged alumni. Dues are split between the Student Foundation and SAA’s Gift to Tech, which means all funds are channeled toward student endeavors.
Students or faculty and staff who are also Tech alumni can get involved at gtmentorjackets.com.
]]>Kristen Bailey
Communications Officer
Institute Communications
The roundtable discussions, held Aug. 9 at the White House in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., brought together more than 35 representatives from some of the country's most promising companies that are utilizing and developing advanced technologies for clean energy manufacturing. Representatives from key research centers, public policy experts and other stakeholders also joined the discussion.
Participants discussed opportunities and challenges to continue improving U.S. competitiveness in advanced clean energy manufacturing in a wide array of topics – ranging from solar and wind to energy storage, vehicles, lighting, smart grid, fuel cells and more – through public-private partnerships in R&D, industry cluster development and technology commercialization activities.
“The roundtable discussions were critical in understanding the capabilities, ideas, and expectations that these top experts in the field of clean energy have and hold; and how we in MaRC can strategically position ourselves to collaborate with them and lead the effort in advanced clean energy manufacturing,” Wang said.
Subjects discussed and debated at the roundtable will inform the U.S. Administration’s evolving manufacturing strategy, at the energy department's Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, where David Danielson, roundtable host and assistant director for energy efficiency and renewable energy, is leading an effort to identify areas of competitive advantage for U.S. manufacturers in global clean energy.
The roundtable builds upon the recent report released in July 2012 by the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership Steering Committee of the President's Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, “Capturing Domestic Competitive Advantage in Advanced Manufacturing.”
The report offered a set of 16 recommendations around three pillars, including enabling innovation, securing the talent pipeline, and improving the business climate. The Aug. 9 roundtable focused on the first pillar, enabling innovation, as it relates to advanced clean energy manufacturing.
]]>“Georgia Tech has benefited greatly from Dean Balfour’s bold vision for education and research in the built environment as well as in music and the arts,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at Georgia Tech. “His leadership has propelled the College of Architecture to new levels of excellence and reconfirmed Georgia Tech as a center of cultural and creative activity in the region, the nation and the world.”
“Returning to Georgia Tech has been such a pleasure, enhanced greatly by new and renewed friendships with so many students, faculty and alumni,” Balfour said. “But I look forward to a return to teaching and to devoting more time to writing.”
Terry Blum, professor in Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business and director of the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship, will chair the search committee for a new dean. Georgia Tech will engage a higher education search firm to provide support in conducting an international search.
During his tenure, Balfour reorganized the College into five schools: Music, Industrial Design, City and Regional Planning, Building Construction and Architecture, greatly enhancing the visibility and distinct character of each. He also elevated the College of Architecture’s focus on research and spearheaded three new PhD programs in Music Technology, Building Construction, and City and Regional Planning.
Balfour led the $9.5 million renovation of the Hinman Research Building, which received dozens of prestigious awards including the ARCHITECT Magazine’s P/A (Progressive Architecture) Award, Interior Design Magazine’s Best of the Year Award and the University System of Georgia Sustainability Award.
In addition to teaching, Balfour will continue his scholarly endeavors. His forthcoming book, Solomon’s Temple: Myth, Conflict and Faith (Wiley, October 2012), is a highly original architectural history of Solomon’s Temple and Islam’s Dome of the Rock that is both a social and cultural history of the region. His current project is a collection of writings and essays exploring perception, experience and the human imagination. Read his full biography here.
]]>The Office of Leadership and Civic Engagement (formerly the Office of Student Involvement and Office of Community Service), working with the Office of New Student and Sophomore Programs, organized Community Connections 2012 to give freshmen the opportunity to start serving the community as soon as they arrive on campus for orientation.
New students and their families who attended FASET sessions throughout the summer have already donated nearly 1,000 items and hundreds of dollars. The donations of travel-sized toiletries, laundry supplies and school supplies will be organized into kits for residents of the Atlanta Day Shelter for Women and Children (ADS) during a culminating event on Friday, Aug. 17. All current students, faculty and staff are invited to participate in the organizing event, which will take place from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Student Center Ballroom. Those interested in helping may RSVP online.
“This is a great opportunity for new students to engage in a direct service project, to meet others who are interested in service and to learn about the range of service opportunities available at Georgia Tech,” said Sarah Perkins, civic engagement coordinator in the Office of Leadership and Civic Engagement.
A full list of items requested by ADS is available online. Collection bins are located in the Office of Leadership and Civic Engagement (Room 2211 of the Student Center Commons) and the Office of New Student and Sophomore Programs (Room 141, Student Services Building). Monetary donations are also accepted and will be used to purchase requested items.
The Atlanta Day Shelter’s mission is to ease the burden of homelessness for women and children and assist them in becoming self-sufficient. The shelter has served as a daytime resource center for homeless women and children in the area since 1984.
]]>Most needed:
Individually packaged laundry detergent (e.g., Tide Pods)
Dryer sheets
Ziploc bags
Markers
Dividers
One-inch binders
Yellow highlighters
Toiletry items for babies (e.g. baby lotion, baby shampoo, baby soap)
Other items needed:
Hand sanitizer
Kleenex
Shampoo
Conditioner
Lotion
Bar soap/Body wash
No. 2 pencils
Mechanical pencils
Pens
Colored pencils
Calculator (mini)
Spiral notebooks
Folders (three-pronged with pockets)
Notebook paper (college- or wide-ruled)
Toiletry items should be travel-sized.
]]>Cathepsins are involved in disease processes as varied as cancer metastasis, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and arthritis. Because cathepsins have harmful effects on critical proteins such as collagen and elastin, pharmaceutical companies have been developing drugs to inhibit activity of the enzymes, but so far these compounds have had too many side effects to be useful and have failed clinical trials.
Using a combination of modeling and experiments, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have shown that one type of cathepsin preferentially attacks another, reducing the enzyme’s degradation of collagen. The work could affect not only the development of drugs to inhibit cathepsin activity, but could also lead to a better understanding of how the enzymes work together.
“These findings provide a new way of thinking about how these proteases are working with and against each other to remodel tissue – or fight against each other,” said Manu Platt, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “There has been an assumption that these cathepsins have been inert in relationship to one another, when in actuality they have been attacking one another. We think this may have broader implications for other classes of proteases.”
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Georgia Cancer Coalition. Details of the study were reported August 10 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Platt and student Zachary Barry made their discovery accidentally while investigating the effects of cathepsin K and cathepsin S – two of the 11-member cathepsin family. Cathepsin K degrades both collagen and elastin, and is one of the most powerful proteases. Cathepsin S degrades elastin, and does not strongly attack collagen.
When the researchers combined the two cathepsins and allowed them to attack samples of elastin, they expected to see increased degradation of the protein. What they saw, however, was not much more damage than cathepsin K did by itself.
Platt at first believed the experiment was flawed, and asked Barry – an undergraduate student in his lab who specializes in modeling – to examine what possible conditions could account for the experimental result. Barry’s modeling suggested that effects observed could occur if cathepsin S were degrading cathepsin K instead of attacking the elastin – a protein essential in arteries and the cardiovascular system.
That theoretical result led to additional experiments in which the researchers measured a direct correlation between an increase in the amount of cathepsin S added to the experiment and a reduction in the degradation of collagen. By increasing the amount of cathepsin S ten-fold over the amount used in the original experiment, Platt and Barry were able to completely block the activity of cathepsin K, preventing damage to the collagen sample.
“We saw that the cathepsin K was going away much faster when there was cathepsin S present than when it was by itself,” said Platt, who is also a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar and a Fellow of the Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology. “We kept increasing the amount of cathepsin S until the collagen was not affected at all because all of the cathepsin K was eaten by the cathepsin S.”
The researchers used a variety of tests to determine the amount of each enzyme, including fluorogenic substrate analysis, Western blotting and multiplex cathepsin zymography – a sensitive technique developed in the Platt laboratory.
Beyond demonstrating for the first time that cathepsins can attack one another, the research also shows the complexity of the body’s enzyme system – and may suggest why drugs designed to inhibit cathepsins haven’t worked as intended.
“The effect of the cathepsins on one another complicates the system,” said Platt. “If you are targeting this system pharmaceutically, you may not have the types or quantities of cathepsins that you expect, which could cause off-target binding and side effects that were not anticipated.”
Platt’s long-term research has focused on cathepsins, including the development of sensitive tools and assays to quantify their activity in cells and tissue, as well as potential diagnostic applications for breast, lung and cervical cancer. Cathepsins normally operate within cells to carry out housekeeping tasks such as breaking down proteins that are no longer needed.
“These enzymes are very powerful, but they have been overlooked because they are difficult to study,” said Platt. “We are changing the way that people view them.”
For the future, Platt plans to study interactions of additional cathepsins – as many as three or four are released during certain disease processes – and to develop a comprehensive model of how these proteases interact while they degrade collagen and elastin. That model could be useful to the designers of future drugs.
“As we build toward a comprehensive model of how these enzymes work, we can begin to understand how they behave in the extracellular matrix around these cells,” said Platt. “That will help us be smarter about how we go about treating diseases and designing new drugs.”
The project described was supported by Award Number DP2OD007433 from the Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health, or the National lnstitutes of Health. This material is also based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under the Science and Technology Center Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular systems (EBICS) Grant No. CBET-0939511.
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Media Relations Assistance: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
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]]>The data analysis and visualization tool is a subset of the Test Matrix Tool (TMT), a multi-component system developed by GTRI for designing, executing and analyzing large-scale modeling and simulation data sets. The visualization capability offers a graphical user interface that provides both on-screen data-manipulation features like filters and the ability to see query results in the form of graphical images almost instantly.
“Data visualization supports data analysis by letting users pose data-related questions onscreen with ease and then view the answers in ways that go far beyond ordinary table formats,” said Edward Clarkson, a GTRI research scientist who is leading the data visualization work. “A picture can be worth a thousand numbers, because visualizing data in a graph allows us to see patterns that might not be apparent from purely numerical results.”
Development of the Test Matrix Tool and its components is being led by Greg Rohling, a GTRI principal research engineer. Rohling’s team developed the TMT to support modeling and simulation investigations into the effectiveness and optimization of numerous U.S. defense systems, including electronic warfare equipment used to protect military aircraft. The work is supported by the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center at Robins Air Force Base.
In developing a simulation test, Test Matrix Tool users can specify desired variations in input parameters using multiple data filters. The TMT system executes all possible combinations of those parameters, creating a test matrix. It then executes the simulations on a Sun/Oracle Grid Engine and stores the resulting simulation output data in a MySQL database.
At that point, TMT’s data analysis component, which includes the data visualization tool, helps users evaluate the often complex test results. By collating the test matrix input and output, the data analysis tools allow users to efficiently filter and visualize test matrix data.
The Test Matrix Tool is designed for use on personal computers. It works under the Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Numerous Potential Applications
Some TMT capabilities, including the data analysis and visualization components, could be useful for scrutinizing information gathered in many disciplines, Clarkson said. He mentioned health care as one field where a multitude of existing data sets could be mined for new insights.
“For example, there’s an enormous amount of data out there on heart patients,” he said. “Our data tools could be used to investigate existing patient information and seek significant trends in the data.”
Clarkson explained that users would face the challenge of organizing legacy data sets into formats that the GTRI data analysis software can exploit. But that task, he added, is generally straightforward and can be performed with automated tools in many cases.
The data format required by the TMT tools, he explained, is not particularly complex. What’s needed is a standard database setup in which the information fields are organized into tabular formats. Moreover, any required metadata – special data that tell the system how to deal with a particular data set – would likely present few development issues.
Clarkson recently demonstrated the capabilities of the data analysis and visualization tool using an existing database: baseball statistics. This particular demonstration involved the use of 40 different data filters available onscreen; the TMT system allows for 300 or more such filters.
In a random query of the 46,000 National League players from the past, an onscreen graph unexpectedly revealed an interesting anomaly during the demonstration. The data indicate that players’ height and weight increased in every past decade except the 1920s and 1930s, when it stayed inexplicably flat.
“That’s the beauty of this kind of tool – it can find the unknown unknowns,” Clarkson observed. “Details show up in graphs that aren’t obvious when you’re looking at just the numbers.”
The TMT data visualization tool, he explained, bears some similarities to the data filtering features found on some websites. For example, many shopping sites let users search for products by using filters to select desired qualities such as size, color and brand name.
However, Clarkson said, TMT’s capabilities are considerably more advanced. Whereas commercial systems stop at the filtering stage, the TMT data analysis tools allow fundamental manipulation of the data. Using filters, investigators can transform the data mathematically, a process that makes unique insights and discoveries possible.
“Data analysis and visualization are great for finding many things you want to know,” Clarkson said. “But another real advantage is that they can detect what you perhaps don’t want to know – the bugs and the anomalies -- the things that just aren’t right and have to be fixed."
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]]>Known as Providing Real Opportunities for Income through Technology (PROFITT), the program is being evaluated at a maximum-security correctional facility in Texas. Once completed and approved, the PROFITT curriculum will be made available to other correctional facilities interested in starting or enhancing Braille training programs. The project was funded by the Second Chance Act, administered by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance.
An expansion of earlier Braille training programs, PROFITT has been developed through a partnership of the National Braille Press, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Beyond Braille skills, PROFITT teaches broader professional skills, including computer operation and computer graphics, small business management and “soft skills” designed to help ex-offenders work as independent consultants.
“PROFITT provides a blueprint for use by any correctional facility interested in implementing a comprehensive, competency-based Braille training program geared toward preparing offenders for long-term sustainable income upon release,” said Patrick Fraser, the program’s coordinator. “The goal is not only to reduce the rate of recidivism, but also to help meet the need for Braille materials.”
The PROFITT pilot program at the Mountain View Braille Facility in Gatesville, Tex., will conclude in mid-July. Input from the pilot will be incorporated into the curriculum, which must still be approved by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Braille is a good topic for prison training programs because it requires extensive instruction and practice, noted Tamara Rorie, a technology licensing associate at AMAC. The PROFITT program includes 750 hours of hands-on classroom training over a period of about 30 weeks.
“It’s a matter of not only learning the material, but also gaining experience,” she said. “It takes about a year for people to become certified in literary Braille, which is the base level. Once they get that, they can continue working on advanced certifications.”
Because the code is difficult to learn, there is an unmet need for people trained to produce Braille materials.
“There are still not enough Braille transcribers to provide the materials that students need, especially textbooks,” Rorie said. “For every hundred books that are published, only one is converted to Braille.”
The Braille code uses a system of raised dots to represent characters, words and portions of words that can be read by blind and visually impaired persons. Braille has been compared to stenographer’s shorthand, and includes several levels of higher certification for mathematics, tactile graphics, textbook formatting and even music.
“Braille is literacy for people who are visually impaired,” said Fraser. “People can listen to a book through a recording or screen reader, but they are not really grasping the full notions of spelling and grammar that are the basis for language and communication. Tactile graphics produced in Braille allow a fuller understanding of the material, and this is especially important to students.”
Braille transcription is often done by independent contractors who receive and deliver their work via the Internet. That freedom is helpful to ex-offenders, whose employment opportunities may otherwise be limited by their criminal records.
“A lot of people in the prison Braille programs have never worked a real job,” said Rorie. “Those who would like to become independent contractors must understand the kind of discipline required to work by themselves.”
There are about three dozen prison Braille training programs operating in the United States. In addition to preparing offenders for an occupation upon release, the programs provide Braille textbooks and other materials mandated by federal law for K-12 schools and other organizations. The services also can provide trainees a sense of purpose.
“The Braille program has given them a reason for being, and it gives them a reason to get up every morning because they love doing what they are doing and they love seeing the finished product,” said Delores Billman, industry supervisor at the Mountain View Prison. “They certainly like to know that someone is using what they have done to better themselves.”
PROFITT’s pilot program at the Mountain View facility is teaching about 15 women who had no previous experience with Braille. But the five-track curriculum is designed so that people with Braille skills can separately use the computer and graphics training, as well as the small business and “soft skills” portions. At Mountain View, another 23 women are studying these components in preparation for release.
Sabrina Hodges, a Braille transcriber at the Mountain View prison, sees the program as key to her future.
“I know that I am going to get something out of this, not just for parole, but when I go home,” she said. “I have made a lot of promises to my family and to myself when I got here, and this program has helped me make that happen.”
To be eligible for PROFITT, offenders must be free of behavioral infractions for a year, have a good command of the English language and be at least six months away from release. While the Mountain View facility is a women’s prison, Braille training programs operate at both men’s prisons and juvenile facilities, Rorie noted.
PROFITT provides a win-win for both offenders and the larger society, Fraser said.
“Braille is not inexpensive to produce, and programs like this can help provide textbook materials to meet the needs of blind and visually impaired students,” he explained. “In addition to meeting the demand for these materials, these programs are providing ex-offenders with skills that will allow them to be tax-paying citizens when they get out.”
This project was supported by Grant No. 2010-RV-BX-0005 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the SMART Office, and the Office for Victims of Crime. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not represent the official position or policies of the United States Department of Justice.
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]]>However, a new study by a team of researchers from the University of Groningen and the Georgia Institute of Technology reveals a common mechanism underlying these traps and provides a theoretical framework to design trap-free plastic electronics. The results are presented in an advance online publication of the journal Nature Materials.
Plastic semiconductors are made from organic, carbon-based polymers, comprising a tunable forbidden energy gap. In a plastic light-emitting diode (LED), an electron current is injected into a higher molecular orbital, situated just above the energy gap. After injection, the electrons move toward the middle of the LED and fall down in energy across the forbidden energy gap, converting the energy loss into photons. As a result, an electrical current is converted into visible light.
However, during their passage through the semiconductor, a lot of electrons get stuck in traps in the material and can no longer be converted into light. In addition, this trapping process greatly reduces the electron current and moves the location where electrons are converted into photons away from the center of the device.
“This reduces the amount of light the diode can produce,” explained Herman Nicolai, first author of the Nature Materials paper.
The traps are poorly understood, and it has been suggested that they are caused by kinks in the polymer chains or impurities in the material.
“We’ve set out to solve this puzzle by comparing the properties of these traps in nine different polymers,” Nicolai explained. “The comparison revealed that the traps in all materials had a very similar energy level.”
The Georgia Tech group, led by Professor Jean-Luc Bredas in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry, investigated computationally the electronic structure of a wide range of possible traps. “What we found out from the calculations is that the energy level of the traps measured experimentally matches that produced by a water-oxygen complex,” said Bredas.
Nicolai explains that “such a complex could easily be introduced during the manufacturing of the semiconductor material, even if this is done under controlled conditions.” The devices Nicolai studied were fabricated in a nitrogen atmosphere, “but this cannot prevent contamination with minute quantities of oxygen and water,” he noted.
The fact that the traps have a similar energy level means that it is now possible to estimate the expected electron current in different plastic materials. And it also points the way to trap-free materials. “The trap energy lies in the forbidden energy gap,” Nicolai explained.
This energy gap represents the difference in energy of the outer shell in which the electrons circle in their ground state and the higher orbital to which they can be moved to become mobile charge carriers. When such a mobile electron runs into a trap that is within the energy gap it will fall in, because the trap has a lower energy level.
“But if chemists could design semiconducting polymers in which the trap energy is above that of the higher orbital in which the electrons move through the material, they couldn’t fall in,” he suggested. “In this case, the energy level of the trap would be higher than that of the electron.”
The results of this study are therefore important for both plastic LEDs and plastic solar cells. “In both cases, the electron current should not be hindered by charge trapping. With our results, more efficient designs can be made,” Nicolai concluded.
The experimental work for this study was done in the Zernike Institute of Advanced Materials (ZIAM) at the faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. The theoretical work to identify the nature of the trap was carried out at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA.
The work at the University of Groningen was supported by the European Commission under contract FP7-13708 (AEVIOM). The work at Georgia Tech was supported by the MRSEC program of the National Science Foundation under award number DMR-0819885.
Citation: H. T. Nicolai1, M. Kuik1, G. A. H.Wetzelaer1, B. de Boer1, C. Campbell2, C. Risko2, J. L. Brédas2,4 and P.W. M. Blom1,3* Unification of trap-limited electron transport in semiconducting polymers. Nature Materials, published online: 29 July 2012 | DOI: 10.1038/NMAT3384
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]]>The event showcased a presentation on new online resources, a panel discussion and question and answer session, and a tour of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC)—Georgia Tech’s startup accelerator.
The EIR Initiative, launched earlier this year at an information summit in Silicon Valley, was created to draw on industry expertise to strengthen USCIS policies and practices critical to American economic growth. Business experts and USCIS immigration experts worked collaboratively over a period of 90 days to optimize the range of existing nonimmigrant visa categories often used by entrepreneurs to provide pathways that are clear, consistent and aligned.
]]>Georgia Tech researchers have found a possible solution to this challenge by developing a way to simulate and control movement of computer-generated characters without a skeletal structure, anything from starfish and earthworms to an elephant’s trunk or the human tongue.
Their modeling techniques have the potential to allow amateur animators and even young children unparalleled control of digital creatures by simply pointing and clicking on a screen to have them move the way they want. One can imagine aspiring animators with tools in the near future to build a more boisterous Bob - “Monsters vs. Aliens’” resident blob - or an updated Ursula from “The Little Mermaid,” with her sinister tentacles used to full effect with computer graphics.
The researchers’ work targets simulation and control of soft body locomotion - movement of characters without a skeletal structure – something that is rarely explored in animation, according to Karen Liu, one of the researchers and associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.
Eschewing the traditional use of skeletons with moving joints as the basis for animation control, the Georgia Tech research simulates soft body computer models and controls their movement in completely new ways. Liu and fellow researchers Jie Tan and Greg Turk will present their research paper “Soft Body Locomotion” at SIGGRAPH 2012, the ACM international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, in Los Angeles, Aug. 5-9.
The computer models used in the research - jello-like alphabet letters - mimicked nature’s soft body organisms and were created using “muscle fibers to control a volume-preserving finite element mesh.” In short, just as a hacky sack or bean bag maintain their mass no matter how they are squashed, the computer models followed the same principle.
The soft body ABCs were able to perform a wide array of motions that users decided with simple point-and-click commands. The researchers developed algorithms that allowed “high-level goals,” which refer to specific movements, like walking from one point to another, or jumping and then regaining balance. Prior to this technique, in order to get soft body characters to perform some meaningful movement, animators might attempt thousands of computer simulation trials to get the soft body even close to a functional motion, Liu says.
“In this project we ‘physically simulated’ or created lifelike movements in the soft body models that don’t require much user intervention. We’ve built a framework where the user or the animator can just click on a point of the soft body and direct the type of movement he or she wants.”
Jie Tan, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, took on primary animation duties and implemented muscle types to produce different motions in the models. Users need only to pick the muscles for their creatures, the movement they want, and watch as the algorithm determines the muscle force needed to fulfill the action.
Greg Turk, professor in the School of Interactive Computing, says the techniques could be an important part of an animator’s toolbox to create graphics-based characters that need to be more flexible or bendable.
Central to the research was solving how soft body characters would employ a balancing strategy during movement. Characters with skeletal support can use their relatively unchanging contact points with the ground to maintain balance (feet size doesn’t change), but soft body characters without legs might have to lengthen their bodies and slide (expanding surface contact) or jump (breaking surface contact). The researchers actively exploited these different types of contact strategies to achieve control goals, including balance.
“We believe this research contribution is one that can apply broadly to other problems in animation control,” Liu says.
A video of the researchers’ soft body models in action can be found at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jtan34/project/softBodyLocomotion.html
Greg Turk will be honored this year at SIGGRAPH with the Computer Graphics Achievement Award and Karen Liu will receive the Significant New Researcher Award. This research was funded by NSF CCF-811485, IIS-11130934 and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
]]>Georgia Tech researchers have found a possible solution to this challenge by developing a way to simulate and control movement of computer-generated characters without a skeletal structure, anything from starfish and earthworms to an elephant’s trunk or the human tongue.
]]>Microorganisms, of course, have evolved ways to swim in spite of these challenges, but tiny robots haven’t quite caught up. Now a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has used complex computational models to design swimming micro-robots that could overcome these challenges to carry cargo and navigate in response to stimuli such as light.
When they’re actually built some day, these simple micro-swimmers could rely on volume changes in unique materials known as hydrogels to move tiny flaps that will propel the robots. The micro-devices could be used in drug delivery, lab-on-a-chip microfluidic systems – and even as micro-construction robots working in swarms.
The simple micro-swimmers were described July 23 in the online advance edition of the journal Soft Matter, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom.
“We believe that our simulations will give experimentalists a reason to pursue development of these micro-swimmers to go beyond what is available now,” said Alexander Alexeev, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “We wanted to demonstrate the principle of how robots this small could move by determining what is important and what would need to be used to build a real system.”
The simple swimmer designed by Alexeev and collaborators Hassan Masoud and Benjamin Bingham consists of a responsive gel body about ten microns long with two propulsive flaps attached to opposite sides. A steering flap sensitive to specific stimuli would be located at the front of the swimmer.
The responsive gel body would undergo periodic expansions and contractions triggered by oscillatory chemical reactions, oscillating magnetic or electric fields, or by cycles of temperature change. These expansions and contractions – the chemical swelling and de-swelling of the material – would create a beating motion in the rigid propulsive flaps attached to each side of the micro-swimmer. Combined with the movement of the gel body, the beating motion would move the micro-swimmer forward.
The trajectory of the micro-swimmer would be controlled by a flexible steering flap on its front. The flap would be made of a material that deforms based on changes in light intensity, temperature or magnetic field.
“The combination of these flaps and the oscillating body creates a very nice motion that we believe can be used to propel the swimmer,” said Alexeev. “To build a device that is autonomous and self-propelling at the micron-scale, we cannot build a tiny submarine. We have to keep it simple.”
Key to the operation of the micro-swimmer would be the latest generation of hydrogels, materials whose volume changes in a cyclical way. The hydrogels would serve as “chemical engines” to provide the motion needed to move the device’s propulsive flaps. Such materials currently exist and are being improved upon for other applications.
“We are using the state-of-the art in materials science, changing the properties of the material,” explained Masoud, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Mechanical Engineering. “We have combined the materials with the principles of hydrodynamics at the small scale to develop this new swimmer.”
As part of their modeling, the researchers examined the effects of flaps of different sizes and properties. They also studied how flexible the micro-swimmer’s body needed to be to produce the kind of movement needed for swimming.
“You can’t swim at the small scale in the same way you swim at the large scale,” Alexeev said. “There is no inertia, which is how you keep moving at the large scale. What happens at the small scale is counterintuitive to what you expect at the large scale.”
The computational fluid modeling the researchers used allowed them to study a wide range of parameters in materials, oscillation rates and flexibility. What they learned, Alexeev said, will give experimentalists a starting point for actually building prototypes of the flexible gel robots.
“We have captured the solid mechanics of the periodically-oscillating body, the fluid dynamics of moving through the viscous liquid, and the coupling between the two,” he said. “From a computational fluid dynamics standpoint, it’s not an easy problem to model at this scale.”
Ultimately, the researchers hope to work with an experimental team to actually build the micro-swimmers. Combining their theoretical work with actual experiments could be a powerful approach to building robots on this size scale.
“This is a simulation that we hope to see in real life one day,” Alexeev said. “We have learned how experimentalists can pursue fabrication of these devices without extensive trial-and-error. We can use the simulations to look inside what will happen by using the laws of physics to explain it.”
The researchers envision groups of micro-swimmers carrying cargo through microfluidic chips or other devices. Swarms of them could one day work together as tiny construction robots moving materials to desired locations for assembly.
But the micro-swimmers won’t win any Olympic competitions. Alexeev estimates that their top speed could be on the order of a few micrometers per second – which should be enough to accomplish their mission.
“If your body is micrometers in size, that kind of speed is really not too bad,” he said. “The swimming speed will be rather slow, but at that size scale, you don’t really need to go very fast since you only need to go short distances.”
Citation: Hassan Masoud, Benjamin I. Bingham and Alexander Alexeev, Soft Matter, 2012, Advance Article. DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25898F.
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]]>"Georgia Tech is committed to using technology and advanced platforms to enrich and expand educational opportunities,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “Through Georgia Tech’s Office of Professional Education, we already offer courses to more than 25,000 students worldwide. Steps such as this agreement will enable even more students throughout the world to have access to Georgia Tech’s expertise, and help to meet the needs for lifelong learning.”
"It seems clear that higher education is currently experiencing the first ripples of a wave that could drastically alter the method, scope and scale of educational access and delivery, " said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president of academic affairs for Georgia Tech. "Georgia Tech has been in the business of offering online courses and education for some time. By joining Coursera we seek to expand our presence in that space, provide increased global access to our excellent educational products, experiment with new methods and ideas in the delivery of education and, most importantly, enhance the learning options and convenience for our own students."
Georgia Tech’s initial courses include Computational Photography, Computational Investing, Energy 101, Control of Mobile Robots and Fundamentals of Online Education. The Institute plans to add online courses across a range of disciplines to the online platform.
"The technological sophistication and expectations of today's college students drastically outpace their institutions," said Rich DeMillo, director of Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities. "By embracing innovators such as Coursera, who are the vanguard for the oncoming technological revolution, universities can not only improve student access to course content, but also fundamentally change core value structures such as student recruitment and retention, degree customization, and overall productivity and efficiency."
Georgia Tech Dean of Professional Education Nelson Baker also noted, “We are empowering people to learn, and are connecting and expanding our global learning community to meet the evolving needs of students worldwide. By adding courses via Coursera, we are further supporting an individual’s quest for wanting to be more competitive and competent whether that is in their studies at a university, in their place of employment or just to be members of an educated society.”
Other institutions partnering with Coursera are the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, UC San Francisco, University of Edinburgh, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, University of Virginia and the University of Washington.
“Coursera is dedicated to creating better educational opportunities inside and outside the classroom, and we could not do it without the blessing and commitment of universities,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. “We’re fortunate to have the support of these highly respected academic institutions as we move toward our shared goal of providing a high-quality education to everyone around the world.”
To date, Coursera has seen more than 680,000 students from 190 countries and more than 1.55 million course enrollments across its 43 courses.
About Coursera
Coursera is on a mission to change the world by educating millions of people by offering classes from top universities and professors online for free. Coursera's comprehensive education platform combines mastery-based learning principles with video lectures, interactive content and a global community of peers, offering students from around the world a unique online learning experience. Coursera has partnered with top-tier universities to provide courses across a broad range of disciplines, including medicine, literature, history and computer science, among others. Coursera is backed by leading venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates. For more information, visit Coursera.org.
Hosted by the Atlanta Pediatric Device Consortium (APDC), the event will give out several awards ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on the device and its stage of development. Devices should be targeted to the pediatric population and will be divided into four age groups, ranging from birth to age 21.
Applicants should submit two-page proposals for their devices by Wednesday, Aug. 1, at 3 p.m. to Jenny Taylor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. More information, including submission guidelines, is available at www.pediatricdevicesatlanta.org/competition. Submissions are welcome from all faculty, entrepreneurs, clinicians, fellows, residents and students from any institution.
Those interested in attending but not submitting entries may RSVP to the event online. The competition is free to attend, includes a complimentary breakfast and will take place at the Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Biosciences (IBB) Building.
APDC was launched last year with a two-year, $1.8 million grant from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to encourage the development of medical devices tailored to the needs of children, with the plan of taking the devices from conception to commercialization.
]]>The I-Corps program connects NSF-funded scientific research with the technological, entrepreneurial and business communities to help create a stronger innovation ecosystem that couples scientific discovery with technology development and societal needs. Leveraging experience and guidance from established entrepreneurs and a targeted curriculum, I-Corps attendees learn to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research.
Beyond Georgia Tech, the NSF will also establish an I-Corps network node at the University of Michigan. By adding these two institutions to its I-Corps program – which began at Stanford University – the NSF will replicate the I-Corps curriculum across the country and begin creating a national network to identify emerging technology concepts that have potential to transition into economically viable products.
“One of Georgia Tech’s strengths is its ability to provide the links needed to help move scientific research quickly from the lab to products coming off the manufacturing floor,” said G. P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Tech. “We are honored to partner with NSF in expanding I-Corps’ ability to help the entrepreneurial and business communities and boost economic growth.”
With a three-year, $1.5 million grant, Georgia Tech will research, analyze and leverage data from the I-Corps program to develop an understanding of how academic institutions can improve support for innovation ecosystems and how the I-Corps network can enable new collaborations in geographic regions to support commercialization opportunities. Georgia Tech will also teach the I-Corps curriculum to cohorts of NSF-designated teams from around the United States.
“Through our translation-friendly technology transfer policies and our 11-year-old VentureLab program, Georgia Tech has built a repeatable process for successfully generating new companies from research at the university,” said Stephen Fleming, a Georgia Tech vice president and executive director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute. “Now we will be able to share with participants of the NSF I-Corps program our experience and commitment to developing best practices in the science of vetting ideas for their suitability to be successful startups.”
One of two seven-week summer 2012 I-Corps classes began July 9 at Georgia Tech and the fall class will begin at Georgia Tech on Oct. 1, 2012. Spanning a broad range of potential products and research areas, the 27 teams in the summer class are participating in a specially designed training curriculum, obtaining guidance and mentoring from private- and public-sector experts – including technology developers, business leaders and venture capitalists. They have received $50,000 grants to begin assessing the commercial readiness of their technology concepts.
Beth Mynatt, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, and Ioannis Brilakis, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Building Construction and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, have previously participated as principal investigators in the I-Corps program.
“The I-Corps program provides a critical missing piece for a university committed to translating research insights into commercial innovations,” said Mynatt. “Working in three-person teams that included research expertise, entrepreneurial focus and business mentorship provided us with a focus on identifying commercial value. The method to the madness is testing ‘hypotheses’ of possible value instead of trying to build a fictitious business model. The best teams ‘pivot’ rapidly by testing these hypotheses and focusing on specific opportunities.”
Mynatt led a team developing “SmartMenu,” an online tool for helping diners choose the best meals for their specific needs. “We honed our product ideas and made numerous discoveries along the way,” she added. “Access to business mentors in the program was invaluable and resulted in a number of important introductions.”
The Georgia Tech I-Corps network node will expand the NSF’s cadre of innovation experts that are mentoring on effective practices for leveraging outcomes of basic research.
“Academic researchers already have many skills valuable for success in business, such as critical thinking, teamwork and an ability to move in a new direction and learn when a hypothesis proves false,” says Errol Arkilic, NSF program director for I-Corps. “The NSF I-Corps builds upon that expertise, introducing researchers to the business community and teaching them to seek, and speak to, the needs of potential customers.”
Nearly 50 teams – composed of academic researchers, student entrepreneurs (undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs), and business mentors – have participated so far in the six-month I-Corps program. The curriculum is a hypothesis-based approach to assessing technological readiness that combines two site-based short courses, extensive online coaching, and hands-on outreach to potential customers. I-Corps merges the structured coursework with guidance from NSF program officers and leading entrepreneurs who have committed their time to the program.
The Innovation Corps is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the Deshpande Foundation. For more information, see: www.nsf.gov/i-corps.
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]]>The PCAST report is a product of its Advanced Manufacturing Partnership Steering Committee, whose membership includes leading manufacturing experts from industry and academia.
“Research universities play a critical role in helping to ensure that more young people are aware of and prepared for careers in science and engineering, and in partnering with industry and government to move innovations quickly to the manufacturing floor,” said G. P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Tech and AMP steering committee member. “We look forward to even greater collaboration as we work to strengthen America’s economy and create jobs.”
The report details the unique role that manufacturing plays in the broader U.S. economy – as a direct source of jobs, as a spur to additional jobs across the economy, and as an important force for addressing the nation’s trade deficit.
Most importantly, the report reveals that the nation’s continued strength in innovation depends on sustaining a close, two-way connection between the innovation and manufacturing processes.
“Proximity to the manufacturing process creates innovation spillovers across firms and industries, leading to the ideas and capabilities that support the next generation of products and processes,” the report notes. “In this way, a vibrant manufacturing sector is inextricably linked to our capacity as a nation to innovate.”
]]>The plan will recommend ways that the county can take advantage of its many economic development strengths, including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport; transportation and logistics assets such as access to air transportation, an extensive rail network, and Interstate highway connections; location at the center of the metropolitan Atlanta area; a strong core of established industry; a growing four-year public university, and a water system with sufficient capacity.
“What stands out about Clayton County is its strong future potential,” said Jason Chernock, project manager with the Community Innovation Services group at Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute. “The county has all of the physical pieces for economic development. It needs a unifying vision, strategic plan and consensus on how to implement the plan. Our job will be to bring people together to find the common ground.”
The county’s last comprehensive economic development plan was produced more than a decade ago, and a lot has changed since then. Like many communities, Clayton County has faced the loss of jobs from the recession, a slowdown in development and declining real estate values.
“This will be a comprehensive strategic planning process that will involve a lot of research, a lot of public engagement, a lot of interaction with community leaders, and the facilitation of a plan,” Chernock explained. “The plan will include everything from mission and vision statements, goals and objectives, benchmarks, to information on roles and responsibilities.”
A steering committee will guide the effort, led by co-chairs Yulonda Beauford, president and CEO of the Clayton County Chamber of Commerce, and Larry Vincent, chairman of the Development Authority of Clayton County. The committee will include representatives from county’s municipalities, as well as numerous private- and public-sector entities that will play a role in the county’s future economic development. The planning process will also include an opportunity for public input.
Also represented on the steering committee is Clayton State University, a unit of the University System of Georgia with approximately 7,000 students and nearly 200 full-time faculty members.
“As a comprehensive, publicly-supported university, we believe Clayton State must serve as a steward of place,” said Thomas Hynes, president of Clayton State University. “Whether through contributing to a more educated workforce; sharing faculty and student knowledge resources in management, small business and entrepreneurship, logistics, health care, archival research; or advancing the arts and social sciences, this economic analysis will help our shared work in the county and the region.”
The eight-step planning process will include facilitating a steering committee, organizing a kick-off meeting, reviewing recent initiatives, interviewing stakeholders, hosting community forums, engaging Clayton State University, performing a target industry analysis, and developing the strategic plan. The work is expected to be completed by the end of calendar 2012.
“The development of this strategic plan is a positive step forward for economic growth and prosperity in Clayton County,” said Yulonda Beauford, president and CEO of the Clayton County Chamber of Commerce. “This process will be collaborative and involve all sectors of the community. By working together, we will strengthen our business competitiveness and future sustainability for our county.”
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]]>For the first time, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have demonstrated that microneedles less than a millimeter in length can deliver drug molecules and particles to the eye in an animal model. The injection targeted the suprachoroidal space of the eye, which provides a natural passageway for drug injected across the white part (sclera) of the eye to flow along the eye’s inner surface and subsequently into the back of the eye. The minimally-invasive technique could represent a significant improvement over conventional methods that inject drugs into the center of the eye – or use eyedrops, which have limited effectiveness in treating many diseases.
The study was reported in the July issue of the journal Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science. The research was supported by the National Eye Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, and by the organization Research to Prevent Blindness.
“This research could lead to a simple and safe procedure that offers doctors a better way to target drugs to specific locations in the eye,” said Samirkumar Patel, the paper’s first author and a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech when the research was conducted. “The design and simplicity of the microneedle device may make it more likely to be used in the clinic as a way to administer drug formulations into the suprachoroidal space that surrounds the eye.”
Patel, who is now director of research for Clearside Biomedical – a startup company formed to commercialize the technology – said the study also showed that the suprachoroidal space could accommodate a variety of drugs and microparticles. That could open the door for the use of timed-release drugs that could reduce the need for frequent injections to treat chronic eye diseases.
The suprachoroidal space is located between two important structures in the eye: the sclera and the choroid. Fluids injected into that space travel circumferentially around the eye, which flows drug solution directly over the choroid and adjacent retina – which are the targets for many drug compounds. The new study showed that injections of fluids containing molecules and particles into that space not only reach the targeted structures, but also remain there for extended time periods. And equally important, the molecules and particles do not significantly reach the lens or front part of the eye, where side effects from drugs can occur.
“The study showed that if we inject non-degradable particles into the suprachoroidal space and wait as long as two months, the particles remain,” said Mark Prausnitz, a Regents professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “That means there is no natural mechanism to remove the particles from the eye. Knowing this, we can design biodegradable particles with drugs encapsulated in them that can slowly release those drugs over a period of time that we could control.”
Currently, doctors typically have two choices for administering drugs to the eye: eye drops and injection with a traditional hypodermic needle into the vitreous at the center of the eye. While injections into the vitreous do reach their target, they also affect other portions of the eye where the drug may not be desirable. Eye drops, which are simple to use, often fail to reach the structures being targeted, Prausnitz said.
Henry Edelhauser, a professor of ophthalmology at Emory School of Medicine, said pharmaceutical companies are now developing new compounds to treat eye diseases. Those drugs will be most effective if they can be delivered directly to the portion of the eye that requires treatment, such as the choroid and retina that this new delivery method targets.
“With this technique, we are keeping the drug right where it needs to be for most therapies of interest in the back of the eye,” he said.
The microneedles used in the technique are made of stainless steel and are less than one millimeter long. The researchers believe that they will cause less trauma to the eye than the larger hypodermic needles, and reduce the risk of infection.
The model compounds used in this study fluoresced inside the eye, showing researchers that they had reached their targets. But the compounds studied were not drugs, so the next step, according to Edelhauser, will be to study how well the microneedle technique can get real drugs to the eye structures of interest.
The technology has been licensed to an Atlanta-based startup, Clearside Biomedical, which plans to advance the micro-injection technology developed in collaboration between the research groups of Mark Prausnitz at Georgia Tech and Henry Edelhauser at Emory.
Clearside Biomedical was formed with the assistance of Georgia Tech’s VentureLab program, which helped obtain early-stage seed funding from the Georgia Research Alliance. Clearside has received $4 million in funding mostly from Hatteras Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Durham, N.C.
In addition to those already mentioned, the study involved Damian Berezovsky and Bernard McCarey from the Emory Eye Center in the Emory University School of Medicine, and Vladimir Zarnitsyn from the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Development of the intraocular microneedle demonstrates the strength of collaboration between researchers at Emory University and Georgia Tech.
“This project leveraged the skills of both institutions and came up with a solution that we could never have developed independently,” Prausnitz said. “With support from the National Institutes of Health, we have developed a solution that could give patients with eye diseases the medication they need in a more effective way.”
Henry Edelhauser, Samirkumar Patel, Mark Prausnitz, Vladimir Zarnitsyn, Emory University and Georgia Tech have financial interests in Clearside Biomedical and its ocular platform. Edelhauser, Patel, Prausnitz and Zarnitsyn own equity in Clearside and the terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by Emory University or Georgia Tech in accordance with their conflict of interest policies.
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]]>According to the White House, the PECASE awards embody the high priority the Obama Administration places on producing outstanding scientists and engineers to advance the nation’s goals, tackle grand challenges and contribute to the American economy.
“My interests and accomplishments are shaped by the ethos of my family, friends and all of those who have supported and encouraged me,” said Cola, who is the director of the NanoEngineered Systems and Transport Lab (NEST). “I am thrilled to have an opportunity to represent them on this national stage. I feel honored to be considered in this group and to be able to share our discoveries of new ways to improve the conversion of waste heat to electricity with a wider audience. “
“Receiving this award is a tremendous honor,” said Duffy. “ One thing I love about my research is that it combines a lot of different approaches – for example, we go out in the field and get muddy, but then also come back to the lab and use advanced molecular techniques to study these parasites. And the goal of all of that is to answer questions that I think are really important, such as what allows disease outbreaks to occur?"
Awardees are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education or community outreach.
According to the White House, Cola was selected for his outstanding research on energy conversion, nanoscale transport and materials; and for significant outreach and educational activities involving K-12 science and art students and teachers from disadvantaged minority communities.
Cola believes that with jobs and energy arguably at the center of public discourse right now that his research on nanoengineered energy technologies is highly relevant, thus the possibilities are very exciting.
“The challenges and opportunities of nanoscience and nanoengineering have attracted many great minds to these fields, which makes interactions with students and colleagues within the community very rewarding personally,” said Cola. “Most of all, I have found that the mix of energy and nanoengineering has opened wide the door to a multifaceted life as a teacher-researcher-entrepreneur, which is exactly where I want to be right now. “
The White House also noted that Duffy was selected for her research on rapid evolution of host-parasite interactions and in creating educational opportunities for college students in underrepresented minority groups and inner-city K-12 students in Atlanta.
“My lab has begun to do work on parasites that can infect multiple host species, which are known as multihost parasites,” said Duffy. “The system I work on allows us to study these parasites in natural settings, as well as do manipulative experiments on them in the lab, which is a rare and powerful combination. We're hoping to figure out things like how parasites jump from one host to another, and the challenges they need to overcome in order to infect multiple host species.”
]]>The technique might initially be used to supply carbon dioxide for such industrial applications as fuel production from algae or enhanced oil recovery. But the method could later be used to supplement the capture of CO2 from power plant flue gases as part of efforts to reduce concentrations of the atmospheric warming chemical.
In a detailed economic feasibility study, the researchers projected that a CO2 removal unit the size of an ocean shipping container could extract approximately a thousand tons of the gas per year with operating costs of approximately $100 per ton. The researchers also reported on advances in adsorbent materials for selectively capturing carbon dioxide.
“Even if we removed CO2 from all the flue gas, we’d still only get a portion of the carbon dioxide emitted each year,” noted David Sholl, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. “If we want to make deep cuts in emissions, we’ll have to do more – and air capture is one option for doing that.”
The Georgia Tech research into air capture techniques was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Papers describing the economic analysis and new adsorbent materials were published in the journals ChemSusChem, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Carbon dioxide from large sources such as coal-burning power plants or chemical facilities account for less than half the worldwide emissions of the gas, noted Christopher Jones, also a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. Much of the remaining emissions come from mobile sources such as buses, cars, planes and ships, where capture would be much more costly per ton.
Jones is collaborating with a startup company – Global Thermostat – to establish a pilot plant to demonstrate the direct air capture technique. The technology for capturing carbon dioxide from the air would be similar to that required for removing the gas from smokestack emissions, though CO2 concentrations in flue gases are dramatically higher than those in the atmosphere.
Flue gases contain about 15 percent carbon dioxide, while CO2 is found in the atmosphere at less than 400 parts per million. That’s a factor of 375, notes Sholl, who said the difference in capture efficiency could be partially made up by eliminating the need to transport CO2 removed from flue gas to sequestration locations.
“Because the atmosphere is generally consistent, you could operate the capture equipment wherever you had a sequestration site,” he said. “I don’t think air capture will ever produce carbon dioxide as cheaply as capturing it from flue gas. But on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be wildly more expensive, either.”
Based on his work with Global Thermostat, Jones believes that the costs of an optimized process will prove to be even lower than the estimates of Sholl’s team. “Sholl’s paper is important because it shows that direct capture of CO2 from the air can be up to ten times less expensive than had been estimated by others,” he said. “Process improvements based on their initial modeling study could bring costs down even further.”
In its economic analysis, Sholl’s team considered all of the energy that would have to be put into the capture process. The cost estimates did not include the capital cost of establishing the capture facilities because the technology is still too new for reliable projections.
The batch extraction process modeled by the Georgia Tech team involves blowing air through a ceramic honeycomb structure coated with dry amino-modified silica material to capture the CO2, then flowing steam through the structure to release the gas. The technique could produce carbon dioxide that is roughly 90 percent pure.
“The technical challenges are similar to those of flue gas capture: demonstration at scale, demonstration of long-term adsorbent stability and demonstration of process feasibility and stability,” Jones said. “Increased funding for air capture work is needed, because most of the funding invested in carbon capture over the past decade has been directed at flue gas capture.”
Sholl and Jones have also been contributing to work on flue gas treatment, conducting research into adsorbent materials, including theoretical and experimental research into adsorbent alternatives such as metal-organic framework (MOF) materials.
Among their recent papers on direct capture of CO2 from the air are:
Jones believes air capture should be among the options developed to address global warming produced by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“Initial demonstrations of the air capture process will probably be targeted for applications that can use the carbon dioxide for commercial purposes,” Jones said. “As the technology matures, we envision implementing CO2 capture from the air as a climate stabilization strategy, in parallel with CO2 capture from flue gas and enhanced utilization of alternative energies.”
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]]>A team of surgeons and university researchers recently reported promising results from a novel surgical connection intended to streamline blood flow between the heart and lungs of such infants.
Typically, the final stage of the Fontan procedure is performed by connecting a cylindrical conduit to the pulmonary arteries, forming a ‘T’ shaped junction. In a pilot study, six patients at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta received a commercially available Y-shaped conduit for their Fontan procedure instead of the cylindrical conduit to create a smoother transition of the blood flow to the pulmonary arteries. Postoperative imaging data from the patients indicated improved blood flow distribution and similar energy efficiency when compared with computer simulations of two alternative connections the patients could have received instead of a Y-graft.
“Based on improved energy characteristics predicted by computer modeling for the Y-shaped conduit, we felt it was time to try it in the clinical realm,” said Kirk Kanter, M.D., chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and professor of surgery at Emory University School of Medicine, who performed the operations. “The pilot study revealed that surgical implementation of a Y-graft for Fontan procedures is feasible and promising because early outcome was good in these patients.”
The surgical procedure and the postoperative outcomes were detailed in two articles recently published online in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery (articles available here and here). The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.
Also involved in the study were Ajit Yoganathan, Ph.D., Regents’ professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; W. James Parks, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics and radiology at Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston; Mark A. Fogel, M.D., director of cardiac magnetic resonance at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing Professor Jarek Rossignac, Ph.D., and Coulter Department graduate student Christopher Haggerty.
The TCPC typically creates a four-way intersection. Blood from the upper half of the body enters the intersection from the top and blood from the lower body enters from the bottom. The blood flows collide and mix in the intersection before they are split and redirected 90 degrees toward the left or right pulmonary arteries. The collision of blood from the two veins at the intersection causes inefficient blood flow.
Because the blood flows passively from the body to the lungs without being pumped by the heart, it is assumed that any energy inefficiencies inherent in the construction of the Fontan pathway may translate into diminished life expectancy and quality of life.
Substituting a Y-shaped conduit should avoid the collision of blood in the intersection and enable a smooth and streamlined transition of the blood to the pulmonary arteries, which carry deoxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs.
For the pilot study, Kanter surgically implanted a commercially available Y-graft, made of a synthetic polymer called polytetrafluoroethylene, in each patient to direct flow from the lower half of the body to the left and right pulmonary arteries. This was a variation of a conduit design, called the Optiflo, which was patented by Yoganathan and colleagues for its ability to efficiently direct an even distribution of blood flow to the left and right pulmonary arteries.
After surgery, the researchers acquired magnetic resonance or computed tomography images to evaluate the operative connections. The images allowed Yoganathan and Haggerty to evaluate the hemodynamic outcomes of the surgical procedures for five of the six patients and compare them to the simulated outcomes of two alternative connections the patients could have received instead of a Y-graft.
They used the images to model blood flow through the arteries under resting and exercise conditions. These simulations assessed the robustness of each connection geometry because small inefficiencies under resting conditions may be amplified with higher flows.
Results for the patients who received the Y-graft showed balanced distribution of flow to both pulmonary arteries with minimal flow disturbance. The resistance of the vessels to blood flow at the connections varied considerably among patients, but the Y-graft results demonstrated resistance levels similar to the alternative connections in four patients and marked improvement in a fifth patient.
“We found desirable flow distribution characteristics using the Y-graft, but the flow efficiency performance fell short of the outcomes we previously predicted,” said Yoganathan. “The results suggest that the Y-graft performs as well as the standard procedure with a T-graft even when the Y-graft design is theoretically sub-optimal.”
The study allowed the researchers to identify ways of refining the surgical technique that should help them improve the theoretical efficiency of the conduit design. Before conducting future clinical trials, the research team plans to address two features of the Y-graft design that limited hemodynamic efficiency in the current study. They plan to introduce curvature to the Y-graft branches and extend the distance between the Y-graft branches to reduce continued interaction and mixing between the two blood streams.
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award numbers HL67622 and HL098252 and by a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Award from the American Heart Association (AHA) (10PRE372002). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigators and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
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]]>Key to the new control system is a piezoelectric cellular actuator that uses a novel biologically inspired technology that will allow a robot eye to move more like a real eye. This will be useful for research studies on human eye movement as well as making video feeds from robots more intuitive. The research is being conducted by Ph.D. candidate Joshua Schultz under the direction of assistant professor Jun Ueda, both from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“For a robot to be truly bio-inspired, it should possess actuation, or motion generators, with properties in common with the musculature of biological organisms,” said Schultz. “The actuators developed in our lab embody many properties in common with biological muscle, especially a cellular structure. Essentially, in the human eye muscles are controlled by neural impulses. Eventually, the actuators we are developing will be used to capture the kinematics and performance of the human eye.”
Details of the research were presented June 25, 2012, at the IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics in Rome, Italy. The research is funded by National Science Foundation. Schultz also receives partial support from the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation.
Ueda, who leads the Georgia Tech Bio-Robotics and Human Modeling Laboratory in the School of Mechanical Engineering, said this novel technology will lay the groundwork for investigating research questions in systems that possess a large number of active units operating together. The application ranges from industrial robots, medical and rehabilitation robots to intelligent assistive robots.
“Robustness against uncertainty of model and environment is crucial for robots physically interacting with humans and environments,” said Ueda. “Successful integration relies on the coordinated design of control, structure, actuators and sensors by considering the dynamic interaction among them.”
Piezoelectric materials expand or contract when electricity is applied to them, providing a way to transform input signals into motion. This principle is the basis for piezoelectric actuators that have been used in numerous applications, but use in robotics applications has been limited due to piezoelectric ceramic's minuscule displacement.
The cellular actuator concept developed by the research team was inspired by biological muscle structure that connects many small actuator units in series or in parallel.
The Georgia Tech team has developed a lightweight, high speed approach that includes a single-degree of freedom camera positioner that can be used to illustrate and understand the performance and control of biologically inspired actuator technology. This new technology uses less energy than traditional camera positioning mechanisms and is compliant for more flexibility.
“Each muscle-like actuator has a piezoelectric material and a nested hierarchical set of strain amplifying mechanisms,” said Ueda. “We are presenting a mathematical concept that can be used to predict the performance as well as select the required geometry of nested structures. We use the design of the camera positioning mechanism’s actuators to demonstrate the concepts.”
The scientists’ research shows mechanisms that can scale up the displacement of piezoelectric stacks to the range of the ocular positioning system. In the past, the piezoelectric stacks available for this purpose have been too small.
“Our research shows a two-port network model that describes compliant strain amplification mechanisms that increase the stroke length of the stacks,” said Schultz. “Our findings make a contribution to the use of piezoelectric stack devices in robotics, modeling, design and simulation of compliant mechanisms. It also advances the control of systems using a large number of motor units for a given degree of freedom and control of robotic actuators.”
In the study, the scientists sought to resolve a previous conundrum. A cable-driven eye could produce the eye’s kinematics, but rigid servomotors would not allow researchers to test the hypothesis for the neurological basis for eye motion.
Some measure of flexibility could be used in software with traditional actuators, but it depended largely on having a continuously variable control signal and it could not show how flexibility could be maintained with quantized actuation corresponding to neural recruitment phenomena.
“Each muscle-like actuator consists of a piezoelectric material and a nested hierarchical set of strain amplifying mechanisms,” said Ueda. “Unlike traditional actuators, piezoelectric cellular actuators are governed by the working principles of muscles - namely, motion results by discretely activating, or recruiting, sets of active fibers, called motor units.
“Motor units are linked by flexible tissue, which serves a two-fold function,” said Ueda. “It combines the action potential of each motor unit, and presents a compliant interface with the world, which is critical in unstructured environments.”
The Georgia Tech team has presented a camera positioner driven by a novel cellular actuator technology, using a contractile ceramic to generate motion. The team used 16 amplified piezoelectric stacks per side.
The use of multiple stacks addressed the need for more layers of amplification. The units were placed inside a rhomboidal mechanism. The work offers an analysis of the force-displacement tradeoffs involved in the actuator design and shows how to find geometry that meets the requirement of the camera positioner, said Schultz.
“The goal of scaling up piezoelectric ceramic stacks holds great potential to more accurately replicate human eye motion than previous actuators,” noted Schultz. “Future work in this area will involve implantation of this technology on a multi-degree of freedom device, applying open and closed loop control algorithms for positioning and analysis of co-contraction phenomena.”
Future research by his team will continue to focus on the development of a design framework for highly integrated robotic systems. This ranges from industrial robots to medical and rehabilitation robots to intelligent assistive robots.
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]]>The type of project sought for these awards is one where sufficient basic research has been done to indicate a technology has commercialization potential but a commitment to a commercialization path has not been made and a focused proof of concept study is required. The intent of the seed grant program is to develop a research initiative built upon strong collaborations between faculty at Georgia Tech and investigators at the GTRI.
There is no limitation on topics that can be addressed through this funding mechanism. However, successful applications must demonstrate that the problem to be studied is of significance to healthcare and that the project is translational. All applications were reviewed by TRIBES Review Committee, which was composed of clinicians, faculty, scientists and business experts.
Awards total $25,000-$40,000 direct costs per pilot project, available for one year.
2012 Competition Finalists
1. "A Sixty Minute Rapid Polymerase Chain Reaction Handheld (SMRPH)for Virus Detection in Children," PI: Craig R. Forest, PhD. Co-Investigators: Andi L. Shane, MD, MPH, MSC, and Brent Tillery, PhD.
2. "Wireless Device to Improve and Monitor Hand Sanitizer Compliance," PIs: Franklin Bost, MBA Russell McCrory, MSEE Co-Investigators: Christopher Hermann, MSME, Jana Stockwell, MD, FAAP, FCCM, and Kate Ellingson, PhD.
3. "Computational-based Optimization of Recombinant Therapeutic Uricase Production," PI: Eric Gaucher, PhD. Co-Investigators: Andrew Morris and David Landgren.
4. "Exploring Short-Range Intra-Body Communication Techniques with Very High Bandwidth for Wireless Ultrasonic Monitoring and Imaging Application," PIs: F. Levent Degertekin, PhD and Maysam Ghovanloo, PhD
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Ultimate players from across the nation vote for Callahan recipients, each listing his or her top three players while not ranking a fellow teammate first. Lance won by a two-to-one margin, and is only the fourth ever to win the Callahan award from the southeast region.
Henry Callahan, the award’s namesake, started the popular northeast sport at the University of Oregon in the 1980s, spreading it across the northwest region and gaining funding from a young Nike corporation. Callahan is considered a legend in Ultimate, also being honored with a move and the game rules in his name.
Georgia Tech Ultimate, also called “Tribe,” has been a highly competitive team in its region among teams from Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee. USA Ultimate – the governing body for club Ultimate, college and youth – administers a series of tournaments each spring season. Though Tribe has had several close attempts at competing at the national level, 2012 marked its first national appearance.
“Our performance this year was significantly aided by our experience playing other national-caliber teams,” Lance said of the tournaments that won the team a national bid.
Tribe has a team dynamic that goes beyond the Ultimate playing field. On a road trip to Austin, Texas, this year, the team created a series of team trivia questions designed to take an hour each to complete. While testing their knowledge of one another, teammates also threw out funny, hypothetical scenarios about each other, such as, “If two of our players could have a kid together, who would have the best Ultimate player?”
“It’s a great thing to do to the pass the time, have some fun, and learn more about your teammates,” said Lance.
Tribe recruits new members each fall of all skill ranges. For more information on past seasons and upcoming tryouts, visit the team’s website.
]]>The 2011 Dodge Charger Enforcer II is a high-tech police cruiser that patrols the Georgia Tech campus, Home Park, Atlantic Station, and Midtown and will have both a Georgia Tech Police officer and an Atlanta Police officer riding together.
“The cooperation and involvement of the entire Georgia Tech community - combined with partnerships between public safety organizations, other universities, businesses, and the surrounding area - remain essential ingredients in creating and maintaining a safe community for everyone,” said Georgia Tech Police Chief Teresa Crocker.
“This car’s distinctive look and high visibility will ensure that students, business owners and residents alike can rest assured that the Atlanta Police Department and Georgia Tech Police Department are true partners in preventing crime,” said Atlanta Police Chief George Turner. “These kinds of partnerships are at the heart of the APD’s mission statement of partnering with our community to reduce crime and improve the quality of life.”
The $37,000 cruiser was made possible by generous donations and a corporate-community partnership of the Midtown Alliance (and its Midtown Blue public safety program), North American Properties (managers of Atlantic Station) the Home Park Community Improvement Association, and the Atlanta Police Foundation. The Atlanta Police Foundation was instrumental in facilitating the donation. The gray car with distinctive lettering (red for Atlanta Police and gold for Georgia Tech) will be used nightly for proactive, community policing and crime-fighting purposes.
“This joint patrol is another example of innovation to ensure continued public safety in the Midtown area,” said Kevin Green, President and CEO, Midtown Alliance. “This is a unique partnership with Georgia Tech and APD and Midtown Alliance is proud to be a part of it.”
]]>The triboelectric generator could supplement power produced by nanogenerators that use the piezoelectric effect to create current from the flexing of zinc oxide nanowires. And because these triboelectric generators can be made nearly transparent, they could offer a new way to produce active sensors that might replace technology now used for touch-sensitive device displays.
“The fact that an electric charge can be produced through this principle is well known,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science & Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “What we have introduced is a gap separation technique that produces a voltage drop, which leads to a current flow, allowing the charge to be used. This generator can convert random mechanical energy from our environment into electric energy.”
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force. Details were reported in the June issue of the journal Nano Letters. In addition to Wang, authors of the paper included Feng-Ru Fan, Long Lin, Guang Zhu, Wenzhuo Wu and Rui Zhang from Georgia Tech. Fan is also affiliated with the State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces at Xiamen University in China.
The triboelectric generator operates when a sheet of polyester rubs against a sheet made of polydimethysiloxane (PDMS). The polyester tends to donate electrons, while the PDMS accepts electrons. Immediately after the polymer surfaces rub together, they are mechanically separated, creating an air gap that isolates the charge on the PDMS surface and forms a dipole moment.
If an electrical load is then connected between the two surfaces, a small current will flow to equalize the charge potential. By continuously rubbing the surfaces together and then quickly separating them, the generator can provide a small alternating current. An external deformation is used to press the surfaces together and slide them to create the rubbing motion.
“For this to work, you have to use to two different kinds of materials to create the different electrodes,” Wang explained. “If you rub together surfaces made from the same material, you don’t get the charge differential.”
The technique could also be used to create a very sensitive self-powered active pressure sensor for potential use with organic electronic or opto-electronic systems. The force from a feather or water droplet touching the surface of the triboelectric generator produces a small current that can be detected to indicate the contact. The sensors can detect pressure as low as about 13 millipascals.
Because the devices can be made approximately 75 percent transparent, they could potentially be used in touch screens to replace existing sensors. “Transparent generators can be fabricated on virtually any surface,” said Wang. “This technique could be used to create very sensitive transparent sensors that would not require power from a device’s battery.”
While smooth surfaces rubbing together do generate charge, Wang and his research team have increased the current production by using micro-patterned surfaces. They studied three different types of surface patterning – lines, cubes and pyramids – and found that placing pyramid shapes on one of the rubbing surfaces generated the most electrical current: as much as 18 volts at about 0.13 microamps per square centimeter.
Wang said the patterning enhanced the generating capacity by boosting the amount of charge formed, improving capacitance change due to the air voids created between the patterns, and by facilitating charge separation.
To fabricate the triboelectric generators, the researchers began by creating a mold from a silicon wafer on which the friction-enhancing patterns are formed using traditional photolithography and either a dry or wet etching process. The molds, in which the features of the patterns are formed in recess, were then treated with a chemical to prevent the PDMS from sticking.
The liquid PDMS elastomer and cross-linker were then mixed and spin-coated onto the mold, and after thermal curing, peeled off as a thin film. The PDMS film with patterning was then fixed onto an electrode surface made of indium tin oxide (ITO) coated with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) by a thin PDMS bonding layer. The entire structure was then covered with another ITO-coated PET film to form a sandwich structure.
“The entire preparation process is simple and low cost, making it possible to be scaled up for large scale production and practical applications,” Wang said.
The generators are robust, continuing to produce current even after days of use – and more than 100,000 cycles of operation, Wang said. The next step in the research will be to create systems that include storage mechanisms for the current generated.
“Friction is everywhere, so this principle could be used in a lot of applications,” Wang added. “We are combining our earlier nanogenerator and this new triboelectric generator for complementary purposes. The triboelectric generator won’t replace the zinc oxide nanogenerator, but it has its own unique advantages that will allow us to use them in parallel.”
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]]>The North Avenue Dining Hall earned the honor for the enhancements its sustainable design elements have brought to the intersection of North Avenue and Centennial Olympic Park Drive/Techwood Drive.
The “addition of the dining hall creates a vibrant street wall and the public space at the corner,” said a statement from the UDC. "While delightful now, [it] will improve with age as the trees create a ceiling for the well-placed outdoor room.” Prior to these changes, the building’s street presence was described as “less than welcoming.”
The dining hall, which opened to campus in the fall of 2011, was the first new dining hall to open on campus since Woodruff’s opening on west campus in 1985. On average, North Avenue serves more than 12,000 students per week during the spring and fall semesters. Meal choices include traditional dining hall fare of pizza, burgers and sandwiches, as well as more expansive options such as pho, world fare and a chef’s station.
Originally built to house athletes for the 1996 Olympic games, the North Avenue Apartments became part of Georgia Tech housing in 2007. The area now home to the dining hall previously housed other external dining establishments.
]]>A water oak tree on the south end of Tech Green will be removed on Saturday, July 14, after fighting a losing battle against the Asian ambrosia beetle.
Landscaping employees noticed the tree exhibiting signs of distress the first week of June, at which point a certified arborist from the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) was brought in to evaluate its status. On June 26, the ISA reported that the tree had been infested, with no known cure to treat the stubborn insect dwellers.
The female Asian ambrosia beetle infests trees in the spring by boring into them and depositing eggs, leaving a deposit of fungus on which her larvae will feed. The hatched larvae eventually pupate and become adult females that further cultivate the fungus, causing the tree to wilt and die. The beetles can sense a vulnerable tree from nearly a mile away, meaning they could have come from somewhere off campus to inhabit the Tech Green tree.
Trees affected by the beetle’s infestations often exhibit drooping leaves with a reddish or purplish discoloration. In this case, many wilted leaves on the tree exhibit a reddish-brown color.
“We are in the process of having tree specialists come and treat the trees in the area of the infested trees so they will be protected,” said Warren Page, director of facilities operations and maintenance. An additional tree at the corner of Hemphill Avenue and Ferst Drive is also infested. These two trees are the first experiences Facilities has had with mature trees being infested.
Though not the oldest, the tree on Tech Green is one of the older ones on campus. Both it and the one at Hemphill and Ferst will be gone but not forgotten, as new trees will be planted in their place.
“It is our policy to place new young trees around campus when trees have to be removed,” Page said. However, replacement trees will not be planted right away, as the summer season is not ideal for trees to take root.
]]>Kristen Shaw
Communications and Marketing
Georgia Tech’s economic impact was the largest among the University System of Georgia (USG) institutions.
The FY 2011 study found that Georgia’s public university system generated nearly 132,000 jobs, or more than 3 percent of all the nonfarm jobs that exist in Georgia. The bottom line is that one job out of every 29 in the state of Georgia is due to the University System.
The full study with data for all 35 USG institutions is available at: http://www.usg.edu/economic_development/documents/PS-USGImpact2011.pdf
]]>The ongoing investigation has revealed that the two suspects were seen at the BP gas station on North Avenue, along with a female in their GMC Suburban vehicle, shortly before coming onto Georgia Tech’s campus to rob the victim. According to police, the suspects parked their vehicle at the gas station before walking toward campus.
The two men entered North Avenue Apartments East by tailgating behind a resident. Once in the residence hall, they went to the top floor staying close to stairways for quick exit routes.
The suspects entered an apartment suite on the seventh floor and surprised a resident who was sleeping in a room with the door open. The two men drew a gun and stole a laptop, cell phone and wallet. No one was injured.
The first suspect is described as a black male in his late teens to early twenties wearing a white shirt and red basketball shorts and armed with a handgun. The second suspect is described as a black male in his late teens to early twenties with short dreadlocks and wearing a black hat, jeans and a black backpack.
Anyone who recognizes these two men, the Suburban vehicle or the female is asked to call Atlanta Crime Stoppers at 404-577-TIPS. Callers can remain anonymous and may be eligible for a reward, police said.
]]>The rides complement the Georgia Tech Woodruff Arts Student Pass, a $20 offer that provides unlimited access to the High Museum of Art and may be used to reserve tickets for the Alliance Theatre and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
“The shuttles provide a great, safe and easy way for students to get to the Woodruff Arts Center every week,” said Merry Hunter Hipp, a fourth-year public policy major and vice president of External Affairs for the Undergraduate Student Government Association (SGA). “SGA is excited to continue our successful partnership with Woodruff Arts Center. We hope that this new initiative will bring more students to the center each week, as well as to the annual Georgia Tech Woodruff Arts Nights.” The fall Georgia Tech night at Woodruff will be Thursday, Sept. 27.
Student passes, which also include invitations to special members-only events and prizes throughout the semester, are on sale at the Georgia Tech Ticket Office.
Written by Institute Communications student assistant Vett Vandiver.
]]>If you are interested in joining the Earth Day Planning Committee, please join us on Tuesday, Oct. 23 (11 a.m. to noon) in the Crescent Room at the Student Center Commons.
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