For the past six years, multidisciplinary researchers from across the world have been probing northern Minnesota peat bogs in an unprecedented, long-range study of climate change supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. They set out to answer complex questions, including one big one – will future warming somehow release 10,000 years of accumulated carbon from peatlands that store a large portion of earth’s terrestrial carbon?
So the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) partnered with the USDA Forest Service to develop a one-of-its-kind field lab in the Marcel Experimental Forest, where below and above ground heating elements are gradually warming the bog in greenhouse-like enclosures big enough to include trees. The enclosures are roofless so that rain and snow can get in.
It’s called the SPRUCE (Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments) experiment, and it was designed as a window into what would happen to peat bogs in a warmer world. A recent study, headed by Georgia Institute of Technology microbiologist Joel Kostka and published June 14 in the journal PNAS, provides a sobering outlook.
“The real concern and one of the major conclusions of this paper is that the ecosystem we’re studying is becoming more methanogenic,” said Kostka, professor and associate chair of research in the School of Biological Sciences, who holds a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and focuses on microbial ecology. “In other words, the warmed bog is enhancing the rate of methane production faster than that for carbon dioxide. This is what we think is going to happen in a warming world, based on our results.”
Testy Little Process
Methanogens are microbes that produce methane, a harmful greenhouse gas that traps up to 30 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Warming the peatland, the researchers found, basically creates a methane production line.
“This occurs because the plant community changes in response to warmer temperatures – mosses decrease and vascular plants increase,” said the paper’s lead author, Rachel Wilson, a researcher with Florida State University’s Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science, where she works in the lab of professor Jeff Chanton, co-author and co-principal investigator of the study.
The process forms a complete cycle: Vascular plants – shrubs and grass-like plants – produce more simple sugars, which are broken down by fermentative bacteria, and the breakdown products then fuel methane-producing microbes use to produce more methane.
While peatlands comprise just 3 percent of the Earth’s landmass, they store about one-third of the planet’s soil carbon. The thinking goes, as global temperatures rise, microbes could break into the carbon bank and the resulting decomposition of the ancient, combustible plant biomass would lead to increased levels of carbon dioxide and methane being released into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.
“Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,” said Wilson. “Warming the climate stimulates methane production, which will contribute to more warming in a positive feedback loop.”
It’s a scenario that Chanton called, “a critical ecosystem shift. Peat soils that have been stable for thousands of years are giving up the ghost, so to speak. It’s a testy little process.”
Delayed Response
That unpleasant outcome is being delayed somewhat by the extreme conditions found in many peat bogs around the world, including at the SPRUCE experiment site.
“Although most peatlands are in northern regions undergoing some of the most rapid warming on the planet, we’re talking about generally cold, acidic soils where there’s no oxygen,” Kostka noted. “Methanogens grow really slowly under these extreme conditions. We do see their activity increasing with warming, but they’re not yet growing that fast.”
He has a good idea of what could happen, though. Several years ago, Kostka took soil samples from the Minnesota site and tested them in his lab at Georgia Tech, exaggerating the temperature to a much greater degree than would be possible in a large-scale experiment like SPRUCE.
Raising the temperature by 20 degrees Celsius, about twice the temperature range used in the field experiment, “we saw huge increases in methane and large changes in the microbes that break down soil carbon into greenhouse gases,” he said.
It's a sped-up version of what they’re seeing in the field where the research team, Kostka explained, “and it is just beginning to scratch the surface of the changes we’re seeing in this ecosystem.”
Next Chapter
The SPRUCE site experiment involves two kinds of treatment, warming and also elevated carbon dioxide. The warming treatment started in 2014. All of the data sets for the PNAS paper are from 2016. The elevated carbon dioxide treatment began in the final days of data collection, so it wasn’t particularly relevant for this study. “Going forward, we’re thinking the effects of elevated carbon dioxide will be one potential future story to tell,” Kostka said. “This is a long-term experiment and many of these large scale climate change field experiments do not observe substantial changes to microbial communities until 10 years after they start.”
Ultimately, SPRUCE experimental activity is designed and intended to develop a quantitative mechanistic understanding of carbon cycling processes, according to Paul Hanson, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist leading the long-range project as principal investigator.
“SPRUCE provides experimental insights for a broad range of plausible future warming conditions for an established peatland ecosystem, combined with or without elevated carbon dioxide,” Hanson said.
So far, the evidence is pointing to a grim possibility: Warming enhances the production of carbon substrates from plants, stimulating microbial activity and greenhouse gas production, possibly leading to amplified climate-peatland feedbacks. Think, gasoline on a fire.
“That would be the worst case scenario,” Kostka said. “We don’t really know yet how plants and microbes will exchange carbon and nutrients in a warmer world. Will that carbon be locked up by the plants and stored in the soil? Will it be respired by microbes and released as a gas?
We are just beginning to see major changes in the microbes and plants at the SPRUCE peatland. Although the first few years of the experiment indicate that a lot more methane will be released to the atmosphere, we will be looking to see if these changes are sustained over the long term.”
CITATIONS: Rachel M. Wilson, Malak M. Tfaily, Max Kolton, Eric Johnston, Caitlin Petro, Cassandra A. Zalman, Paul J. Hanson, Heino M. Heyman, Jennifer E. Kyle, David W. Hoyt, Elizabeth K. Eder, Samuel O. Purvine, Randy K. Kolka, Stephen D. Sebestyen, Natalie A. Griffiths, Christopher W. Schadt, Jason K. Keller, Scott D. Bridgham, and Jeffrey P. Chanton, and Joel E. Kostka. “Soil metabolome response to whole ecosystem warming at the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments experiment” (PNAS, June 2021) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004192118
AERIAL PHOTO: Hanson, P.J., M.B. Krassovski, and L.A. Hook. 2020. SPRUCE S1 Bog and SPRUCE Experiment Aerial Photographs. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TES SFA, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. https://doi.org/10.3334/CDIAC/spruce.012 (UAV image number 0050 collected on October 4, 2020).
RELATED LINKS:
“Soil metabolome response to whole ecosystem warming at the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments experiment”
Joel Kostka – Microbial Ecology
“Shaking a Sleeping Bog Monster” (Research Horizons)
NSF Supports Research on the Microbes in Peat Moss
ScienceMatters Podcast: Digging Up Climate Clues in Peat Moss
At the first ever CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics, held on June 10, 2021, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection at Georgia Tech (CMDI) came together virtually to discuss ecological and evolutionary perspectives on infectious disease dynamics.
“The mission of the CMDI is to transform the study and the sustainable control of microbial dynamics in contexts of human and environmental health,” notes Sam Brown, director of CMDI and professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. “In keeping with this work, the CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics brought together these scientists as neighbors in Atlanta, and as organizations committed to the research of disease prevention and control.”
“In addition to showcasing the overlapping research interests of the CMDI and the CDC, the symposium also offered members of the Georgia Tech and CDC communities an open platform to ask questions of researchers in real time, as well as an opportunity to make new connections and encourage collaboration,” says Jennifer Farrell, a Ph.D. student studying microbiology at Georgia Tech who helped organize the meeting.
Farrell shares:
The online symposium drew 178 participants from across Georgia Tech and the CDC, setting the stage for continued communication and collaboration between the two institutions. The day kicked off with opening remarks from Brown and Juliana Cyril, director of the Office of Technology and Innovation, Office of Science, CDC. Cyril and Brown each highlighted the unique relationships and collaborative potential between the two organizations.
Talks spanned pathogen systems, from the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Streptococcus pneumoniae (Rich Stanton and Davina Campbell, CDC; Pengbo Cao, CMDI; Bernie Beall, CDC), to colonization dynamics of the fungal pathogen, Candida auris (Joe Sexton, CDC), to shield immunity in SARS-CoV-2 (Adriana Lucia-Sans and Andreea Magalie, CMDI).
Talks were further divided into research themes such as biofilm control (Pablo Bravo, CMDI; Rodney Donlan, CDC; Sheyda Azimi, CMDI) and microbiomes in infection (Commander Alison Laufer-Halpin, CDC; Jennifer Farrell, CMDI).
“In line with the commitment of the CMDI to promote trainee career development, the CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics was organized and run by Center graduate students and post-doctoral scientists, and CMDI talks were presented exclusively by Center trainees,” adds Farrell. “We look forward to continuing the conversation with our CDC colleagues in the future!”
Laura Cadonati has been appointed as the new associate dean for Research in the College of Sciences (CoS) Dean’s Office at the Georgia Institute of Technology effective July 1, 2021.
Cadonati serves as a professor in the School of Physics and as director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech.
“I am delighted to welcome Laura to the CoS Dean’s Office,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair. “She is an accomplished researcher and educator whose breadth of experience will be invaluable to the College. I am looking forward to working with Laura in the years ahead on supporting and highlighting the amazing research across the College — and on the implementation of the research component of our CoS strategic plan.”
Cadonati received her Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 2001. She joined the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (CRA) at Georgia Tech in January 2015 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and was appointed director of the CRA in July 2020.
“I am honored by the trust the College of Sciences is placing in me,” Cadonati shares, “and I look forward to supporting our faculty in all the ways necessary to advance their research to new levels — and deepening our College’s scientific impact on our campus and in society as a whole.”
As associate dean for Research, Cadonati will focus on cultivating College of Sciences faculty members to develop and sustain excellence in scholarship and research, as well as creating an environment in which innovation, entrepreneurship, and public service are fundamental characteristics of graduates of the College.
She will coordinate the research enterprise and agenda for the College and its stakeholders, and will foster the College’s leadership in developing scientific solutions for a better world.
Cadonati will also focus on identifying new research opportunities, encouraging research collaborations, facilitating partnerships among faculty both within and outside of the Institute, and will execute on the College’s new strategic plan to realize our shared mission and vision.
In addition to a continued embrace of fundamental science, Cadonati will focus on cross-cutting and convergent scientific directions to guide the College’s research investments, specifically elevating the following ongoing initiatives within the six schools of the College:
- Quantum systems including quantum materials, quantum computing, and quantum information science
- Neuroscience, physics of movement, and robotics
- Microbial dynamics and infection, evolution, astrobiology, and the origins of life
- Planetary sciences and astrophysics
- Data science that harnesses machine learning and artificial intelligence to spur the data revolution in the sciences
- Climate science, biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, and global change
Cadonati’s own research interests include gravitational waves and particle astrophysics. She has published and co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, has presented a number of lectures and invited seminars, and has held leadership positions in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), including leading its data analysis and astrophysics division at the time of the discovery of gravitational waves — which led to the 2017 Nobel prize in Physics to the founders of the project. As deputy spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, she has facilitated collaborations between LIGO and its partners, including astronomers and particle observatories around the world.
Cadonati is a fellow of the American Physical Society and is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER (Faculty Early Career Development Program) award. She is an associate editor for the European Journal of Physics and also serves on several advisory boards.
In 2018, she received the Institute’s Outstanding Faculty Research Author Award, which recognizes “faculty who most contributed to highly impactful publications describing the results of research conducted at Georgia Tech during the period January 1, 2013, to December 31, 2017” for her work and achievements in ushering the era of multi-messenger gravitational-wave astronomy.
Cadonati is joined in the College of Sciences Dean’s Office by Jennifer Leavey and Carrie Shepler, who recently accepted appointments as assistant deans in the College, also effective July 1, 2021.
About the College of Sciences
The College of Sciences cultivates curiosity, encourages exploration, and fosters innovation to develop scientific solutions for a better world. Our connected community of scientists and mathematicians collaborates across disciplines and challenges to achieve excellence in science, teaching, and research. Working across six internationally ranked schools with the brightest young minds in our fields, we mentor future leaders to identify and push the frontiers of human knowledge, imagination, and innovation.
We nurture scientifically curious students by offering diverse educational and research experiences. As an internationally recognized, preeminent institution in the sciences and mathematics, we help students build empowering foundations in the sciences and mathematics — educating and preparing the next generation of scientists who will create the technologies of the future.
Most of the disciplines within our six schools — Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology — are ranked in the top 10%. We organize ourselves in multidisciplinary research neighborhoods to promote broad exchange of ideas. We also offer exciting opportunities for students to engage in research, and train with top professors in chosen fields.
Our internationally recognized senior faculty and an extraordinarily talented group of junior faculty are genuinely concerned about undergraduate and graduate education, and they bring the excitement of new discoveries in the research laboratory to the classroom. The quality of the faculty and the curriculum, combined with new state-of-the-art facilities and a low student to faculty ratio, ensure the excellent educational opportunities available to our students.
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.
As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.
Meet Julia Kubanek, Vice President of Interdisciplinary Research at Georgia Tech.
Kubanek oversees all interdisciplinary research activities including the Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRIs), Interdisciplinary Research Centers, the Pediatric Technology Center, and the Georgia Center for Medical Innovation.
What is your field of expertise and why did you choose it?
My students and I ask how living organisms communicate and interact with each other using chemistry as a language of life. We explore molecules produced by microbes, plants, and animals as words in this language, delivering messages like “don’t eat me! I taste terrible” or “yes, I’m one of your kind! mate with me” or “the surface of my body is a terrible place to land, you won’t grow well on top of me." Humans know these molecules more as antibiotics, toxins, and strange smells – but to the living organisms that produce them and those sensing these molecules in natural environments, they are an essential part of survival and reproduction.
We do most of our research in marine systems, discovering new chemical messages that affect the health of the oceans, which can also be leveraged by scientists as new medicines and solutions to environmental challenges. Some of the environmental challenges we focus on are harmful algal blooms and biofuel production. I chose this field of research because I love wilderness and am fascinated by the diversity of species on earth – including the capacity of diverse organisms to produce unusual chemicals.
What makes the way the IRIs enables campus research unique?
The IRIs provide an intellectual home for researchers who have interests in common but different backgrounds and expertise. Each IRI has members from all over our campus and we each bring a different perspective on how to get research done. We find commonality on what kinds of scientific and societal questions need to be answered and then pool our various expertise to answer those questions, through joint projects, centers, training programs, and outreach activities.
What couldn’t have happened without Georgia Tech's IRIs?
After we bring samples from the field into the lab, my research is dependent on specialized equipment, not all of which we have in our own lab. In fact, I’m glad we don’t have all that equipment in our lab because I wouldn’t be able to maintain it all or learn everything about each instrument. For my group’s research, the IRI core facilities and their personnel have been essential to gathering data from many kinds of specialized instrumentation. My students and postdocs get hands-on experience with these instruments which helps build their careers. The diverse core facilities of the IRIs and the expertise of their staff enable us to apply many kinds of experiments to solve each scientific question, rather than being focused only on one technical capability.
What impact is your interdisciplinary research having on the world?
My group’s research has enabled the discovery of several new potential drugs, including molecules that inhibit pathogens like the malaria parasite, drug-resistant bacteria, and coronaviruses. The IRIs have also helped us figure out the mechanisms by which some of these drugs work. Involvement in the IRIs has also enabled us to better understand why and how harmful algal blooms become more toxic under certain environmental conditions, which has implications for seafood safety.
What do you like to do in your spare time when you are not working on your research or teaching?
I love to hike and swim in wild places. These days, I am spending some of my time around the Smoky Mountains where I seek out wildflowers I have not seen before and to hope that I’ll get to see a bear (but not a rattlesnake). I have seen both in the last year, and the experience was simultaneously thrilling and frightening. I am an occasional volunteer with Trees Atlanta, a frequent jogger in my neighborhood, and an eager (but unskilled) yoga practitioner. My yoga teachers say there is no such thing as being bad at yoga, but I think they are just being nice to me.
A new five-year, $1.27 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will help transform the study of quantitative- and data-intensive biosciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The grant will create the Integrative and Quantitative Biosciences Accelerated Training Environment (InQuBATE) Predoctoral Training Program at Georgia Tech. InQuBATE is designed to train a new generation of biomedical researchers and thought leaders to harness the data revolution.
“We want to improve and enhance the training of students to focus on biological questions while leveraging modern tools, and in some cases developing new tools, to address foundational challenges at scales from molecules to systems,” said Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences. Weitz is co-leading the program with Peng Qiu, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Biology is undergoing a transformation, according to Weitz and Qiu, requiring a new educational paradigm that integrates quantitative approaches like computational modeling and data analytics into the experimental study of living systems.
“Our intention is to develop a training environment that instills a quantitative, data-driven mindset, integrating quantitative and data science methods into all aspects of the life science training pipeline,” added Weitz, founding director of Tech’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS).
The roots of InQuBATE go back to the fall of 2016, shortly after QBioS was launched. Weitz saw an opportunity to augment what he was teaching in his cornerstone course, Foundations of Quantitative Biosciences, in which students model living systems from the molecular level up through cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems. In doing so, students “got a brief introduction to implementing high-dimensional data analytics, visual analytics, clustering, and modern machine learning methods. But we couldn’t cover allthose topics in detail,” Weitz said.
So, he reached out to Qiu, who was teaching data analytic methods in his Machine Learning in Biosciences course: “Instead of us developing that class, we started strongly encouraging QBioS students to take Peng’s class,” Weitz said.
“For me, this was a great opportunity to work with students from the biology side who had real interests in learning data mining and machine learning, as well as students from the engineering side,” said Qiu, principal investigator in the Machine Learning and Bioinformatics Lab in Coulter BME. “We could see that it was a great learning environment and the QBioS students really excelled in the class. That gave us confidence. Now we’re building this [InQuBATE] training program, and hope it will foster even greater cross pollination.”
The training program is designed to do exactly that, bringing together students and faculty from three Georgia Tech colleges: computing, engineering, and sciences. That combination of expertise is reflected in the leadership team. In addition to principal investigators Weitz (College of Sciences) and Qiu (College of Engineering), the faculty leadership team includes Elizabeth Cherry (School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing), Eva Dyer (Coulter BME, College of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine), and Marvin Whiteley (School of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences).
The InQuBATE program will ultimately support 15 Ph.D. students over five years. The first cohort — prioritizing second-year Ph.D. students — will be selected in August. Next spring, the program will begin soliciting applications from first-year Ph.D. students.
“The program will extend the breadth of student training without adding time to the Ph.D.,” Weitz said. “For students on the engineering or computing side, InQuBATE will augment their living systems research experience. For students on the living systems side, the program will augment their training in modeling and data analytics.”
Weitz, Qiu, and their collaborators also are developing a series of semester-long and short-form (a week or less) courses that will be available to other graduate students, in addition to the InQuBATE cohorts.
“We intend to make programmatic offerings available to a broader community,” Weitz said. “In the long term, we hope InQuBATE takes on a central role in shaping the culture of integrative approaches in the study of living systems at Georgia Tech.”
Jennifer Leavey and Carrie Shepler have accepted appointments as assistant deans in the College of Sciences Dean’s Office at the Georgia Institute of Technology effective July 1, 2021.
Leavey, named assistant dean for Faculty Mentoring in the College, also serves as principal academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences, director of the Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project, and coordinator of the College’s educational activities related to science and sustainability.
"I look forward to helping faculty connect with others who will help them grow professionally and removing barriers that might be limiting their success,” Leavey shares. “I have benefitted from a number of excellent mentors in my 16 years on campus, and I hope to help others develop similar relationships."
Shepler joins the Dean’s Office as assistant dean for Teaching Effectiveness in the College, also serves as principal academic professional focusing primarily on undergraduate program initiatives in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where she has directed the first-year chemistry program and other instructional activities.
“I am so excited that the College has chosen to emphasize its educational mission through the creation of this new role,” Shepler says. “I have always identified professionally as a teacher above all else, and it is a privilege to have the opportunity to share that passion on this scale.”
Through their roles as assistant deans, Leavey and Shepler join Laura Cadonati (newly appointed associate dean of Research for the College of Sciences, also effective July 1) in cultivating faculty members to develop and sustain excellence in scholarship and research, as well as creating an environment in which innovation, entrepreneurship, and public service are fundamental characteristics of graduates of the College.
Their collaborative leadership will execute key components of the College’s new strategic plan — focused on catalyzing discovery and solutions, amplifying impact, and building communities of excellence across the workplace, education and training, and research endeavors — to realize our shared mission and vision.
"The Dean’s Office is truly excited to have Jennifer and Carrie joining our team," says Matt Baker, associate dean for Faculty Development in the College. “Their talent, experience, and enthusiasm will allow the College of Sciences to tackle important problems that we’ve never previously had the bandwidth to address.”
Meet Jennifer Leavey
After graduating from Georgia Tech with a bachelor’s in chemistry in 1995, Leavey received her Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis at Emory University. After conducting research fellowships in cellular immunology at the University of Georgia and Emory University, she joined the School of Biology (now the School of Biological Sciences) at Georgia Tech as an academic professional.
She has taken a leading role in the growth of the College of Sciences Explore Living Learning Community, serving as its faculty director. She has also developed innovative vertically-integrated projects (VIPs) including Living Building Science, which is based on the science around the Kendeda Building, and STEMComm, which promotes scientific communication through creative media about recent scientific discoveries and engineering innovations. Leavey has also served as director of the Bee-INSPIRED summer undergraduate research program at Georgia Tech.
Leavey has been recognized through a number of awards, including the Institute's Innovation in Co-curricular Education Award (2014) and the Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award (2012). She has also served as principal investigator of multiyear awards to support undergraduate experiential learning from both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Meet Carrie Shepler
Shepler received her bachelor’s in chemistry and communication arts from Georgetown College in Kentucky, and completed her Ph.D. in environmental radiochemistry at Washington State University. Before joining the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech, she held instructional roles at Washington State and at the University of Georgia as a Franklin Teaching Post-Doctoral Fellow.
Shepler is the recipient of several awards including the College’s Eric R. Immel Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016) and the Institute's Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award (2011).
"Carrie is widely recognized for her dedication to students and excellence in instruction," says David Collard, senior associate dean in the College of Sciences (CoS). "The creation of the assistant dean position to focus on teaching effectiveness has its origins in the recommendations of a CoS cohort of Provost's Teaching and Learning Fellows a couple of years ago,” he explains. “I can think of no one better than Carrie to lead the development of a robust program of peer-led review of instruction that fosters faculty development."
About the College of Sciences
The College of Sciences cultivates curiosity, encourages exploration, and fosters innovation to develop scientific solutions for a better world. Our connected community of scientists and mathematicians collaborates across disciplines and challenges to achieve excellence in science, teaching, and research. Working across six internationally ranked schools with the brightest young minds in our fields, we mentor future leaders to identify and push the frontiers of human knowledge, imagination, and innovation.
We nurture scientifically curious students by offering diverse educational and research experiences. As an internationally recognized, preeminent institution in the sciences and mathematics, we help students build empowering foundations in the sciences and mathematics — educating and preparing the next generation of scientists who will create the technologies of the future.
Most of the disciplines within our six schools — Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology — are ranked in the top 10%. We organize ourselves in multidisciplinary research neighborhoods to promote broad exchange of ideas. We also offer exciting opportunities for students to engage in research, and train with top professors in chosen fields.
Our internationally recognized senior faculty and an extraordinarily talented group of junior faculty are genuinely concerned about undergraduate and graduate education, and they bring the excitement of new discoveries in the research laboratory to the classroom. The quality of the faculty and the curriculum, combined with new state-of-the-art facilities and a low student to faculty ratio, ensure the excellent educational opportunities available to our students.
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.
As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.
Christina Ragan has been a lecturer of biology and the director of Outreach for Georgia Tech’s B.S. in Neuroscience program since only January of this year. Yet she has already won an award for her teaching because “her contributions to neuroscience education at various stages along her academic journey have been numerous and influential.”
That’s what the international Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN) organization, which supports neuroscience research and education, says in a statement announcing Ragan as the winner of its 2020 Carol Ann Paul Neuroscience Educator of the Year Award.
“I am so honored and grateful,” Ragan says. “It means so much that my own peers, who are experts in neuroscience education, nominated me for this award. It's been a very tumultuous time, not just for education but for the world, and this recognition is a nice glimmer of sunshine during an otherwise stressful time.”
One of Ragan’s contributions to neuroscience education is highlighted by one of her nominators quoted in the FUN statement: “We first connected in early 2018 through the Teaching Resources for Biological Psychology and Neuroscience Facebook page that Christina founded and continues to actively support. I have found this page to be an incredible resource that allows me and over a thousand members to connect, share, and learn about new and effective teaching techniques.”
Ragan started the Facebook page in 2015 when she was a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University. “I created the group, initially inviting my grad school friends, because there really weren't many avenues for people to get feedback and request activities and assignments for neuroscience courses,” she says. “I wanted tried and true effective assignments and the ability to discuss ideas, so that's how the page was born.” That page now has more than 1,300 members.
Ragan’s outreach activities include annual Brain Awareness Day and Week activities during the month of March. Brain Awareness is a global campaign designed to foster public enthusiasm and support for brain science, and is coordinated by the Dana Foundation. This year, Ragan organized a virtual interactive session on neuroscience for middle school students.
Ragan’s research interests include determining individual differences in the neurobiology of maternal behavior and anxiety during the postpartum period. “In her classroom, she has integrated her experiences researching maternal anxiety,” says another nominator.
Ragan has also been a research mentor for numerous students, helping many undergraduates in independent neuroscience research projects. Many of these students have received grants for their work, some have co-authored research publications, and many have presented their work at scientific conferences.
The Educator Award is given annually to a regular member or fellow of FUN in recognition of efforts related to promoting effective teaching of neuroscience at the undergraduate level. The award honors the late Carol Ann Paul from Wellesley College, an influential founder of one of the earliest undergraduate neuroscience programs, Ragan says.
“Receiving this award adds to the many awards neuroscience faculty at Georgia Tech have received, and continues to highlight the quality of education that our undergraduate students obtain in the neuroscience program.”
Ragan will co-host the inaugural Neuroscience Teaching Conference July 22-23, 2021. More information on the virtual conference can be found here.
Two researchers from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and three from the School of Biological Sciences have received promotions for their work, support, and service.
Liangjun Zhou and David Gaul, both research scientists II in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, have been promoted to the position of senior research scientist.
In the School of Biological Sciences, the following promotions have occurred:
Bartosz Ilkowski — principal research technologist (formerly senior research technologist)
Kuntal Mukerjee — senior research scientist (formerly research scientist II)
Brandy Olmer — research associate II (formerly research associate)
For Gaul, the promotion comes after spending five years as the leader of the Metabolomics/Lipidomics core in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. In that role, Gaul has taken on a leadership role in the National Institutes of Health’s Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium, which is examining the impact of that activity at the molecular level in humans and animals.
During his time with the Consortium, Gaul developed a comprehensive platform that can profile more than 600 lipids (materials in living cells that can include fatty acids, neutral fats, waxes and steroids) in a semi-quantitative fashion.
Gaul is also actively participating in research at the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization, and is collaborating with Georgia Tech and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta researchers to investigate the effects of traumatic brain injury in children.
“Gaul has shown incredible leadership in reshaping the small molecule mass spectrometry services at Georgia Tech, bringing us to a position where we are competitive at a national and international level,” says Sue Winters, administrative manager II in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Liangjun Zhao came to Georgia Tech following Ph.D. studies in enzymology at Wayne State University. M.G. Finn, professor and chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and James A. Carlos Family Chair for Pediatric Technology, says Zhao has been a leading member of the Finn Lab for five years. “In that role, his accomplishments include several outstanding papers on the genetic modification of virus-like particles (VLPs) as robust display platforms for functional molecules and as containers for active enzymes,” Finn says. “He has also created new methods for VLP evolution, and was an important contributor to Georgia Tech’s coronavirus response as a member of the team producing reagents and methods for campus-wide testing.”
Zhao is also a member of the Molecular Evolution Core Facility, responsible for creating and adapting procedures for DNA synthesis and high-throughput DNA sequencing. He has represented Georgia Tech “very well” at a Gordon Research Conference, and as a reviewer for several journals, Finn adds.
“Bartosz (Ilkowski) and I have been colleagues for eighteen years and he still amazes me with his knowledge and innovative ideas relating to anything associated with high performance computing and computing in general, all while being self-taught,” says Jessica Forness, center manager of the Center for the Study of Systems Biology. “Whether it’s water-chilled doors, optimizing computer time, density and cooling, or just helping me fix the printer, he always has an innovative solution.”
“Kuntal Mukherjee is a dedicated scientist and a good friend,” says lab manager Gary Newman. “He works hard on his research and is always able to help his coworkers. All of Kuntal’s outstanding work is the direct result of his unique perspective and immense dedication.”
Frances Diggle, a research scientist in the lab of Marvin Whiteley, shares that Brandy Olmer works remotely from Texas, supporting the Whiteley, Steve Diggle and Sam Brown labs in the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection. Olmer assists with administrative systems, along with submitting grants, tracking funding, hiring, and organizing marketing events. “She is incredibly knowledgeable and a pleasure to work with," notes Frances Diggle. "She’s always willing to help and find ways to make things happen." Olmer also was responsible for coordinating the "This Week in Microbiology" (TWiM) podcast recording on campus in October 2019.
“The work of research faculty is critical to the school’s mission to fuel scientific discovery,” adds Todd Streelman, professor and chair of the School of Biological Sciences. “We’re very proud of our candidates promoted this year.”
Two charitable foundations have announced their support of research at the Georgia Institute of Technology that could change the basic understanding of DNA, potentially leading to new treatments for degenerative diseases.
The W.M. Keck Foundation and the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation have awarded grants of $1 million and $300,000, respectively, to boost the research of Francesca Storici, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and principal investigator for the projects. Both grants are directed toward decrypting the hidden message of ribonucleotide incorporation in human nuclear DNA.
“We have a lot to learn about the role ribonucleotides play in the structure and function of human DNA,” said Storici, also a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, whose lab already has contributed much to what the world knows about ribonucleotides, or rNMPs – the basic building blocks of RNA – when they are embedded in DNA.
Storici and her collaborators have developed new tools and techniques to find and characterize rNMPs in DNA. Their studies of yeast DNA suggest that rNMPs aren’t just random “noise,” as had been previously alleged, but rather offer a code – Storici and her colleagues call it “cryptic language,” capable of regulating DNA functions.
The grants will help researchers begin to translate that cryptic language.
“These ribonucleotides may represent novel biomarkers for human diseases such as cancer and other degenerative disorders,” Storici said.
Mistaken Replication
For an organism to grow, its cells must divide. For a cell to divide, its DNA must replicate. In humans, nearly 2 trillion cells divide every day. DNA polymerases, enzymes that facilitate DNA replication, mis-incorporate – or incorporate – rNMPs. These embedded rNMPs are known for changing the character of DNA and posing a threat to genomic stability.
Storici’s lab developed and tested a technique called ribose-seq that let them determine the whole profile of rNMPs incorporated into yeast DNA. Using ribose-seq, they discovered hot spots and patterns where rNMP insertions accumulate – accumulations that were assumed to be random noise.
Based on their recent findings, the researchers hypothesize that some rNMPs form specific motifs, or cryptic words, in human DNA, comprising previously hidden signals for specific metabolic functions of DNA, such as gene expression and replication.
“We don’t think this cryptic language of ribonucleotides is random. So, our goal is to decode the cryptic language,” Storici said. “Currently, we know nothing about that. There may be a particular sequence, or patterns of regularity that we can identify.”
Using ribose-seq to map rNMPs in DNA, via next-generation sequencing, and a computational toolkit they developed called Ribose-Map, the Storici team will build libraries of rNMP sites from a number of human cell types.
Through bioinformatic analyses and computational methods, they intend to identify and decipher the cryptic words of rNMP incorporation, “setting the stage to discover rNMPs’ role,” Storici said.
The foundations are both supporting the same scope of work, but at different scales, and the researchers will work with different human cell lines for each grant.
The Mathers Foundation will cover work with the Storici lab only. The Keck Foundation is supporting a collaborative effort between Storici and Natasha Jonoska, professor of mathematics at the University of South Florida. Both Storici and Jonoska are founding members of the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology.
“Through the combination of our molecular biology tools at Georgia Tech, with Natasha’s mathematical expertise in modeling and data analysis, there is great potential here for a big breakthrough – for developing a greater understanding of the biology of the human genome,” Storici said.
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About The G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation
The mission of The G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation is to advance knowledge in the life sciences by sponsoring scientific research that will benefit humankind. Basic scientific research, with potential translational application, is central to this goal. Since commencing grantmaking activities in 1982, the Mathers Foundation has granted more than $350 million. For many years, the foundation has enjoyed special recognition in the research community in supporting basic scientific research, realizing that true transformative breakthroughs usually occur after a thorough understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying natural phenomena. More recently, and with the advent of newer investigative methodologies, technology, and tools, the foundation now embraces innovative translational research proposals.
About the W.M. Keck Foundation
The W.M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 in Los Angeles by William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Company. One of the nation’s largest philanthropic organizations, the W.M. Keck Foundation supports outstanding science, engineering, and medical research. The foundation also supports undergraduate education and maintains a program within Southern California to support arts and culture, education, health, and community service projects.
About the Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.
As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.
In a fiscal year indelibly marked by the pandemic, College of Sciences researchers and students maintained high research standards despite the obstacles and restrictions of Covid-19. The result was a high rate of research study submissions during FY21 (July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021) at Georgia Tech — with some significant funding wins for the College of Sciences.
“Students used their creativity to imagine new experiments, data analyses, and modeling studies that were feasible despite our facilities being shut down fully last spring and partially throughout summer, fall, winter, and spring of 2021,” says Julia Kubanek, vice president for Interdisciplinary Research (VPIR) at Georgia Tech. “Because of the safety and effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines, we are now in a position to return more fully to lab- and field-based research. It’s energizing to once again learn from each other in collaborative research settings and to meet in person to discuss results and plan new projects.”
Kubanek, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, who served as associate dean of Research for the College of Sciences until assuming her new role as VPIR on July 1, 2021, says Georgia Tech faculty have been “heroic” in juggling remote and hybrid teaching, and remote student mentorship, while protecting health and safety in their labs. “Each faculty-led team of trainees and researchers has had to decide what works for their own projects, deferring some collaborative field and lab experiments that were unsafe during the year because we couldn’t work shoulder-to-shoulder,” she says. Faculty remained in close contact with sponsors like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, which made accommodations for project timelines and experimental design.
Faculty and students were also involved in quick pivots of their research so they could study the pandemic. Research teams launched entirely new initiatives focusing on pandemic response, vaccine development, antiviral drug discovery, Covid-19-related testing, and modeling of disease transmission.
“Students and postdoctoral researchers in the College of Sciences got to play critical roles in these projects, which brought new meaning to us regarding Georgia Tech’s mission to improve the human condition,” Kubanek says.
Here are some major research funding grants approved for the schools during FY21 in the College of Sciences, along with coordinating principal investigators and funding sources:
Modeling SARS-CoV-2, Interventions, and Impacts on Healthcare Resources (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
Joshua Weitz, Patton Distinguished Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences, is a key researcher in Georgia Tech’s response to the novel coronavirus. Weitz co-led development of a modeling tool early in the pandemic for estimating risk to those attending events of various sizes in all U.S. counties.
Exploring a Reservoir Within a Greenland Glacier, and Plumbing the Uncertainties of Sea Level Rise (Heising-Simons Foundation)
Winnie Chu, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is studying the Helheim Glacier, which could lead to more clues about climate change’s impact on losses to Greenland’s ice mass.
Neha Garg Receives NSF CAREER Award to Fight Coral Reef Disease (NSF)
Garg, an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has won an NSF CAREER award to study Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, which has already infected more than 20 species of corals off Florida’s coast.
Topology Between Dimensions Three and Four (NSF)
Led by Jennifer Hom, associate professor in the School of Mathematics
Program of Research on Multimodal Human-Machine Interfaces (Toyota Corp)
Led by Bruce Walker, professor in the School of Psychology and School of Interactive Computing
The Challenge of Predicting Rainfall in a Changing Climate (NSF)
Jie He, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has received an NSF CAREER award to unlock the uncertainty in rainfall predictions.
Giant Polymer Brushes: How Fluid-Like Hyaluronan Brushes Minimize Biofilms Adhesion (NSF)
Led by Jennifer Curtis, associate professor in the School of Physics
Characterization and Recovery of Critical Metals from Municipal Solid Waste (U.S. Department of Energy)
Led by Yuanzhi Tang, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
GLACIOME: Developing a Comprehensive Model of the Coupled Glacier-Ocean-Melange System (NSF)
Led by Alex Robel, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; learn more about Robel's recent research here.
Reposition and Optimization of Deferiprone for Breast Center Therapy (NSF)
Led by Adegboyega "Yomi" Oyelere, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Yuhong Fan, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Scholar
Breaking the Chain: Disrupting Guinea Worm Disease Transmission (The Carter Center)
Led by Jeannette Yen, professor in the School of Biological Sciences
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