James Stringfellow, an employment specialist with a history of helping Atlanta-based veterans and entertainment industry staff in the workforce, has been named the first career educator for the College of Sciences.

“I am thrilled to have James join the Georgia Tech Career Center,” says Laura Garcia, director of Career Education Programs. “I hope everyone gives him a warm welcome to the Georgia Tech community.” 

Stringfellow, who began his duties on January 4, leads the following initiatives:

  • Assisting students with career mapping, co-op and internships, and workforce preparedness.
  • Supporting College of Sciences programs by facilitating career education events.
  • Supporting College instructors with employer updates and industry trends.
  • Developing employer partnerships to cultivate employment opportunities. 
  • Assisting the Career Center team in meeting its community goals.

Stringfellow will be available for remote meetings from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays. He will work out of Room 2-90 in the Boggs Building from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, and at the Georgia Tech Career Center (located on the first floor of the Bill Moore Student Success Center) from 8 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays.

Stringfellow previously worked for the Veterans Empowerment Organization (VEO) as their employment specialist responsible for assisting veterans with re-entry into the civilian workforce. Prior to the VEO, he served as an award-winning career services manager at SAE Institute where he oversaw employer outreach and graduate employment for audio, film, and entertainment business programs. Stringfellow also worked for DeVry University in both career services and admissions in support of its College of Health Sciences.  

Stringfellow earned a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Tuskegee University, and received his MBA in International Business from Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry. A member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Stringfellow shares that he stays connected to the entertainment industry by coaching creatives on how to protect their musical brand, speaking at related conferences, and serving as a disc jockey at various events throughout Atlanta.

“I am thrilled to have James join the College of Sciences,” shares Cameron Tyson, assistant dean for Academic Programs in the College of Sciences. 

Tyson and Garcia also extend a special thanks to the new role’s search committee for their “hard work and finding a great addition to our team.” Committee members included:

  • Alonzo Whyte (search chair), academic professional, Undergraduate Neuroscience Program
  • Andrew Newman, professor and undergraduate coordinator, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
  • Enid Steinbart, principal academic professional and director of Undergraduate Advising and Assessment, School of Mathematics
  • Mariah Liggins, advisor for Pre-Health, Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising
  • Mackenzie Pierce, undergraduate student, School of Psychology

The Georgia Tech College of Computing has received an $11 million grant from Schmidt Futures to create one of the four software engineering centers within the newly launched Virtual Institute for Scientific Software (VISS). The new center will hire half-a-dozen software engineers to write scalable, reliable, and portable open-source software for scientific research.

“Scientific research involves increasingly complex software, technologies, and platforms,” said Alessandro Orso, the software engineer and professor of computer science who is heading up the project. “Also, platforms constantly evolve, and the complexity and amount of data involved is ever-growing.”

The result is that these software systems are often developed as prototypes that are difficult to understand, maintain, and use, which limits their efficacy and ultimately hinders scientific progress.

Software engineers are trained to address these kinds of issues and know how to build high-quality software, but their time is too expensive for a typical research project’s budget. In typical grants, software is often treated as a byproduct of research, meaning that limited funding is allocated for it.

That’s where Schmidt Futures comes in. Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. They are investing $40 million in VISS over five years at four universities: Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Cambridge.

“Schmidt Futures’ Virtual Institute for Scientific Software is a core part of our efforts to mobilize exceptional talent to solve specific hard problems in science and society,” said Executive Vice President Elizabeth Young-McNally.

At Georgia Tech, the funds will hire a software engineering lead, as well as three senior and two junior software engineers. A faculty director and an advisory board will help guide the group’s work, which will include collaborations with Georgia Tech scientists.

"We are very proud to host one of the four inaugural Schmidt Futures Virtual Institute of Scientific Software centers,” said Charles Isbell, Dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair of Computing.

“Georgia Tech’s center will advance and support scientific research by applying modern software engineering practices, cutting-edge technologies, and modern tools to the development of scientific software. The center will also engage with students and researchers to train the next generation of software engineering leaders.”

The cycle of rising temperatures leads to increases in precipitation as well as droughts.  But what impact will these weather extremes, especially heavier precipitation, have on the earth’s most effective water cleansers – wetland sediments?  

That question is driving a new $1 million, three-year grant awarded to a Georgia Institute of Technology interdisciplinary research team of geochemistry, biology and applied mechanics experts.

The award is part of the Department of Energy’s $7.7 million funding of 11 studies to improve the understanding of Earth system predictability and the Department’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model, a state-of the-science climate model. The researchers intend to develop a new scalable model that can analyze and ultimately predict where and when sediment disruptions are most likely to occur. 

Wetlands – Where Water and Land Meet

Found at the boundary between land and water, wetlands function as natural sponges that trap, cleanse, and slowly release surface water – they also serve as a natural climate change buffer, since they act as carbon “sinks,” storing vast amounts of carbon and methane in the ground. Swamps, marshes, and bogs are all examples of wetlands. What isn’t known is if wetlands that become damaged or degraded from excess water will still absorb carbon at the same level.  

By better understanding how wetlands work, Georgia Tech hopes to shed light on how wetlands will function with more frequent and more intense rainstorms.   

“A lot of work has been done in polar regions where there has been melting because of global warming, which has been shown to release a lot of methane. That’s the main motivation behind the work we’re going to do,” said the project’s principal investigator, Martial Taillefert, a geochemist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

As water levels rise, below ground oxygen is consumed very quickly, he explained. Then microbial processes take over, leading to methane forming as well as carbon dioxide, that can escape to the atmosphere.

In this project Taillefert will characterize the physical and chemical processes taking place in a wetland, mainly using electrochemical sensors deployed at different locations in the wetland. Taillefert will be able to follow the chemical response to microbial processes and study how perturbations of the water cycle affect the release of greenhouse gases. This data will then be used to fine tune the models that will predict greenhouse gas emissions.

Micro to Macro Scale
Initial studies will involve samples on the scale of a few grains of soil, but the researchers hope to eventually run simulations on the scale of a riverbed or watershed (where surface water drains into a common stream channel or other body of water).

“The goal is twofold – first, to satisfy our scientific curiosity and understand how those microbial processes can actually change the level of oxygen and trigger greenhouse gas emissions, and second, to develop a model that can predict what processes will be in the next cycle to better prepare and perhaps reduce carbon emissions in some cases,” said project collaborator Chloé Arson, associate professor of Geosystems Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

While Taillefert focuses on the chemistry component and Arson on the mathematical modeling, collaborator Thomas DiChristina serves as the microbe expert.

“My lab looks at what kind of hidden microbial processes are going on that we can't detect with the sensors because the methane is getting recycled so fast in the ground,” said DiChristina, professor in the School of Biological Sciences

DiChristina will be looking at multiple gene expressions without having to grow the bacteria in a laboratory. 

“Genomics allows you to deduce expression of metabolic potential. For example, which gene is producing methane, and which gene is inhibiting methane production,” he said.

Since methane won’t release into the atmosphere unless a certain condition occurs, the model will enable researchers to predict under what conditions methane would pour out of the sediments versus being retained and recycled, DiChristina explained.

The calculations that predict how much methane and carbon dioxide go into the atmosphere depend on an accurate description of what's happening in the subsurface -- in the sediment and in groundwater, Taillefert added. 

“We cannot yet quantify that really well. We think using our approach will enable us to get more data and a better understanding of how the process works and translate that knowledge into the models,” he said.

Taillefert and DiChristina have been working on improving Georgia Tech’s models for predicting these processes for over three decades.  With this latest award, they hope to better understand and model the processes of oxidation and reduction that change the microstructure of sediments during cycles of flood.

New Research Thrust – AI and Machine Learning  

Arson is most interested in predicting the changes in the size, shape, and arrangement of the grains of soil to understand how the porous space between the grains is affected by bio-chemical reactions. 

“Understanding the evolution of the porous space will help predict transport properties within the sediments, and the expected emissions of greenhouse gases,” said Arson. 

An expert in applied mechanics, she will use AI to build a model that can single out dominant reactions within the soil microstructure and disregard those that have minimal impact. Such insight will help simplify the model and allow it to more quickly correlate certain criteria that leads to spikes in greenhouse gases. 

“If you have a predictive model that actually attempts to explain the processes, as well as predicting them, then you have a more versatile approach that can be transferred to many other sites or environments,” she said. “I also could envision using this model and the machine learning algorithm to map locations where you expect higher emissions, and identify sites as risky, moderately risky or safe.”

Georgia Tech is partnering with two Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories: Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) in Aiken, SC, and Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, IL.

“Georgia Tech has a unique capability here that we don't have, and that capability is this combination of using state-of-the-art genomics capabilities, along with state-of-the-art electrochemistry, two attributes that Georgia Tech is internationally known for,” said Daniel Kaplan, senior research fellow with SRNL, which will serve as the study site.

Kaplan noted that Georgia Tech’s research fits perfectly with the DOE’s goal to better understand how wetlands function, enabling scientists to better understand their role in controlling water quality.

“Wetlands do a great job of cleaning out all the impurities and getting rid of a lot of the contaminants to clean the water up as it moves through a watershed,” said Kaplan. 

Atomic-scale Analysis  

Argonne National Laboratory plans to take Georgia Tech’s sediment samples and examine them at the atomic scale of individual atoms and electrons using the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a football-field-sized synchrotron that produces x-rays 10 billion times clearer than what is produced at a doctor’s office.

“The fundamental reactions that are controlling the quality of the water happen at the microorganism or nano scale,” said Kenneth Kemner, senior physicist and group leader of the Molecular Environmental Science Group at the Argonne National Lab. “By bringing all the different ways of looking at wetlands together, we'll actually have a much deeper understanding of how they function.”

From one of several x-ray ports operated 24x7, the APS can capture images of single microorganisms about 100 times smaller than the diameter of the human hair. In fact, when the APS first came online, it successfully analyzed hair strands of Ludwig van Beethoven, with the analysis deducing that the great German composer suffered from lead poisoning.

Kemner acknowledged that Georgia Tech brings unique capabilities to the wetlands research effort. He explained that answering the hard questions such as those posed by climate change will require this transdisciplinary and integrated problem-solving approach. 

Additional unfunded collaborators for this study include Christa Pennacchio, PMO Lead with the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (JGI), and Stephen Callister, scientist with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a U.S. DOE national scientific user facility managed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.   

The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) has announced that a 2022 Molecular Pharmacology Early Career Award will be presented to Dr. Matthew Torres, faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences, in recognition of his scholarly achievements as a junior investigator in the field of molecular pharmacology.

Dr. Torres is receiving this award in recognition of his innovative research that combines genetics, mass spectrometry, and cutting-edge bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications impact protein function and cell physiology, and also in recognition of his strong commitment to teaching, mentoring and service. Dr. Torres is currently an Associate Professor in the School. He received his PhD in biochemistry and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The primary focus of Dr. Torres’s lab is to combine yeast genetics, mass spectrometry (MS) and bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications (PTMs) impact protein structure, function and cell behavior. His group studies how PTMs regulate G protein signaling pathways, with a current emphasis on the G protein gamma subunit. His lab also developed SAPH-ire (“Systematic Analysis of PTM Hotspots”), a bioinformatics tool that employs machine learning to prioritize PTMs important for protein function and provide recommendations for experimental analysis. Dr. Torres has been a member of ASPET since 2017.

The award will be presented by the Division for Molecular Pharmacology at the ASPET Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on Monday, April 4, 2022 where Dr. Torres will deliver a lecture on his research titled "From m/z to Gαβγ: Accessing the Collective Wisdom in Proteomics to Reveal Posttranslational Governors of G protein Signaling".

The talk will focus on the development of protein bioinformatic and computational tools that revealed how Gγ subunits - through phosphorylation of their intrinsically disordered N-termini - can serve as governors of Gβγ signaling.

Story adapted from:

2022 ASPET Award Winners

Sustainable Development Goals Action and Awareness Week 2022 is Feb. 28 – March 4. The campus community is invited to participate in a variety of events that increase awareness of and encourage actions that advance the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They address the world’s most monumental challenges, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Some of the objectives are improved industry, innovation, and infrastructure; affordable and clean energy; and sustainable cities and communities. The SDGs appear by name in the Institute’s strategic plan as long-term goals that should guide teaching, research, and operations.

SDG Action and Awareness Week 2022 will begin with an interactive campus discussion, titled Engaging With the SDGs Across Campus, focusing on how the goals are being realized across the Institute and ways to better work together across disciplines and departments to amplify our impact. President Ángel Cabrera will moderate the discussion with participants from the College of Sciences, Serve-Learn-Sustain, Interdisciplinary Research, and Engineers Without Borders.

Other events during the week include a Tech Dining Sustainability Showcase, a panel on Infrastructure and Sustainability, Changing Relationships: You and Your Aging Parents, Toilet Talk With Shan and Shannon, A Healthy Georgia: Exploring the Impact of the Energy Transition on Public Health, the Association for Sustainable Investment Podcast Club Kickoff, and Engaging With the SDGs to Advance Sustainability in Atlanta. View a full listing of the week’s events.

In Fall 2020, a panel discussion and keynote address by Cabrera introduced the Tech community to the 17 goals. The event covered their relevance to the Institute and emphasized how Georgia Tech can lead the region in implementing and advancing these goals.

“If we are committed to improving the human condition, then we should embrace the SDGs to guide our actions as a university,” Cabrera said when introducing the SDGs.

SDG Action and Awareness Week is part of a larger global effort through the University Global Coalition, whose partners are hosting a variety of online events that are open to all. 

 

Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering will host a question-and-answer session with NASA astronaut and alumnus Shane Kimbrough on Friday, March 4. The free event, open to students, faculty, and staff, will be held in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons (room 152) from 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

Kimbrough is returning to his alma mater for the first time since living on the International Space Station (ISS) for six months in 2021. In three trips to space, he has spent 388 days away from Earth, the fourth highest total among U.S. astronauts.

The event will be moderated by Naia Butler-Craig, a Ph.D. student in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. Butler-Craig is a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellow and a NASA Pathways intern in the Science and Space Technology Systems branch at Glenn Research Center. The Q&A will be streamed live on the Georgia Tech YouTube channel, where viewers can submit questions. K-12 schools around Atlanta will also participate remotely.

The Q&A session is one of several Georgia Tech events for Kimbrough on Friday. He will spend the morning touring labs dedicated to spacecraft design and space-related research. That evening, he will throw out the first pitch at Georgia Tech’s baseball game against the University of Georgia. The action starts at 6pm at Russ Chandler Stadium.

Kimbrough grew up in Atlanta, attending Georgia Tech sporting events as a kid. He was an NCAA pitcher while earning his undergraduate degree at the United States Military Academy. After nearly a decade serving in the U.S. Army, Kimbrough graduated with a master’s degree in operations research from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE).

Kimbrough was selected to be an astronaut in 2004. His first mission was aboard space shuttle Endeavour in 2008. He returned to orbit in 2016 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, serving as commander of the ISS for six months.

Last April, Kimbrough was commander of NASA/SpaceX Crew-2, launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida. By flying on Crew Dragon, Kimbrough became the fourth person to travel on three different spacecrafts.

During his three missions, Kimbrough has taken Georgia Tech jerseys and a flag from the Ramblin’ Wreck into orbit. He also threw out the first pitch in a taped ceremony from the ISS before a 2021 Georgia Tech baseball game and recorded a message that was played during last fall’s space-themed football game.

The Georgia Institute of Technology has been selected as the in-depth cell characterization platform hub for the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Regenerative Medicine Innovation Project (RMIP). Established under the 21st Century Cures Act, the main goal of the $30 million RMIP is the development of transformative new therapies based on adult stem cells.

A key element of NIH's strategy in implementing the RMIP has been to identify the field's critical challenges and provide resources and tools to address them.  A widely acknowledged challenge in the regenerative medicine field is a limited understanding of how specific stem cell characteristics lead to successful clinical outcomes.  To address this challenge, the NIH in consultation with the scientific community and in collaboration with Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, developed a proposed framework for in-depth cell characterization (IDCC). 

The University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), which serves as the administrative hub for the RMIP in-depth cell characterization activities, issued a request for proposals for a characterization infrastructure hub, where this science would happen.  After a competitive solicitation and review, Georgia Tech was selected to provide IDCC of human adult source stem cells used in RMIP studies, as well as stem cell products that RMIP awardees have developed for clinical application.

“Our analysis will provide researchers a deeper understanding of the cell products in these various clinical and IND-supporting pre-clinical trials – the characteristics that contribute to their safety and efficacy, for example,” said Krishnendu Roy, principal investigator of the new IDCC Platform Hub. Through this kind of in-depth analysis of every cell therapy that is manufactured or used in an RMIP project, researchers will create what Roy and others call a “cell fingerprint.”

 “When we have created a large enough database, scientists will be able to correlate the cell fingerprint with the outcomes of a particular disease in a particular patient and gain insights into the critical quality attributes of the cells that make them most effective for a specific patient.”

The IDCC Platform Hub will benefit from the existing resources at Georgia Tech, which include the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing (MC3M), and the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT). These research centers, along with the core facilities of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, made Georgia Tech highly competitive in the award process, according to Roy.

“We’ve been working on in-depth cell characterization for clinical trials and pre-clinical projects through the Marcus Center and CMaT for several years now, so we’re very well positioned,” said Roy, director of both CMaT and the Marcus Center, and the Robert A. Milton Endowed Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“Over the past four years, we’ve developed the broad and deep analytics and characterization infrastructure along with the logistics and data-management know-how necessary to conduct these studies,” Roy added. “So, we can take a cell and learn as much as we can from its gene expression profiles, protein profiles, lipid profiles, metabolite profiles, and its functional properties.”

Roy and Carolyn Yeago, associate director of the Marcus Center, will manage activities for the IDCC Platform Hub at Georgia Tech. The rest of the leadership team includes co-principal investigators Andrés García, executive director of the Petit Institute and Regents Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; Greg Gibson, director of the Center for Integrative Genomics and Regents Professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Facundo Fernandez, Professor and Associate Chair for Research in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; and Craig Forest, professor in the Woodruff School.

The IDCC Platform Hub is supported by $1.7 million for the first year – 50 percent from the NIH and 50 percent from non-federal dollars (as required by the Cures Act).  Most of the non-federal contributions are being made by the Marcus Foundation and Georgia Tech.

 

Alfred Merrill, professor emeritus in the School of Biological Sciences and Smithgall Chair in Molecular Cell Biology in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) — who brought research attention to an important class of organic compounds found in all tissues, including the brain — has been elected as a fellow of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB)

“This honor is only bestowed to our most distinguished and established members,” says ASBMB president Toni Antalis. ASBMB Fellowships were established in 2020 “to recognize our members for their meritorious efforts to advance the molecular life sciences through sustained outstanding accomplishments in scientific research, education, mentorship, commitment to diversity, and service to the society and the scientific community.”

“It is an honor to be selected as a fellow of the ASBMB, an organization that was established over a hundred years ago and promotes research and training in biochemistry through newsletters, conferences and publication of several of the most highly regarded journals in the field, such as The Journal of Biological Chemistry and The Journal of Lipid Research,” Merrill says.

“We are thrilled to see Al Merrill named a ASBMB Fellow,” says Todd Streelman, professor and chair of the School of Biological Sciences. “This award acknowledges Al’s lifetime of achievement in the lab and as a mentor to his colleagues. On behalf of the School of Biological Sciences, I congratulate Al on this honor."

Merrill was nominated by George Carman, Board of Governors Professor of Food Science, and Founding Director of the Rutgers Center for Lipid Research in the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition, & Health at Rutgers University. “Al has made impressive contributions to science through both the discoveries by his laboratory and his assistance to others through service activities,” says Carman, who was named an ASBMB Fellow in 2021.

Merrill has been an IBB member since he came to Georgia Tech in fall 2001. He was an adjunct professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 2003-2016. Merrill’s Georgia Tech research affiliations include the Center for Bio-Imaging Mass Spectrometry, the Integrated Cancer Research Center, the Center for ImmunoEngineering, and the Center for Drug Design Development and Delivery.

Merrill is also a member of the Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Research Program at Emory Winship Cancer Institute

Improving our understanding of important organic compounds

Lipids are hormones, fats, oils and waxes that store energy and act as messengers within the body. A class of lipids, sphingolipids — named after the mysterious sphinx of mythology because of their enigmatic nature to early researchers — are important in tissue development, cell structure, cell-cell communication and signal transduction (how a cell responds to substances outside the cell). 

Merrill began researching sphingolipids while an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine in 1981. “I wanted to branch out from my areas of previous training, which had been on the mechanisms of action of coenzymes and glycerolipids,” he says. “The sphingoid base biosynthesis pathway looked promising because few other scientists were studying it and my background in these two areas somewhat uniquely prepared me to tackle that challenging field. It was also helpful that I like to develop new methods for analyzing biochemical processes, and one of the first things that I did was develop easier ways to study sphingoid bases and their metabolism.”

The ASBMB notes that Merrill developed quantitative methods to measure sphingolipids and was a major contributor to mass spectrometry–based lipidomics research guidance. Merrill helped determine how the lipid backbones of sphingolipids are made and how they function in cell signaling and disease. 

Three research studies that Merrill conducted in 1986 detailing sphingolipids and cell signaling were designated “Classics” in 2016 by the Journal of Biological Chemistry because of their scientific influence. 

Merrill is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an associate editor of the Journal of Lipid Research. He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry for 20 years.

Merrill is one of five Georgia-based scientists who received 2022 ASBMB Fellowships. The others are:

Six College of Sciences researchers are among 19 Georgia Tech faculty and students receiving 2022 Research Awards from the Georgia Tech chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. 

Sigma Xi’s mission is “to enhance the health of the research enterprise, foster integrity in science and engineering, and promote the public’s understanding of science for the purpose of improving the human condition.” 

Two College of Sciences researchers won the Best Faculty Paper Award:

Grigoriev won for the paper, “Robust learning from noisy, incomplete, high-dimensional experimental data via physically constrained symbolic regression.” The study appeared in Nature Communications.

Ng won for four papers:

Four College of Sciences graduate students are also recognized.

Best Ph.D. Thesis Awards:

  • Yuchen He, School of Mathematics
    Advisor: Sung Ha Kang
    Title: "Mathematical and data-driven pattern representation with applications in image processing, computer graphics, and infinite dimensional dynamical data mining"  

  • Pan Liu, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
    Advisor: Yuanzhi Tang 
    Title: "Speciation and recovery of rare earth elements (REES) from coal fly ash"   

  • Suttipong “Jay” Suttapitugsakul, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
    Advisor: Ronghu Wu 
    Title: "MS-based chemical proteomics studies of extracellular glycoproteins: identification, quantification, and dynamics" 

Best M.S. Thesis Award:

  • Charles Ross Lindsey, School of Biological Sciences
    Advisor: Frank Rosenzweig
    Title: "Phylotranscriptomics points to multiple independent origins of multicellularity and cellular differentiation in the Volvocine algae"

The Sigma Xi Georgia Tech Chapter awards ceremony is scheduled for April, preceding the Georgia Tech faculty awards ceremony. Learn more.

Shared on behalf of Arts at Georgia Tech:

Georgia Institute of Technology students, faculty, and staff are proudly taking part in the 2022 ACCelerate Festival, a celebration of creative exploration and innovative research happening at the intersection of science, engineering, arts, and design. Featuring teams from universities and colleges across the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and the Smithsonian Institution, the Festival promotes cutting-edge creative work from a new generation of thinkers. This year’s event, to be held April 8 – 10, 2022, will be the third time the ACC institutions have gathered in DC, and Georgia Tech is honored to have been represented at each Festival to date.

 

“The ACCelerate Festival is an opportunity to showcase the incredible possibilities that await us at the intersection of art and technology,” said Georgia Tech Provost Steve McLaughlin. “We are proud to once again send teams from Georgia Tech and participate alongside our ACC peers. The arts have an undeniable power to teach, heal, and transform us, and this festival gives great visibility and a new way to experience the innovative and impactful education and research that is taking place on our campuses each day.”

The two Georgia Tech teams participating in the 2022 ACCelerate Festival come from the School of Architecture at the College of Design, and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Georgia Tech’s participation in ACCelerate is managed by Georgia Tech Arts, a department in the Division of Student Engagement and Well-Being.

Walking in the Footsteps of History

On March 7, 1965, at the south side of Edmund Pettus Bridge, armed State Troopers attacked peaceful civil rights activists attempting to march to the state capital of Montgomery in an incident that became known as Bloody Sunday. Despite access to vivid archival material, little interpretation addresses the physical context and experiential timeline. To digitally record this significant civil rights site and to make the specific context of the event more experientially engaging to the public, this project’s multidisciplinary team of designers, architectural historians, civil rights historians, cultural resource managers, and construction technology specialists are pairing collected 3D digital data of Selma’s extant structures with digital reconstructions to recreate the site.

By melding the physical and virtual, Walking in the Footsteps of History presents a broader understanding of the events of 1965 in and around Selma through enhanced historic interpretation by animating famous photographs through immersive visualization, creating interactive digital platforms for exploring fragile archival content such as the Good Samaritan Hospital logbook, and affording virtual tours where visitors can safely explore the Bloody Sunday conflict site that is bordered by a busy highway.

The team is led by Danielle Willkens, assistant professor, School of Architecture, who commented “This project has encompassed more than 6 years’ work with civil rights foot soldiers and their descendants with the intention of enabling visitors to translate the visceral experience to an understanding of the tenets of what was being advocated for - voting rights and civil rights – in the 1960’s through present time.”

Participating staff include Aaron Shackleford, director of Georgia Tech Arts. Georgia Tech student researchers include Simran Bajaj, Thomas Bray, Sydnee Henry, Carly Langsdorf, Sean Li, Sakshi Nanda, So Min Park, Patricia J. Rangel, Aishwarya Somasundaram, Christian Waweru, and Eden Wright. This project is the result of an ongoing collaboration with Junshan Liu, associate professor at Auburn University's McWhorter School of Building Science and Georgia Tech Visiting Scholar and the Auburn University team including faculty (R. Burt, K. Hébert, and E. Gaddis) and students (C. Brown, A. Davis, M. Gibbs, and S. Page). The team is currently completing a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, sponsored by a National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant.

Visit the ACCelerate website for more information about the team’s work and exhibition.

Heart Sense

“How can the very creation, rendering, and experiencing of biological data contribute to a more nuanced understanding of our bodies?” This is the question at the heart of this project. Heart Sense is a series of installations that visualize biometric data such as heart rate and breath as participants engage in a variety of listening and viewing activities. Our bodies are often conceived as separate autonomous entities, disjoint from the physical and social environments that they inhabit while in fact we are deeply connected with the material and social world around us.

The first installation tracks a participant’s heart rate, galvanic skin response, and breathing as they watch a short, emotionally engaging video. This data input produces flower-like visualizations that illustrate the physiological responses. The second installation engages the social dimension of embodiment through the mediation of the physical environment. Participants are invited to sit around a table and are given headphones to listen to music.

A floral visualization representing the collective heart rates of the participants will be projected onto the table, the size and the colors of each petal shifting with changes in each participant’s body. The visualization showcases how our bodies come into relation with each other and are in and of the environment, as they respond to our surrounding conditions even when we are not aware of it.

The team is led by Nassim Parvin, associate professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, who states “This project has catalyzed interdisciplinary collaboration across natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and it has been a privilege to work with talented students in imaginative world-building.”

Participating faculty include Lewis Wheaton, associate professor, Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech, and Anne Pollock, previously associate professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and now professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London. The interdisciplinary team includes post-doctoral researcher Aditya Anupam alongside Georgia Tech student researchers Pooja Casula, Shubhangi Gupta, Sylvia Janicki, Michelle Ramirez, and Mohsin Yousufi.

Visit the ACCelerate website for more information about the team’s work and exhibition.

Visit the LMC website for detailed Heart Sense documentation and Heart Sense demonstration.

Working at the Intersection of Art, Learning, and Research

“The faculty and students at Georgia Tech have embraced the role of art and creativity as a way to engage with people and share their research with a wide audience,” said Georgia Tech Arts Director Aaron Shackelford. He explains that Georgia Tech Arts selected each project because of the way they bring together art, learning and research. “Both projects show what happens when you bring art and creativity into every step of the process,” he notes, “and the results are these innovative approaches to conducting important work that can be experienced by anyone visiting the Smithsonian.” Each project also supports the well-being of the community. “Heart Sense invites us to have a better understanding of our own bodies, while Walking in the Footsteps of History pushes us to have a better understanding of our nation’s history. Both are important for cultivating the well-being of our community, which is a central goal for Georgia Tech as a whole and one of the most important benefits of the arts.”

ACCelerate is programmed by Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Hosted at the National Museum of American History, the multi-day festival is free and open to the public. The 2022 Festival features 24 projects from 12 ACC schools; the most recent Festival drew public attendance of more than 30,000.

For more information about the 2022 ACCelerate Festival, visit their website.

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