The Career, Research, and Innovation Development Conference (CRIDC) is Georgia Tech’s professional development event for graduate students. CRIDC is held annually at the beginning of the spring semester and is designed to connect graduate students of all degree types with professionals in research, industry, consulting and government, nonprofits, management, and entrepreneurship. The 2021 event will be held Feb. 8-12 as a completely virtual event. It is open to all Georgia Tech master’s and Ph.D. students, as well as postdoctoral scholars. ​

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Article by Emma Ryan

On Feb. 8-12, Georgia Tech will host the 2021 Career, Research, and Innovation Development Conference (CRIDC), an annual event that offers graduate students the opportunity to network, attend panels, and participate in a career fair and poster competition. 

“CRIDC has become a Georgia Tech tradition,” said Ogün Kargin, a second-year graduate student in Aerospace Engineering and vice president of Professional Development for the Graduate Student Government Association. “For the past 11 years, SGA has hosted this event to provide opportunities for graduate students to meet our industry partners, showcase their research, and hone their professional development skills. This year, our team is very excited to offer this event in a fully virtual format!”

Here are some highlights of the 2021 event:

• Career-related Panels. Sessions include PhD2Consulting, Entrepreneurship, and Done With Grad School. What’s Next?, as well as a series on diversity, inclusion, and ethics. The panels will be streamed online and preregistration is not required to attend.
• Poster Competition. This competition gives students the opportunity to present their research posters to a nontechnical audience. Winners receive a $1,500 professional development award, and the competition is open to all graduate students. The deadline to submit poster abstracts is Jan. 19.
• Innovation Competition. Sponsored by Tech’s VentureLab, the Innovation Competition awards cash prizes to the graduate students who make the best case for how their work might get to market and meet customer needs. The application for the competition is due Jan. 21.
• MS and PhD CRIDC Virtual Career Fair. To be held on Feb. 9, the career fair will offer students the opportunity to connect with scientists interested in their work. Registration for the fair opens Jan. 26. 

Learn more about the event on the CRIDC website, and register to attend and have your resume added to the resume book here. 

This virtual colloquium will have events spanning two days: 

Wednesday, February 17th: Poster Session 
Thursday, February 18th: Research talks and Mars 2020 Perserverance Landing viewing

Our aim is to highlight work involving space exploration; biological, geological, and astronomical origins; and astrobiology of any sub-field at Georgia Tech and beyond.

Through this colloquium, we hope to:

• forge relationships between diverse individuals of various fields, experience levels, and backgrounds
• provide a professional growth opportunity for early career individuals including undergraduates, graduates, and post-docs
• encourage collaboration and interdisciplinary understanding
• expand our internal awareness of local work an dinnovations

For registration and abstract submission, complete the form linked below by the end of the day on January 29th (deadline extended from original due date).

Wed, Feb 17th, 5-6 pm

Join here: https://bluejeans.com/488994566

• Poster Session

Thur, Feb. 18th, Starting at 10:15 am

Join here: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/fjxqjbgp

• 10:15- Welcome and Introduction

• 10:30- Astrobiology graduate certificate ceremony

• 10:45- Talks, 10 min talk + 5 min discussion

  • Bhanu Kumar (Grad student, MATH)

  • Rebecca Guth-Metzler (Grad student, CHEM)

  • Abigail Johnson (Grad student, OSE)

  • Tony Burnetti (Postdoc, BIO)

• 11:45- Plenary talk, Prof. Lisa Yaszek (LMC)

• 12:45- Lunch

• 1:30- Talks, 15 min talk + 5 min discussion

  • Micah Shaible (Research scientist, ChBE)

  • Prof. Chris Carr (AE and EAS)

SCMB will host its 3rd Annual Symposium as a free online event from December 7th-10th, from 12:00pm-2:00pm (EST). The Symposium will explore the theme of Interactional Expertise—the secret sauce behind many successful cross-disciplinary collaborations. The event will host panel discussions with math-bio researchers and explore the successes and the pitfalls of collaborating across disciplines. Junior speakers from all 4 NSF-Simons MathBioSys research centers will contribute talks demonstrating the innovative work being done at the math-bio interface. The Symposium will conclude with a plenary talk from Heather Harrington (Oxford) on Algebraic Systems Biology and a poster session open to all registrants. For more information and to register for the event, please visit scmb.gatech.edu/symposium

Dragonfly: In Situ Exploration of Titan’s Organic Chemistry and Habitability

Georgia Tech's Center for Space Technology and Research (C-STAR) hosts Titan Week, featuring days of virtual fun on Saturn's spectacular, intriguing moon, and NASA's plans to explore it. 

At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19, CSTAR hosts Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, for its 2020 Distinguished Lecture. This year's virtual version will be via BlueJeans. 

Turtle is the principal investigator for NASA's Dragonfly mission, which proposes to use a rotorcraft lander to explore the environment of Titan.

NASA's Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform wide- ranging in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment. Taking advantage of Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly can fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to measure the compositions of surface materials and observe Titan's geology and meteorology. Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at dozens of sites, traveling 150 km during a three-year mission to characterize Titan's habitability and determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide key ingredients for life.

Registration and other information for the 2020 Distinguished Lecture can be found here.

About Elizabeth Turtle

Dr. Elizabeth Turtle is a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Her research focus is using remote sensing observations and numerical geophysical models to study geological structures and their implications for the surfaces and interiors of the planets on which they formed. The processes of interest include impact cratering and tectonics on terrestrial planets and outer planet icy satellites, mountain formation on Io, creep of ice-rich permafrost on Mars, and dynamics of lakes on Titan. Turtle is the Principal investigator of the Dragonfly mission to Titan and the Europa Imaging System  for NASA's upcoming Europa mission, an associate on the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem and RADAR teams, and a co-investigator on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.

Patton Distinguished Professors Joshua S. Weitz and Greg Gibson will join JulieAnne Williamson, Executive Director of Sustainability and Building Operations at Georgia Tech and Team Lead for Campus Surveillance Testing Operations, to discuss campus cases and tracking, actions taken to date, and next steps. Brielle Lonsberry, Student Body President for Georgia Tech Undergraduate SGA will moderate our townhall Q&A.

Everyone is welcome! Join via BlueJeans Events. Open Q&A will follow the team's presentations. A video recap of this talk will be posted to cos.gatech.edu and @gtsciences social channels.

This talk is hosted by the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.

The 3rd SCMB Annual Symposium is a free online event that will elevate and amplify the ongoing dialogue at the interface of mathematics and biology. The Symposium will host curated panels to highlight and dissect impactful interdisciplinary work from the math/bio community. Invited talks from all four National Science Foundation-Simons MathBioSys Research Centers will share compelling success stories of mathematical theory meeting biosystems data. In addition to these curated events, the Symposium will offer spatial conferencing to facilitate organic conversation and an informal poster session in a digital setting

With effective communication an ever-important skill in a virtual world, the SCMB has decided to make Interactional Expertise (IE) the theme of its 3rd annual Symposium. In this context, you don't need to be an expert in both math and biology in order to work productively at the math/bio interface. You just need to be able to communicate effectively with someone whose research expertise complements your own.

Symposium attendees will hear about:

* The impact of IE in shaping the careers of senior math-bio researchers

* The value of developing IE from SCMB's junior researchers

* The importance of IE in early career math/bio employment opportunities

Each of the first three days will spotlight one of these conversations, followed by a pair of short talks. The talks will highlight math/bio research frontiers and will be given by junior researchers at SCMB and the other three NSF-Simons MathBioSys research centers.

Support Junior Researchers and Build Math/Bio Community

The final day will feature a plentary talk on Algebraic Systems Biology by Heather Harrington, professor at the University of Oxford, and an interactive poster session with spatial conferencing. All poster session presenters will be entered into a drawing for complementary registration at the SCMB's 4th Symposium (expected to be in-person in Feb. 2022). 

Learn more and register for the 3rd Annual Symposium here.

About the SCMB

The Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology at Georgia Tech is one of four such centers in the U.S. examining the intersection of mathematics and biology. The National Science Foundation teamed up with the Simons Foundation in 2017 to award grants establishing the centers. The other Centers are at Harvard University, Northwestern University, and the University of California, Irvine. The SCMB has six partner institutions across the Southeast, including  Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN; Tulane University in New Orleans, LA; the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL; the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL; Clemson University in Clemson, SC; and Duke University in Durham, NC.

Join us virtually on BlueJeans as Georgia Tech School of Physics professor and Glen P. Robinson Chair in Nonlinear Sciences Chair Predrag Cvitanović and Emory University Senior Lecturer and Director of the Planetarium Erin Wells Bonning explain the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. After the presentation, the speakers will answer questions from the audience, so come curious! This talk is open to the public and all are welcome to join.

About the Prize

Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Roger Penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.

In 1957 Penrose, then a graduate student, met Georgia Tech’s late David Ritz Finkelstein in a fateful meeting that changed both men’s lives forever after. It was Finkelstein’s extension of the Schwarzschild metric which provided Penrose with an opening into general relativity and set him on the path to his 1965 discovery celebrated by this year’s prize.

The other half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of — in Ghez’s words — "The Monster at the heart of the Milky Way," a black hole whose existence had been hypothesized since the early 1970s.

In order to visually observe an object that famously does not emit any light, precise measurements of stars moving in the black hole’s gravitational field had to be carried out. The independent work of Genzel and Ghez mapping the positions of these stars over many years has led to the clearest evidence yet that the center of our Milky Way galaxy contains “The Monster”, that possibly every galaxy contains a black hole, and that the environment near it looks nothing like what was expected.

Learn more: 2020 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics, Explained

Mait Metspalu, Ph.D.
Institute of Genomics
University of Tartu

Join the BlueJeans Meeting

ABSTRACT
While the language map of Europe is dominated by Indo-European languages we see the spread of Uralic (Finno Ugric) languages in northeast Europe (and Hungary). Is there anything in the genetic diversity of these populations that connects them specifically with each other and with their linguistic relatives in western Russia and Siberia? What do aDNA studies reveal about the population demographic history in NE Europe and in Estonia in particular. And finally i’m going to talk about our recent efforts in filling the aDNA gap in East European Plain.

Host: Joe Lachance, Ph.D.

It gives new meaning to "smashing pumpkins," and is quickly becoming a Halloween tradition at Georgia Tech. Society of Physics students will join School of Physics' Ed Greco in flash-freezing pumpkins in nitrogen and dropping them off from the roof of the Howey Building — one our of our tallest buildings in the heart of campus.

Tune into the livestream of this year's pumpkin drop on Friday October 30 at 3 PM ET on Twitch: twitch.tv/gatechsps

Join President Ángel Cabrera in conversation with conservationist Enric Sala, current National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and author of The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild, which makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.

The event includes an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.

Unscripted and informal — unearthing leadership’s thinking behind the big ideas taking shape across the Institute and trends likely to define our future — this video series is meant to capture candid conversations between President Ángel Cabrera and thought leaders across Georgia Tech and beyond.

Discussions will revolve around various topics related to academics and research, as well as campus life and culture.

I'm very much looking forward to exploring the multitude of voices and backgrounds that contribute to making Georgia Tech what it is and shaping the world we live in,” said President Cabrera. “Every day I am inspired by the talent I get to work with, and I’m excited to share it with our entire community.”

JOIN: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/pryjtgck

About Enric Sala:
Sala, a former university professor who saw himself writing the obituary of ocean life, quit academia to become a full-time conservationist. He founded and leads Pristine Seas, a project that combines exploration, research, and media to support and empower local communities and inspire country leaders to protect the last wild places in the ocean. Pristine Seas has helped to create 22 of the largest marine reserves on the planet, covering an area of 5.8 million square kilometers.