College of Sciences

Over the last two years, the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) operations, research, and service portfolios have grown significantly. To accommodate this, IDEaS has taken steps to expand its current leadership team, granting new titles to two College of Sciences researchers. New Thrust Lead positions were created to focus on and opportunistically expand capabilities in important areas. Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents' Professor, Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair, and GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, is now Thrust Lead for Precision Medicine and Drug Discovery. David Sherrill, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is the new Director for the Center for High Performance Computing (CHiPC). Sherrill previously served as IDEaS Asst. Director for Research and Education.

Since 2016, Jenny McGuire, an assistant professor in the Schools of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and Biological Sciences, has traveled from Atlanta to northern Wyoming and its Natural Trap Cave to hunt fossils. The goal is to use those fossils to learn more from them about climate change's inpact on animal and human population. Pack rats and their cave nests are helping McGuire and her fellow scientists in their search for clues about how that region, its plant and animal life has changed over the last 30,000 years. The Billings Gazette has more coverage here. 

This Reuters roundup of the latest scentific studies on the coronovirus and Covid-19 vaccines includes new research from Joshua Weitz, Professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in Biological Sciences, and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences in the School of Biological Sciences. In a report recently posted on the medical website medRxiv ahead of peer review, Weitz and his co-authors advise, based on their computer models, that unvaccinated healthcare workers be assigned to work with vaccinated patients. In that scenario, if a healthcare worker becomes infected but does not realize it and shows up to work, "then the chance of onward spread is significantly reduced ... leading to lower rates in the facility as a whole," says Weitz.

Staying cool as temperatures rise can be a struggle during Atlanta's summer. Now Georgia Tech and Spelman College scholars are teaming up to take a closer, scientific look at the impact of high city temperatures and why some neighborhoods feel the heat more than others. Approximately 40 students will serve as data collectors for the urban heat campaign, using a small temperature sensor that they will assemble, program, and connect to a smartphone app with guidance from the UrbanHeatATL team, which includes Spelman College Environmental and Health Sciences Program, the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, the Partnership for Southern Equity, the Georgia Tech Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, the Urban Climate Lab and the Georgia Tech Global Change Program and the City of Atlanta.