College of Sciences

Georgia Tech College of Sciences Dean Susan Lozier is quoted, and her research cited, in a New York Times story detailing scientists' concerns about the northern arm of the Gulf Stream, the river-within-an-ocean that transports warmth to the North Atlantic. Several studies now suggest this northern portion of the Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing, resulting in a "cold blob" of water just south of Greenland that could result in negative consequences for continents along the Atlantic.  Lozier, the John Clark Sutherland and Betsy Middleton Chair, is a physical oceanographer who is also the president of the American Geophysical Union. She is the international project lead investigator for Osnap, an array of ocean sensors stretching from Canada to Greenland and Scotland. “There are very strong signals in the ocean of climate change,” Lozier says in the story. But most studies on the AMOC (Atlantic meridional overturning circulation) don’t measure the “conveyor belt” directly. (Subscription required.)

Recycling water used in paper mills can be an expensive process; evaporators are usually used, but they require a lot of energy. Filtration membranes are better but so far can't withstand the harsh conditions and high chemical concentrations found in pulping wastewater.  Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have found a method to engineer membranes made from graphene oxide, a chemically resistant material based on carbon, so they can work effectively in industrial applications. The researchers are Sankar Nair, Zhongzhen Wang, and Chen Ma from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Meisha Shofner and Scott Sinquefield from the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, and Chunyan Xu with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

Three researchers from the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering have published research that identified a large number of genes and gene sets that were potentially useful as transcript-level biomarkers for predicting drug-specific patient survival outcomes. The findings suggest that the drug-specific survival marker genes they found warrant further investigation for insights into drug mechanisms, and for validation as biomarkers to aid cancer therapy decisions. The researchers are Bridget Neary, Jie Zhou, and Peng Qiu. 

The pandemic may have delayed its completion, but Georgia Tech has announced the results of its 17 Rooms at Georgia Tech: Recommended Actions report. It builds on the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) project, with 17 "rooms" dedicated to stated goals such as No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Clean Water, Affordable Energy, etc., and how those can be implemented at the local level. Kim Cobb, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and director of the Global Change Project, was part of the report's synthesis team.