College of Sciences

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Analog missions, like those conducted at NASA’s CHAPEA facility at the Johnson Space Center, help scientists study human spaceflight without leaving Earth. Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images

Humanity’s drive to explore has taken us across the solar system, with astronaut boots, various landers and rovers’ wheels exploring the surfaces of several different planetary bodies. These environments are generally hostile to human and equipment health, so designing and executing these missions requires a lot of planning, testing and technological development.

Isaiah Bolden

Congratulations to Isaiah Bolden, Jennifer Glass, Alex Robel, and Yuanzhi Tang on their new endowed faculty professorships.

Tiny helices emerge during a phase separation process, offering clues about how life's building blocks may have first developed a preference for one 'handed' form over another. (Credit: Jong-Hoon Lee, Ziming Wang, Ying Diao)

A new study reveals that many conjugated polymers, long considered structurally neutral, can spontaneously twist into chiral shapes. This surprising behavior, overlooked for decades, could pave the way for development of a new class of energy-efficient electronics inspired by nature. Collaborative findings across University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Tech, University of North Carolina, and Purdue University are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

GT NEXT 2025 Recipients

The Office of Technology Licensing has announced the 2025 recipients of the GT NEXT awards, a grant that helps students advance their inventions toward market readiness. Providing early momentum for promising technologies, the grants help students move their research toward real-world impact. 

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Neuroscience experts from across Georgia Tech will soon come together for a new interdisciplinary research institute, the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS), launched in July. Faculty in INNS are helping to solve some of neuroscience’s most pressing problems, and many have promising medical applications. One important aspect of studying the brain is understanding how the brain and the body work together. Meet the researchers who study brain-body interactions, from monitoring the neuron degradation that causes Alzheimer’s to enhancing mobility for stroke survivors, in an effort to improve the health and quality of life for millions of Americans.

A lizard wearing one of the sensors, which weigh just three-hundredths of a gram each — the same as a two grains of rice. (Credit: Jon Suh)

The award will support Stroud as he creates evolution’s first high-definition map — with the help of 1,000 backpack-wearing lizards.

Experts In The News

As Hurricane Melissa barrels toward Jamaica as a Category 5 storm, some in the meteorological community are questioning if the traditional way of measuring hurricane strength still tells the full story.

Zachary Handlos, director of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Undergraduate Degree Program at Georgia Tech, believes it might be time to rethink how we classify hurricanes. While the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which rates storms from Category 1 through 5 based solely on maximum wind speed, has been used for decades, Handlos says it doesn’t always capture a storm’s true impact.

“You don’t have to be a tropical cyclone expert to know that the scale has some limitations,” Handlos said. “It doesn’t necessarily portray how strong or impactful a hurricane can be beyond its wind speed.”

11Alive News October 27, 2025

The Blue Mountains in eastern Jamaica could be a region where landslides occur with heavy rain due to steep hill slopes, said Karl Lang, an assistant professor of geology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lang said regions that have been clearcut for agriculture could be susceptible to landslides because the plants that previously grew there helped bind the soil together by the strength of their roots.

Some roads built on steep hills in Puerto Rico were affected by landslides when Hurricane Fiona (2022) and Hurricane Maria (2017) hit, said Lang. “Every time you cut into a steep slope, you make a steeper slope above the road,” he said.

“The real problem there is that you create the road that’s your conduit in and out of the location … and then the landslide dams the road. You create your own problem both by creating the increased probability of a landslide, but also by having those landslides occur where you need to go,” said Lang.

AP News October 27, 2025

Upcoming Events

Nov
05
2025
Featuring Roni Sengupta - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Nov
07
2025
Join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab for Fossil Fridays! Become a fossil hunter and help discover how vertebrate communities have changed through time.
Nov
11
2025
The AI4Science Center hosts a seminar highlighting innovative applications of machine learning in the natural sciences, featuring guest speaker Robert Jernigan, Professor at Iowa State University and Director of the Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Bio
Nov
12
2025
Featuring Changliu Liu - Associate Professor, The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
Nov
14
2025
Join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab for Fossil Fridays! Become a fossil hunter and help discover how vertebrate communities have changed through time.

Spark: College of Sciences at Georgia Tech

Welcome — we're so glad you're here. Learn more about us in this video, narrated by Susan Lozier, College of Sciences Dean and Sutherland Chair.