Experts in the News

In an article published in Science, Maria Martignoni, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, reflects on her path as a scientist and shares advice to students: 

"One does not need to have a clear life plan to belong in science. Many scientists know from the start that they want to be academic researchers. But for others the path unfolds gradually, with spurts of doubt and uncertainty along the way. In a way, that’s fitting. As researchers we are explorers, and part of our mission involves finding our way without always knowing where we are going.”

Postdoctoral researcher Aniruddha Bhattacharya and School of Physics Professor Chandra Raman have introduced a novel way to generate entanglement between photons – an essential step in building scalable quantum computers that use photons as quantum bits (qubits). Their research, published in Physical Review Letters, leverages a mathematical concept called non-Abelian quantum holonomy to entangle photons in a deterministic way without relying on strong nonlinear interactions or irrevocably probabilistic quantum measurements.

As the effects of the earthquake in Myanmar continue to be uncovered, scientists say the hazard of this tremor is comparable to a potential event along the San Andreas Fault in the western United States - which many say is also overdue for an earthquake. 

Computer models can simulate the extent of such a large earthquake, but researchers say Friday's catastrophe revealed new insights on what to expect. For one, the Myanmar earthquake was probably a supershear event - when shaking is stronger than expected for a particular earthquake, said Zhigang Peng, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Supershear events are rare and not fully understood. Scientists have found growing evidence that they usually occur on long, mature strike-slip faults, such as the Sagaing or San Andreas faults. But they don't know the exact conditions that may cause a rupture to trigger such extreme shaking.

Peng said that by examining what conditions caused this in Myanmar, "it informs our understanding of similar potential events, for example, on the San Andres Fault."

When a chemical fire broke out at the BioLab facility in Conyers, Georgia in 2024, a plume of smoke blanketed the area, triggering evacuations and urgent warnings to stay indoors. But for many residents, this wasn’t just an isolated emergency—it was part of a larger pattern of industrial incidents at the plant that raised serious concerns about safety and oversight. 

The series “Manufacturing Danger: The BioLab Story” uncovers what led to the fire, how officials and the company responded, and the lingering questions about its impact on the community. The series includes expert analyses from Greg Huey, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Pamela Pollet, principal academic professional in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

This story also appeared at NPR.

In an article published in The Washington Post, Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences James Stroud provides an overview of his research: 

Every morning in Miami, our fieldwork begins the same way. Fresh Cuban coffee and pastelitos — delicious Latin American pastries — fuel our team for another day of evolutionary detective work. In this case, we are tracking evolution in real time, measuring natural selection as it happens in a community of Caribbean lizards.

Our research takes place on a South Florida island roughly the size of an American football field — assuming we are successful in sidestepping the American crocodiles that bask in the surrounding lake. We call it Lizard Island, and it's a special place.

Since 2015, we have been conducting evolutionary research here on five species of remarkable lizards called anoles. Our team is working to understand one of biology's most fundamental questions: How does natural selection drive evolution in real time?

This also appeared in The Conversation. 

Peter Yunker, associate professor in the School of Physics, reflects on the results of new experiments which show that cells pack in increasingly well-ordered patterns as the relative sizes of their nuclei grow.

“This research is a beautiful example of how the physics of packing is so important in biological systems,” states Yunker. He says the researchers introduce the idea that cell packing can be controlled by the relative size of the nucleus, which “is an accessible control parameter that may play important roles during development and could be used in bioengineering.”

How life on Earth evolved from unicellular to multicellular organisms remains a mystery, though evidence indicates that this may have occurred multiple times independently. To understand what could have happened, Will Ratcliff, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, has been conducting long-term evolution experiments on yeast in which multicellularity develops and emerges spontaneously.

In a recent episode of “The Joy of Why” podcast, Ratcliff discusses what his “snowflake yeast” model could reveal about the origins of multicellularity, the surprising discoveries his team has made, and how he responds to skeptics who question his approach.

Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Jennifer Glass comments on a paper recently published in Science that details “photochemodenitrification,” a nitrous oxide production pathway through which sunlight induces substantial and consistent nitrous oxide formation under oxic abiotic conditions in fresh and marine surface waters. 

“I think it’s a beautiful [study],’ says Glass, noting that researchers have previously shown similar light-driven processes in atmospheric aerosols, but never in aquatic environments. “As we’ve been sequencing more and more genomes in the environment a lot of us have moved really into that -omics space, looking for key markers for genes … This just goes to show that sometimes it’s not biological,” she says. “You have to think outside the box and consider all the chemistry that can be happening, not just the enzymes.”

Nga Lee "Sally" Ng, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, leads the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported Atmospheric Science and Chemistry mEasurement NeTwork (ASCENT), which includes 12 air quality measurement sites nationwide. Each site has state-of-the-art instruments that help us understand aerosols, or tiny particles in the atmosphere. The network is constantly analyzing the chemical constituents of aerosols with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometers, referred to as PM2.5, which contribute to more than 90% of the adverse health impacts associated with air pollution.

"We provide ASCENT data to the public in real time so that people know what's in the air we're breathing," Ng said.

The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia named Robert Scott president of Albany State University, effective May 1, 2025. Scott, who holds a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, will return to higher education after almost two decades working in the private sector. 

Georgia Tech’s campus was recently the site of an interactive celebration of science. The 2025 Atlanta Science Festival launched Saturday, March 8, 2025 at Georgia Tech. Dozens of exhibits were spread out all over the campus, with hands-on STEM activities, demonstrations, and information about the research currently happening on campus. 

(A similar story appeared at WABE.)

Four million Americans suffer from glaucoma, an incurable eye disease that slowly degrades peripheral vision and eventually leads to blindness. A new treatment could potentially stop this degradation and possibly save people’s vision before it’s too late.

Raquel Lieberman, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and her lab team have discovered two new antibodies with promise to treat glaucoma. The antibodies can break down the protein myocilin, which, when it malfunctions, can cause glaucoma.

Lieberman’s group recently published this research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Nexus.