Experts in the News

Zachary Handlos, Georgia Tech atmospheric science educator, explains how drought, heat, and shifting weather patterns are fueling more intense Southeast wildfires.

Less than a month after the historic Artemis II mission began, a Georgia Tech researcher is being recognized for his work in helping keep astronauts safe in space.

Thomas Orlando, a Regents’ professor at Georgia Tech, designed the spacesuits worn by astronauts on Artemis 2. He said his team focused on protecting the suits from micrometeorite impacts and especially lunar dust.

“We realized that a bigger problem, at least from NASA’s perspective, is dust," Orlando said. “We don’t really want dust to be on spacesuits. It can get into the seals. It could, you know, cause them to leak.”

Orlando works with graduate students to study the challenges astronauts may face in space and on the moon.

Researchers have long known that when two galaxies approach each other and merge, the supermassive black holes at their centers form a pair and are eventually expected to merge as well.  It is precisely these mergers that are considered one of the sources of the gravitational-wave background — a faint “hum” of spacetime detected in recent years. However, the role played by the geometry of the collision in this process has remained an open question. 

Graduate student Sena Ghobadi of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Physics, along with her colleagues, has developed three-dimensional dynamic models of such collisions. 

A similar story appeared in Sky & Telescope. 

Zachary Handlos, senior academic professional in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, explains how weather patterns can lead to conditions conducive to the types of wildfires currently seen in Florida and Georgia. 

This piece also appeared in The Washington Post and The Conversation.

Assistant Professor Benjamin Freeman and graduate student Shreyas Arashanapalli of the School of Biological Sciences detail their study on the use of birdsong for territorial defense. They highlight that male birds — and many female birds — sing and defend territories. Their examination uncovered that cooperative territorial defense is especially common in birds with long-term social bonds or that live close to the equator.

In December, The Conversation hosted a webinar on AI’s revolutionary role in drug discovery and development. Science and technology editor Eric Smalley interviewed Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents' Professor and eminent scholar in computational systems biology at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Benjamin P. Brown, assistant professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. Skolnick has developed AI-based approaches to predict protein structure and function that may help with drug discovery and finding off-label uses of existing drugs. Brown’s lab works on creating new computer models that make drug discovery faster and more reliable.

While it often gets written off as being distracted or not paying attention, daydreaming is actually a sign of an active and imaginative mind. In fact, a 2017 study found that daydreamers are generally smarter than their focused peers. “People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering,” said Eric Schumacher, the Georgia Tech psychology professor who co-authored the study.

People who daydream frequently have things running through their heads, whether they are thinking through ideas or picturing possible outcomes. Letting the mind wander allows unexpected connections to form. To an outside observer, they may seem checked out of reality. However, other highly intellectual people know that they're truly deeply engaged, just not with what's going on right in front of them.

As astronauts head toward the moon for the first time in decades, engineers and scientists at Georgia Tech are looking on with excitement. The current Artemis II mission is set to take four astronauts around the moon.

The previous Artemis mission in 2022 was unmanned, but researchers from Georgia Tech contributed to it. With this mission, Georgia Tech grads are involved, including people who lead teams that worked on the launch and will recover the crew and the spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean when they return to Earth. […] Last year, Georgia Tech created its Space Research Institute to pull together faculty, staff and students who work on space from different areas, including engineering, science and business.

The successful launch of Artemis II has renewed interest in space exploration, and experts at Georgia Tech say the mission could inspire a new generation while advancing technologies that benefit life on Earth.

“The technologies we create, the money we spend on this, benefit life on earth,” said Jud Ready, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Space Research Institute, who oversees tens of millions of dollars of space research. […]Just like Apollo inspired a generation, the hope is that Artemis can as well. 

Students stopped by a series of telescopes set out by Georgia Tech’s Astronomy Club on Thursday morning, peering at the sun and asking questions.

Most were answered by Paul Sell, who directs Tech’s observatory. “The sun is very active,” he explained to one student. “It goes through 11-year cycles.”

ATLANTA, GA / ACCESS Newswire / March 30, 2026 / Drawdown Georgia today announced the launch of the Drawdown Georgia Climate Outlook Maps, a new tool designed to help civic, business, and community leaders understand and visualize how Georgia's climate may change between now and 2050-and what those changes could mean for infrastructure, agriculture, public health, and economic development.

Alex Robel, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, said pumping sand onshore is far from a perfect solution to stabilize a beach, but it’s “one of the best tools we have in our arsenal.”

“It’s been done in the United States for almost a century in different places and we know how to do it,” Robel said. “We’re good at it.”

But nourishment is only a Band-Aid for erosion. Once cities start replenishing sand, Robel said they have to keep doing it regularly. 

A team of researchers including David Hu, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences and George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, have visualized mosquito flight behavior for the first time.

Based on their data, the researchers said they don’t think mosquitoes swarm because they’re following the pack. Each appeared to pick up on the cues independently, then found themselves at the same place at the same time.

“It’s like a crowded bar,” said Hu. “Customers aren’t there because they followed each other into the bar. They’re attracted by the same cues: drinks, music, and the atmosphere. The same is true of mosquitoes. Rather than following the leader, the insect follows the signals and happens to arrive at the same spot as the others. They’re good copies of each other.”

A similar story was published by The Economic Times.