Experts in the News

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.

A special issue of Pure and Applied Functional Analysis honors mathematician School of Mathematics Regents' Professor Leonid Bunimovich on his 75th birthday. 

Bunimovich's pioneering contributions have shaped modern dynamical systems. He is best known for discovering a fundamental mechanism of chaos in dynamical systems, including systems of chaotic billiards such as the Bunimovich stadium, Bunimovich flowers, and elliptic flowers. Learn about his research in this 2023 news story: Bringing Understanding to Chaotic Dynamics with Billiards, Flowers, and ... Mushrooms?

If you’ve walked the aisles of a grocery store, scrolled through social media, watched television, or set foot in a fast-casual restaurant chain in recent months, you know that protein is having its moment.

So, why are brands pushing protein? An International Food Information Council study found that 70% of adults are looking to increase their protein intake. But as it makes its way into more products than ever before, is it too much of a good thing?

Lesley Baradel is a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and lecturer in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. In this episode of "Generating Buzz", she digs into the protein-packed trend, with implications ranging from health and wellness to marketing and how the rise of GLP-1s factors into the increased focus on the macronutrient.

Research led by Georgia Tech physicist Itamar Kolvin has found that the presence of small imperfections or heterogeneities in materials can have a dual effect on their strength and resilience. While heterogeneities were historically believed to make materials stronger by creating an obstacle course for cracks, the new study shows that in some complex materials, heterogeneities can actually accelerate crack propagation and weaken the overall structure. The findings have implications for how engineers design and reinforce materials to optimize their toughness.

Assistant Professor Zhu-Xi Luo and Ph.D. student Yi-Lin Tsao from Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Physics have demonstrated a novel mechanism for stabilising physical phases vulnerable to topological defects. Their work addresses a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics: the destabilisation of phases like superfluids by thermally-induced defects such as anyons and vortices. 

Ratan Murty, assistant professor in the School of Psychology, discusses a new functional MRI study published in Nature Neuroscience which found that at two months old, babies’ visual systems appear ready to distinguish among a variety of common objects. 

Murty says the study’s findings should prompt researchers to reconsider how infants learn to process the world. Cognitive development is often regarded as a bottom-up process, in which “the early visual regions that encode simpler features develop first, and higher-level regions that encode more complex features emerge later.” Instead, brain maturation is “non-hierarchical,” he says, with the more complex visual ventral cortex developing before the lateral occipitotemporal cortex.