Experts in the News

At the 2022 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in December, planetary scientists gathered to discuss their visions for the future of solar system exploration — visions that include drilling into the surface of the moon, peering into the atmosphere of Mars, sniffing out what's in water spurting out of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, and more. One of those projects is the Ice Shell Impact Penetrator (IceShIP), a probe that would hit the icy ocean surface of Jupiter's moon Europa "faster than a bullet" according to Chinmayee Govinda Raj, a doctoral candidate in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The impact would melt some of the ice, and the probe would also carry heaters to help melting along. Then, the spacecraft would sip up that extraterrestrial liquid, sending it to internal instruments that could analyze it for signs of life. Raj and a team of scientists conducted a 2022 study of IceShIP's post-impact components.

This roundup of news items includes a report updating research on graphene, a possible successor to silicon as the foundation for all electronics, from Walter de Heer, Regent's Professor in the School of Physics. De Heer's latest advance involves developing a new  nanoelectronics platform based on graphene. The technology is compatible with conventional microelectronics manufacturing, a necessity for any viable alternative to silicon. In the course of its research, de Heer's team may have also discovered a new quasiparticle. Their discovery could lead to manufacturing smaller, faster, more efficient, and more sustainable computer chips, and has potential implications for quantum and high-performance computing.

The InspiHer program created by Dr. Jennifer Williams has a mission that runs deep in Newton County. In fact, it was an inspired Williams who piloted the program seven years ago for purpose of exposing females — specifically minority females — to coding and computer science at a young age. That small, founding club has evolved into a county wide movement to inspire young females students throughout all Newton County schools to consider careers in coding and computer technology. Partnerships included Georgia Tech’s CEISMC program (Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing) sending five women to lead a session of the Earsketch program, a branch of InspiHer where girls get to code music and create original songs. Lizanne DeStefano is CEISMC's executive director and a professor in the School of Psychology. 

At the 2022 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in December, planetary scientists gathered to discuss their visions for the future of solar system exploration — visions that include drilling into the surface of the moon, peering into the atmosphere of Mars, sniffing out what's in water spurting out of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, and more. One of those projects is the Ice Shell Impact Penetrator (IceShIP), a probe that would hit the icy ocean surface of Jupiter's moon Europa "faster than a bullet" according to Chinmayee Govinda Raj, a doctoral candidate in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The impact would melt some of the ice, and the probe would also carry heaters to help melting along. Then, the spacecraft would sip up that extraterrestrial liquid, sending it to internal instruments that could analyze it for signs of life. Raj and a team of scientists conducted a 2022 study of IceShIP's post-impact components.

Blair D. Sullivan, B.S. MATH/CS 2003, will be one of four plenary speakers at the Spring Southeast Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, scheduled for March 18-19 at Georgia Tech. Sullivan is now an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, with an adjunct appointment at North Carolina State University. Her research interests include parameterized algorithms, structural graph theory, applied discrete mathematics, random graphs, and combinatorial scientific computing. Sullivan was also a research scientist in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ride National Laboratory. Several School of Mathematics faculty members are organizing panels and other discussions during the Spring Southeast Sectional Meeting. 

Skipping a stone across water requires skill and patience and, of course, a great stone. Personal preference may send you to a flat, light one, which seems to skip easier. But scientists have found that is not the only way to get impressive leaps. A recent University of Bristol study researched how shape and mass affect the way objects interact with water. And it found that a heavier rock with a good curve — imagine the shape of a mango but smaller —  can get an impressive bounce. David Hu, a professor with the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the School of Physics, did not take part in the study but comments on how surprised he was that the Bristol scientists studied curved objects. 

Is science better when it disrupts or when there are just incremental improvements to previous knowledge? The topic was analyzed in a recent study, and it seems that researchers have spent these past years improving things rather than trying to revolutionize everything. The study suggests that the level of "disruptiveness" in scientific research has gone way down in the 2000s compared to the last half-century. Yian Yin, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, highlights how disruptiveness is not inherently good, and incremental science is not necessarily bad. Yin cites the first direct observation of gravitational waves, a landmark discovery that was both revolutionary and the product of incremental science. Georgia Tech researchers, many from the School of Physics, worked with researchers at the Laser Interferomoter Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) on the gravitational wave observations. (This coverage also appeared in Nature and Inside Higher Education.)

Skipping a stone across water requires skill and patience and, of course, a great stone. Personal preference may send you to a flat, light one, which seems to skip easier. But scientists have found that is not the only way to get impressive leaps. A recent University of Bristol study researched how shape and mass affect the way objects interact with water. And it found that a heavier rock with a good curve — imagine the shape of a mango but smaller —  can get an impressive bounce. David Hu, a professor with the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the School of Physics, did not take part in the study but comments on how surprised he was that the Bristol scientists studied curved objects. 

Blair D. Sullivan, B.S. MATH/CS 2003, will be one of four plenary speakers at the Spring Southeast Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, scheduled for March 18-19 at Georgia Tech. Sullivan is now an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, with an adjunct appointment at North Carolina State University. Her research interests include parameterized algorithms, structural graph theory, applied discrete mathematics, random graphs, and combinatorial scientific computing. Sullivan was also a research scientist in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ride National Laboratory. Several School of Mathematics faculty members are organizing panels and other discussions during the Spring Southeast Sectional Meeting. 

Over the past two years, artificial intelligence has shown it can predict what many cellular components look like. For instance, the AlphaFold deep-learning tool developed by Google sister company DeepMind has decoded how nearly every amino acid sequence folds into defined shapes. With a grant of computing time from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge, a team led by Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents' Professor, Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair & GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, is extending that work to unfurl how those proteins interact and form complex, working structures in living systems. More details on this development can be found at the College of Sciences News Center here. 

Ahead of the fifteenth anniversary of the 2008 Iowa Caucuses, President Barack Obama held a roundtable discussion with six former campaign organizers to reflect on their work in Iowa and how, 15 years later, they have continued making an impact within their communities. “I really rode the wave of your work and that ultimately led to a historic election,” said President Obama, who spoke of how seeing campaign organizers and volunteers working so hard up close inspired him to be a better candidate and the role they played in the early victory that put him on a viable path to the presidency. One of those advisors is Shannon Valley, M.S. EAS 2016, Ph.D. EAS 2019. Currently, Valley is a American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow placed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Before that, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic InstitutioAfAfter n.

Ahead of the fifteenth anniversary of the 2008 Iowa Caucuses, President Barack Obama held a roundtable discussion with six former campaign organizers to reflect on their work in Iowa and how, 15 years later, they have continued making an impact within their communities. “I really rode the wave of your work and that ultimately led to a historic election,” said President Obama, who spoke of how seeing campaign organizers and volunteers working so hard up close inspired him to be a better candidate and the role they played in the early victory that put him on a viable path to the presidency. One of those advisors is Shannon Valley, M.S. EAS 2016, Ph.D. EAS 2019. Currently, Valley is a American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow placed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Before that, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic InstitutioAfAfter n.