Experts in the News

Ph.D. Robotics Student in Robotics Tianyu Wang and Postdoctoral Physics Scholar Christopher Pierce are developing snakelike, limbless robots. The robots could come in handy in search-and-rescue situations, where they could navigate collapsed buildings to find and assist survivors — and could readily move through confined and cluttered spaces such as debris fields, where walking or wheeled robots and human rescuers tend to fail.

Scientists have been trying to build snakelike, limbless robots for decades. These robots could come in handy in search-and-rescue situations, where they could navigate collapsed buildings to find and assist survivors. Georgia Tech researchers Tianyu Wang, a robotics Ph.D. student, and Christopher Pierce, a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Physics, recently shared how they go about building these robots, drawing inspiration from creatures like worms and snakes. Wang and Pierce work with Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. This story has been republished in Know Techie, IOT World Today and The Good Men Project.

Bolstered by state and national workforce needs and their promising return on investment, the STEM track represents a gold mine for colleges and universities that want to ensure credentials from their institution are providing students with good job prospects and gainful employment. Meanwhile, the humanities and social sciences are taking a back seat. But something exciting is happening in the world of higher education. Colleges and universities hailing from both sides of the fence are inching ever closer to the middle, integrating lessons in the humanities with STEM-based curriculum—and vice versa. School of Biological Sciences and School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor Julia Kubanek, who also serves as the Institute's vice president for Interdisciplinary Research, shared her thoughts on the positive impacts of this on institutions like Georgia Tech.

Moving with an exoskeleton sounds a bit like science fiction, but it’s actually the cutting edge of what’s possible. The EPIC (Exoskeleton and Prosthetic Intelligent Controls) and PoWeR (Physiology of Wearable Robotics) labs at Georgia Tech are working to create exoskeletons that restore and even enhance walking abilities. Here, Senior Research Scientist and clinician Kinsey Herrin works to improve 14-year-old Sebastian Andres Sacerdoti's ability to walk after suffering from a tumor impaired his movement at seven years-old. The PoWeR lab is run by Greg Sawicki, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

A new theory allows researchers to create easy-to-solve mathematical models using cables, a previously challenging mathematical problem — offering key insights into the behavior of deformable solids, with applications spanning from engineering and biology to nanotechnology. The work, also shared on Phys.org, was led by School of Physics Assistant Professor Zeb Rocklin and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The adage “you don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it” rings true for a Georgia Tech psychology major after she began experiencing rapid hearing loss. But softball player Chandler Dennis credits a her cochlear implant with drawing her out of self-isolation and helping her reconnect with friends and family. Dennis is set to graduate this spring, with plans to pursue a career in sports psychology. But first, she’s laser-focused on her final season of pitching.

Brandon Pries is a graduate student in the School of Physics who researches computational astrophysics with Professor John Wise, using machine learning to study the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes in the early universe. Pries has also done extensive research with the NSF IceCube Collaboration. Pries recently shared a deep dive on neutrinos with astrobites, a daily literature journal (an "astro-ph reader's digest") supported by the AAS.

In a warming climate, meltwater from Antarctica is expected to contribute significantly to rising seas. For the most part, though, research has been focused on West Antarctica, in places like the Thwaites Glacier, which has seen significant melt in recent decades. In a paper published Jan. 19 in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers at Stanford have shown that the Wilkes Subglacial Basin in East Antarctica, which holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than 10 feet, could be closer to runaway melting than anyone realized. One of the study's co-authors is Winnie Chu, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

In the world of competitive speed puzzling, where an eye for detail and fast handiwork can impact completion time — down to the second — the ability to assemble hundreds of pieces quickly no matter where players stand gives them an edge. They are part of a growing group of jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts who participate in the sport — a fast-moving, hyper-focused variant of the relaxing pastime that has seen a resurgence in popularity. Faith Lindell-Taylor, Research Grants and Operations Manager in the College of Sciences, is quoted in this Washington Post story, and for good reason: she is a co-founder and current treasurer of the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association. Lindell-Taylor told the Post that speed-puzzling organizers try to pick unreleased images to avoid giving any competitors an advantage.

Evolution can perform spectacular makeovers: today's airborne songbirds descended from the wingless, earthbound dinosaurs that roamed millions of years ago, for example. But some organisms seem to change very little, even over eons. Scientists have long wondered how these species withstand the pressures of natural selection. The prevailing hypothesis for this “stasis paradox” has been that natural selection keeps some species unchanged by selecting for moderate or average traits (so-called stabilizing selection) rather than selecting for more extreme traits that would cause a species to change (directional selection). But a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA contradicts this idea, showing that evolution constantly favors different traits in seemingly unchanging animals that improve short-term survival. In the long term, though, “all that evolution cancels out and leads to no change,” says the study's lead author, James Stroud, assistant professor and Elizabeth Smithgall-Watts Endowed Faculty in the School of Biological Sciences. 

Researchers from University of California San Diego, as part of a large collaboration with scientists around the world, have developed a new search tool to help researchers better understand the metabolism of microorganisms. Microbes are key players in virtually all biological and environmental systems, yet limitations in current techniques used to study microbial metabolism make it difficult to decode their interactions and activities.The new research, published in Nature Microbiology, directly addresses these limitations, which could ultimately transform understanding of both human health and the environment. Two of the many co-authors of the study are from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry — Neha Garg, assistant professor, and Nicole Aiosa, graduate scholar.  

Eighteen-year-old Anu Iyer, a recent Little Rock, Ark., high school graduate now studying for her bachelor's degree at the School of Biological Sciences, has collaborated with a University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) research team and is the lead author for a research study in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature portfolio journals. The publication stems from Iyer’s work with other researchers using machine learning to detect Parkinson’s disease. Iyer was able to confirm the reliability of telephone voice recordings to detect Parkinson’s. The UAMS study team collected telephone voice samples from 50 people diagnosed with Parkinson’s and 50 healthy control participants, then applied machine learning classification with voice features related to phonation.