Experts in the News

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.

Where is cutting-edge engineering research being conducted in the U.S.? What are our leading universities for sponsored research in engineering subfields such as chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering? One answer to those questions can be found in the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey, released in December by the National Science Foundation (NSF). That survey measures the dollars spent annually on research and development (R and D) at American colleges and universities. Georgia Tech is second on the overall list, with $839,071 on research and development expenditures. 

Many of us feel tethered to our water bottles because we've been told that being hydrated is key to being healthy. NPR's Life Kit and Short Wave colleagues teamed up to talk about what science says about hydrating. Turns out much of the lore is due for an update. Example: drinking eight glasses of water a day is good for you. That actually depends on body size and activity level. But Mindy Millard-Stafford, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of Georgia Tech's Exercise Physiology Lab, says even mild dehydration, or a two percent loss of water, can impact the brain's executive functions and ability to pay sustained attention. 

Where is cutting-edge engineering research being conducted in the U.S.? What are our leading universities for sponsored research in engineering subfields such as chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering? One answer to those questions can be found in the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey, released in December by the National Science Foundation (NSF). That survey measures the dollars spent annually on research and development (R and D) at American colleges and universities. Georgia Tech is second on the overall list, with $839,071 on research and development expenditures. 

Henry Segerman, a British American mathematician and mathematical artist at Oklahoma State University, has invented a puzzle to help explain the Earth's annual trip around the sun: Continental Drift, a 3-D sliding puzzle that made its debut earlier this year. The underlying geometric concept is holonomy: When you travel a loop on a curved surface and return to the starting point, you arrive somewhat turned around, rotated, perhaps by 180 degrees. It's just one of Segerman's inventions that help visualize mathematics. A few years ago, Dr. Segerman demonstrated Extensors: a construction kit for making extending mechanisms from scissor-like hinged parts. Sabetta Matsumoto, an associate professor in the School of Physics, applied mathematician, and Dr. Segerman’s partner, gave input into the contraption’s development and came up with the name Extensor. Between them, math is “a pretty common conversation,” said Matsumoto, who was featured in a 2019 New York Times story about her project to investigate the mathematics and mechanics of knitting. (This story also appears in Yahoo! News.)