Experts in the News

Georgia Tech is a Top 50 institution of higher learning, according to the latest annual U.S. News and World Report college rankings. Included in the information about Tech is an 11Alive News video featuring Adam, Rommi, and Zane Kashlan, triplets who recently graduated from the College of Sciences — after just three years — each with a B.S. in Neuroscience.  

President Joe Biden has selected longtime biologist and former government scientist Renee Wegrzyn as the first director of the nascent Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, ARPA-H for short. Wegrzyn is a double alumna of the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech, holding both a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Bioengineering, and a B.S. in Biology from the Institute. 

From bears to moose to lynx, and even squirrels and frogs, animals are leaving their homes in search of cooler climates as the planet warms. In fact, roughly half of the world’s 4,000 species are on the move, with many migrating northwards towards higher latitudes. For ecologists and conservationists, understanding how these species’ viable habitats expand and contract in the context of a rapidly shifting climate is critical. But current models can produce inaccurate, and overly optimistic results, because they fail to consider a key question: can a species realistically reach a suitable climate before it’s too late? A new computer modeling tool, MegaSDM, may help. It includes research from Jenny McGuire, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences, and Ben Shipley, Ph.D. candidate in the School of Biological Sciences, and it's the first modeling tool that considers dispersal limits for many species, climate models, and time periods at once.

Electrical signals tell the heart to contract, but when the signals form spiral waves, they can lead to dangerous cardiac events like tachycardia and fibrillation. Researchers at Georgia Tech and clinicians at Emory University School of Medicine are bringing a new understanding to these complicated conditions with the first high-resolution visualizations of stable spiral waves in human ventricles. The Georgia Tech School of Physics researchers are Flavio Fenton, professor, and IIija Uzelac, research scientist.

NASA is preparing to enter a new space age from Florida's space coast, and a scientist in Georgia is helping newly tapped Artemis astronauts step onto the moon with next-generation suits. Thom Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the School of Physics, is a co-founder of the Center for Space Technology and Research. Orlando has been working with NASA to design the space suits that future astronauts will wear as they walk on the lunar surface.

After years of planning and two Covid-induced delays, the TRACER (TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment) field campaign began last fall in the Houston, Texas, region, collecting data on clouds, aerosols, precipitation, meteorology, and radiation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A four-month intensive operational period began June 1, bringing many more instruments and detailed measurements to the campaign. This allowed a group of undergraduate and high school interns at Brookhaven National Laboratory to gain firsthand experience analyzing real atmospheric data and contribute to the science coming from TRACER. One of those undergraduate interns is Emily Melvin of the School of Physics, who blogs that she was "allowed to practice my forecasting skills and explore some of the resources available to meteorologists."

Turbulence plays a key role in our daily lives, making for bumpy plane rides, affecting weather and climate, limiting the fuel efficiency of the cars we drive, and impacting clean energy technologies. Yet, scientists and engineers have puzzled at ways to predict and alter turbulent fluid flows, and it has long remained one of the most challenging problems in science and engineering. Now, physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated — numerically and experimentally — that turbulence can be understood and quantified with the help of a relatively small set of special solutions to the governing equations of fluid dynamics that can be precomputed for a particular geometry, once and for all. The research by Roman Grigoriev and Michael Schatz, professors in the School of Physics, was also covered in ScienceDaily.

Patch.com in Smyrna/Vinings focuses on one of Smyrna's city council representatives, Lewis Wheaton, who is also an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, and a member of Georgia Tech's neuroscience program. The prosthetics that Wheaton's team researches in his Cognitive Motor Control Lab would provide improved motor rehabilitation training for individuals with upper limb amputation. Patch.com also links to a longer Georgia Tech feature on the interdisciplinary neuroscience program. 

Cognitive fatigue is viewed as an inflated cost of cognitive control. It is characterized by more impulsive decisions in which people lose the ability to manage their brain processes as easily and make more spur-of-the-moment judgments. It occurs when we must use our heads for extended periods of time, whether it is while researching, writing an article, making a timetable, or reading a book. Several scientists are interviewed, including Phillip Ackerman, professor in the School of Psychology, who says engaging in enjoyable activities makes you less prone to experiencing cognitive tiredness than engaging in boring activities.

Britney Schmidt hunts for clues about the universe in a West Australian salt lake. The NASA-funded researcher, formerly with the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, says the otherworldly landscape, with its pink-hued water and fringing trees, is no mere illusion; it is more like Mars than almost any other location on Earth. It could even help scientists detect extraterrestrial life on other planets. Joining Schmidt in that hunt is Taylor Plattner, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

As written by Martin B. Short, associate professor in the School of Mathematics, "the author goes about ruining an online word guessing game by generally trying to mathify the whole thing." Trying to find the secret solution word in Wordle has become the latest internet word game obsession for many, and as Short writes, it can indeed involve a judicious use of math to rapidly find the hidden word. (Registration required.)

Temperatures are climbing around the globe, leaving parts of the world sweltering under extreme heat, with record-breaking temperatures fueling wildfires and severe drought in some areas. Heat waves around the world have dashed records, threatened public health, and buckled infrastructure, in what Georgia Tech researchers say are signs of the climate crisis' impact on day-to-day weather. “This is a stronger heat wave than it used to be,” says Zachary Handlos, senior academic professional in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “But, really, the concern is that these are expected to happen more frequently as the globe warms and atmosphere warms. So, that means everything is warmer in general.”