Experts in the News

Research done in recent years after Florida's last historic cold snap reveals that the temperature at which iguanas become cold-stunned may be lower than what was commonly believed before.

"As a scientist, I was fascinated why these lizards can now tolerate a colder temperature than they had recently, prior to this cold snap," reptile researcher James Stroud of Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences told Gulf Coast News via Zoom.

Stroud has been studying invasive lizards of all sizes with a particular focus on understanding their tolerance for cold temperatures. His work has revolved around studying lizards that survive significant cold snaps and then testing to see how their tolerance changes afterward.

"Prior to the cold snap event, all lizards could tolerate temps around 46 to 50 degrees," Stroud said. "After they experienced colder temps than they had experienced in the previous few winters, they could suddenly tolerate colder temps, down to around 42 Fahrenheit."

Flu rates are still high in Georgia this month but appear to be dropping slightly as people resume regular schedules after the winter holidays.

Vaccination remains the best way to protect against the flu, said M.G. Finn, a professor of biochemistry at Georgia Tech and an expert in viruses and immunology.

Finn said there is a gap between this year’s vaccine and the variant of flu that is circulating widely, in part because scientists design the vaccine well in advance of the flu season. Still, the vaccine reduces the risk of hospitalization by about 40%, he said, making it a valuable tool for protecting health.

“You want to bias the odds in your favor of not getting seriously ill if you happen to come across somebody who has the flu, and you want to minimize the chances of you passing it along to people around you,” Finn said. “It’s completely and utterly safe, so there is no risk whatsoever for taking it.”

Green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are not native to the U.S. but were brought to Florida in the 1960s, where they have, for the most part, flourished—except, that is, when temperatures have dropped below 50 degrees F (10 degrees C). 

These chilly conditions can cause a cold shock in the lizards. And because the iguanas tend to sleep in trees, getting cold shocked can sometimes cause the animals to fall from the skies in an infamous Florida phenomenon. 

“These tropical lizards were experiencing conditions that they’ve never experienced in their entire evolutionary history before, tens of millions of years,” says James Stroud, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

But in Florida, colder conditions occur every few years—albeit less often as temperatures rise because of climate change. The experience of the iguanas that have been forced to confront the cold in the state can teach scientists more about how animals respond to new climates more generally, Stroud says.

Jennifer Glass, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was recently quoted in an article published in Scientific American that discusses the evolution of Wikipedia:

As Wikipedia’s use grew, some educators softened their stance, encouraging its use to find leads to sources that students could dig into directly. Others took a different approach, assigning students to edit Wikipedia entries—many through Wiki Education.

Jennifer Glass, a biogeochemist at Georgia Institute of Technology, is one of those professors; she has incorporated Wikipedia editing into her teaching since 2018. She wanted a student project that emphasized the concise and technical but understandable writing style that the site uses. And although she hadn’t done much editing for Wikipedia herself, she was impressed by the website’s breadth of content.

Each semester, her students write one article from scratch about a topic they research, from dolomitization to the tropopause. Glass says the project teaches them the value of institutional access to published literature and the skill of fact-checking their writing line by line.

For their leadership across various industries and positive contributions to their communities, 12 Georgia Tech alumni are among Georgia Trend’s 100 Most Influential Georgians for 2026. The list includes two College of Sciences alumni, Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera (M.S. PSY 1993, Ph.D. PSY 1995) and President and Dean of Morehouse School of Medicine Valerie Montgomery Rice (CHEM 1983).

In the mid-1990s, a Department of Energy-funded project helped catalyze one of the most transformative breakthroughs in American energy history: the development of a horizontal drilling bit capable of withstanding the extreme conditions of shale formations. 

Before this innovation, natural gas trapped in tight shale rock was considered too expensive and technically challenging to extract. 

Read Full Story on AJC.

In an article published by The Conversation, Benjamin Freeman, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, discusses his research, including a recent study on how mountain birds in the Pacific Northwest are responding to climate change.

Assistant Professor Christopher Carr co-authored an article published in The Conversation that discusses NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. Carr characterizes the mission as a “testament to a new era in spaceflight”.

College of Sciences Alum Jill I. Gostin (M.S. MATH 1989) has been elected to serve as the President-Elect of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), marking a significant achievement in her decades of technical and professional leadership. Gostin is a former longtime research leader at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

A team of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences published a paper on  interlimb training and how it may provide tangible benefits during early-stage rehabilitation following upper limb amputation, especially in cases of partial-hand loss.

As Hurricane Melissa barrels toward Jamaica as a Category 5 storm, some in the meteorological community are questioning if the traditional way of measuring hurricane strength still tells the full story.

Zachary Handlos, director of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Undergraduate Degree Program at Georgia Tech, believes it might be time to rethink how we classify hurricanes. While the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which rates storms from Category 1 through 5 based solely on maximum wind speed, has been used for decades, Handlos says it doesn’t always capture a storm’s true impact.

“You don’t have to be a tropical cyclone expert to know that the scale has some limitations,” Handlos said. “It doesn’t necessarily portray how strong or impactful a hurricane can be beyond its wind speed.”

The Blue Mountains in eastern Jamaica could be a region where landslides occur with heavy rain due to steep hill slopes, said Karl Lang, an assistant professor of geology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lang said regions that have been clearcut for agriculture could be susceptible to landslides because the plants that previously grew there helped bind the soil together by the strength of their roots.

Some roads built on steep hills in Puerto Rico were affected by landslides when Hurricane Fiona (2022) and Hurricane Maria (2017) hit, said Lang. “Every time you cut into a steep slope, you make a steeper slope above the road,” he said.

“The real problem there is that you create the road that’s your conduit in and out of the location … and then the landslide dams the road. You create your own problem both by creating the increased probability of a landslide, but also by having those landslides occur where you need to go,” said Lang.