Experts in the News

As an organic chemist who designs molecules to exhibit traits needed by other researchers, James Wilson relies on team science to shape his work. Outside of the classroom and lab, Wilson is a solo warrior who pushes his body to the limits as a competitive cyclist. He recently completed the infamous GAPCO (Great Allegheny Passage and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal), a 335-mile gravel ride from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., in 19 hours and 39 minutes — one of the fastest times ever recorded. He did it by himself, without sleeping and without support. A track athlete in high school, Wilson began cycling as an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina. He competed in local and national events, then tapered his riding while completing his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 2004 from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

A $72.5 million investment from the National Science Foundation will drive the design, discovery and development of advanced materials needed to address major societal challenges. The Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program will fund 37 new four-year projects. One of those projects, Organic Materials Architectured for Researching Vibronic Excitations with Light in the Infrared (MARVEL-IR), will be led by principal investigator Jason Azoulay, Associate Professor and Georgia Research Aliance Vasser Woolley Distinguished Investigator in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. (This research is also covered at Manufacturing.net.)

Lynn Ingram writes that she thought she'd found the state seashell of North Carolina, a Scotch bonnet, on one of the state's beaches. But she soon discovered that the shell was a species of sea snail that is only found in the Pacific Ocean. How did it end up in the Atlantic? Joseph Montoya, professor in the School of Biological Sciences who is also director of Georgia Tech's Ocean Science and Engineering program, says one possibility involves ballast tanks of oceangoing ships; sometimes these shells start as larvae living in plankton that may have been caught up in a ship's ballast water. 

Southern California is no stranger to earthquakes, but tropical storms like Hilary are rare. It’s even rarer for a magnitude-5.1 earthquake near Ojai, Calif. to strike on the same Sunday afternoon (Aug. 20, 2023) that a tropical storm swept through Southern California. This uncommon confluence of events has sparked a heightened curiosity in the general public, including popular memes and the portmanteau “hurriquake.” But is there a physical connection between these events beyond mere coincidence in space and time? Zhigang Peng, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was part of a research team that studied available meteorological and seismic data to reveal that the quake near Ojai, Calif. was almost certainly not triggered by Hilary, which had been downgraded to a tropical storm at the time the earthquake struck.

The winners of the 2023 World Laureates Association Prize were recently announced, and the Prize in Computer Science or Mathematics was awarded to Arkadi Nemirovski, adjunct professor in the School of Mathematics, and Professor Yurii Nesterov at Université Catholique de Louvain "for their seminal work in convex optimization theory, including self-concordant function and interior-point methods, a complexity theory of optimization, accelerated gradient methods, and robust optimization methodological advances." Nemirovski is also Professor and John P. Hunter Chair in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. (This story was also covered in Science, Technode Global, Yahoo! Finance, China Daily, ecns.cn and Cision.)

The first enzyme was discovered in 1833, almost 200 years ago and long before the nature of proteins was appreciated. The field of enzymology came into its own in the 20th century. Technological advances in the hands of creative enzymologists led to an ever-growing understanding of how enzymes achieve enormous rate accelerations as well as the structural basis for substrate specificity and allosteric regulation. A session scheduled for the Discover BMB convention in San Antonio March 23-26 will feature Raquel Lieberman, Professor and Sepcic-Pfiel Chair in Chemistry in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, speaking on the topic, Enzymes for a Sustainable Future.

At the apex of the Greenland ice sheet, a community of 41 scientists and support staff carry out cutting-edge research into everything from climate change to particle physics. This story details recent research underway at Summit Station, located close to the apex of the Greenland ice sheet and one of the most remote scientific stations on Earth. One of two ice-coring projects at Summit Station involved Rachel Moore, a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Moore will use the core samples to study bacteria and other latent biological entities once afloat in the atmosphere and now buried in the ice sheet. Her research will provide a window into the Earth’s environmental history and changing atmospheric patterns that goes back about six centuries.

Zhong Lin Wang, Hightower Chair and Regents' Professor in the School of Materials Science & Engineering, with an adjunct appointment in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, will take part in a webinar sponsored by the IOP Publishing journal, JPhys Materials, to explore the immense potential of ambient energy harvesting materials. Wang pioneered the nanogenerators field for distributed energy, self-powered sensors, and large-scale blue energy. The webinar is scheduled for 11 a.m.-1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, September 26; click here for registration.

Researchers are exploring how active matter can be harnessed for tasks like designing new materials with tailored properties, understanding the behavior of biological organisms, and even developing new approaches to robotics and autonomous systems. But that’s only possible if scientists learn how the microscopic units making up active matter interact, and whether they can affect these interactions and thereby the collective properties of active matter on the macroscopic scale. School of Physics Professor Roman Grigoriev and his research colleagues have found a potential first step by developing a new model of active matter that generated new insight into the physics of the problem. They detail their methods and results in a new study published in Science Advances, “Physically informed data-driven modeling of active nematics.” Lead author of the study is graduate researcher Matthew Golden. Co-authors are graduate researcher Jyothishraj Nambisan and Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, professor in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Barcelona and a former associate professor of Physics at Georgia Tech. (This research was also covered in WorldTimeTodays andCityLife.)

Valerie Montgomery Rice, president and CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine and a Georgia Tech alumna, has received a major honor from the National Medical Association. The organization is giving its 2023 Scroll of Merit Award, its highest honor, to Montgomery Rice. The award recognizes someone who has made significant contributions to medicine, health advocacy or service to the association. Montgomery Rice, who received her bachelor's degree from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is the first woman to lead the private historically Black medical school in Atlanta. (This award was also covered in the Atlanta Tribune.) 

Santosh Vempala, the Frederick Storey II Chair of Computing and Distinguished Professor in the School of Computer Science, with courtesy appointments in the School of Mathematics and H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been named a 2023 Simons Investigator in theoretical computer science by the Simons Foundation. Simons Investigators are outstanding theoretical scientists who receive a stable base of research support from the foundation, enabling them to undertake the long-term study of fundamental questions in mathematics, physics, astrophysics and computer science. Vempala is the second Georgia Tech scientist to be named a Simons Investigator; in 2022, Joshua Weitz, former professor in the School of Biological Sciences, was supported by the Foundation for research in theoretical physics in life sciences. 

There’s no artist more vibrant, spiritual, or creative than Mother Earth. Then, we have mortals like Georgia Tech School of Physics alumni Dylan Diamond, who execute Mother Earth’s designs into functional tools or, in this case, a timepiece: “Moss Clock.” The clock has its own gear train and servo, or motors. The bottom line: this technology is a clock composed of living moss. Diamond had the idea to make a “digitally inspired” clock where moving panels of different colored moss resemble a classic digital clock display. "My physics degree helped, but I firmly believe that in the age of information, with public access to so many free tutorials and teachers online, anyone can do something like this," Diamond said.