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The Office of Technology Licensing has announced the 2025 recipients of the GT NEXT awards, a grant that helps students advance their inventions toward market readiness. Providing early momentum for promising technologies, the grants help students move their research toward real-world impact.
The award will support Stroud as he creates evolution’s first high-definition map — with the help of 1,000 backpack-wearing lizards.
Neuroscience experts from across Georgia Tech will soon come together for a new interdisciplinary research institute, the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS), launched in July. Faculty in INNS are helping to solve some of neuroscience’s most pressing problems, and many have promising medical applications. One important aspect of studying the brain is understanding how the brain and the body work together. Meet the researchers who study brain-body interactions, from monitoring the neuron degradation that causes Alzheimer’s to enhancing mobility for stroke survivors, in an effort to improve the health and quality of life for millions of Americans.
“This course truly underscores Georgia Tech’s commitment to pioneering meaningful undergraduate experiences,” says teacher Vinayak (Vinny) Agarwal. “No other peer institution I know of is exposing undergraduates to bioinformatics at this level.”
Georgia Tech researchers are developing solutions to monitor and forecast flooding, as well as restore ecosystems to prevent future flooding. These efforts support communities’ resilience in the face of climate change and keep the U.S. secure.
As climate change influences hurricane behavior, experts are taking a closer look at how we classify and communicate storm risks, and what that means for forecasting, preparedness, and public understanding.
Experts In The News
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.”
11Alive News October 27, 2025The 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.
AP News October 27, 2025
