WSB-TV2' sLinda Stouffer looks at high-tech ideas being implemented to make cities smarter. Among them are sea-level sensors deployed by a Georgia Tech team in Savannah. The team includes School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences' Kim Cobb. First results from those sensors are coming in, in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. View the full news segment here.

Episode 9 of ScienceMatters' Season 1 stars Dan Margalit.  Listen to the podcast or read the transcript here. 

Dan Margalit is a professor in the School of Mathematics. 

Margalit's research area is topology. He studies the properties of shapes that persist even when the shapes are stretched or bent. 

For example, two metal rings that are linked stay linked even if you bend or stretch the metal. A typical question in topology is the following: Someone hands you two rings made of metal; if you are allowed to bend and stretch the metal, can you pull the rings apart or not? 

Most of Margalit's research in topology is about surfaces. The surface could be that of a ball or a donut. Surfaces are central in mathematics. They can describe the possible motions of a robot arm or all the possible solutions of a polynomial.

Margalit's particular research is on the symmetries of surfaces. Some symmetries of surfaces are easy to understand. But when bending and stretching are allowed, the symmetries are more challenging.

For Margalit, "mathematics is important because it describes the world in a beautiful and coherent way. Even the most far-fetched and abstract mathematical ideas can make their way into everyday life."

In Episode 9, Margalit talks about the beauty of mathematics and offers advice to overcome "math phobia."

Take a listen at sciencematters.gatech.edu.

Enter to win a prize by answering the question for Episode 9: 

According to Episode 9, what group of people can’t tell the difference between a coffee cup and a donut?

Submit your entry by 11 AM on Monday, Oct. 22, at sciencematters.gatech.edu. 

By Mallory Rosten, Communications Assistant

Simone Jarvis was sitting in the car when she got a call from Terry Snell, a professor in what is now the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences.  

It was 2015. She was a high school senior thinking about her future, uncertain, like most of her peers, about the path she would take. Although she had been admitted to Georgia Tech, she was still undecided. When Snell offered her a $1,500 stipend and the opportunity to start research in her first year at Tech, Jarvis took it as a sign.  

“It aligned perfectly with what I wanted to do,” Jarvis recalls. “The chance to get into a lab my freshman year definitely swayed my decision toward Tech. It was really exciting.” 

What Snell offered was a Fast Track to Research Scholarship. Snell conceived the program while he was school chair, struck by the low uptake of admission offers: of 300 offers, only a third would enroll.  

Snell had an epiphany: Research is one of Georgia Tech’s biggest strengths. The opportunity to join research labs as an undergraduate is one of Tech’s most attractive features as a university. What would be more enticing than offering incoming first-year students a chance to jump into research right from the start? 

“One of the most compelling things about science is doing science,” Snell says. “If you can start doing science in your first year, without waiting until you’re a junior, it makes the road to a career in science much smoother.”  

The program offers the top 30 accepted biology majors a $1,500 stipend if they commit to doing research in their first year. Since the program’s inception, Snell has seen a positive impact on recruitment, in both the quality and number of students that apply.  

Jarvis was among the first recipients of Fast Track scholarships. As a first-year student, she joined the lab of renowned marine ecologist and evolutionary biologist Mark Hay. 

Jarvis was focused and bright from the start, Hay says. She took over graduate-student duties after just a few weeks in the lab. Now in her fourth year at Tech, Jarvis still works with Hay. The Fast Track scholarship had ignited a passion for the scientific inquiry going on in the Hay Lab.   

In 2017, Alexandra Towner also joined the Hay Lab as a Fast Track scholar.   

“I’ve always been drawn to oceans,” she says. She loved that Hay’s work encompassed both large concepts about ocean ecosystems but also drilled down to the molecular aspects of interspecies interactions in coral reefs. “It was the best of both worlds,” she says. 

“It was nerve wracking,” Towner recalls of the first time she met with Hay. “You don’t know a lot and you’re meeting this incredible professor who has 20,000 citations on Google Scholar. But he sat us down and explained everything in terms we could understand.” This fall, Towner began her second year at the Hay Lab. 

Hay wants to help students achieve their dreams. If they want to become scientists, he hopes to place them so they’ll be competitive for graduate schools. If they want to become physicians, he’ll make sure that they understand the scientific method and problem-solving.  

But first, the students he chooses must be driven to do research. “I want them invested in the question,” Hay says. “I want research to be a way of life for them, not just a job. Everyone starts off knowing how to do science as a little kid – you’re curious and explore. That’s what I’m still doing, and that’s what I want my students to do.” 

“It was nerve wracking. You don’t know a lot and you’re meeting this incredible professor who has 20,000 citations on Google Scholar. But he sat us down and explained everything in terms we could understand.” 

FIELD WORK IN FRENCH POLYNESIA 

Jarvis and Towner are innately curious. Which is why this past summer, Hay took them on a trip to Moorea, an island in French Polynesia where he conducts field work. They stayed in the University of California Berkeley's research station, with researchers from various institutions. 

In Moorea, Jarvis and Towner spent many hours every day seven feet deep underwater. “We would wake up early, watch the sun rise over the reef, and go out to the water” Jarvis recalls, “We were so exhausted by the end of the day that we would just eat, watch the sun set, and fall asleep.” 

The field work gave them a chance to see the genesis of the samples they had been studying in the lab to answer questions about the survival of coral reefs. “Across the world, algae is coming in and taking over coral reefs. We wanted to know if this is making corals more susceptible to disease,” Towner says.  

For Towner, the experience was life-changing.  

“One day, we did a dive on the reef 30 feet deep. It’s just coral as far as the eye can see,” Towner says. “And you have this moment where you hope that if you have kids they’re able to see something similar. We’re in this incredible time where we’re able to see these incredible things and do this work. My eyes welled up down there.” 

“One day, we did a dive on the reef 30 feet deep. It’s just coral as far as the eye can see. And you have this moment where you hope that if you have kids they’re able to see something similar....My eyes welled up down there.” 

FIRST OF A KIND 

Although Georgia Tech has many programs to encourage research for undergraduates, the Fast Track Scholarship was the first for first-year students. Recipients must use the award within their first two semesters at Tech. Pre-existing awards URSA and PURA are for continuing students.  

Recently the College of Sciences, inspired by the success of Fast Track, established the Early Research Award for science and mathematics majors. Awardees have up to their first four semesters at Tech to get into research.  

For any prospective biology major offered the scholarship, Jarvis offers this advice: “Take it. It’ll set you on a course that you couldn’t have imagined when you applied to Tech.” 

The students are what make Fast Track Scholarship so rewarding, Hay says. “I can only do so much with my hands, but if I look out at what my past students are doing – there are 100 or more – I feel prouder than I would’ve been if I just did it all myself. They’re part of my academic family, my lineage. That’s what we're supposed to do as scientists – allow others to flourish and replace us.” 

Editor's Note: Mallory Rosten wrote this story from the reporting notes of A. Maureen Rouhi. 

Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate Chinar Patil is the winner of the ScienceMatters Episode 7 quiz. Unlike most podcast consumers, Patil reads the transcripts, while getting coffee in the morning. "It's a good way to start the day," he says.

ScienceMatters is a great way for "the Georgia Tech community to see what others are doing," Patil says. "We are all specialists in our fields, but it is useful to read or hear about other work in laymen's terms."

Patil hails from the city of Nashik, in the state of Maharastra, in India. He came to Georgia Tech as a Ph.D. student in 2012. He will defend his thesis, and hopes to be a Ph.D. graduate, in December.

Patil has been working with Todd Streelman, who is a professor in and the chair of the School of Biological Sciences. Streelman's research uses cichlid fish from Lake Malawi to study the relationship between genotype and phenotype in wild vertebrates. The lake is known as the site of evolutionary radiations among certain groups of animals, including cichlid fish.The Streelman Lab has pioneered genomic and molecular biology approaches in this natural system to solve problems that are difficult to address using traditional model organisms.  

In Streelman's lab, Patil has been studying the evolutionary genomics of cichlid fish from Lake Malawi. "I sequence genomes from various cichlid species and try to understand the genetic basis of the differences between species and make some inferences about their evolutionary history," he says. 

The Episode 7 quiz question: What is the name of the song that Jennifer Leavey says sounds like a love song but is actually about bacteria living together in biofilms?

The answer: Stuck on You

Episode 8 of ScienceMatters is out this week. "When People Age and Memory Fails" stars Audrey Duarte, associate professor in the School of Psychology.

If you would like to join the ScienceMatters Hall of Fame, enter the answer to this question: According to Episode 8, what brain waves are associated with deep states of sleep?

Submit your answer by 11 a.m. Monday, October 15, at sciencematters.gatech.edu.

One is a pioneer of mathematical analysis as applied to global companies, at a time when women in this line of work were rare. Another is helping to design the sports footwear of the future. Some found themselves in careers close to the degree they earned at Georgia Tech. Others parlayed their Georgia Tech science education into management consulting or business law.

All of them used their College of Sciences degrees to make a difference in their professions. For some, that path took a turn because of what they learned about science – and themselves – at Georgia Tech. Nine of our notable alumni share their memories of life at Georgia Tech, the lessons they learned that they applied in their careers, and what they would tell current students about how to make the most of their time in the College of Sciences.

Meet nine accomplished alumni from the College of Sciences:

• Mena Aioub, Technology Development Engineer at Intel
• Arick Auyang, Footwear Developer at Nike
• Beth Cabrera, Advocate of Personal Well-Being
• Michelle Lyons, Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company
• Ryan Mills, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Melissa Nord, Certified Broadcast Meteorologist, WUSA 9, Washington, DC
• Libby Peck, Former Mathematical Analyst at The Coca-Cola Company
• Lauren Reaves, Meteorologist at the National Weather Service
• Clay Sparrow, Senior Counsel at Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Episode 8 of ScienceMatters' Season 1 stars Audrey Duarte.  Listen to the podcast here and read the transcript here.

Audrey Duarte is an associate professor in the School of Psychology and the principal investigator of the Memory and Aging Lab.

Because memory is key to who we are and how we react to situations, Duarte and her fellow researchers are trying to figure out how memory fails as we get older. A failing memory can be a sign of serious disease such as Alzheimer’s, but it can also impact otherwise healthy, aging adults.

What exactly causes those memory failures? Can they be prevented by cognitive activities, just as physical exercise helps maintain muscular and cardiovascular fitness? Could this research be applied to new ways of educating students, particularly those on the autism scale?

Those are the questions Duarte is trying to answer, as she explains in Episode 8.

Take a listen at sciencematters.gatech.edu.

Enter to win a prize by answering the question for Episode 8: 

According to Episode 8, what brain waves are associated with deep states of sleep?

Submit your entry by 11 AM on Monday, Oct. 15, at sciencematters.gatech.edu. Answer and winner will be announced shortly after the quiz closes.

Jennifer Leavey is the integrated science curriculum coordinator for the College of Sciences. She also directs the Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project, an interdisciplinary initiative designed to recruit and retain STEM students by studying how urban habitats affect honey bee health and how technology can be used to study bees. 

“Most of the programs I work on relate to encouraging undergraduates to become more engaged in studying science,” Leavey said. “The Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project sprouted out of the idea that if something is authentic, it doesn’t matter what discipline students are in or what class they’re taking, they’ll become interested in it.”

Learn more about Jennifer Leavey's activities, including leading a science rock band, in the full story by Victor Rogers.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes two breakthroughs that revolutionized laser physics. Chirped pulse amplification of lasers is one of them. Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland share one-half of the prize for paving the way toward the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created by humans.

The winners solved an important problem: how to amplify short laser pulses to high energies without damaging the materials used for amplification.

Evers since lasers were invented, researchers have tried to create ever shorter and more intense pulses. That’s because short, intense laser pulses can do lots of interesting things, like accelerate charged particles or knock out electrons from molecules.

“There are a host of applications in basic scientific research that depend on femtosecond lasers, including time-resolved studies,” says Chandra Raman, an associate professor in the School of Physics.

But ramping up the intensity destroys the amplifying material.

“Laser and laser-amplifier media are more easily damaged by high-intensity laser light than are standard optics such as prisms and mirrors,” says Rick Trebino, a professor in the School of Physics. “They limit the possible intensity achievable.”

Mourou and Strickland solved the problem by first stretching the laser pulses in time, then amplifying them, and finally compressing them. That treatment enabled a pulse to pack much more light in the same space. “Amplifiers based on this idea yield thousands of times more pulse energy,” Trebino says.

Since the breakthrough – now called chirped pulse amplification (CPA) – many generations of scientists have used the tool in research, Raman says. CPA also facilitated the spread of high-power lasers in industry and medicine, including targeted laser surgery and specialized cutting of materials with minimal heating of the surroundings.

“CPA is a clear example of a scientific breakthrough whose influence goes far beyond the field where it originated,” Raman says.

Raman encountered first-generation CPA systems when he was a Ph.D. student studying the electron dynamics of special atoms. He had to build his own system, one that could generate superfast, high-intensity, femtosecond pulses. A femtosecond is one-quadrillionth of a second.

The home-built femtosecond system occupied two optical tables. “The alignments were a bit delicate and finicky, and it was sometimes frustrating getting them exactly right,” Raman says. “But it opened my eyes to how clever and specialized tools can open a vista to fundamental science. I had fun.”

“Because of CPA, much higher laser intensities are now being generated in research labs worldwide, giving access to any color imaginable through nonlinear optics,” Trebino says. “The European Union is now building the highest intensity laser systems ever, which could lead to new discoveries of exotic physics.”

In Georgia Tech, Raman studies the fundamental behavior of atoms at much longer timescales – in milliseconds or seconds rather than femtoseconds. For this work, the tools are different from the femtosecond laser he built as a Ph.D. student. Still, he says, “the tinkering I did with the CPA laser shaped my current research to bring out interesting properties of atoms.”

The other half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to optical tweezers. Using laser beams, these tools grab particles, atoms, viruses, and living cell and enable their inspection and manipulation under a microscope. Arthur Ashkin, formerly of Bell Labs, receives half of the 2018 prize for this invention.  

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes two breakthroughs that revolutionized laser physics. Optical tweezers are one of them. Using laser beams as fingers, these tools grab particles, atoms, viruses, and living cells. Arthur Ashkin, formerly of Bell Labs, receives half of the 2018 prize for this invention.

Optical tweezers have had an impact on many scientific areas by providing direct physical access to the nanoscopic world, says Jennifer Curtis, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. Ashkin showed that a focused laser beam could grab and manipulate tiny bits of matter. Researchers can observe what’s going on through a microscope.

“I am thrilled to see Ashkin receive a prize for his contributions,” says Curtis, who is a member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “His invention opened new frontiers in many fields for creative researchers who want to probe, manipulate, and engineer nanoscale matter. He inspired a next generation of scientists, including myself.”

Optical tweezers are like the tractor beams that Captain Kirk of Star Trek uses to capture enemy starships, Curtis says. They are possible, she says, because polarizable materials are attracted to regions of high electromagnetic radiation, which includes light.

“A focused laser beam provides a sweet spot for small particles localize,” Curtis explains. “The tighter the laser focus, the stronger the trap, and the more confined the particle becomes. Once trapped, particles and cells are easily moved about by simply steering the laser beam with a mirror. Hence by moving the focus of the laser around, you can move, probe, and assemble materials from the bottom up.  

“It’s a fascinating tool that boggles the imagination and opens up great possibilities thanks to its ability to grab and examine what would normally be untouchable tiny pieces of matter – from DNA to viruses to organelles to red blood cells.”

As a Ph.D. student, Curtis contributed to developing the technology of optical tweezers. Her research showed that liquid crystal displays can be used to split a single laser beam into multiple beams forming a desired pattern. “We could create hundreds of optical traps and locate them in three dimensions. We could also change the position of the traps in real time,” she says.

In her Georgia Tech research in the field of biological physics, Curtis uses optical tweezers to study the mechanical properties of cells and to explore cell-cell and cell-interface interactions. Eventually, she would like to study the mechanical properties and spatial dynamics of microbial communities such as biofilms.

For now, the largest impact of optical tweezers is on research, Curtis says. By enabling close examination of biological molecules, organelles, and cells and measurement of the force applied on these tiny particles, optical tweezers gave birth to the field of single-molecule biophysics. From the biophysics of DNA to the workings of molecular motors like kinesin and myosin, optical tweezers opened a window to a world that was not available before. Other fields – colloidal physics, soft-matter physics, materials science, polymer physics, statistical physics, and fluid mechanics – have been similarly energized by this tool.  

The other half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics is shared by Gérard Mourou, at the École Polytechnique near Paris, and Donna Strickland, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. They invented a way to create the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever. Applications of their work include millions of corrective eye surgeries.  

In the Fall of 2003 — not long after retiring from her 28-year career as a mathematics professor at Kennesaw State University — Elaine M. Hubbard, MATH 1972, MS MATH 1974, Ph.D. MATH 1980, felt compelled to take action that would have a lasting impact on her alma mater.

That September, Hubbard signed an endowment agreement whose income would one day establish the Elaine M. Hubbard Endowed Chair in the School of Mathematics — the School’s first endowed faculty chair. 

By establishing an endowment fund through her Will, Hubbard knew she would never meet any of the distinguished academics who would ultimately hold the Hubbard Chair. She did know, however, that her estate gift would one day play a vital role in developing and strengthening Georgia Tech’s mathematics faculty, which had long ago helped lay the foundation for her own success as a scholar and teacher. 

Following the Board of Regents’ approval of the Hubbard Chair earlier this year, the School of Mathematics is now embarking on an international search to fill this pivotal position of academic leadership. 

Continue here for the full story from the Office of Development