Experts in the News

Karl Lang, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Claudia Avalos, assistant professor at New York University, are among the eight research teams to receive an award through the 2025 Scialog: Sustainable Metals, Minerals, and Materials initiative. 

Supported by The Kavli Foundation, the collaboration will focus on monazite, a group of rare earth-bearing minerals essential for modern technology, including clean energy technologies. Using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, Lang and Avalos will examine how the mineral’s atomic structure responds to radiation damage and annealing. By observing the material at the atomic scale, they aim to uncover the fundamental mechanisms at work, uncovering insights that could lead to processing innovations and improved applications.

As the weather heats up, you may find the same jog that was comfortable outdoors a few months ago now leaves you drenched in sweat.

Sweating a lot can mean you’re working hard, but sweat alone isn’t necessarily a great indicator of workout intensity, said Mindy Millard-Stafford, an exercise physiologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “You can’t really compare one person’s sweat rate to another and say, ‘This person worked harder,’” she said.

But understanding how much you sweat can help you stay hydrated and safe while working out in warmer conditions. We asked experts, including Millard-Stafford, what to watch out for.

There are hives of activity on the roof of the ever-cool Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design. It’s a facility of technological marvel, creativity, and reclamation. The perfect place for urban honeybees to weave their environmental magic.

In this GPB interview, Jennifer Leavey of the School of Biological Sciences discusses her work leading the Georgia Tech Urban Honeybee Project, which studies how urban habitats affect honeybee health and how technology can be used to study bees. 

As spring wears on, there is hope the worst of this season will soon pass, and that relief is coming. In Florida, the rainy season begins on May 15, followed soon after by the start of the Atlantic hurricane season. But there's not much wet weather on the horizon in the Sunshine State — or, anywhere across the Southeast.

"We just can't seem to shake this," said Zachary Handlos, director of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Georgia Tech. Until the current patterns shift, he said, "the risk is going to remain high."

Zachary Handlos, Georgia Tech atmospheric science educator, explains how drought, heat, and shifting weather patterns are fueling more intense Southeast wildfires.

Less than a month after the historic Artemis II mission began, a Georgia Tech researcher is being recognized for his work in helping keep astronauts safe in space.

Thomas Orlando, a Regents’ professor at Georgia Tech, designed the spacesuits worn by astronauts on Artemis 2. He said his team focused on protecting the suits from micrometeorite impacts and especially lunar dust.

“We realized that a bigger problem, at least from NASA’s perspective, is dust," Orlando said. “We don’t really want dust to be on spacesuits. It can get into the seals. It could, you know, cause them to leak.”

Orlando works with graduate students to study the challenges astronauts may face in space and on the moon.

Researchers have long known that when two galaxies approach each other and merge, the supermassive black holes at their centers form a pair and are eventually expected to merge as well.  It is precisely these mergers that are considered one of the sources of the gravitational-wave background — a faint “hum” of spacetime detected in recent years. However, the role played by the geometry of the collision in this process has remained an open question. 

Graduate student Sena Ghobadi of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Physics, along with her colleagues, has developed three-dimensional dynamic models of such collisions. 

A similar story appeared in Sky & Telescope. 

Zachary Handlos, senior academic professional in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, explains how weather patterns can lead to conditions conducive to the types of wildfires currently seen in Florida and Georgia. 

This piece also appeared in The Washington Post and The Conversation.

Assistant Professor Benjamin Freeman and graduate student Shreyas Arashanapalli of the School of Biological Sciences detail their study on the use of birdsong for territorial defense. They highlight that male birds — and many female birds — sing and defend territories. Their examination uncovered that cooperative territorial defense is especially common in birds with long-term social bonds or that live close to the equator.

In December, The Conversation hosted a webinar on AI’s revolutionary role in drug discovery and development. Science and technology editor Eric Smalley interviewed Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents' Professor and eminent scholar in computational systems biology at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Benjamin P. Brown, assistant professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. Skolnick has developed AI-based approaches to predict protein structure and function that may help with drug discovery and finding off-label uses of existing drugs. Brown’s lab works on creating new computer models that make drug discovery faster and more reliable.

While it often gets written off as being distracted or not paying attention, daydreaming is actually a sign of an active and imaginative mind. In fact, a 2017 study found that daydreamers are generally smarter than their focused peers. “People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering,” said Eric Schumacher, the Georgia Tech psychology professor who co-authored the study.

People who daydream frequently have things running through their heads, whether they are thinking through ideas or picturing possible outcomes. Letting the mind wander allows unexpected connections to form. To an outside observer, they may seem checked out of reality. However, other highly intellectual people know that they're truly deeply engaged, just not with what's going on right in front of them.

As astronauts head toward the moon for the first time in decades, engineers and scientists at Georgia Tech are looking on with excitement. The current Artemis II mission is set to take four astronauts around the moon.

The previous Artemis mission in 2022 was unmanned, but researchers from Georgia Tech contributed to it. With this mission, Georgia Tech grads are involved, including people who lead teams that worked on the launch and will recover the crew and the spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean when they return to Earth. […] Last year, Georgia Tech created its Space Research Institute to pull together faculty, staff and students who work on space from different areas, including engineering, science and business.