"Our innovation for end-of-service wind turbine blades is both simple and elegant – at its core, our technology captures all the embodied energy in the composite materials in the blade," said Gentry, professor in the School of Architecture.

"The Re-Wind Network has pioneered structural recycling, the only of a number of competing technologies that upcycles the material of the blade and preserves the embodied energy from manufacturing," Gentry said.

"Little additional energy is used to remanufacture the blade and the life of the blade, typically 20 years, is extended at least 50 years. This is a win-win solution from an environmental and economic perspective."

Other methods for dealing with decommissioned wind blades involve mechanical grinding and landfilling of subsequent waste, an expensive and energy-intensive process, he said.

Team members include Gentry, Sakshi Kakkad, Cayleigh Nicholson, Mehmet Bermek, and Larry Bank, from the School of Architecture; Gabriel Ackall, Yulizza Henao, and Aeva Silverman, from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering;  and Eric Johansen, a business consultant from Fiberglass Trusses Inc.

The team is part of the Re-Wind Network, a multinational research and development network which develops large-scale infrastructure projects from decommissioned wind turbine blades. 

Re-Wind's pedestrian bridges, known as BladeBridges, have already captured media attention. Two more BladeBridges are expected in Atlanta in 2024, Gentry said. Re-Wind has also developed, prototyped, and tested transmission poles made from blade segments. The team's other proposals include culverts, barriers, and floats.

In this brief Q&A, Milam discusses her research focus, how it relates to materials research, and the impact of this initiative.

What is your field of expertise and at what point in your life did you first become interested in this area?

My field of expertise lies in bio-inspired materials science and engineering. Natural macromolecular components of biological systems such as cell receptors or antibodies rely on recognition-based binding events to, for example, allow a cell to take up particular nutrients or to neutralize a specific pathogen threat. Inspired by nature’s capabilities, my group’s research strives to identify and study synthetic macromolecular materials with bio-inspired compositions and self-folded structures. I first became interested in using DNA for its recognition capabilities during my postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. For the first several years as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, my group used DNA duplexes as a temporary glue between particle surfaces. Our more recent efforts focus on finding oligonucleotides to function as ligands or capture agents for a specific biological or nonbiological target.

What questions or challenges sparked your current materials research?

Polymers or macromolecules hold a lot of promise as a class of materials for various applications. Synthetic macromolecules, however, pose a lot of synthesis and post-use challenges that can hinder the discovery and practical use of novel macromolecular chemistries. Natural polymers such as oligonucleotides and proteins, on the other hand, have their own elegant synthesis and degradation pathways. To promote discovery of novel macromolecular materials, my group uses nature’s reagents and building blocks to synthesize numerous artificial biopolymer candidates. Since we do not start with any sequence design rules, we rely on maximizing the composition diversity of these artificial biopolymers. We then test all candidates collectively to efficiently choose ones with the desired functionality.

Why is your initiative important to the development of Georgia Tech’s Materials research strategy?

One of the challenges to discovering macromolecular systems that are both novel and practical is the lack of design rules. For example, how does one choose the right number and composition of repeat units for a macromolecule that binds to a particular material surface or to a particular biological target. If you can take advantage of nature’s building blocks and enzymes, then you can explore a wide chemical combinatorial space without having to follow any prerequisite design rules. Better yet, you can then use your initial findings to come up with design rules to explore additional, possibly better macromolecular candidates. This approach to macromolecule discovery is inherently interdisciplinary since one must combine or adapt techniques and approaches developed by biologists, polymer scientists, and materials engineers. Thus, Georgia Tech is a great place to foster this interdisciplinary strategy to research.

What are the broader global and social benefits of the research you and your team conduct?

In addition to training members of our future workforce with interdisciplinary skill sets, we want to carve out a pathway to designing, synthesizing and using environmentally friendly, multiuse macromolecules with commercial promise.

What are your plans for engaging a wider GT faculty pool with IMat research?

Currently, we are primarily in the brainstorming stage. To this end, I am engaging with science and engineering faculty at GT as well as Emory. As cross-disciplinary ideas start to brew, we will work towards multi-PI funding opportunities that engage the broader GT faculty and community.

In this brief Q&A, Correa-Baena discusses his research focus, how it relates to materials research, and the impact of this initiative.

What is your field of expertise and at what point in your life did you first become interested in this area?

I am an expert in materials for energy harvesting and conversion. I first became interested in this topic when I was an undergraduate student and started thinking about the future of energy production. 

What questions or challenges sparked your current materials research?

I was born and raised in a country where fossil fuels dominate the energy production landscape, yet where renewables are readily available. Colombia is a large producer of oil but also boasts a huge potential for solar energy production. This juxtaposition always puzzled me growing up. As a researcher in this field, I want to ensure that all countries around the world have access to solar energy, by helping lower deployment cost. 

Why is your initiative important to the development of Georgia Tech’s Materials research strategy?

There is a growing need to expand our research footprint at Georgia Tech with regard to photovoltaics. This is especially important with the impact of the photovoltaic industry presence in Georgia. My initiative is focusing on galvanizing activities around photovoltaic research at Georgia Tech that can benefit our footprint globally as well as locally with industry partners.

What are the broader global and social benefits of the research you and your team conduct?

The main benefit of the research we do is to the photovoltaic industry, which we hope to engage through cutting-edge research at Georgia Tech.

What are your plans for engaging a wider Georgia Tech faculty pool with IMat research?

I am planning to organize an internal workshop, as well as a session on photovoltaics in the Next Generation of Energy Materials Symposium to be held in March 2024 at Georgia Tech. In addition, as part of my efforts to engage the Georgia Tech community at large, I am working to create a website that will connect the Georgia Tech community working towards advancing photovoltaic capabilities for future manufacturing advancements. 

She won the award for her research on emerging materials and devices that promote energy-efficient computing. MRS brings together materials researchers from around the world to promote the sharing and communication of interdisciplinary research and technology to improve the quality of life.

She is advised by Eric M. Vogel, Ph.D., ECE adjunct professor and Hightower Professor in the School of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE).

Athena, who is also an IBM Ph.D. Fellow, presented her award-winning research at the meeting, and gave talks about two of her other research projects, “A Novel Electrical Bias Technique to Recover Degraded ReRAM Arrays for Deep Learning” and “Describing the Analog Resistance Change of HfOx Neuromorphic Synapses.”

She was also one of five global finalists for the Arthur Nowick Graduate Student Award for teaching and mentoring.

This is the latest in a growing list of honors for Athena. She’s also been recognized with the ECE Ph.D. Fellowship, Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship, EECS Rising Stars 2023, and Colonel Oscar P. Cleaver Award for the most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation proposal in ECE.

Before her time at Georgia Tech, Athena received her undergraduate degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. She then spent two semesters at Purdue University as a graduate researcher, where she collaborated with Idaho National Lab on nuclear materials for next-generation energy.

Since coming to Georgia Tech, she’s received her M.S. in ECE and has been active in Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering (WECE) and Women in Material Science and Engineering (WiMSE), helping to increase the involvement of women and minorities in STEM.

In one paper, researchers have unraveled how nitrogen, water, carbon, and light can interact with a catalyst to produce ammonia at ambient temperature and pressure, a much less energy-intensive approach than current practice. The second paper describes a stable catalyst able to convert waste fertilizer back into nonpolluting nitrogen that could one day be used to make new fertilizer.

Significant work remains on both processes, but the senior author on the papers, Marta Hatzell, said they’re a step toward a more sustainable cycle that still meets the needs of a growing worldwide population.

“We often think it would be nice not to have to use synthetic fertilizers for agriculture, but that’s not realistic in the near term considering how much plant growth is dependent on synthetic fertilizers and how much food the world’s population needs,” said Hatzell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “The idea is that maybe one day you could manufacture, capture, and recycle fertilizer on site."

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The Humboldt recipients are academics whose fundamental discoveries, theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own disciplines and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.

Li’s research focuses on theory and computation of disordered materials — such as glass and liquid — with an emphasis on understanding the underlying atomic structures and their relations to properties. These materials are known for the lack of long-range order, making it extremely difficult, if not possible, to determine the exact atomic structures experimentally. The missing connection between the structure and property has challenged scientists for decades.

Using computational and theoretical approaches, Li’s research is directed towards the fundamental understanding of the mechanisms, process, and structures of the materials. He has made many contributions in the topics of glass transitions, deformation localization in glassy materials, thermodynamic and statistical physics models for metastable systems and their phase transitions, and algorithm development for computations.

“Besides the honor and recognition, for which I am very grateful, the Humboldt Research Award brings a tremendous opportunity for international collaboration of basic research through the financial support and also the Humboldt network.” Li said. "The fundamental understanding enables us to carry out new experiment and computation that could lead to development of new materials that have not been possible for disordered or amorphous materials.”

In addition to the honor, the Foundation also provides financial support for Li to foster and carry out creative collaborative research in Germany. Li will work closely with colleagues in two world-class institutions in Germany: Prof. Robert Maaß at Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM) in Berlin and Prof. Jörg Weissmüller at Hamburg University of Technology in Hamburg.

They will work on how new design of microstructures in disordered materials could bring revolutionary changes to the physical and mechanical properties and how length scale and geometric and topological shapes influence the surface and interface properties of this class of materials.

AI and ML have the spotlight right now in science, and the conference promises to be the first of many, says Feryal Özel, Professor and Chair of the School of Physics. 

"We were delighted to host the AI/ML in Physics conference and see the exciting rapid developments in this field,” Özel says. “The conference was a prominent launching point for the new AI/ML initiative we are starting in the School of Physics."​ 

That initiative includes hiring two tenure-track faculty members, who will benefit from substantial expertise and resources in artificial intelligence and machine learning that already exist in the Colleges of Sciences, Engineering, and Computing.

The conference attendees heard from colleagues about how the technologies were helping with research involving exoplanet searches, plasma physics experiments, and culling through terabytes of data. They also learned that a rough search of keyword titles by Andreas Berlind, director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, showed that about a fifth of all current NSF grant proposals include components around artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“That’s a lot,” Berlind told the audience. “It’s doubled in the last four years. It’s rapidly increasing.”

Berlind was one of three program officers from the NSF and NASA invited to the conference to give presentations on the funding landscape for AI/ML research in the physical sciences. 

“It’s tool development, the oldest story in human history,” said Germano Iannacchione, director of the NSF’s Division of Materials Research, who added that AI/ML tools “help us navigate very complex spaces — to augment and enhance our reasoning capabilities, and our pattern recognition capabilities.”

That sentiment was echoed by Dimitrios Psaltis, School of Physics professor and a co-organizer of the conference. 

“They usually say if you have a hammer, you see everything as a nail,” Psaltis said. “Just because we have a tool doesn't mean we're going to solve all the problems. So we're in the exploratory phase because we don't know yet which problems in physics machine learning will help us solve. Clearly it will help us solve some problems, because it's a brand new tool, and there are other instances when it will make zero contribution. And until we find out what those problems are, we're going to just explore everything.”

That means trying to find out if there is a place for the technologies in classical and modern physics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, optics, geophysics, cosmology, particle physics, and astrophysics, to name just a few branches of study.

Sanaz Vahidinia of NASA’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Grants told the attendees that her division was an early and enthusiastic adopter of AI and machine learning. She listed examples of the technologies assisting with gamma-ray astronomy and analyzing data from the Hubble and Kepler space telescopes. “AI and deep learning were very good at identifying patterns in Kepler data,” Vahidinia said. 

Some of the physicist presentations at the conference showed pattern recognition capabilities and other features for AI and ML: 

• Cassandra Hall, assistant professor of Computational Astrophysics at the University of Georgia, illustrated how machine learning helped in the search for hidden forming exoplanets. 
• Christopher J. Rozell, Julian T. Hightower Chair and Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, spoke of his experiments using “explainable AI” (AI that conveys in human terms how it reaches its decisions) to track depression recovery with deep brain stimulation.
• Paulo Alves, assistant professor of physics at UCLA College of Physical Sciences Space Institute, presented on AI/ML as tools of scientific discovery in plasma physics.

Alves’s presentation inspired another physicist attending the conference, Psaltis said. “One of our local colleagues, who's doing magnetic materials research, said, ‘Hey, I can apply the exact same thing in my field,’ which he had never thought about before. So we not only have cross-fertilization (of ideas) at the conference, but we’re also learning what works and what doesn't.”

More information on funding and grants at the National Science Foundation can be found here. Information on NASA grants is found here. 

Understanding these metamaterials is key to “programming” them correctly, maximizing their utility.  “One of the paradigms of this research is that the material is the machine,” Zeb Rocklin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, explains. “We're creating a material that performs the mechanical tasks that we want it to, and the processes, forces and displacements in the ways we want it to.”

A new $630,000 NSF CAREER grant will help Rocklin continue that research.

The National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award is a five-year grant designed to help promising researchers establish a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in their field. Known as CAREER awards, the grants are NSF’s most prestigious funding for untenured assistant professors.

The award, for “Geometric and topological mechanics of flexible structures,” will help Rocklin continue developing a new, unified theory for mechanical metamaterials — a group of structures that can flex and move, while having traditional solid components that make it easier to model. The theory could then be applied by other scientists and engineers to create responsive objects with smart fabrics that could respond to changes in environment — like novel knee replacements, responsive airplane wings, and better robots.

Materials as machines

“A solid is defined by the fact that it has a shape, and if I try to change the shape it might generate patterns of stress, or if I hit it, you might hear noise, because it's vibrating,” says Rocklin. “While we often think about things in terms of solids, liquids, and gasses, a lot of the things that are very important to us are not what we think of as a conventional solid.”

Flexible solids, like clothing, robots, and even our own bodies permeate our world, and are often some of the most useful materials we encounter. “This creates this huge challenge,” Rocklin says, “because flexible solids can't always be understood using current techniques of physics. We can write down the equations, but the equations are often too hard for anyone to solve.” For example, imagine trying to predict or replicate the infinite ways a piece of paper can crumple. As a result, flexible solids are often expensive and time consuming to model.

That’s where Rocklin’s new theory comes in.

Mechanical metamaterials

By combining well-known solids with flexible properties, Rocklin hopes to create a mathematically simple theory. “There are philosophical differences and limitations here,” he says, “but as a physicist, I’m looking for universal principles that can apply to a variety of things. Our technique is meant to complement the existing simulations, and it's meant to provide us more insight into these systems so that we can understand how to control them better.”

By building a theory around materials made of repeating solids connected by flexible hinges, Rocklin hopes to make a computationally inexpensive technique to predict and control the deformation of flexible structures. One example of this type of structure consists of  solid square pieces connected by their corners in a checkerboard pattern. The pieces pivot against each other at these hinged corners, allowing the structure to easily expand and contract. “These materials find a sweet spot in between simple solids that were well-characterized in the nineteenth century and the flexible objects that are just too complicated for us to fully describe,” Rocklin adds.

While the material can only deform via one method, (by flexing at the hinges) this does not mean that there is only one way the material deforms. Rather, through this one method of deformation, there are an infinite number of modes or computations that the fabric can assume, illustrating Rocklin's key insight – that a single flexible mode inevitably gives rise to a whole host of complex deformations.

“There's very simple universal math to describe how this type of material operates,” Rocklin adds. “And, when people actually make this material, it turns out that it actually looks like this, and it actually deforms in this way.”

Broad applications

As a theoretical physicist, Rocklin is focused on developing a unified theory that can be applied by experts across many fields. For example, collapsable biomedical devices like stents, which should be small when inserted, but need to expand when inside the body. Inspired by the ever-adapting wings of birds, adaptable airplane wings are also an intriguing frontier.

Rather than minute adjustments via circuitry, airplane wings could be built from these flexible solids, which could be designed to automatically adapt when given a signal from the wind. Building an antenna from materials that respond to certain electromagnetic frequencies, to optimize signal reception, is another of many possible applications for the work. 

Associate Professor Matthew McDowell, Professor Min Zhou, and Woodruff Professor Ting Zhu will hold the position for a five-year term and receive discretionary funding to support their educational and research activities.

These appointments recognize each of the three recipients for their intellectual leadership and broader impact in the field of material processing, and the ability to help the Woodruff School grow in emerging areas of importance.

“Throughout their careers, Matt, Min, and Ting have been leaders in their fields and made significant contributions to research,” said Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair. “They are highly deserving of this endowed chair position, and I know David McDowell, who held the Paden Chair until his retirement earlier this year, is proud to pass it on to his son and former long-term collaborators and mentees.”

McDowell’s research focuses on developing materials for next-generation battery systems, as well as understanding dynamic materials transformations in electrochemical energy devices. He leads the newly established Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center (GTABC) with co-director Gleb Yushin, a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. The new center will build community at the Institute, work to enhance research and educational relationships with industry partners, and create a new battery manufacturing facility on Georgia Tech’s campus.

Zhou's research interests concern material behavior over a wide range of length scales. His research emphasizes finite element and molecular dynamics simulations as well as experimental characterization with digital diagnostics.

Zhu's research focuses on the mechanical behavior of advanced engineering materials at the nano to macro-scale. He conducts modeling and simulations using the atomistic, continuum, and multiscale methods.

The endowed chair was made possible by Georgia Tech alumnus Carter N. Paden, Jr., IM 1951, who had a lifelong career in metals processing.

The Wearable Intelligent Systems and Healthcare (WISH) Center will work to push innovation in wearable sensors and electronics technologies. Focus areas of the center will include electronics, artificial intelligence, biological science, material sciences, manufacturing, system design, and medical engineering.

“We are excited by the promise of bioelectronics improving human health and all the exciting science engineering that is required to make it a reality,” said Michael Filler, interim executive director of IEN.

WISH is directed by W. Hong Yeo, associate professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, and Yuhang Hu, associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech.

“I founded WISH to bring together Georgia Tech’s expertise in various disciplines and to create opportunities for developing wearable bioelectronics and human-machine technologies leading to better lives and communities,” said Yeo.

Yeo’s research focuses on developing soft sensors, electronics and robotics for health monitoring and disease diagnosis at the intersection of human and machine interaction. Other researchers in the center represent disciplines from across Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Engineering, Computing, Sciences, Design, and Liberal Arts; Emory University; and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

WISH will be one of IEN’s 10 strategic research centers, along with the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center, a graduated NSF Engineering Research Center focusing on advanced packaging using 2.5D and 3D heterogeneous integration technologies, and the Georgia Electronic Design Center, one of the world’s largest university-based semiconductor research centers. WISH is an evolution of the Center for Human-Centric Interfaces and Engineering, which received seed funding from IEN to focus on collaborative research for human-centered design, biofeedback control, and integrated nanosystems to advance human-machine interaction in the scope of healthcare.

IEN supports early-stage research in underfunded research areas that span all disciplines in science and engineering through its seed grant programs, which focus on research in biomedicine, electronics, optoelectronics and photonics, and energy applications.

“Pressure injuries directly impact the veteran’s quality of life, because the medical provider will order the veteran to bed rest for weeks and potentially months,” said Kim House, a physician and medical director of the Spinal Cord Injury Clinic at the Atlanta Veterans Administration Healthcare System. “At every clinic visit, I provide education for pressure injury prevention.”

House could one day have a new tool to offer her patients, thanks to researchers in the Georgia Tech College of Engineering, and wheelchair-bound veterans are just the beginning.

Materials engineers are developing new fabric sensors and a customized wheelchair system that assesses and automatically eases pressure at contact points to prevent injuries from developing in the first place.

“We have three key issues happening: First, continuous pressure. Second, moisture, because when you're sitting in the same spot, you tend to sweat and generate moisture. And third is shear. When you try to move somebody, the skin shears. That perfect combination is what causes pressure injuries,” said Sundaresan Jayaraman, professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). “We believe we have a solution to the perfect storm of pressure, moisture and shear, which means the user’s quality of life is going to get better.”

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The new IRI, which has yet to be named, will explore the vast scientific, technological, societal, and economic impacts of innovative materials and devices, as well as foster their incorporation into systems that improve the human condition in areas such as information and communication technologies, the built environment, and human well-being and performance.

“The new IRI will not only combine the strengths of IEN and IMat, but will also allow us to further expand faculty representation from across the Institute,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president of Interdisciplinary Research at Georgia Tech. “As we look at the future of research in these areas, expanding inclusivity of researchers from the liberal arts, design, business, and basic sciences will allow us to better meet the education, workforce development, and innovation needs of Georgia, the U.S., and the world.”

The new IRI will strengthen Georgia Tech’s role in national focus areas such as the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the Materials Genome Initiative, and the CHIPS and Science Act, as well as identify and shape future priorities.

Core competencies of the new IRI will include:

• Fundamental science to comprehend and control matter from the nanoscale to the mesoscale.
• The synthesis, processing, and characterization of materials to achieve desired properties.
• The design and fabrication of novel devices and components with enhanced capabilities.
• The integration of materials, devices, and components into larger systems.
• Computing, modeling, simulation, and big data to advance progress at all length scales.
• Integration into all stages of research, from conceptualization to impact assessment, of economic, business, and social factors to ensure sustainable and equitable benefits.

“IEN and IMat have worked closely together for years, and there is overlap in the research areas we cover,” said Eric Vogel, IMat’s executive director. “This is an opportunity for us to build on IEN and IMat’s individual successes and our strong record of collaboration to create something even more exceptional.”

The new IRI will strengthen the state-of-the-art core cleanroom and characterization facilities, providing researchers with the tools and resources necessary for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. These facilities will continue to serve both Georgia Tech and, through its leadership within the NSF National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, the nation. Recognizing the importance of nurturing talent, it will champion education and outreach programs to inspire the next generation and equip the workforce with the skills necessary to collaborate and communicate across multiple disciplines.

“This is an exciting time to look to the future,” said Michael Filler, interim executive director of IEN. “We highly value the dedication and hard work of our staff and research faculty, who have been crucial to the success of IEN and IMat and will be the backbone of this new organization. We look forward to creating something exceptional in the coming months.”

Since becoming a part of the Georgia Tech faculty in 2012, where he holds a joint appointment in Materials Science and Engineering, Cai has played a pivotal role in advancing research on nanophotonic materials and devices. Notably, his authored work, "Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications," serves as a globally recognized textbook and reference.

Cai's accolades include the OSA/SPIE Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award, the CooperVision Science & Technology Award, and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. He is also a Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

Optica Fellows, a select group representing no more than 10 percent of the total membership, are individuals who have demonstrated exceptional dedication to advancing optics and photonics. The election process is highly competitive, with candidates recommended by the Fellow Members Committee and subsequently approved by the Awards Council and Board of Directors.

Alongside 128 other distinguished individuals, Cai will be honored at Optica conferences and events throughout 2024. The comprehensive list of the 2024 Optica Fellows is accessible online.

“Solar energy does not only have a great impact in mitigating climate change, but it also offers a transformative solution for communities currently lacking power grid access,” said Castro-Méndez. “By harnessing the sun’s energy through photovoltaic panels, these communities can generate their own electricity locally, enabling essential services, even in remote or underserved areas. This topic is particularly relevant in Colombia, my country of origin, where large communities do not have access to electricity yet.” 

Castro-Méndez’s research and published work in mitigating climate change earned a Chih Foundation Graduate Student Research Publication award. 

In his publication titled, “Vapor Phase Infiltration Improves Thermal Stability of Organic Layers in Perovskite Solar Cells,” Castro-Méndez demonstrates an innovative approach that contributes to the overall stability and longevity of perovskite solar cells. This invention is currently in the process of becoming a patent. His research has contributed to paving the way for more reliable, efficient, and commercially viable perovskite solar cells. 

“Climate change has always been a very relevant topic,” he said. “My interest to actively do something about it was triggered by my undergrad project advisor, Prof. Pablo Ortiz-Herrera. He had a research group on solar cells, and I joined his group in my 3rd year to start investigating this topic. There, I realized that alternative energies have a big potential and that they are real, not just something I would see in a sci-fi movie.”

The Chih Foundation awards graduate students whose research publication(s) reflect invention and innovation for the betterment of society. Each awardee receives $2,500 to pursue their research. 

“The impact of my research is to develop processes that could be used in industry to produce perovskite solar cells,” said Castro-Méndez. “I also am working on improving the long-term stability of perovskite solar cells, which is important to make this technology worth it. This award means that the research I’m doing is appreciated and that I’m not the only one who sees the value in it. It boosts my motivation further.” 

Castro-Méndez is one of four recipients of the 2023 Chih Foundation Graduate Student Research Publication Awards. Congratulations to the following 2023 Chih Foundation Graduate Student Research Publication award recipients: Andrés-Felipe Castro Méndez, Dongsuk Sung, Hantian Zhang, and Vanessa Oguamanam. 

Altogether, the agency is investing $3 million in the three projects led by faculty members in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME) and the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). Georgia Tech is a contributing partner on a fourth project led by Notre Dame researchers to explore materials that can be switched from an insulator to a metal with an external trigger.

The new awards are part of NSF’s Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program, which is intended to discover and create advanced materials twice as fast and at a fraction of the cost of traditional research methods.

Read more about the researchers' plans on the College of Engineering website.

Point-of-care technologies are medical diagnostic tests performed outside the laboratory in close proximity to where a patient is receiving care. This allows health care providers to make clinical decisions more rapidly, conveniently and efficiently.

AMCE POCT, which is one of six sites in the U.S. selected by NIH as part of the NIH Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network, was originally established in 2018 to foster the development and commercialization of microsystems (microchip-enabled, biosensor-based, microfluidic) diagnostic tests that can be used in places such as the home, community or doctor’s office. The center played a pivotal role during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as the national test verification center to rapidly evaluate COVID-19 tests and help make them widely available.

Read the full announcement

Congratulations to the award winners listed below!

Thematic Events in AI Awards

Proposed Workshop: “Foundation of scientific AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Optimization of Complex Systems”
Primary PI: Peng Chen, Assistant Professor, School of Computational Science and Engineering

Proposed Series: “Guest Lecture Seminar Series on Generative Art and Music”
Primary PI: Gil Weinberg, Professor, School of Music

Cyber-Infrastructure Resource Awards

Title: Human-in-the-Loop Musical Audio Source Separation
Topics: Music Informatics, Machine Learning
Primary PI: Alexander Lerch, Associate Professor, School of Music
Co-PIs: Karn Watcharasupat, Music Informatics Group | Yiwei Ding, Music Informatics Group | Pavan Seshadri, Music Informatics Group

Title: Towards A Multi-Species, Multi-Region Foundation Model for Neuroscience
Topics: Data-Centric AI, Neuroscience
Primary PI: Eva Dyer, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering

Title: Multi-point Optimization for Building Sustainable Deep Learning Infrastructure
Topics: Energy Efficient Computing, Deep Learning, AI Systems OPtimization
Primary PI: Divya Mahajan, Assistant Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Computer Science

Title: Neutrons for Precision Tests of the Standard Model
Topics: Nuclear/Particle Physics, Computational Physics
Primary PI: Aaron Jezghani - OIT-PACE

Title: Continual Pretraining for Egocentric Video
Primary PI: : Zsolt Kira, Assistant Professor, School of Interactive Computing
Co-PI: Shaunak Halbe, Ph.D. Student, Machine Learning

Title: Training More Trustworthy LLMs for Scientific Discovery via Debating and Tool Use
Topics: Trustworthy AI, Large-Language Models, Multi-Agent Systems, AI Optimization
Primary PIs: Chao Zhang, School of Computational Science and Engineering & Bo Dai, College of Computing

Title: Scaling up Foundation AI-based Protein Function Prediction with IDEaS Cyberinfrastructure
Topics: AI, Biology
Primary PI: Yunan Luo, Assistant Professor, School of Computational Science and Engineering        

• Christa M. Ernst

The goals of the funded proposals include identifying prominent emerging research directions on the topic of AI, shaping IDEaS future strategy in the initiative area, building an inclusive and active community of Georgia Tech researchers in the field that potentially include external collaborators, and identifying and preparing groundwork for competing in large-scale grant opportunities in AI and its use in other research fields.

Below are the 2023 recipients and the co-sponsoring IRIs:

Proposal Title: "AI for Chemical and Materials Discovery" + “AI in Microscopy Thrust”
PI: Victor Fung, CSE | Vida Jamali, ChBE| Pan Li, ECE | Amirali Aghazadeh Mohandesi, ECE
Award: $20k (co-sponsored by IMat)

Overview: The goal of this initiative is to bring together expertise in machine learning/AI, high-throughput computing, computational chemistry, and experimental materials synthesis and characterization to accelerate material discovery. Computational chemistry and materials simulations are critical for developing new materials and understanding their behavior and performance, as well as aiding in experimental synthesis and characterization. Machine learning and AI play a pivotal role in accelerating material discovery through data-driven surrogate models, as well as high-throughput and automated synthesis and characterization.

Proposal Title: " AI + Quantum Materials”
PI: Zhigang JIang, Physics | Martin Mourigal, Physics
Award: $20k (Co-Sponsored by IMat)

Overview: Zhigang Jiang is currently leading an initiative within IMAT entitled “Quantum responses of topological and magnetic matter” to nurture multi-PI projects. By crosscutting the IMAT initiative with this IDEAS call, we propose to support and feature the applications of AI on predictive and inverse problems in quantum materials. Understanding the limit and capabilities of AI methodologies is a huge barrier of entry for Physics students, because researchers in that field already need heavy training in quantum mechanics, low-temperature physics and chemical synthesis. Our most pressing need is for our AI inclined quantum materials students to find a broader community to engage with and learn. This is the primary problem we aim to solve with this initiative.

PI: Jeffrey Skolnick, Bio Sci | Chao Zhang, CSE
Proposal Title: Harnessing Large Language Models for Targeted and Effective Small Molecule 4 Library Design in Challenging Disease Treatment
Award: $15k (co-sponsored by IBB)

Overview: Our objective is to use large language models (LLMs) in conjunction with AI algorithms to identify effective driver proteins, develop screening algorithms that target appropriate binding sites while avoiding deleterious ones, and consider bioavailability and drug resistance factors. LLMs can rapidly analyze vast amounts of information from literature and bioinformatics tools, generating hypotheses and suggesting molecular modifications. By bridging multiple disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and pharmacology, LLMs can provide valuable insights from diverse sources, assisting researchers in making informed decisions. Our aim is to establish a first-in-class, LLM driven research initiative at Georgia Tech that focuses on designing highly effective small molecule libraries to treat challenging diseases. This initiative will go beyond existing AI approaches to molecule generation, which often only consider simple properties like hydrogen bonding or rely on a limited set of proteins to train the LLM and therefore lack generalizability. As a result, this initiative is expected to consistently produce safe and effective disease-specific molecules.

PI: Yiyi He, School of City & Regional Plan | Jun Rentschler, World Bank
Proposal Title: “AI for Climate Resilient Energy Systems”
Award: $15k (co-sponsored by SEI)

Overview: We are committed to building a team of interdisciplinary & transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners with a shared goal: developing a new framework which model future climatic variations and the interconnected and interdependent energy infrastructure network as complex systems. To achieve this, we will harness the power of cutting-edge climate model outputs, sourced from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), and integrate approaches from Machine Learning and Deep Learning models. This strategic amalgamation of data and techniques will enable us to gain profound insights into the intricate web of future climate-change-induced extreme weather conditions and their immediate and long-term ramifications on energy infrastructure networks. The seed grant from IDEaS stands as the crucial catalyst for kick-starting this ambitious endeavor. It will empower us to form a collaborative and inclusive community of GT researchers hailing from various domains, including City and Regional Planning, Earth and Atmospheric Science, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering etc. By drawing upon the wealth of expertise and perspectives from these diverse fields, we aim to foster an environment where innovative ideas and solutions can flourish. In addition to our internal team, we also have plans to collaborate with external partners, including the World Bank, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and the Berkeley AI Research Initiative, who share our vision of addressing the complex challenges at the intersection of climate and energy infrastructure.

PI: Jian Luo, Civil & Environmental Eng | Yi Deng, EAS
Proposal Title: “Physics-informed Deep Learning for Real-time Forecasting of Urban Flooding”
Award: $15k (co-sponsored by BBISS)

Overview: Our research team envisions a significant trend in the exploration of AI applications for urban flooding hazard forecasting. Georgia Tech possesses a wealth of interdisciplinary expertise, positioning us to make a pioneering contribution to this burgeoning field. We aim to harness the combined strengths of Georgia Tech's experts in civil and environmental engineering, atmospheric and climate science, and data science to chart new territory in this emerging trend. Furthermore, we envision the potential extension of our research efforts towards the development of a real-time hazard forecasting application. This application would incorporate adaptation and mitigation strategies in collaboration with local government agencies, emergency management departments, and researchers in computer engineering and social science studies. Such a holistic approach would address the multifaceted challenges posed by urban flooding. To the best of our knowledge, Georgia Tech currently lacks a dedicated team focused on the fusion of AI and climate/flood research, making this initiative even more pioneering and impactful.

Proposal Title: “AI for Recycling and Circular Economy”
PI: Valerie Thomas, ISyE and PubPoly | Steven Balakirsky, GTRI
Award: $15k (co-sponsored by BBISS)

Overview: Most asset management and recycling use technology that has not changed for decades. The use of bar codes and RFID has provided some benefits, such as for retail returns management. Automated sorting of recyclables using magnets, eddy currents, and laser plastics identification has improved municipal recycling. Yet the overall field has been challenged by not-quite-easy-enough identification of products in use or at end of life. AI approaches, including computer vision, data fusion, and machine learning provide the additional capability to make asset management and product recycling easy enough to be nearly autonomous. Georgia Tech is well suited to lead in the development of this application. With its strength in machine learning, robotics, sustainable business, supply chains and logistics, and technology commercialization, Georgia Tech has the multi-disciplinary capability to make this concept a reality, in research and in commercial application.

Proposal Title: “Data-Driven Platform for Transforming Subjective Assessment into Objective Processes for Artistic Human Performance and Wellness”
PI: Milka Trajkova, Research Scientist/School of Literature, Media, Communication | Brian Magerko, School of Literature, Media, Communication
Award: $15k (co-sponsored by IPaT)

Overview: Artistic human movement at large, stands at the precipice of a data-driven renaissance. By leveraging novel tools, we can usher in a transparent, data-driven, and accessible training environment. The potential ramifications extend beyond dance. As sports analytics have reshaped our understanding of athletic prowess, a similar approach to dance could redefine our comprehension of human movement, with implications spanning healthcare, construction, rehabilitation, and active aging. Georgia Tech, with its prowess in AI, HCI, and biomechanics is primed to lead this exploration. To actualize this vision, we propose the following research questions with ballet as a prime example of one of the most complex types of artistic movements: 1) What kinds of data - real-time kinematic, kinetic, biomechanical, etc. captured through accessible off-the-shelf technologies, are essential for effective AI assessment in ballet education for young adults?; 2) How can we design and develop an end-to-end ML architecture that assesses artistic and technical performance?; 3) What feedback elements (combination of timing, communication mode, feedback nature, polarity, visualization) are most effective for AI- based dance assessment?; and 4) How does AI-assisted feedback enhance physical wellness, artistic performance, and the learning process in young athletes compared to traditional methods?

-         Christa M. Ernst

Over the summer of 2023, the two students served as research interns for Ye Zhao, Assistant Professor; School of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, and Ting Zhu, Woodruff Professor; School of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the Institute for Materials, both learning from the experience and proposing new research paths to their hosting lab team.

Mentored by graduate students Kelin Yu and Chaitanya Mehta, Christian and Matthew were introduced to the basics of robotic grippers with embedded tactile sensors and training via convolutional neural networks, a powerful artificial intelligence approach that imitates the way humans learn things. After this introductory period, the pair proposed their own approach to testing the robotic gripper on various objects with different textures and shapes. The two discovered that by changing several parameters of the neural network they were able to increase the precision of the robotic arm so that it can more accurately identify the grasped object, adjust its force accordingly to hold the objects firmly but without breakage.

“Following an extensive period of learning and exploration, Matthew and Christian identified and proposed a novel research topic, followed by the development of a comprehensive research plan. Their proposed topic effectively integrates deep learning and tactile sensing to enhance the accuracy of object identification by robotic hands, “said graduate student and mentor Kelin Yu. “They introduced a novel approach to object classification by utilizing deformations of grasped fruit objects and deep learning models. Moreover, Matthew and Christian played important roles in various phases of the research, including the intricate tasks of model training, meticulous data acquisition, and the execution of experiments on robotic hardware. Their active participation was pivotal in driving the project to successful completion.”

In addition to gaining new skills, such as using SOLIDWORKS for design and modeling and 3D printing for prototyping, the two gained valuable insights into the importance of collaboration across specialized teams for productive research outcomes.

Prior to having this opportunity, I never would have imagined that so many specialized groups had to work together and communicate with each other. I would see the Cassie foot team members come in some days and they would discuss topics with the Robotic gripper team members Chaitanya or Colin. – Christian Hable

Georgia Tech has a cutting-edge research environment, such as at Professor Zhao’s lab, where research on robotics and artificial intelligence intersects. I am very impressed by how dedicated and hardworking my mentors, Colin and Chaitanya, were. Our wonderful research experience would not have been possible without the dedication of my mentors. – Matthew Zhu

Kelin, Chaitanya, Zhao and Ting are currently in the process of preparing a journal manuscript on the research, with Matthew and Christian as co-authors. The tentative title of the manuscript is “A robotic hand for object identification through tactile sensing and neural networks”.

- Christa M. Ernst

The team is comprised of Professor Greg Durgin and graduate students Vaibhav Bhosale, Jonathan Dolan, Grishma Kalepu, and Deeksha Manjunath. Their award-winning paper, “PaddleSats: Attitude Control and Station-Keeping for Ultra-Low Density SSP Satellites,” was selected from a field of 37 international papers.

The research presents the authors’ new PaddleSat concept in which satellites are constructed from uniformly thin surfaces, using deflections in their solar panels and subsequent changes in solar pressure-induced momentum to perform station-keeping operations. Such satellites have low launch costs and very long lifetimes in space, as there is no longer the need to carry station-keeping fuel.

PaddleSats also mitigate space debris concerns as the uniformly thin satellites will—without intervention from their controller—gradually descend from orbit (either in fragments or as a whole) due to the influence of solar pressure on the spacecraft. The PaddleSat concept is crucial for developing space solar power satellites for green energy or even low-cost communication satellites that do not contribute long-term orbital debris.

The four students who co-authored the paper began investigating the concept in 2022 as an “ECE 6390 Satellite Communications and Navigation Systems” course project. They continued to refine their work after the course, which led to this original, award-winning concept paper.

The IEEE WiSEE international conference series has been a home for the top-tier research in wireless-related systems in space for the last 11 years. The researchers were honored at this year’s conference held in Aveiro, Portugal from September 6-8.

Top photo caption: Student researchers Vaibhav Ghosale (middle) and Grishma Kalepu (right) being presented the WiSEE Best Paper Award from Juan Fraire, the conference’s technical program committee chair.

Roman Grigoriev is mostly interested in the emergent behaviors in active matter systems made up of units on a molecular scale — tiny systems that convert stored energy into directed motion, consuming energy as they move and exert mechanical force.

“Active matter systems have garnered significant attention in physics, biology, and materials science due to their unique properties and potential applications,” Grigoriev, a professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech, explains.

“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,” he says.

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.

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.”

School of Physics graduate researcher Matthew Golden is the study's lead author. 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.

A two-dimensional 'solution?'

The research team focused on one of the most common examples of active matter, a suspension of self-propelled particles, such as bacteria or synthetic microswimmers, in a liquid medium. These particles cluster, swarm, and otherwise form dynamic patterns due to their ability to move and interact with each other.

“In our paper, we use data from an experimental system involving suspensions of microtubules, which provide structural support, shape, and organization to eukaryotic cells (any cell with a clearly defined nucleus),” Grigoriev explains.

Microtubules, as well as actin filaments and some bacteria, are examples of nematics, rod-like objects whose "heads" are indistinguishable from their "tails.”

The motion of microtubules is driven by molecular motors powered by a protein, kinesin, which consumes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) dissolved in the liquid to slide a pair of neighboring microtubules past one another. The researcher’s system used microtubules suspended between layers of oil and water, which restricted their movement to two dimensions.

“That makes it easier to visualize the microtubules and track their motion. By changing the kinesin or ATP concentrations, we could control the motion of the microtubules, making this experimental setup by far one of the most popular in the study of active nematics and even more generally, active matter,” Grigoriev said.

‘This is where the story gets interesting’

Getting a clearer picture of microtubular movements was just one discovery in the study.

Another was learning more about the relationships between the characteristic patterns describing the orientation and motion of nematic molecules on a macroscopic scale. Those patterns, or topological defects, determine how the nematics orient themselves at the oil-water interface, that is in two spatial dimensions.

“Understanding the relationship between the flow — the global property of the system, or the fluid — and the topological defects, which describe the local orientation of microtubules, is one of the key intellectual questions facing researchers in the field,” Grigoriev said. “One needs to correctly identify the dominant physical effects which control the interaction between the microtubules and the surrounding fluid.”

“And this is where the story gets interesting,” Grigoriev adds. “For over a decade, it was believed that the key physics were well understood, with a large number of theoretical and computational studies relying on a generally accepted first principles model” — that is, one based on established science — “that was originally derived for active nematics in three spatial dimensions.”

In the Georgia Tech model, though, the dynamics of active nematics — more specifically, the length and time scales of the emerging patterns — are controlled by a pair of physical constants describing those assumed dominant physical effects: the stiffness of the microtubules (their flexibility), and the activity describing the stress, or force, generated by the kinesin motors.

“Using a data-driven approach, we inferred the correct form of the model demonstrating that, for two-dimensional active nematics, the dominant physical effects are different from what was previously assumed,” Grigoriev says. “In particular, the time scale is set by the rate at which bundles of microtubules are stretched by kinesin.” It is this rate, rather than the stress, that is constant.

The danger of confirmation bias

Grigoriev said the results of the study have important implications for understanding of active nematics and their emergent behaviors, explaining that they help rationalize a number of recent experimental results that were previously unexplained, such as how the density of topological defects scales with the concentration of kinesin and the viscosity of the fluid layers.

“More importantly, our results demonstrate the danger associated with traditional assumptions that established research communities often land on and have difficulty overcoming,” Grigoriev said. “While data-driven methods may have their own sources of bias, they offer a perspective which is different enough from more traditional approaches to become a valuable research tool in their own right.”

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing 50 states and more than 148 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Funding: This study was funded by the National Science Foundation, grant no. CMMI-2028454. “Physically informed data-driven modeling of active nematics,” DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq6120

For example, CLDDs can be used to manage chronic medical conditions, such as diabetes, where maintaining precise control over mediation dosage is critical.

While they hold immense promise for improving patient outcomes and treatment adherence, CLDDs have only recently entered clinical use due to the difficulty in integrating the sensing and actuating components of human-machine Interfaces (HMIs).

Researchers at Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering have published an article in Device that provides a comprehensive overview of advancements, strengths, and challenges associated with various CLDD approaches.

Examples of devices already in use include insulin pumps, implantable pain pumps, and epilepsy neurostimulators.

In the paper, titled “Communication Protocols Integrating Wearables, Ingestibles, and Implantables for Closed-Loop Therapies,” the researchers explore both passive and active CLDDs.

Passive devices (typically implantable or ingestible) can release drugs over extended periods without active, real-time monitoring, while active CLDDs incorporate real-time monitoring and feedback mechanisms to adjust drug delivery in response to changing circumstances.

“Active closed-loop, drug-delivery systems are poised to usher in a new generation of remote, personalized healthcare driven by human-machine interfaces,” said study co-author Alex Abramson, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

“But to accentuate the shift from passive to active CLDDs, the integration of advanced sensors and actuators is crucial,” added Ramy Ghanim, a PhD student in Abramson’s lab and co-author of the paper.

Sensors in CLDDs continuously monitor specific health parameters in the body (e.g., blood glucose levels for diabetics), and that data is fed to actuators that determine if a specific treatment is needed (such as releasing insulin).

Communication Systems

In the article, the researchers explore various methods for communication transmission in CLDDs, including hardwiring, radio frequency (RF) wireless communication such as Bluetooth, ultrasound, and in-body communication (harnessing the body itself for data transfer through methods like ionic, biochemical, and optical communication). Each method comes with unique advantages and challenges, according to the researchers.

Challenges in developing advanced HMIs include battery size constraints, powering requirements, data transmission rates, and locational dependance.

One big challenge is making sure these devices work no matter where they are inside a patient. Like a cellphone working best near a Wi-Fi router, these devices need to be in the right place to communicate effectively. Sometimes, they move around inside the body, which can be a problem.

The paper explores potential solutions to various challenges, including energy harvesting techniques, wireless powering, and location tracking systems. Ensuring secure data transmission and protection against hacking is also crucial, the researchers noted.

Benefits to Patients

Benefits of CLDDs include simplicity by automating treatment, reducing side effects by delivering medication precisely in a timely manner, and cost-effectiveness by reducing hospitalizations and complications associated with patient non-compliance.

Up to half of all patients requiring frequent and redundant dosages are noncompliant, sometimes missing doses due to complex treatment regimens, according to the researchers. Consequences include decreased quality of life, preventable disease progression, and an estimated annual cost of $528.4 billion in U.S. healthcare expenditure solely due to suboptimal medication therapy.

“Closed-loop drug delivery systems are poised to transform the landscape of chronic illness treatment by enhancing therapeutic release profiles and easing drug administration, thereby improving patients’ quality of life, decreasing medical expenditures, and improving compliance,” Abramson said.

CITATION: Ramy Ghanim, Anika Kaushik, Jihoon Park, and Alex Abramson, “Communication Protocols Integrating Wearables, Ingestibles, and Implantables for Closed-Loop Therapies,” Device, https://www.cell.com/device/fulltext/S2666-9986(23)00144-8, 2023   

The Consulate General of France in Atlanta has announced that Berger has been awarded the Chevalier dans L'Ordre des Palmes Académiques for her “exceptional dedication and significant accomplishments in the field of science and education,” says Rami Abi Akl, French attaché for science and technology in Atlanta.

The Palmes Académiques is presented to French citizens and non-citizens who have made significant contributions to French education, science, and culture. The first Palmes Académiques was presented by Napoleon in 1808.

Berger’s “pioneering work in physics, particularly on graphene, has not only advanced scientific knowledge, but also served as an inspiration to others in her field,” Abi Akl says.

In addition to her research and classes at Georgia Tech, Berger is Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), which has been home to 12 Nobel Prize and 10 Fields Medal winners. Berger’s affiliation is with the CNRS International Research Lab, with its main campus at Georgia Tech-Europe in Metz, France, and an affiliated lab at Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus.

Approximately 50 colleagues from both countries have conducted collaborative research at both Georgia Tech campuses, thanks to Berger’s efforts.

“Her selection for this honor also reflects her remarkable impact on both the American and French scientific communities,” Abi Akl says. “Her collaborative efforts and contributions to scientific research have fostered strong ties between France and the United States, strengthening the bonds of scientific diplomacy.”

“A very big thank you to the French General Consulate in Atlanta for submitting my name for this distinctive honor,” Berger recently shared. “Among other funding agencies and foundations, I am particularly grateful to the French Embassy for their partnership grants that funded travel and helped collaboration between almost 60 faculty members, postdoctoral scholars, and students.”

“I also want to thank Georgia Tech and the School of Physics for their full support,” she added. “All that travel and dedicated lab work wouldn’t have happened without the love and support at home from my husband and our three sons.”

About Claire Berger

Berger was born in Paris, France, and received her Ph.D. from the Université Grenoble Alpes. She joined Georgia Tech in 2001, and she quickly established herself as a noted researcher of the electronic properties of graphene, a material with a flat, two-dimensional structure that is touted as a potential successor to silicon in computer processors.

Berger and School of Physics Regents’ Professor Walter de Heer are working on graphene discoveries that could lead to smaller, more energy-efficient processing that is expected to usher in a new era of quantum and high performance computing.

Walter de Heer welcomed Berger into his lab when she arrived at Georgia Tech, she says. “I want to thank him for being an incredible team leader in this adventure, for his continuous support, his insights, dedication and passion for science.”

Berger co-authored the first article demonstrating the two-dimensional properties of graphene and a possible electronics platform for the material. Berger, de Heer, and School of Physics Professor Phillip First also co-authored the first patent for graphene electronics in 2003.

She is the co-author of more than 200 publications in international journals. From 2014 to 2019, she was among the top one percent most cited researchers in physics.

In good company with another Atlanta Palmes winner

Berger says she was given the letter by the General Consul of Atlanta announcing her award during an event at the Embassy. “I was so surprised by the nomination that I was fumbling trying to find my words. This was a great — and a bit embarrassing — moment at the same time.”

One of her good friends, Bill Moon, is a fellow Palmes Académiques winner for promoting French language instruction at private and public schools in Atlanta and Decatur. “He founded the International Community School in Clarkston, Georgia, a public charter elementary school serving the needs of U.S. and refugee families now living in DeKalb County, and he continues to be active in the service of communities,” Berger says. “To be awarded the same medal as Bill is an incredible honor.”

In this brief Q&A, Rocklin discusses his research focus, how it relates to materials research, and the impact of this initiative.

What is your field of expertise and at what point in your life did you first become interested in this area?

I'm a soft matter physicist who studies flexible structures and metamaterials. Flexible structures can support mechanical loads while undergoing complex deformations. Metamaterials are structures engineered with repeating patterns such as holes or creases that imbue them with fundamentally new properties. I have been interested in using math and logic to solve puzzles and figure things out from a very young age. This has grown over the last several years into designing structures with new geometries to convey force in new and useful ways.

What questions or challenges sparked your current materials research?

Flexible structures lend themselves to complex behavior and fascinating puzzles. Why do origami sheets seem to bend in exactly the opposite direction as conventional thin plates? How can you design a structure that can robustly toggle between flexible and stiff? How many different stable shapes can be programmed into a single mechanical metamaterial?

Why is your initiative important to the development of Georgia Tech’s materials research strategy?

This research offers a new way of conceptualizing materials research, connecting with a vibrant and growing international materials community. Materials research often involves manipulating the smallest (atomic) scale, whereas metamaterials aim to take advantage of structure at all scales, up to the human scale of the overall system. This complements existing materials research while connecting it with other disciplines such as robotics and mechanical engineering.

What are the broader global and social benefits of the research you and your team conduct?

As a scientist, I have faith that deeper knowledge leads to broad social benefits. In the case of metamaterials, this benefit is already being realized. Soft robots, sheets of paper, textiles, plants, and the human body itself are all flexible structures. Metamaterial principles are being used widely, from space missions to surgical stents, to create stronger, tougher, cheaper, softer, and lighter-weight structures.

What are your plans for engaging a wider Georgia Tech faculty pool with IMat research?

Georgia Tech has a remarkable set of researchers who work on metamaterials, as well as many others who work in adjacent and complementary areas. Our immediate goal is to strengthen communication and build a sense of community to share ideas and craft teams of collaborators capable of developing new research programs.

Kiandra Peart, co-founder of Reinvend, said the amount of people surprised her.

“After the first VIP session was over, hundreds of people were just flooding through the door at all times,” she said. “We had to give the pitch a million times to explain it to a lot of different people, but they seemed really, really engaged, and we were also able to get a few interactions.”

Reinvend is working through a potential deal with Tech Dining on using their vending machines, which would expand food options for students after dining halls close.

Demo Day is the culmination of the 12-week summer accelerator, Startup Launch, where founders learn about entrepreneurship and build out their businesses with the support of mentors. Along with guidance from experts in business, teams receive $5,000 in optional funding and $30,000 of in-kind services. This year, the program had over 100 startups and 250 founders, continuing the growth trend for CREATE-X. The program aims to eventually support the launch of 300 startups per year.

Peart said the experience taught the team how to better pitch to potential clients and formulate a call to action after a successful interaction.

Since its inception in 2014, CREATE-X has had more than 5,000 participate in their programming, which is segmented in three areas: Learn, Make, and Launch. Besides providing resources, the program also helps founders through its rich entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“We want to increase access to entrepreneurship. That’s the heart of the program, and it’s the goal to have everyone in the Tech community to have entrepreneurial confidence. The energy and passion of our founders to solve real-world problems — it’s palpable at Demo Day. I’d say it’s the best place to see what we’re about and understand what this program offers,” said Rahul Saxena, director of CREATE-X, who also reminded founders that the connections they make here would last for years.

At its core, CREATE-X is a community geared toward innovation. Participants were at the forefront of integrating OpenAI's GPT-3 when it was not yet widely adopted. They share their insights with each other, and the program has mentors coming back from even the very first cohort. Starting with eight teams, CREATE-X has now launched more than 400 startup teams, with founders representing 38 academic majors. Its total startup portfolio valuation is above $1.9 billion.

Peart compared CREATE-X to an energy drink.

“After going through the program, I was really able to refine my ideas, talk with other people, and now that the program is over, I feel energized,” she said. “I think that having an accelerator right at home allows students who may have never considered starting a company, or didn't have access to an accelerator, to actually utilize their resources from their school and their own community to get their companies started.”

Although Demo Day just ended, CREATE-X is already gearing up for  the next cohort. Applications for Startup Launch opened Aug. 31, the same day as Demo Day.

“Consider interning for yourself next summer,” said Saxena. “We know you have ideas about solutions to address global challenges. You’re at Tech; you have the talent. Let us help you with the resources and support system.”

Georgia Tech students, alumni, and faculty can apply to GT Startup Launch now. The priority deadline is Nov. 6. To learn more about CREATE-X, find CREATE-X events to build a startup team, or learn more about entrepreneurship, visit th CREATE-X website

According to LLNL materials scientist Kyle Sullivan, who sponsored Brettmann’s mini-sabbatical, she helped his team take a fresh look at their methodology, enabling them to identify ways to streamline a highly complex process.

“Many of our material development activities start with multi-faceted problems,” Sullivan said. “We were eager to draw from Blair’s experience in pharmaceutical manufacturing to help us identify an efficient methodology to apply to our research.”

Brettmann’s research focuses on material processing, including how a material’s properties influence the optimal processing approach, as well as how novel processing techniques can be used to develop materials with the features needed for specific applications. Her goal is to better understand options for real-time monitoring of material processing, including effective data collection tools, as well as knowing which experimental data would be beneficial to analyze. As she heads back to Georgia Tech to start another academic year, Brettmann is hoping that the insight she gained during her mini-sabbatical will help her research team as they test new analytical techniques for their material formulation experiments.

Dobbs spent her summer at LLNL investigating material formulation techniques. She helped design and conduct experiments that explored ways to optimize material mixing and she developed a new process for analyzing experimental data. During her internship, Dobbs met with LLNL experts in materials processing and advanced manufacturing, who helped her frame her experiments.

“It was great to expand my understanding of the entire manufacturing process and learn about key challenges in the field," Dobbs said. “The opportunity to spend time with energetics experts was one of the highlights of my internship experience.”

Read the full article

"Our investment will help train the next generation of talent necessary to fill key openings in the semiconductor industry and grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "By supporting novel, transdisciplinary research, we will enable breakthroughs in semiconductors and microelectronics and address the national need for a reliable, secure supply of innovative semiconductor technologies, systems and professionals."

View the announcement

To enable this research, IMat leadership has supported strategic interdisciplinary initiatives since 2021. Each initiative has a dedicated faculty lead to guide the initiative and prepare teams to compete for mid- and large-scale, multi-investigator research centers with academic, national laboratory, and industry partners. Initiative leads also work to increase the campus’ collaborative spirit by working with other Interdisciplinary Research Institutes, campus units, and the Georgia Tech Research Institute to design and support research programs. Initiative leads serve for one academic year and may be considered for renewal based on their progress in achieving community-building goals and their impact on IMat and the materials innovation ecosystem at Georgia Tech.

“The goal of our initiative lead program is to provide support for these strategic interdisciplinary research areas,” said IMat Executive Director Eric Vogel. “Now that we are in the third year of the program, we have seen significant growth in many of the initiatives we have supported, including batteries and energy storage and materials laboratories for the future.”

Materials for Energy Storage Initiative to Become Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center

Matthew McDowell has served as an IMat initiative lead in Materials for Energy Storage, a joint initiative with the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), since the program began in 2021. With the nation’s increased focus on electric vehicles, battery storage technologies have gained significant attention since McDowell launched his initiative. In addition, the state of Georgia is becoming the epicenter of the battery belt of the Southeast, with more than $25 billion invested or announced in EV-related research in the past three years. The Materials for Energy Storage Initiative has worked to highlight Georgia Tech’s strong energy storage research community and how it can help shape the development of next-generation energy storage devices. In 2023, McDowell and his team hosted Georgia Tech Battery Day, a sold-out event that brought together more than 230 energy researchers and industry representatives to advance energy storage technologies.

This year, the Materials for Energy Storage Initiative will become the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center, with McDowell and Gleb Yushin as co-directors. The new center will build community at Georgia Tech, work to enhance relationships with industrial partners, and create a new battery manufacturing facility on Georgia Tech’s campus. The Advanced Battery Center is the latest initiative to gain external funding and become a center, in addition to the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics and the Georgia AI Manufacturing coalition led by former IMat Initiative Lead Aaron Stebner.

Meet the 2023-24 IMat Initiative Leads

Materials for Solar Energy Harvesting and Conversion

Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena is an assistant professor and the Goizueta Early Career Faculty Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. He holds a B.S. in management and engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental engineering, all from the University of Connecticut. Correa-Baena runs the Energy Materials Lab at Georgia Tech, which focuses on understanding and control of crystallographic structure and effects on electronic dynamics at the nanoscale of low-cost semiconductors for optoelectronic applications.

As an initiative lead, Correa-Baena will work to create a community around solar energy harvesting and conversion at Georgia Tech. He aims to integrate photovoltaic, photodetectors, and related devices into IMaT-related research; energize research in these areas at Georgia Tech at large; and consolidate the expertise of the many research groups working on or around photovoltaics/photodetectors that will allow us to target interdisciplinary research funding opportunities. He also wants to provide an official link at Georgia Tech for industry partners to interact with faculty on photovoltaics, with a special aim at First Solar and QCells, the largest solar panel factory in the western hemisphere.

Autonomous Research for Materials

Mark Losego is an associate professor, MSE Faculty Fellow, and Dean’s Education Innovation Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. He holds a B.S. from Penn State University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from North Carolina State University, all in materials science and engineering. The Losego research lab focuses on materials processing to develop novel organic-inorganic hybrid materials and interfaces for microelectronics, sustainable energy devices, national security technologies, and advanced textiles.

As an IMat initiative lead, Losego will help build a community at Georgia Tech that works toward developing autonomous and intelligent systems (robots) that execute physical experiments — processing, characterizing, and measuring the properties of materials — and then uses this knowledge to iteratively and intelligently execute subsequent experiments that produce new knowledge about process-structure-property relations, which inform materials discovery and design. He also hopes to learn what technical questions, training opportunities, or other incentives would compel Georgia Tech roboticists to collaborate with materials scientists to develop autonomous materials discovery systems and what the Georgia Tech materials community can do with emerging, inexpensive, and simple-to-use robotics systems to drive autonomous materials discovery.

Macromolecular Materials at Biotic and Abiotic Interfaces

Valeria Tohver Milam is an associate professor and MSE Faculty Fellow in MSE. She holds a B.S. from the University of Florida, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, all in materials science and engineering. Her research interests are in DNA-based ligands for molecular, macromolecular, and mesoscale targets and bio-inspired colloidal assembly for multifunctional drug delivery vehicles and colloidal-based sensing. She also leads the Milam Group.

As an IMat initiative lead, Milam will work to build an inclusive and active community across and beyond Georgia Tech to identify emerging research directions in macromolecular materials. Macromolecules, whether natural, bio-inspired, or completely synthetic, hold promise for enabling the next generation of materials to successfully perform at biotic as well as abiotic interfaces. Motivated by broad applications ranging from health to the environment, this initiative will bring together experimental and computational engineers and scientists focused on fundamental studies of macromolecular systems. The goal is to identify pathways to novel compositions, structures, synthesis, and characterization approaches to designing and implementing macromolecular materials.

Mechanical Metamaterials

D. Zeb Rocklin is an assistant professor in the School of Physics. He holds a B.Sc. in physics and economics from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include soft condensed matter physics and adjacent fields like statistical physics, physics of living systems, and hard condensed matter with a particular focus on the relationship between the geometric structure of a system and its mechanical response. He leads the Rocklin Group at Georgia Tech, which focuses on the structure and motion of soft materials.

As an IMat initiative lead, Rocklin aims to bring faculty together within the Colleges of Sciences, Engineering, and Design to develop, characterize, and apply novel metamaterials — those with programmed structures above the atomic scale, blurring the line between material and machine. They can reveal fundamentally new physics while also incorporating new functionality for flexibility, strength, and intelligent processing of mechanical force and energy.

Materials and Interfaces for Catalysis and Separations | Marta Hatzell
Marta Hatzell is an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She earned a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and an M.Eng in environmental engineering from Pennsylvania State University. Her research group focuses on exploring sustainable catalysis and separations with applications from electrofuels and solar fuels to desalination.

To mitigate issues related to climate change, there is a societal push to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Thermal separations and catalysis are the primary sources of carbon emissions in industry today. Thus, there is a growing research focus on developing next-generation materials for net zero catalysis and separation processes. In year one, Hatzell aided in bringing together faculty for two center-level proposals through the NSF and DOE. She also helped run a workshop to disseminate information regarding the DOE Earthshot call. In her second year as an initiative lead, Hatzell will continue to bring faculty together who are working on materials-related issues aimed at decarbonizing industrial separations and catalysis, identify the bottlenecks for new materials, and assess their long-term impacts.

Quantum Responses of Topological and Magnetic Matter | Zhigang Jiang
Zhigang Jiang is a professor in the School of Physics. He holds a B.S. in physics from Beijing University and a Ph.D. in physics from Northwestern University. He was also a postdoctoral research associate at Columbia University jointly with Princeton University and NHMFL from 2005 to 2008. His research interests are in the quantum transport and infrared optical properties of topological and magnetic materials. His current projects include infrared magneto-spectroscopy of topological semimetals, band-engineering topological phases in metamorphic InAsSb ordered alloys, and developing new materials for portable, real-time radiation monitoring devices.

The goals of this initiative are twofold: first, to anchor, develop, and promote the community of researchers working on the fundamental magnetic properties of quantum materials. And second, to connect these researchers to application-centric initiatives led by other science or engineering colleagues across Georgia Tech. The focus will be on fundamental research progress in topological and magnetic matter and to communicate their importance, relevance, and significance to Georgia Tech’s research audience. In addition, this initiative aims to leverage fundamental discoveries in quantum materials and explore how they can be translated in their own right into quantum systems with new functionalities for spintronics, qubits, and electronic devices.

Materials in Extreme Environments | Richard W. Neu
Richard W. Neu is a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. His research involves the understanding and prediction of the fatigue behavior of materials and closely related topics, typically when the material must resist degradation and failure in harsh environments. He has investigated a broad range of structural materials, including steels, titanium alloys, nickel-base superalloys, metal matrix composites, molybdenum alloys, high entropy alloys, medical device materials, and solder alloys used in electronic packaging. 

Neu served as an initiative lead in 2022 and will continue in this role in 2023. He will continue to engage and build an interdisciplinary research community to address the complex issues associated with new materials in extreme environments. These environments include high temperature, high pressure, corrosive, wear/erosion, cyclic loading, high-rate impacts, and radiation. In harsh environments, materials are continuously evolving and deforming, presenting a roadblock in advancing engineering systems due to the uncertainty in the performance of new materials or new process methods such as additive manufacturing. Managing this risk by predicting the uncertainties, both internal to the material (its structure feature) and external environment, is an important consideration that materials engineering must address.

Organic Photonics and Electronics | Jason Azoulay

Jason Azoulay is an associate professor and Georgia Research Alliance Vasser-Woolley Chair in Optoelectronics in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, with a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Santa Barbara and performed postdoctoral studies at Sandia National Laboratories. His research group unites strong synthetic foundations with physics, materials science, and engineering to synthesize and apply next-generation functional materials. Research within his group includes homogeneous catalysis applied to polymer synthesis; electronic, photonic, magnetic, and quantum materials; device fabrication and engineering; chemical sensing in complex aqueous environments for environmental monitoring; and the synthesis, application, and engineering of high-performance polymers across multiple technology platforms.

Emerging semiconductor materials open new pathways and opportunities to address critical national needs with global societal impacts in climate change, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, information science, consumer applications, defense-wide applications, and many others. Azoulay will work across multiple Georgia Tech centers, topical working groups, and institutes to create a unique materials research environment that spans traditionally siloed disciplines and materials classes. These efforts will advance the chemistry, materials science, and application of emerging photonic, optoelectronic, semiconductor, spin-based, and quantum technologies and raise the recognition of the materials innovations at Georgia Tech to the international stage.

Materials for Biomedical Systems | W. Hong Yeo

W. Hong Yeo is an associate professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the director of the IEN Center for Human-Centric Interfaces and Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and genome sciences from the University of Washington and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the areas of nano-microengineering, soft materials, molecular interactions, and biosystems, with an emphasis on nanomembrane bioelectronics and human-machine interfaces.

Yeo led the Materials for Biomedical Systems initiative in 2022 and will continue in this role in 2023, where he will continue to foster collaborations between faculty, researchers, and clinicians to advance research in biomaterials and biomedical systems. In 2022, this initiative successfully hosted the MBS Day by inviting more than 80 people from academia, industry, and national labs to share knowledge, research ideas, and commercialization opportunities. Yeo believes collaborative research environments between materials science and engineering and medicine will result in fundamental breakthroughs in bioinspired materials, human-centered designs, and integrated biomedical systems, which will significantly advance human healthcare. He also hopes to enhance human health via multidisciplinary materials research to tackle the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge to engineer better medicines in collaboration with both academic and industry partners.

The day began at the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), where students learned about ferrofluids, thin films, magic sand, measuring their height in nanometers, and the size and scale of the universe. They also visited the Materials Characterization Facility for an introduction to characterization and demonstrations of some of its tools, including the digital optical microscope and atomic force microscope. The IEN portion of the day concluded with a window tour of the IEN cleanroom and an opportunity to gown up in “bunny suits,” the standard uniform worn by cleanroom users.

“We’re committed to developing the pipeline of the future microelectronics workforce,” said Mikkel Thomas, assistant director of workforce development at IEN. “This includes K-12 students who may not know what microelectronics are, or the career paths associated with them. We were glad to host part of Chip Camp and introduce these students to IEN.”

Following a lunch break, campers visited the Invention Studio makerspace, where they built their own rockets — and then launched them in Tech Green.

Micron Chip Camp is a global initiative offering opportunities to students in the U.S. and Asia both in person and online. Micron teamed up with STE(A)M Truck, Atlanta's leader in hands-on STEAM education, for the Georgia session.

In addition to hosting students for camps, IEN provides a variety of outreach programs for K-12 and adult learners, which include short courses and seminars, research experiences for undergraduates, and research experiences for teachers. To learn more about these opportunities, visit research.gatech.edu/nano/workforce-development.

The team has identified two possible candidates using new machine learning models they developed and deployed with the capabilities of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego. They published their progress recently in the journal Physical Review Materials.

Superconductors allow electricity to pass with no resistance, but conventional materials require temperatures near absolute zero (nearly -460 degrees Fahrenheit). For more than a century, scientists have been searching for materials able to accomplish the feat at room temperature and ambient pressure.

“The main challenge of the [artificial intelligence/machine learning] method is that we need, but never have, the desired database of superconductors,” said Huan Tran, senior research scientist in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. “All previous works relied on databases that are sometimes large enough, but completely lacking in atomic-level information — which is absolutely crucial for accurate predictions.”

Tran and Tuoc Vu from Hanoi University have been building a database with that atomic-level information, filling in a critical gap in available data so they can train machine learning models to accurately predict promising superconductive materials.

More details about their work from the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

But battery researchers have begun to approach the limits of lithium-ion. As next-generation long-range vehicles and electric aircraft start to arrive on the market, the search for safer, cheaper, and more powerful battery systems that can outperform lithium-ion is ramping up.

A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, led by Matthew McDowell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering, is using aluminum foil to create batteries with higher energy density and greater stability. The team’s new battery system, detailed in Nature Communications, could enable electric vehicles to run longer on a single charge and would be cheaper to manufacture — all while having a positive impact on the environment.

“We are always looking for batteries with higher energy density, which would enable electric vehicles to drive for longer distances on a charge,” McDowell said. “It’s interesting that we can use aluminum as a battery material, because it’s cost-effective, highly recyclable, and easy to work with.”

The idea of making batteries with aluminum isn’t new. Researchers investigated its potential in the 1970s, but it didn’t work well.

When used in a conventional lithium-ion battery, aluminum fractures and fails within a few charge-discharge cycles, due to expansion and contraction as lithium travels in and out of the material. Developers concluded that aluminum wasn’t a viable battery material, and the idea was largely abandoned.

Now, solid-state batteries have entered the picture. While lithium-ion batteries contain a flammable liquid that can lead to fires, solid-state batteries contain a solid material that's not flammable and, therefore, likely safer. Solid-state batteries also enable the integration of new high-performance active materials, as shown in this research.

The project began as a collaboration between the Georgia Tech team and Novelis, a leading manufacturer of aluminum and the world’s largest aluminum recycler, as part of the Novelis Innovation Hub at Georgia Tech. The research team knew that aluminum would have energy, cost, and manufacturing benefits when used as a material in the battery’s anode — the negatively charged side of the battery that stores lithium to create energy — but pure aluminum foils were failing rapidly when tested in batteries.

The team decided to take a different approach. Instead of using pure aluminum in the foils, they added small amounts of other materials to the aluminum to create foils with particular “microstructures,” or arrangements of different materials. They tested over 100 different materials to understand how they would behave in batteries.

“We needed to incorporate a material that would address aluminum’s fundamental issues as a battery anode,” said Yuhgene Liu, a Ph.D. student in McDowell’s lab and first author on the paper. “Our new aluminum foil anode demonstrated markedly improved performance and stability when implemented in solid-state batteries, as opposed to conventional lithium-ion batteries.” 

The team observed that the aluminum anode could store more lithium than conventional anode materials, and therefore more energy. In the end, they had created high energy density batteries that could potentially outperform lithium-ion batteries.

“One of the benefits of our aluminum anode that we're excited about is that it enables performance improvements, but it also can be very cost-effective,” McDowell said. “On top of that, when using a foil directly as a battery component, we actually remove a lot of the manufacturing steps that would normally be required to produce a battery material.”

Short-range electric aircraft are in development by several companies, but the limiting factor is batteries. Today’s batteries do not hold enough energy to power aircraft to fly distances greater than 150 miles or so. New battery chemistries are needed, and the McDowell team’s aluminum anode batteries could open the door to more powerful battery technologies.

“The initial success of these aluminum foil anodes presents a new direction for discovering other potential battery materials,” Liu said. "This hopefully opens pathways for reimagining a more energy-optimized and cost-effective battery cell architecture.”

The team is currently working to scale up the size of the batteries to understand how size influences the aluminum’s behavior. The group is also actively exploring other materials and microstructures with the goal of creating very cheap foils for battery systems.

“This is a story about a material that was known about for a long time, but was largely abandoned early on in battery development,” McDowell said. “But with new knowledge, combined with a new technology — the solid-state battery — we've figured out how we can rejuvenate the idea and achieve really promising performance.”

Funding: Support is acknowledged from Novelis, Inc. M.T.M. acknowledges support from a Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This work was performed in part at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (ECCS-2025462).

Citation: Liu, Y., Wang, C., Yoon, S.G. et al. Aluminum foil negative electrodes with multiphase microstructure for all-solid-state Li-ion batteries. Nat Commun 14, 3975 (2023).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39685-x

Writer: Catherine Barzler

Photography: Rob Felt

The pipeline extracts material property records from published papers and populates the data into a new application called Polymer Scholar. The platform works like a browser to search polymers and materials properties by keyword, rather than reading through countless articles.

The application makes materials research more efficient, which could lead to the discovery of new polymers.

“Essentially, we have created an index on materials science literature that is much more granular than ones in a typical index that a search engine would create,” said Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Pranav Shetty, the lead designer of the pipeline.

“Our hope is that materials science researchers can make use of this capability in their day-to-day lives and workflows, and therefore, allow their work to have much more usability toward studying polymers and developing new materials.”

The group’s paper says the number of materials science papers published annually grows at a rate of 6% compounded annually. This amount of content makes for long, difficult work for scientists and in need of a computing solution.

The group’s answer is MaterialsBERT, a model they built and trained that powers the pipeline.

MaterialsBERT categorizes words in the text by association with a material property record. After the model associates text with records, the data is fed to Polymer Scholar. Scientists can use Polymer Scholar to study data, searching by either a polymer name or a property, like boiling point or tensile strength.

The group used 2.4 million materials science abstracts to train MaterialsBERT. In tests, the model outperformed five other models on three of five entity-recognition datasets.

According to the study, the pipeline needed only 60 hours to obtain 300,000 material property records from over 130,000 abstracts.

As a comparison, materials scientists currently use a database called PoLyInfo. This system has over 492,000 material property records, manually curated by hand over the span of many years. Georgia Tech’s pipeline can accomplish in hours what took humans years to do in PoLyInfo.

“Polymer Scholar and MaterialsBERT are powered by a large corpus of 2.4 million materials science articles, which took some time and effort to develop the infrastructure to support such a large collection,” said Chao Zhang, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). “This body of papers made all the difference in training MaterialsBERT because it improved the language model’s ability to identify and extract data.”

Polymer research is vital because of the roles polymers play in manufacturing, healthcare, electronics, and other industries. Polymers have desirable properties that make them useful for future applications.

When polymer research slows, it inhibits the development of new technologies. These technologies are needed to overcome today’s challenges like climate change, faltering infrastructure, and sustainable energy.

In their paper, the group analyzed data using polymer solar cells, fuel cells, and supercapacitors as keywords in Polymer Scholar. This showed that scholars can use the pipeline to infer trends and phenomena in materials science literature. It also used practical examples to demonstrate applicability.

The journal npj computational materials published the group’s paper because of its findings.

The group’s work embodies Georgia Tech’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship. Researchers from the School of CSE and the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) collaborated on the pipeline.

School of CSE authors include Shetty, Zhang, and Ph.D. student Sonakshi Gupta. MSE authors include postdoctoral researchers Arunkumar Chitteth Rajan, Christopher Kuenneth, undergraduate students Lakshmi Prerana Panchumarti, Lauren Holm, and Professor Rampi Ramprasad.

The pipeline is the latest work for the group which is committed to applying computational methods to lead innovations in materials science.

“Our long-term vision is to use the extracted data to train models that can predict material properties,” Ramprasad said. “Creating a pipeline to extract this data that can seamlessly feed into predictive models will ultimately lead to an extraordinary pace of materials discovery.”

The pipeline extracts material property records from published papers and populates the data into a new application called Polymer Scholar. The platform works like a browser to search polymers and materials properties by keyword, rather than reading through countless articles.

The application makes materials research more efficient, which could lead to discovery of new polymers.

“Essentially, we have created an index on materials science literature that is much more granular than ones in a typical index that a search engine would create,” said Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Pranav Shetty, the lead designer of the pipeline.

“Our hope is that materials science researchers can make use of this capability in their day to day lives and workflows, and therefore, allow their work to have much more usability toward studying polymers and developing new materials.”

The group’s paper says the number of materials science papers published annually grows at a rate of 6% compounded annually. This amount of content makes for long, difficult work for scientists and in need of a computing solution.

The group’s answer is MaterialsBERT, a model they built and trained that powers the pipeline.

MaterialsBERT categorizes words in text by association with a material property record. After the model associates text with records, the data is fed to Polymer Scholar. Scientists can use Polymer Scholar to study data, searching either polymer name or a property, like boiling point or tensile strength.

The group used 2.4 million materials science abstracts to train MaterialsBERT. In tests, the model outperformed five other models on three of five entity-recognition datasets.

According to the study, the pipeline needed only 60 hours to obtain 300,000 material property records from over 130,000 abstracts.

As a comparison, materials scientists currently use a database called PoLyInfo. This system has over 492,000 material property records, manually curated by hand over the span of many years. Georgia Tech’s pipeline can accomplish in hours what took humans years to do in PoLyInfo.

“Polymer Scholar and MaterialsBERT are powered by a large corpus of 2.4 million materials science articles, which took some time and effort to develop the infrastructure to support such a large collection,” said Chao Zhang, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). “This body of papers made all the difference training MaterialsBERT because it improved the language model’s ability to identify and extract data.”

Polymer research is vital because of their role in manufacturing, healthcare, electronics, and other industries. Polymers have desirable properties that make them useful toward future applications.

When polymer research slows, it inhibits development of new technologies. These technologies are needed to overcome today’s challenges like climate change, faltering infrastructure, and sustainable energy.

In their paper, the group analyzed data using polymer solar cells, fuel cells, and supercapacitors as keywords in Polymer Scholar. This showed that scholars can use the pipeline to infer trends and phenomena in materials science literature. It also used practical examples to demonstrate applicability.

The journal npj computational materials published the group’s paper because of its findings.

The group’s work embodies Georgia Tech’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship. Researchers from the School of CSE and the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) collaborated on the pipeline.

School of CSE authors include Shetty, Zhang, and Ph.D. student Sonakshi Gupta. MSE authors include postdoctoral researchers Arunkumar Chitteth Rajan, Christopher Kuenneth, undergraduate students Lakshmi Prerana Panchumarti, Lauren Holm, and Professor Rampi Ramprasad.

The pipeline is the latest work for the group who are committed to applying computational methods to lead innovations in materials science.

“Our long-term vision is to use the extracted data to train models that can predict material properties,” Ramprasad said. “Creating a pipeline to extract this data that can seamlessly feed into predictive models will ultimately lead to an extraordinary pace of materials discovery.”

At the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), researchers are working to expand their fundamental understanding of these hybrid electrolytes, the component that transfers charge between electrodes as the batteries power systems such as electric vehicles (EVs) – and are then recharged. Lithium-ion batteries widely used in today’s EVs rely on liquid electrolytes, which are susceptible to thermal runaway and fire if they are damaged.

“We’ve shown that we can fabricate these hybrid, solid-state electrolytes and put them into coin cells to demonstrate high performance and high stability,” said Ilan Stern, a principal research scientist who leads battery research at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Georgia Tech’s applied research organization. “We’ve laid the foundation to show that we can develop innovations in solid-state batteries based on these ceramic-polymer hybrids. Our next step is to integrate the technology into pouch cells, the type of batteries used in electric vehicles.”

The GTRI researchers are working with colleagues from Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Strategic Energy Institute on research into an electrolyte known as lithium aluminum germanium phosphate (LAGP). A polymer component known as poly DOL surrounds the LAGP electrolyte, providing internal ionic conductivity that goes well beyond existing ceramic electrolytes – without the disadvantages of flammable liquids. The fabrication team and academic collaboration are led by Jinho Park, a GTRI research scientist. Synthesis of the LAGP ceramic is led by Jason Nadler, a GTRI principal research scientist.

Advantages of Hybrid Ceramic-Polymer Materials

Stern describes traditional ceramic electrolytes as similar to hard candy – think M&Ms – poured into the space between the battery anode and cathode. The hard ceramics provide safety and energy storage advantages, but are limited in how much they contact the electrodes to transfer ionic charges. Adding the polymer dramatically improves the interfacial contact between the electrodes and electrolyte while maintaining most advantages of the ceramics.

“The electrochemical stability, thermal stability and mechanical stability will be the main differences between the liquid electrolytes and these hybrids,” he said. “We’re really taking the best of both worlds. As solid-state batteries enable the use of a Li-metal anode, the ceiling for capacity is significantly higher, so we should ultimately see a dramatic increase in energy density compared to the conventional Li-ion batteries based on the liquid electrolytes.”

The hybrid ceramic-polymer electrolyte looks like a hockey puck, but will be more resistant to damage than a pure ceramic. “It will certainly be much more forgiving than a ceramic,” Stern said. “Even if micro-cracks develop, the polymer will provide the scaffolding to ensure integrity, holding it together structurally.”

Moving Ahead with Solid-State Batteries

Solid-state batteries are not yet in commercial use, but at least one EV manufacturer plans to put them into vehicles within the next few years as battery manufacturers continue to make improvements. But the technology is far less mature than existing liquid-electrolyte systems, inviting innovations such as the hybrid system the Georgia Tech researchers are working on.

The research is being supported, in part, by a $1.1 million, three-year independent research and development commitment from GTRI. “With the unprecedented federal and state investment made in Georgia for electric vehicles, battery manufacturing, and recycling, GTRI continues to build strong collaborations to help identify gaps and new business models – and to forecast the number and types of recycling plants necessary to respond to future market demands,” Stern added.

Based on encouraging results with small, laboratory-scale batteries, the researchers plan to expand their work into batteries that could be fabricated by the hundreds or thousands for further development and testing – and, ultimately, large-scale manufacturing. “As we increase our efficiency with fabrication, manufacturing costs will come down, while supply chain integration and the sustainability goals of reusability and recycling will have a big impact,” Stern said.

Model-Based System Engineering Guides the Future

Beyond demonstrating the potential for this technology, the research team also is modeling the operation of the cells to help guide future technology development and assessing the potential life cycle of the hybrid electrolyte solid-state batteries. Among the future goals are integrating the technology into supply chains that would not rely on materials sourced from conflict areas of the world, and evaluating new electrode materials such as lithium metal and silicon to replace standard graphite.

“The objective of the model-based system engineering (MBSE) task is to model expert knowledge ranging from the fabrication level to the system integration to unveil opportunities for research as well as new business models,” said Paula Gomez, a GTRI senior research engineer, and the modeling team lead.

The research team is developing models in three main areas: (1) fabrication and performance; (2) manufacturing process; and (3) reuse, refurbish, and recycling. Integrating these models involves evaluating battery efficiency and stability, cost of production, and energy consumption, as well as return on investment of recycling materials.

Though the advantages of solid-state electrolytes are very attractive, there are challenges ahead. A hybrid electrolyte system is more complicated to manufacture, and the electrical, mechanical, and chemical interactions between the materials must be thoroughly studied. “The more complexity you have, the more issues you have to understand,” Stern said.

Military and Economic Development Applications

GTRI is known for its support of national security through research sponsored by U.S. Department of Defense agencies. Stern expects the improved solid-state battery technology will ultimately find its way into military gear carried by soldiers and future generations of electrically powered military vehicles.

The work also supports economic development for the state of Georgia, which is rapidly becoming a hub for electric vehicle and battery manufacturing.

“Georgia is becoming the epicenter of the electrification revolution with vehicle makers such as Rivian and Hyundai, battery companies such as SK, FREYER Battery, and recyclers such as Ascend Elements,” Stern said. “Georgia Tech is contributing to the state’s economic development by helping drive that innovation.”

Battery Day Demonstrates Interest

A recent “Battery Day” held March 30 at Georgia Tech highlighted the broad research collaborations already underway. Led by Matthew McDowell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering, the event attracted more than 230 energy researchers and industry participants.

Beyond those already mentioned, the hybrid battery project includes Michael Shearin, Richard Wise, John Hankinson, Matthew Swarts, Khatereh Hadi, Milad Navaei, and Jack Zentner from GTRI.

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

According to NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office (OPDO), this debris jeopardizes future space projects. Large objects like rocket bodies and non-functional satellites are the source of fragmentation debris.

The OPDO website says removal of even five of the highest-risk objects per year could stabilize the low Earth orbit debris environment.

A research team with members from the Georgia Tech Research Institute, the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, and the Space Systems Design Laboratory has developed a concept using a net to capture and de-orbit large debris.

A mutual connection at Tech's GVU recommended that the team speak to Lisa Marks, assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design, based on her work combining traditional textile with new materials and methods.

Putting Textiles in Space Requires Creative Expertise

“There’s a lot of different projects on space debris happening all around the world,” Marks said, “and there’ve been a few concept papers talking about using a net.”

“But all the drawings of the net are basic concepts, just a square with a few hatches through it. No one has figured out what that net might be.”

Marks researches ways to combine traditional textile handcraft with algorithmic modeling. “I specialize in analyzing the shape of every stitch and how we can use that stitch differently. Can we create new patterns through coding, or make it larger and out of wood?”

“It allows me to think really creatively about how we can use different textiles.”

This innovative, exploratory approach is a natural fit to create a net for a job no has ever done. “There's a lot of technical considerations with this,” Marks said. 

“It must pack incredibly small, weigh very little, and still be strong enough to capture and drag a rocket fuselage. There are considerations just for a material to exist in space. It needs to have low UV reactivity, low off gassing.”

“We need to understand every single little aspect of each of these techniques in order to do this.”

Static Nets Catch Fish; Slippery Nets Catch Rockets

Marks is working with Teflon, using the same knots used for fishing nets, but the non-traditional material means the nets work differently than fishing nets, she said. “These knots are made to be static, because you don’t want fish to get through the nets. But because Teflon is so slippery, the knots move around.”

“I think it will help the net’s strength, because the net will deform around irregular shapes before it breaks. What makes it unsuitable for fishing and annoying to work with becomes a huge benefit for what we need it to do.”

Some traditional handcraft techniques are dying out, and Marks sees projects like this as a reason preserving these techniques is important. “We don’t know what problems we’re going to have to solve in the future, and these crafts can be used in really surprising ways.”

“I would not have thought, ‘Netted filet lace, that’s how we’re going to solve a space problem!’ But if we lose this type of lace, we can’t solve space problems with it.”

“I’m so excited,” said Mya Griesbaum, a first-year materials science and engineering student.

This was the second time Griesbaum had taken the I2P course and presented at the showcase. Griesbaum came back to see how other students had developed their projects, but also for I2P resources to develop her own, like research education, class credit, a $500 reimbursement for physical expenses, and faculty mentorship. The access to labs and mentors was particularly helpful, she said.

On her table, she had a spread of materials, including a halter top. Griesbaum created a fungi-derived alternative to leather, called Mycorrhiza, in collaboration with Pratyusha Akavaram, Irene Dumitriu, Ben Collins, and Aryaman Jha. Griesbaum worked two semesters on perfecting the leather, going through several lab mishaps and iterative research.

“Progress can be really slow, and patience is key,” she said. “I remember going in and really wanting to make a scalable product in a single semester and that definitely was not the case.”

However, Griesbaum encouraged other students to not be deterred.

“You don't have to know as much as you think you do. You do not have to be an expert in a field whatsoever. There are so many people who can help you out and who want to help you out and share the knowledge,” she said. “Just go for it.”

Who Wants a Cricket Brownie?

At another booth, an attendee with over a decade of experience in marketing alternative flowers and sustainable products offered support to Lauren Duderstadt, a fifth-year student and double major in mechanical engineering and industrial design, and Rohan Banerjee, another fifth-year student and mechanical engineer major, for their cricket powder-based snack, Crikey.

The pair had brought brownie samples made from pulverized crickets that boasted 20 grams of protein per serving. The samples had a chocolate taste but also a pillowy texture, something the team worked hard to achieve.

At first, the texture had been sandy. Trying to get the texture and taste right propelled them to continue, Banerjee said.

“On a granular, day-to-day level, when we’re working on a prototype, tasting it and seeing what we think, it’s that curiosity of ‘What if we tweak this? What if we can make it a little better?’” Banerjee said. “And over months of doing that, you end up with something dramatically better than where you started.”

During that iteration process, Banerjee appreciated the faculty resources most.  

“Even though we picked something that’s seemingly niche, our mentor was someone we found to have significant experience in marketing and product development in similar spaces. He was able to give us a lot of really good feedback,” Banerjee said.

Craig Forest, associate director for CREATE-X’s MAKE program, said many students gain applicable skills and confidence working with CREATE-X mentors.

“Since 2015, more than 1,500 students have been able to pursue their invention ideas because of the generous time from mentors across campus and the resources of CREATE-X,” Forest said. “I2P gives students the resources, incentives, and structure to move their idea from their head to a real, working prototype on the table.”

Why Not Be the Change?

At another booth, a uterus model sat prominently on display. Sarah Deiters, a fourth-year biomedical engineering major, and Ayusha Prasad, a second-year biomedical engineering major, had created a product called Cervilove, designed to make IUD insertion less painful.

“There are many women who suffer with IUD insertion, and a lot of women who don't even attempt to use it because of the pain,” Deiters said. “So, attacking that idea has been awesome.”

Some attendees stopped by to hear about the product. The students explained that the current process for insertion uses a tenaculum, which pierces cervical tissue and was developed from forceps used in the 19th century for bullet extraction. Impressed attendees gave the team contacts for investors and additional support.

“IUD insertion hasn’t really changed since IUDs became popular nearly 75 years ago,” Deiters said. “I was just thinking, ‘Why can’t we do something about it? What’s keeping us from changing the culture and the whole insertion process for IUDs?’”

Prasad said the entire experience of I2P boosted their confidence.

“Knowing that somehow and some way we can potentially make a better healthcare environment for women is something that drives us forward,” Prasad said. “I think if you’re passionate about something, then this is definitely the place for it to take off.”

Spring 2023 I2P Showcase Winners

1st place: Mycorrhiza

(Mya Griesbaum (lead), and collaborators, Pratyusha Akavaram, Irene Dumitriu, Ben Collins, and Aryaman Jha)

2nd place: Crikey (Lauren Duderstadt and Rohan Banerjee)

3rd place: Cervilove (Sarah Deiters and Ayusha Prasad)

Mycorrhiza gained access to the CREATE-X summer startup accelerator, Georgia Tech Startup Launch, giving the startup $5,000 in optional seed funding, coaching, and free incorporation services. Mycorrhiza will also gain access to investors and industry partners at Demo Day, which attracts more than 1,3000 attendees, and more.

I2P applications for the summer and fall are open. Students must apply for the program to register for the course. The last deadline for the summer session is May 15. Read more about the course on the CREATE-X website.

“The existing healthcare challenges are so complicated and demanding, so the collaboration between academia, industry, and national labs is imperative, and synergistic multidisciplinary research is required,” explained Yeo, who is also an associate professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and holds a courtesy appointment in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

To further this initiative, Yeo and Emory University’s Young Jang organized the Materials for Biomedical Systems (MBS) Day at Georgia Tech. The workshop was held on March 30 at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center and attracted researchers and industry representatives from a variety of disciplines.

The focus of the morning session was on soft materials and biomaterials for medical systems. It began with a talk on Organogels x EGaIn for Soft & Self-Healing Bioelectronics from Carmel Majidi, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Additional speakers in the morning session included ProgenaCare Global’s Allison Ramey-Ward, Seoul National University’s Young Bin Choy, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology’s Jae-Woong Jeong. The morning concluded with a panel discussion, regarding the translation of biomaterials technologies to system developments and commercialization, moderated by the University of Pittsburgh’s Youngjae Chun.

The afternoon session of the day was focused on stem cells and regenerative medicine. It began with a talk on Bioengineered Hydrogels for Regenerative Medicine from Andrés García, executive director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) and Regents’ Professor at Georgia Tech. Additional speakers in this session included Sung-Jin Park from Emory/Georgia Tech, William Hynes from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ki Dong Park from Ajou University, Ho-Wook Jun from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Johnna Temenoff from Emory University/Georgia Tech. The session concluded with a panel discussion moderated by Johnny Lam from the Food and Drug Administration.

“I am so thankful for all of the participants, sponsors, and organizers who made such an amazing workshop that generated innovative ideas and new collaboration opportunities from across the field,” said Yeo. “We also discussed immediate commercialization paths and regulatory importance in developing biomaterials and medical systems. We will continue offering networking and research-sharing opportunities to facilitate knowledge exchange through this MBS initiative.”

After the workshop, multiple students participated in a poster contest to showcase their research in biomaterials and medical systems and network with attendees. MBS Day was co-sponsored by IMat and IBB.

To further this mission, IMat and the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) co-hosted the 2023 Brumley D. Pritchett Lecture and IMat Symposium on Materials Innovations on March 31, 2023. The Symposium included talks from invited speakers and Georgia Tech faculty, a poster contest, and networking opportunities.

“The 2023 IMat Symposium on Materials Innovations was a great success,” said Eric Vogel, IMat’s executive director. “The talks were interesting, and the audience was engaged.”

The prestigious Brumley D. Pritchett lecture featured Giulia Galli, the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. Galli’s talk was on Complex Materials from First Principles: From Sustainable Energy Sources to Quantum Information Science.

The Symposium content focused on new advances in materials science and their applications in various industries. Guest speakers included Christophe Levy from Holcim Innovation Center and Carmel Majidi, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Levy started off the day with his talk on industrial innovations in the cement and concrete domain and Majidi discussed integrated soft materials for human-compatible machines and electronics.

Georgia Tech speakers included Associate Chair for Research and Woodruff Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Anna Erickson, IMat Science Advisor and Professor Martin Mourigal, Assistant Professor Vida Jamali, Associate Professor and Vasser-Woolley Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator in Sensors and Instrumentation Jason Azoulay, and Assistant Professor Victor Fung.

More than 20 students participated in the poster contest with presenters from the Schools of Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Physics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Aerospace Engineering.

The winning poster and recipient of a $500 prize was submitted by Rahul Venkatesh. His poster was on “Data-Enabled Experimental Development of Polymer-Based Organic Electronics.” In addition to the winner, three finalists were also selected. Presenters of the finalist posters included Daniel Aziz, Carolina Colon, and Harsh Verma. Each received a prize of $250.

This was the second year IMat and MSE hosted the Symposium, and it provided attendees with valuable insights into the latest advances in the field of materials science. It also provided an opportunity for researchers and students to network and collaborate, paving the way for future breakthroughs in materials science.

In this brief Q&A, Neu discusses his research focus, how it relates to materials research, and the impact of this initiative.

What is your field of expertise and at what point in your life did you first become interested in this area?

My field of expertise is the mechanical behavior of materials, mainly structural alloys. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I chose to study engineering mechanics, which is the discipline explaining the way materials behave under loads and displacements. This led me to conduct undergraduate research on the thermomechanical mechanical fatigue of railway wheels, which occurs from the brake shoe application on the tread resulting in frictional heating of the wheel's surface. On a long downward grade, the wheel treads can get red hot, since the brakes are continuously applied. The strength and elastic properties of the wheel steel are reduced, and permanent changes such as the formation of residual stresses and changes in the microstructure degrade the mechanical behavior after repeated braking. Understanding and predicting this response enables more durable wheel steels and designs.

In my early career, I investigated several problems that involved structural materials needing to survive extreme environments. These included the understanding of the mechanisms leading to hot bearings in railway freight cars, the thermomechanical response of the skin material for hypersonic aircraft, and the thermomechanical fatigue and creep of hot turbine sections in gas turbines for both propulsion and energy generation. These problems are changing because high strength, high creep resistance, and good fracture toughness are needed, while the material itself continues to evolve at these high temperatures. In addition, chemical reactions can occur, significantly affecting the microstructure and mechanical behavior of the material near the surface. The problem of understanding these materials operating in these extreme environments entails a multidisciplinary approach involving mechanics, metallurgy, manufacturing processes, tribology, and machine design.

What questions or challenges sparked your current materials research?

My current research does not deviate much from my early days of research. The most challenging problems in the mechanical behavior of materials involve pushing materials to their extremes. There is a continuing need to discover and design structural alloys and composites with improved high-temperature properties, with reduced degradation in the environment they must withstand, whether corrosive, cryogenic, high temperature, or more often, a combination of these. Today, these challenges include developing more efficient gas turbine systems that can burn alternative fuels such as hydrogen, rolling bearing and gear steels that have higher reliability, and establishing quality assurance for materials manufactured using additive manufacturing and other novel processes to ensure that they will survive these extreme environments.

Why is your initiative important to the development of Georgia Tech’s Materials research strategy?

Leading the initiative for Materials in Extreme Environments, I desired to bring together faculty and researchers working in this area and those working on applications that involve materials operating in extreme environments. This year we identified one important application area where Georgia Tech is taking the lead. Hydrogen is likely to be a major player in the future green energy economy. One challenge to realizing a hydrogen energy economy is the efficient and low-cost generation, storage, and transport of hydrogen. In alloys, the degradation due to hydrogen embrittlement is one of the concerns that must be addressed. Both the materials understanding in this environment and the design of newer materials and surface modifications are needed. Furthermore, this needs to be accomplished at a large scale and low cost.

What are the broader global and social benefits of the research you and your team conduct?

The work we do enables safer and lower life cycle costs of mechanical systems, critically important for all the highly loaded structural components of aircraft and other transportation systems, hypersonic aircraft and rocket systems, gas turbine systems, nuclear power generation systems, and immense wind turbine components, as well as materials used in medical devices that are implanted in humans. Our research provides the knowledge and engineering tools to achieve a safer world and superior mechanical systems that improve the quality of life.

What are your plans for engaging a wider GT faculty pool with IMat research?

We are engaging with external experts to understand the needs in materials for the hydrogen value chain. While much research today is focused on producing green hydrogen through lower cost electrolysis and using hydrogen for energy generation with fuel cells, a big challenge of storing and transporting the hydrogen from its production to where it will be used requires novel solutions and materials. This involves, for example, storing hydrogen under extreme pressures in an environment where hydrogen itself can react and degrade the mechanical properties of the materials. The time is right for a diverse group of faculty to work on the storage and transportation challenges to facilitate energy having a substantial reduction in the carbon footprint while also reducing the life cycle costs of the infrastructure.

Alper Erturk (Lead PI), Carl Ring Family Chair and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Yuhang Hu, associate professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the Woodruff School and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, were awarded $7.5 million for their project, Bio‐Inspired Material Architectures for Deep Sea (BIMADS). Randall Engle, professor in the School of Psychology, was awarded the same amount for his project titled Understanding and Building Overall Cognitive Capability Through Attention Control.

Erturk and Hu’s interdisciplinary project will explore the fundamental science behind the biological characteristics that allow deep sea fish to adapt and survive in high pressure ocean environments. They will then translate those findings to engineer bioinspired materials needed to realize the Navy’s advanced capabilities in deep sea environments.

“In the deep ocean, marine organisms have evolved to thrive in high pressure environments, and adapt to pressure changes while remaining functional,” Erturk said. “Our goal for this project is to discover, test, and translate biological mechanisms into synthetic materials and structures that can dynamically adapt to high pressures in the ocean.”

Specifically, the researchers will test and explore the origins of the biological mechanisms (both molecular and macroscopic) that underlie the ability for deep sea snailfish to adapt to high pressures, pressure changes, and pressure differentials across material interfaces. Using findings from the biological studies, the researchers will design synthetic materials and structures that will then be evaluated in high pressure chambers.

“Knowledge gained from these studies will provide insight toward the design of structures spanning from atmospheric dive suits to robotic fish for the deep ocean,” Hu said.

BIMADS brings together experts in marine biology, bioengineering, biomimetic materials, chemistry, mechanochemistry and multiphysics chemomechanical modeling, hydrogel synthesis, biohybrid material fabrication, and the design, mechanics, and dynamics of architected structures. In addition to Erturk and Hu, the team also includes Anna Balazs and Lance Davidson from the University of Pittsburgh, John Costello from Providence College, Shashank Priya from the University of Minnesota, and Andrew Sarles from the University of Tennessee.

Attention Control in Naval Training

Engle’s project will explore the brain’s mechanisms of attention control and investigate methods to potentially improve it or reduce its decline.

“We want to better understand the role that controlling attention and individual differences in that ability has in real-world, complex tasks such as flying a plane, driving a car, or even studying for a physics test,” Engle said. “We expect this work will help the Navy identify job trainees who are best able to attend to complex tasks, and also help to mitigate the effects of fatigue and mind wandering common to those tasks.”

According to Engle, the Navy trains about a thousand air traffic control professionals each year and spends over $100,000 per candidate. But nearly a quarter of candidates fail training, leading to significant financial waste.

Engle’s work with air traffic control trainees showed that current evaluations used to select candidates for training only predicts a small percentage of success. Engle found that, by using his measures of ability to control attention in evaluations, the Navy could more than double predictive success in candidate training. In addition, researchers found that Engle’s measures appeared to have less adverse impact and bias against women and minority candidates.

Engle’s collaborative research team includes researchers from MIT, the University of Chicago, Purdue University, and Michigan State University. Each team member is studying a different aspect of attention control.

According to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, since 2020, Georgia has had $21 billion invested or announced in EV-related projects with 26,700 jobs created. With investments in alternate energy technologies growing exponentially in the nation, McDowell revealed Georgia Tech is well-positioned to make an impact on the next generation energy storage technologies and extended an open invitation to industry members to partner with researchers. As one of the most research-intensive academic institutions in the nation, Georgia Tech has more than $1.3 billion in research and other sponsored funds and produces the highest number of engineering doctoral graduates in the nation.

“More than half of Georgia Tech's strategic initiatives are focused on improving the efficiency and sustainability of energy storage, supporting clean energy sources, and mitigating climate change," said Chaouki Abdallah, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. "As a leader in battery technologies research, we are bringing together engineers, scientists, and researchers in academia and industry to conduct innovative research to address humanity's most urgent and complex challenges, and to advance technology and improve the human condition."

Rich Simmons, director of research and studies at the Strategic Energy Institute moderated the first panel discussion that included industry panelists from Panasonic, Cox Automotive, Bluebird Corp., Delta Airlines and Hyundai Kia. The panelists analyzed the opportunities and challenges in the electric transportation sector and explained their current focus areas in energy storage. The panel affirmed that while EVs have been around for more than three decades, the industry is still in its infancy and there is a huge potential to advance technology in all areas of the EV sector.

The discussion also brought forth important factors like safety, lifecycle, and sustainability in driving innovations in the energy storage sector. The attendees also discussed supply chain issues, a hot topic in almost all sectors of the nation, and the need to develop a diversity of resources for more resilient systems. The industry panelists affirmed a strong interest in partnering on research and development projects as well as gaining access to university talent.

Gleb Yushin, professor in the School of Material Science and Engineering and co-founder of Sila Nanotechnologies Inc., presented his battery research and development success story at Georgia Tech. Sila is a Georgia Tech start-up founded in 2011 and has produced the world’s first commercially available high-silicon-content anode for lithium-ion batteries in 2021. Materials manufactured in its U.S. facilities will power electric vehicles starting with the Mercedes-Benz G-class series in 2023.

The program included lightning talks on cutting-edge research in battery materials, specifically solid-state electrolytes and plastic crystal embedded elastomer electrolytes (PCEEs) by Seung Woo Lee, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Santiago Grijalva, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, discussed the challenges and opportunities for the successful use of energy storage for the grid.

Tequila Harris, initiative lead for Energy and Manufacturing and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, spoke to energy materials and carbon-neutral applications. Presenting a case for roll-to-roll manufacturing of battery materials, Harris said that the need for quick, high yield manufacturing processes and alternative materials and structures were important considerations for the industry.

Materials, manufacturing, and market opportunities were the topic for the next panel moderated by McDowell and included panelists from Albemarle, Novelis, Solvay, Truist Securities, and Energy Impact Partners. Analyzing the current challenges, the panelists brought up hiring and workforce development, increasing capacity and building the ecosystem, decarbonizing existing processes, and understanding federal policies and regulations.

Lightning talks later in the afternoon by researchers at Georgia Tech touched on the latest developments in the cross-disciplinary research bridging mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, AI manufacturing, and material science in energy storage research. Topics included safe rechargeable batteries with water-based electrolytes (Nian Liu, assistant professor, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering), AI-accelerated manufacturing (Aaron Stebner, associate professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering), battery recycling (Hailong Chen, associate professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering), and parametric life-cycle models for a solid-state battery circular economy (Ilan Stern, research scientist from GTRI).

Another industry panel on grid, infrastructure and communities moderated by Faisal Alamgir, professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering included panelists from Southern Company, Stryten Energy, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. Improving the grid resiliency and storage capacity; proximity to the energy source; optimizing and implementing new technology in an equitable way; standardization of the evolving business models; economic development and resource building through skilled workforce; educating the consumer; and getting larger portions of the grid with renewable energy were top of mind with the panelists.

“Energy-storage-related R&D efforts at Georgia Tech are extensive and include next-gen battery chemistry development, battery characterization, recycling, and energy generation and distribution,” said McDowell. “There is a tremendous opportunity to leverage the broad expertise we bring to advance energy storage systems. Battery Day has been hugely successful in not only bringing this expertise to the forefront, but also in affirming the need for continued interaction with the companies engaged in this arena. Our mission is to serve as a centralized focal point for research interactions between companies in the battery/EV space and faculty members on campus.”

One example of this is Victor Fung, an assistant professor with Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). Fung recently led a research team that developed a new, first-of-its-kind algorithm that can reconstruct atomic structure in generative models.

A significant application Fung focuses this research toward is in the field of materials science and engineering. The algorithm could be key in developing further AI tools and new materials to the benefit of individual researchers and entire communities alike.

“Structural representations are a well-known concept people have used in other machine learning applications for chemistry and materials, like training models to predict energies and forces,” Fung said. “But this is really the first time that anyone has used this in generative models.”

Structure is a key property in a material design. For example, structure plays a role in determining superconductivity within electronics, biological viability in drugs, and catalyzation of certain chemical reactions.

Fung explained that using generative models to study atomic structure, and to design new materials, could be vital in climate remediation. This may include developing greener catalysts for use in fuel cells, designing better material for carbon capture, and discovering new light-absorbent molecules for application in solar panels.

The algorithm can help engineers create new materials with targeted properties by building models atom-by-atom, a concept called inverse design. The algorithm is a progressive step forward in allowing computer models to create new materials tailor-made with specific functions and characteristics in mind by designers.

Specifically, the algorithm allows materials scientists to know the exact structure of materials that exhibit a desired property, potentially making proposed material designs a reality.

“If we know the structure of material, we can be sure of what properties it has, and we will have a clear goal to try to synthesize it and develop applications,” Fung said. “We basically have the key to defining the material in the chemical space.”

Fung’s paper is the first in a forthcoming series of studies to develop new generative models for atomic structure. He and his co-researchers think the series could result in new algorithms and models that yield commercial benefits, as well as solve large, scientific problems.

As part of this campaign to share his research, Fung is set to discuss the findings March 31 at 2023 Symposium on Materials Innovations, hosted by Georgia Tech’s Institute for Materials (IMat). 

School of CSE Ph.D. student Shuyi Jia worked with Fung to develop the algorithm and is a co-author on the paper. The pair partnered with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists Jiaxin Zhang, Junqi Yin, and Panchapakesan Ganesh through the study.

Along with AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, generative models are popularly used today in images, text, audio, and other types of information. They are not as common in overcoming scientific challenges due to their data-intensive nature, an obstacle that Fung’s algorithm helps overcome.

In technical terms, the algorithm makes it possible for generative models to work with non-invertible structural representations, such as atom-centered symmetry functions.

Now that the group has learned how to use models to generate structure, they want to extend this to broader problems in materials design and discovery. This includes being able to generate structures with different chemical compositions as well.

Here, their algorithm becomes a tested, verified method using generative models to understand and overcome complex engineering problems.

“People who are interested in solving these kinds of problems in materials discovery, whether for specific applications, specific types of materials, or specific properties, can potentially use this approach, or at least take inspiration from it,” Fung said.

With historic investments from major players in the EV space, including Rivian, Kia, and Hyundai, the state of Georgia is uniquely positioned to serve as a leader in this effort. As the state's leading research institute, Georgia Tech is on the cutting edge of the movement. 

The transportation sector is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the U.S. at nearly 30%, with passenger vehicles accounting for around 80% of the sector's total output1 as of 2019. Electric vehicles are widely regarded as a budding solution to reduce emissions, but even as both demand and production continue to increase, EVs currently account for around 1% of the cars on America's roadways. 

From the supply chain to the infrastructure needed to support alternative-fuel vehicles alongside consumer hesitancy, achieving the goals set by both the public and private sectors — including the Biden Administration's target of EVs making up at least 50% of new car sales by 2030 — will not be easy. Through research and development, policy, and collaboration, Tech experts are working toward finding solutions that will serve as catalysts during this transitionary period for the environment and the way Americans drive.

Check out the full story. 

The team consisted of Georgia Tech theoretical physicists Sami Hakani and Itamar Kimchi, along with experimental physicists Feng Ye (Oak Ridge National Lab), Lance DeLong (University of Kentucky), and, from the University of Colorado at Boulder: Gang Cao, Yifei Ni, Yu Zhang, and Hengdi Zhao. The group was drawn to the research after their previous study investigated the same material.

“Because this material did not fit any preexisting models, we had to develop new ideas to understand it,” said Georgia Tech graduate student Hakani, who played a key role in developing the theory. “These new ideas will help us study related materials that could be used for next-generation magnetic field devices.”

An Exception to the Rule

The physicists first became interested in the Mn3Si2Te6 material due to its unique electrical properties — in particular, a property called colossal magnetoresistance, an extreme enhancement in a material’s electrical conductivity when a magnetic field is applied.

In most materials, applying a magnetic field does not change that material’s conductivity. However, in another class of materials, applying a magnetic field does change conductivity; this is called magnetoresistance, and it can scale to “giant” and “colossal” changes in conductivity. In instances of colossal magnetoresistance, a material can change from behaving like an insulator (like Styrofoam) to being as conductive as a metal wire.

This change is not altogether unusual. Materials displaying giant magnetoresistance are not uncommon and are often used in computers; however, in all of these known materials, the material does not change its behavior in a way that significantly depends on the direction of the applied magnetic field. This new trimer-honeycomb material does.

“The phenomenon defies all existing theoretical models and experimental precedents,” said Kimchi, theoretical physicist and assistant professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech. And that’s where he and Hakani come in.

Uncovering Looping Currents

“As theoretical physicists, we develop new kinds of mathematical models,” said Kimchi. “When it’s qualitatively difficult to understand how anything can make sense in experimental data — when there’s something qualitatively shocking — we try to come up with that basic picture.”

Using the information uncovered by the experimental physicists, Hakani and Kimchi set out to understand why the extreme change in conductivity only happens when the magnetic field is applied perpendicularly to the honeycomb-like surface of the material.

“Our idea smelled promising, but, unfortunately, we quickly realized that currents between the magnetic manganese ions would be forbidden by symmetry, which was discouraging,” said Kimchi. “However, Sami then did the symmetry analysis for the octahedrally arranged tellurium ions, and, for them, currents were symmetry-allowed and could work out!”

Viewed from above, the material looks like a series of two-dimensional honeycombs. From the side, however, the material is composed of “sheets,” like a layer cake. Within each “sheet” of honeycomb, electrons can move in circular paths around each octahedral cell. These looping, circular-moving currents within the material are responsible for the material’s unique behavior. 

On its own, without a magnetic field present, electrons move both counterclockwise and clockwise around the honeycomb “cells,” like cars going in both directions around a roundabout. Just like in uncontrolled traffic, “traffic jams” make it difficult for electrons to move quickly throughout the material. Without a way to streamline traffic, the material acts more like an insulator.

However, if a magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the honeycomb-like surface, a “flow of traffic” is established, and electrons navigate the loops more quickly. The material then acts as a conductor, showing a seven-magnitude increase in conductivity — equivalent to an increase of a billion percent.

A New Paradigm

The transformation from insulator to conductor can also be driven by applying electrical currents in the material, but in that case, it doesn’t happen instantaneously. It can take seconds or even minutes for the material to switch from insulator to conductor.

The team believes that this tunability and slower type of switching, coupled with the material’s sensitivity to currents, could lead to new applications and discoveries in current-controlled quantum devices, a field of devices that range from sensors to computers to secure communication.

The next step? Working to better understand the newly discovered quantum state, and finding other materials where the quantum state might exist.

“Looking forward, we hope to understand not only what makes this material special, but also which microscopic ingredients are needed for related materials to become useful quantum technologies in our future,” said Hakani.

RCSA’s mission is to advance early stage, high-potential, basic scientific research. The association provides funding for research and sponsors conferences to support a diverse and inclusive community of early career faculty, innovative ideas for basic research, integration of research and science teaching, interdisciplinary research, and building the foundation for the academic leadership of the future.

The Scialog® program invests in interdisciplinary, innovative, basic research on problems of high complexity that are timely and of significant value to society.

Its goal is to foster new collaborations across multiple disciplines to spark innovative ideas, stimulate significant advances on chosen topics, and attract higher levels of funding.

SMART collaborations

Elisabetta Matsumoto, an associate professor in the School of Physics, was part of the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative program, in which participants are encouraged to form teams and develop collaborative projects with potential national impact in science education. 

Matsumoto’s collaborative project, Supporting Making to Align Research and Teaching (SMART), builds off an existing Cottrell project aiming to increase awareness of making, an emerging instructional practice where students learn a discipline (and enjoy enhanced creativity and self-expression) by creating shared physical and digital artifacts. 

The goal of this project is to support and document faculty training and adoption of making methods, as well as to generate examples of making activities in disciplines, such as chemistry and astronomy, that have not adopted this technique.

Mars samples

Frances Rivera-Hernández, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is participating in the second year of the Scialog® Signatures of Life in the Universe program (the Heising-Simons Foundation is a program co-sponsor). 

The team’s goal is to catalyze cutting-edge research with the potential to transform our understanding of the habitability of planets, of how the occurrence of life alters planets and leaves signatures, and of how to detect such signatures beyond Earth.

Rivera-Hernández’s project with Laurie Barge, a research scientist in the Planetary Sciences division of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is titled Mars Sample Return: Connecting Martian Environmental Chemistry to Returned Samples. It is funded by NASA.

A rich history of RCSA support 

RCSA is a longtime supporter of College of Sciences research. Several faculty members from a variety of disciplines have been named Cottrell Scholars or joined the Scialog program over the past 29 years. 

Two School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences associate professors, Jennifer Glass and Chris Reinhard, were part of the first year of the Signatures of Life in the Universe program in 2021. Glass was chosen for her research proposal, Methane from Nontraditional Abiotic Sources and Potential for False Biosignature Positives, while Reinhard proposal was Stochastic Simulation of Evolving Planetary Biospheres.

Also in 2021, Vinayak Agarwal, an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Biological Sciences, was named a Cottrell Scholar for his proposal, Unlocking Marine Eukaryotic Natural Product Biosynthetic Schemes in Research and Education.

Elisabetta Matsumoto’s first time as a Cottrell Scholar was in 2020 for her research on tying together the science and mathematics behind knitting, which was featured in  The New York Times. 

Also in 2020, Gongjie Li, professor in the School of Physics, and Amanda Stockton, professors in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, were named Scialog® Signatures of Life in the Universe Fellows. 

Chad Risko, a former Ph.D. student in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, was named a Cottrell Scholar in 2018 with the goal of developing a course-based undergraduate research experience focusing on the application of computing and data science in chemistry. Risko was a Ph.D. student of former Regents Professor Jean-Luc Brédas.

Brian Hammer, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, was part of a 2015 collaborative effort for the Scialog® Molecules Come to Life Team Award for the project, Rebooting the Gut Microbial Ecosystem Using Bacterial Dueling.

Previous Georgia Tech recipients of the Cottrell Scholar Award also include David Collard (1994), professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and senior associate dean in the College of Sciences; Michael Schatz (1999) and Tamara Bogdanović (2016), both professors of the School of Physics.

Research scientist James Ponder and a team of Georgia Tech chemists and engineers thought they could design a transparent polymer film that would conduct electricity as effectively as other commonly used materials, while also being flexible and easy to use at an industrial scale.

They’d do it by simply removing the nonconductive material from their conductive element. Sounds logical, right?

The resulting process could yield new kinds of flexible, transparent electronic devices — things like wearable biosensors, organic photovoltaic cells, and virtual or augmented reality displays and glasses.

“We had this initial idea that we have a conductive element that we're covering with a nonconductive material, so what if we just get rid of that,” said Ponder, who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Georgia Tech and returned as a research scientist in mechanical engineering. “It's a simple idea, and there were so many points where it could have failed for different reasons. But it does work, and it works better than we expected.”

Read more about the team's flexible, highly conductive polymer on the College of Engineering website.

In this brief Q&A, Hatzell discusses her research focus, how it relates to materials research, and the global impact of this initiative.

What is your field of expertise and at what point in your life did you first become interested in this area?

My field of research focuses on electrochemical materials for separations and catalysis. As an undergraduate I became very interested in the energy transition. At that point in time, it was clear that there was a need to move to a more electrified power and transportation sector, but it was unclear how to address decarbonization in the industrial sector. That is when I became interested in electrochemistry, electrochemical materials, and electrochemical engineering, as these skill sets seemed crucial to the energy transition. I've been working in this area ever since! At Georgia Tech, my group is interested in decarbonizing hard-to-abate industries like chemical manufacturing, electrofuels, desalination, and industrial separations. 

What questions or challenges sparked your current materials research?

With all the new technologies and processes being designed around electrochemistry, there are so many open questions about what materials can be used for separations and catalysis. Materials for modern-day industrial separations and catalysis have been largely optimized. However, as we move toward new electrified technologies, we can rethink how we design materials and systems. 

Why is your initiative important to the development of Georgia Tech’s Materials research strategy?

Decarbonizing chemical manufacturing is incredibly important for the globe to meet Net Zero carbon emissions and mitigate issues related to climate change. And, at the heart of this transition is the discovery and design of new materials. We need materials that have high activity and selectivity, are durable, and are cost-effective in order to implement these new processes in the industrial sector.

What are the broader global and social benefits of the research you and your team conduct?

We work on a number of catalytic and separations-based processes. One in particular that has global and societal benefits is the synthesis of ammonia for synthetic fertilizers. Today, half of the world's population depends on synthetic fertilizers, and nearly 100% of these fertilizers are made using one catalytic process. Unfortunately, this current process emits a significant amount of CO₂, and therefore we are looking at electrified catalytic processes which can decrease or eliminate this carbon footprint. 

What are your plans for engaging a wider GT faculty pool with IMat research?

With so many talented researchers on campus, we are always looking for new ways to bring faculty together to engage in larger efforts. Thus, our primary plans focus on efforts that bring faculty together. We are currently in the process of planning workshops and seminars to bring together faculty who have interests in catalysis and reaction engineering. 

In newly published research, a team led by Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, assistant professor in the School of Materials Sciences and Engineering at Georgia Tech, shows that halide perovskite solar cells are less stable than previously thought. Their work reveals the thermal instability that happens within the cells’ interface layers, but also offers a path forward towards reliability and efficiency for halide perovskite solar technology. Their research, published as the cover story for the journal Advanced Materials in December 2022, has immediate implications for both academics and industry professionals working with perovskites in photovoltaics, a field concerned with electric currents generated by sunlight.

Lead halide perovskite solar cells promise superior conversion of sunlight into electrical power. Currently, the most common strategy for coaxing high conversion efficiency out of these cells is to treat their surfaces with large positively charged ions known as cations.

These cations are too big to fit into the perovskite atomic-scale lattice, and, upon landing on the perovskite crystal, change the material’s structure at the interface where they are deposited. The resulting atomic-scale defects limit the efficacy of current extraction from the solar cell. Despite awareness of these structural changes, research on whether the cations are stable after deposition is limited, leaving a gap in understanding of a process that could impact the long-term viability of halide perovskite solar cells. 

“Our concern was that during long periods of solar cell operation the reconstruction of the interfaces would continue,” said Correa-Baena. “So, we sought to understand and demonstrate how this process happens over time.”

To carry out the experiment, the team created a sample solar device using typical perovskite films. The device features eight independent solar cells, which enables the researchers to experiment and generate data based on each cell’s performance. They investigated how the cells would perform, both with and without the cation surface treatment, and studied the cation-modified interfaces of each cell before and after prolonged thermal stress using synchrotron-based X-ray characterization techniques.

First, the researchers exposed the pre-treated samples to 100 degrees Celsius for 40 minutes, and then measured their changes in chemical composition using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. They also used another type of X-ray technology to investigate precisely what type of crystal structures form on the film’s surface. Combining the information from the two tools, the researchers could visualize how the cations diffuse into the lattice and how the interface structure changes when exposed to heat. 

Next, to understand how the cation-induced structural changes impact solar cell performance, the researchers employed excitation correlation spectroscopy in collaboration with Carlos Silva, professor of physics and chemistry at Georgia Tech.  The technique exposes the solar cell samples to very fast pulses of light and detects the intensity of light emitted from the film after each pulse to understand how energy from light is lost. The measurements allow the researchers to understand what kinds of surface defects are detrimental to performance.

Finally, the team correlated the changes in structure and optoelectronic properties with the differences in the solar cells’ efficiencies. They also studied the changes induced by high temperatures in two of the most used cations and observed the differences in dynamics at their interfaces.

“Our work revealed that there is concerning instability introduced by treatment with certain cations,” said Carlo Perini, a research scientist in Correa-Baena’s lab and the first author of the paper. “But the good news is that, with proper engineering of the interface layer, we will see enhanced stability of this technology in the future.”

The researchers learned that the surfaces of metal halide perovskite films treated with organic cations keep evolving in structure and composition under thermal stress. They saw that the resulting atomic-scale changes at the interface can cause a meaningful loss in power conversion efficiency in solar cells. In addition, they found that the speed of these changes depends on the type of cations used, suggesting that stable interfaces might be within reach with adequate engineering of the molecules.

“We hope this work will compel researchers to test these interfaces at high temperatures and seek solutions to the problem of instability,” Correa-Baena said. “This work should point scientists in the right direction, to an area where they can focus in order to build more efficient and stable solar technologies.”

CITATION: Perini, C. A. R., Rojas-Gatjens, E., Ravello, M., Castro-Mendez, A., Hidalgo, J., An, Y., Kim, S., Lai, B., Li, R., Silva-Acuña, C., Correa-Baena, J.-P., Interface Reconstruction from Ruddlesden–Popper Structures Impacts Stability in Lead Halide Perovskite Solar Cells. Adv. Mater. 2022, 34, 2204726.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202204726

Prausnitz is the J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) and director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery. He’s also the only Georgia Tech faculty member recognized as both a Regents’ Professor and Regents’ Entrepreneur, the highest academic titles awarded by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents. He joins 105 new NAE members in the 2023 class along with 18 new international members.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Grover is a professor and the associate chair for graduate studies at Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering. Her research interests include feedback control of colloidal crystallization for photonic materials; chemical evolution in the origins of life; modeling and control of pharmaceutical and nuclear waste crystallization; and process-structure-property relationships in polymer organic electronics. 

SRNL intends to collaborate with Grover to utilize her expertise and experience to:

• Facilitate research and development activities pertaining to in-situ analysis of process streams for DOE tank waste treatment programs, including application of instruments and calibration techniques.
• Analyze SRNL data generated during testing of in-situ instruments in non-radioactive simulants of high-level waste.
• Expand and develop relationships within Georgia Tech to facilitate further collaboration 
• Develop the next generation of outstanding engineering talent with interest to pursue research career opportunities in the national laboratory system

“Dr. Grover’s efforts contribute directly to SRNL’s strategic goal of providing applied science and engineering for the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Environmental Management’s active cleanup sites and Office of Legacy Management’s post-closure management sites,” said SRNL Deputy Lab Director, Science and Technology, Sue Clark, PhD. “Dr. Grover will strengthen SRNL’s core competency of accelerating remediation, minimizing waste, and reducing risk by supporting process stream characterization associated with treatment of DOE tank waste.” 

In addition to her primary research, Grover focuses on creating an even more inclusive community, exploring issues relevant to women, underrepresented minorities, and international students. She co-leads the GT-Equal (Graduate Training for Equality in Underrepresented Academic Leadership) Program and, in 2020, was named a National Science Foundation Organizational Change for Gender Equity in STEM Academic Professions (ADVANCE) Professor.  Georgia Tech’s ADVANCE Program builds and sustains an inter-college network of professors who are world-class researchers and role models to support the community and advancement of women and minorities in academia.  Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering also was one of two institutions selected nationwide to be inaugural sites for the American Chemical Society’s Bridge Program, which aims to increase the number of underrepresented minority students who receive doctoral degrees in chemical sciences.

The Joint Appointment Program at SRNL provides university faculty opportunities to engage in the laboratory’s research and development that address the nation’s challenges in energy, science, national security, and environmental stewardship. Together, SRNL staff and joint appointees help ensure America’s security and prosperity through transformative science and technology solutions. Joint appointees serve as a bridge between their university, SRNL researchers and students.

Savannah River National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy multi-program research and development center that’s managed and operated by Battelle Savannah River Alliance, LLC (BSRA). SRNL puts science to work to protect the nation by providing practical, cost-effective solutions to the nation’s environmental, nuclear security, nuclear materials management, and energy manufacturing challenges (https://srnl.doe.gov/).

The Paris Agreement actually aims for 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avoid potential catastrophic changes to our climate. But it’s become increasingly clear to climate scientists and policymakers that just reducing emissions is not enough.

“We now know that we probably should have stopped putting massive amounts of CO₂ in the air 10, 20, 30 years ago to prevent the climate from getting above 2 degrees C,” said Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech. “Now we've waited so long to reduce our emissions that we need to develop technologies that are referred to as negative emissions technologies that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.”

Jones was one of a handful of scientists who co-authored a landmark National Academies report in 2018 that outlined a variety of approaches to negative emissions. Agricultural practices and forest management are options — essentially using nature’s ability to grab carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away in plants and soil. But Jones said we’ll need quicker and more direct approaches.

“We could plant billions of trees to do this, but there's not enough available land. And the trees don't grow fast enough for us to do this quickly enough to slow global warming at the rate required,” said Jones, John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). “That's where direct air capture comes in: It's a chemical engineering way of designing a process that takes CO₂ out of the air.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Now, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, in collaboration with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have developed a new process based on 2D materials to create LED displays with smaller and thinner pixels. Enabled by two-dimensional, materials-based layer transfer technology, the innovation promises a future of clearer and more realistic LED displays.

The team published a paper in the journal Nature in February titled, “Vertical full-colour micro-LEDs via 2D materials-based layer transfer.” Co-authors also include researchers from Sejong University in Korea, and from additional institutions in the U.S. and South Korea.

Georgia Tech-Europe Professor Abdallah Ougazzaden and research scientist Suresh Sundaram (who both also hold appointments in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering) collaborated with researchers from MIT to turn the conventional LED manufacturing process on its head — literally. Instead of using prevailing processes based on laying red, green, and blue (RGB) LEDs side by side, which limits pixel density, the team vertically stacked freestanding, ultrathin RGB LED membranes, achieving an array density of 5,100 pixels per inch — the smallest pixel size reported to date (4 microns) and the smallest-ever stack height — all while delivering a full commercial range of colors. This ultra-small vertical stack was achieved via the technology of van der Waals epitaxy on 2D boron nitride developed at the Georgia Tech-Europe lab and the technology of remote epitaxy on graphene developed at MIT.

The study showed that the world’s thinnest and smallest pixeled displays can be enabled by an active layer separation technology using 2D materials such as graphene and boron to enable high array density micro-LEDs resulting in full-color realization of micro-LED displays.

One unique facet of the two-dimensional, material-based layer transfer (2DLT) technique is that it allows the reuse of epitaxial wafers. Reusing this costly substrate could significantly lower the cost for manufacturing smaller, thinner, and more realistic displays.

“We have now demonstrated that this advanced 2D, materials-based growth and transfer technology can surpass conventional growth and transfer technology in specific domains, such as in virtual and augmented reality displays,” said Ougazzaden, the lead researcher for the Georgia Tech team.

These advanced techniques were developed in metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) reactors, the key tool for LED production at the wafer scale. The 2DLT technique can be replicated on an industrial scale with high throughput yield. The technology has the potential to bring the field of virtual and augmented reality to the next level, enabling the next generation of immersive, realistic micro-LED displays.

“This emerging technology has a tremendous potential for flexible electronics and the heterogenous integration in opto-electronics, which we believe will develop new functionalities and attract industry to develop commercial products from smartphone screens to medical devices,” Ougazzaden said.

Citation: Shin, J., Kim, H., Sundaram, S. et al. Vertical full-colour micro-LEDs via 2D materials-based layer transfer. Nature 614, 81–87 (2023).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05612-1

Each year, SPIE promotes members as new Fellows of the Society. This year’s cohort of 83 new SPIE Fellows have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. They are honored for their technical achievement and for their service to the general optics community and to SPIE in particular.

Cai has been a member of the ECE faculty since 2012. His research is in the area of nanophotonic materials and devices, in which he has made a major impact on the evolving field of plasmonics and metamaterials. He has published more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and the total citations of his recent papers have reached approximately 20,000 within the past 10 years. Cai is the author of “Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications,” which is used as a textbook or a major reference at many universities around the world.

Emelianov is the director of the Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Research Laboratory at Georgia Tech which focuses on the translation of diagnostic imaging, therapeutic instrumentation, and nanobiotechnology for clinical applications. He holds an appointment at the Emory University School of Medicine, where he is affiliated with Winship Cancer Institute, Department of Radiology, and other clinical units. In the course of his work, Emelianov has pioneered several ultrasound-based imaging techniques, including shear wave elasticity imaging and molecular photoacoustic imaging.

The complete list of the 2023 SPIE Fellows is available online.

Yeo is an Associate Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and holds a courtesy appointment in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. He is also the director of the Center for Human-Centric Interfaces and Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on the areas of nano and microengineering, advanced soft materials, molecular interactions, and bio-electromechanical systems, with an emphasis on stretchable hybrid electronics.

In this brief Q&A, Yeo discusses his interest in materials for biomedical systems, some of the current challenges in human healthcare, and how he hopes to bridge the gap between materials research and bioengineering systems at Georgia Tech.

What is your field of expertise and at what point in your life did you first become interested in this area?

My expertise is in biomaterial-enabled medical sensors and electronics. During my graduate study, I found biomedical systems research impressive since it can contribute to human healthcare. Currently, I am working on the study of soft materials, flexible mechanics, nanomanufacturing, machine learning, electronics, and system packaging to develop nanomembrane biosensors and bioelectronics. These biomedical systems are used to advance portable human health monitoring, quantitative disease diagnosis, enhanced therapeutics, and persistent human-machine interfaces. 

What questions or challenges sparked your current materials research?

I have found out that the existing medical devices urgently need new materials that can enhance their sensitivity, reliability, and usability. That triggers my research using new biomaterials and nanomaterials to develop human-centered medical systems. 

Why is your initiative important to the development of Georgia Tech’s Materials research strategy?

This initiative, materials for biomedical systems (MBS), can bring new perspectives on tissue-compatible and bio-friendly materials to develop next-generation healthcare monitors, diagnostics, and therapeutic tools. The MBS initiative will study interdisciplinary fundamental science in materials and integrated materials engineering to develop innovative biomedical systems for bridging gaps in materials research and bioengineering systems at Georgia Tech. This initiative will build an inclusive culture and interdisciplinary research ecosystem across and beyond Georgia Tech while targeting large-scale extramural center funding and developing industry consortia. 

What are the broader global and social benefits of the research you and your team conduct?

One of the Grand Challenges in Engineering is to engineer better medicines, which still has many unresolved and ongoing challenges in materials and biomedical systems. It should be addressed by combined efforts and expertise in materials, nanoengineering, physiology, electronics, informatics, and human-centric designs. The MBS initiative will enhance human health via multidisciplinary materials research, which will bring a unique opportunity to Georgia Tech to tackle the healthcare grand challenge. 

What are your plans for engaging a wider Georgia Tech faculty pool with IMat research?

I plan to organize Georgia Tech, regional, and national workshops and/or technical conferences to bring together the biomaterials, biomedical, human-centered engineering, and nanoengineering communities. Eventually, I will organize a Georgia Tech-Industry Consortium to gain external awareness and sustainable research support. 

Qcells, a solar power company, plans to build a $2.3 billion manufacturing complex just north of Atlanta in Cartersville to not only make state-of-the-art components for solar panels, but also to build complete panels used in a variety of settings, from houses to large-scale commercial and industrial solar arrays.

Georgia Tech is home to some of the world’s leading researchers and experts in photovoltaic materials and solar energy. Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, assistant professor and Goizueta Junior Faculty Rotating Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, and his research group have been blazing trails on the hunt for new materials that can be used in solar energy conversion.

“The most important part of this investment in U.S. manufacturing is the fact that Qcells is investing in the development of ingot and wafer production,” Correa-Baena said. Currently, silicon needs to be processed to form solar cells used to harvest energy. Ingots are the first step in the manufacturing process of refining raw materials into wafers. The wafers become the base for completed solar panels.

Over the past decade, most ingot and wafer production has been happening outside of the U.S. “With this investment, we guarantee that we can have full control of the supply chain by manufacturing all aspects of the solar panels domestically,” said Correa-Baena. Ultimately, the goal is to make solar energy more affordable for American consumers and create high-paying jobs for Georgians.

“It is exciting to see that silicon manufacturing is restarting in the U.S. and that Georgia is at the forefront of it,” said Ajeet Rohatgi, Regents’ Professor and John H. Weitnauer Jr. Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Rohatgi is one of the world’s leading researchers in photovoltaics – the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials like silicon. He is the founding director of the first university-based and Department of Energy-funded Center of Excellence for Photovoltaics Research and Education. The center’s work focuses on finding and improving the materials used to make solar cells while also improving their efficiency.

Qcells built its first plant near Dalton, Georgia, in 2019. By 2022, the facility had become the largest producer of solar panels in the western hemisphere. Rohatgi says representatives from Qcells have visited his research facilities on campus, and he and his team have visited the company’s Dalton facility as well.

“As demand for clean energy continues to grow nationally, we’re ready to put thousands of people to work creating fully American made and sustainable solar solutions, from raw material to finished panels,” said Justin Lee, CEO of Qcells. “We are committed to working with our customers as well as national and Georgia leaders to bring completely clean energy to millions of people across the country.”

Tim Lieuwen, executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute, Regents' Professor, and David S. Lewis Jr. Chair said, “Georgia Tech is a key leader in most of the core technologies associated with clean energy industries, has nationally distinctive researchers and facilities, and educates a lot of undergraduate and graduate students in these areas.”

That is why Tech has the potential to be a valuable partner in this project. “We are in a unique space where we can interface with Qcells to help them improve materials processing and explore new materials, but also aid in their manufacturing processes by introducing artificial intelligence to optimize processes and increase their productivity,” said Correa-Baena.

The announcement is not just significant for Georgia Tech, but for the state of Georgia as well. In Lieuwen’s view, Georgia is emerging as a center of clean energy manufacturing and technology, in no small part thanks to the Institute’s partnerships, research, and workforce development efforts. He says advancements in electric vehicles, batteries, and hydrogen power are all picking up steam in our state. “Having these types of companies in areas where Georgia Tech is focusing research and development efforts is good for the Institute and the state.”

The Qcells expansion is likely just the tip of the iceberg, as leading researchers from across campus identify projects like these where Tech ingenuity and innovation can make a difference.

“I’m enthusiastic about this expansion of solar cell manufacturing in Georgia because it builds on other clean energy, electrification, and energy storage industries already existing or planned for our state,” said Julia Kubanek, professor and vice president for Interdisciplinary Research. “The Southeast is increasingly becoming known as a hub for cleantech innovation, and Georgia Tech is proud to be a key contributor to this ecosystem.”

Production at the new Qcells solar plant is expected to start in 2024.

• Fill out the Google Form (https://tinyurl.com/papercontest)
• Image of at least 2400 by 3000 pixels or 2400 by 2400 pixels to be able to print 8" x 10" or 8" x 8"
• File size must be between 5 MB and 20 MB
• If available, high quality photo of sample
• Maximum of three images per person

Guidelines

• Only images containing bio-derived components / biomaterials / bioproducts or are related to papermaking
• Images may be taken from TEM/SEM/light microscopy/3D imaging
• Images must be original work and allowed to be displayed. Use by the Paper Museum, RBI, or Georgia Tech does not infringe on copyright with upcoming or already published works.
• Contestants must agree to allow reproduction for the museum website, museum guides, or for educational purposes. The winning contestants are encouraged to submit samples to be displayed with image.
• Samples may be provided after selection of winning images and should not be proprietary.

Now the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is getting on board with Yushin’s Georgia Tech startup as part of federal efforts to reinvigorate tech manufacturing in the United States.

DOE awarded Sila Nanotechnologies $100 million this fall to support the company’s new factory in Moses Lake, Washington, and help Sila hire and train up to 300 workers for the facility. It was one of 21 projects funded in domestic battery materials processing and manufacturing.

“It’s our mission to help move America away from being energy dependent and become a leader in the energy transformation,” said Yushin, the company’s chief technology officer and a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. “With this funding, Sila will deliver proven, clean energy technology and world-scale manufacturing to revitalize the industry and gain independence.”

Birthed from Yushin’s research on lithium-ion batteries, Sila manufactures next-generation materials and a silicon anode technology that boosts battery energy density by 20%. The silicon anodes are a drop-in replacement for graphite anodes in lithium-ion batteries. The new facility is projected to produce enough capacity to power 200,000 electric vehicles by 2026. Sila has inked a deal with Mercedes-Benz to use the company’s technology, starting with G-Class vehicles.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The development of hypersonic vehicles able to travel through the Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 5 or faster – five times the speed of sound – is attracting substantial new government and industry funding. But test facilities needed to evaluate thermodynamic, aerodynamic, acoustic, and other issues critical to operating in that harsh environment are limited, in high demand, and costly to use.

Georgia Tech researchers want to eliminate that roadblock by building hardened CubeSats that could use re-entry from space to generate the conditions needed to evaluate hypersonic technologies. The small satellites, with their key systems protected from the heat of re-entry, would be launched into the upper atmosphere from the International Space Station or a “rideshare” rocket to provide several minutes of testing at velocities of up to Mach 25.

“We are looking at the feasibility of building what would be an inexpensive flying wind tunnel,” said Krish Ahuja, Regents Professor of Aerospace Engineering and division chief for aerospace and acoustics in the Aerospace, Transportation, and Advanced Systems Laboratory of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the project’s principal investigator. “We could gather pretty much any data that would be needed for hypersonic research and provide a new way to conduct studies that now can be quite difficult to do.”

Initial Study Suggests Developing 6U Vehicle

Based on a six-month feasibility study that included collaborators from Georgia Tech’s School of Aerospace Engineering and two private companies, Ahuja believes it would be worthwhile to pursue design of a 6U test vehicle to evaluate the concept. (A 6U CubeSat is about the size of the system unit of a desktop computer). If that proves promising, larger vehicles could be constructed with more capable instrumentation, guidance, and even propulsion.

The goal of the project’s first year is to understand what would be required to develop and launch the flying testbeds – and recover them after flight. Design and development of the new test vehicles must overcome significant challenges related to controlling the flight duration, speed, altitude, and orientation of the vehicle during data collection. Systems to communicate with the ground and track the vehicle’s trajectory must also be developed. Also, part of the first-year goal is creating a roadmap showing the development and test process.

“Ongoing work will include a ‘system-of-systems’ analysis of the concept to model its performance and interaction with other support systems to assess its capability to conduct scientific research,” Ahuja said. “Our initial calculations indicate that a 6U CubeSat could be hardened with a thermal protection system for hypersonic conditions to help conduct limited feasibility experiments. This will be a building block for future systems that would be larger and able to conduct the testing we envision.”

Initial testing is likely to involve free fall of the test vehicle, but subsequent tests would include control surfaces that would provide steering to prevent tumbling and other undesired effects. Multiple CubeSats could also be operated together.

Possible New Capabilities for Small Satellites

CubeSats, so-called because they are designed in standard cube sizes, aren’t normally designed to be recovered after a mission; when their work is done, they simply burn up in the atmosphere. Because Ahuja wants to study effects on materials and capture data from onboard instruments, the flying wind tunnel satellites will need to be recovered using parachutes that would drop them into a recovery zone, perhaps in the desert Southwest.

“Getting them down at the right location will require good guidance and control, good telemetry, and a propulsion system,” he said. “The challenge will be to make these very small and inexpensive. To get the information we need, we will have to bring the testbed safely to the ground.”

The high temperatures generated by re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere could be useful for more than simulating hypersonic conditions. Ahuja believes the heat could be used to operate a proprietary device that could provide steering for the CubeSats, which normally don’t have propulsion systems.

Much of current research on hypersonic flight depends on data from computational fluid dynamics simulations, which need validation from testing. Beyond the information gained from the testbed, Ahuja believes the small spacecraft could make big contributions by providing a real-world anchor for the analysis tools that researchers are using for a variety of hypersonic vehicles.

A New Approach to Hypersonic Testing is Needed

Hypersonic testing is typically done in short-duration wind tunnels or high-temperature testbeds, meaning high-speed and high-temperature conditions are difficult to achieve simultaneously and at test durations relevant to hypersonic vehicles. In addition, there are few existing facilities where such testing can be done, and they are in high demand. The new testbed is expected to provide about three minutes of testing per flight.

Currently, there is a critical need to understand how much and what kind of thermal protection system is needed to protect hypersonic vehicles at high velocities where friction can produce temperatures of more than 4,000 degrees F. Additionally, there are questions about acoustic effects and how uneven heating will spread across a vehicle and potentially damage its structure.

“The airflow across a hypersonic vehicle can be both turbulent and laminar, different on different parts of the vehicle,” said Ahuja. “These wide variations of the flow properties can produce large variations in temperatures over the vehicle surface, which is highly undesirable with respect to the vehicle’s structural integrity. As such, we need to understand what is happening to the material as a result of temperature changes over time. This thermal loading cannot be studied in conventional wind tunnels, which normally offer fractions of seconds of run time at hypersonic conditions, because it takes a while for those conditions to become steady.”

Acoustic loading can also dramatically affect the structural integrity of a hypersonic vehicle, and that likewise requires time to evaluate. “Acoustic loading of the kind that could generate a crack in a structure that develops over time,” he said. “We could create and study these conditions with our flying testbed.”

Funding from GTRI’s Independent Research and Development (IRAD) program has supported the initiative so far, and by gathering enough data from the initial studies, Ahuja hopes to attract collaborators to help implement the new test approach.

“There is so much enthusiasm for this that I believe our chances of success are high,” he said. “By launching from another space system, we won’t have to worry about the initial launch propulsion. This could address a lot of challenges in conducting hypersonic research.”

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu).

GTRI Communications

Georgia Tech Research Institute

Atlanta, Georgia USA

About GTRI: The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, the state, and industry. For more information, please visit www.gtri.gatech.edu.

The four winning teams, led by PIs from across Georgia Tech’s Colleges and Schools, will host their workshops during the Spring 2023 semester at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Atlanta campus.

Congratulations to the Workshop Grant Winners!

Integrative Genomics for Health Equity

This one-day workshop will address the computational and analytical limitations to the use of integrative genomics and multi-omic profiling to understand and promote health equity. As genomic analysis begins to transform healthcare delivery, by promoting personalized assessment of therapeutic intervention, it is becoming increasingly apparent that both social and genetic determinants of health need to be measured.  Equitable implementation of genomic medicine must evaluate the influences of ancestry as well as socioeconomic status alongside genetics, with effects mediated in part through gene expression and epigenetics.  This workshop will bring together up to 9 speakers who will be asked to present their views on how genomic and non-genomic data can be integrated to guide precision medicine of diverse human populations.

• Greg Gibson (Regents Professor, School of Biological Sciences
• King Jordan (Professor, Director Bioinformatics Program
• Joseph Lachance (Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences

Single Cell Spatial Omics

The field of single cell spatial omics is growing fast, thanks to global consortia such as the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) and the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP), and also due to reduced next-generation sequencing (NGS) costs. Arguably, the biggest challenge in realizing the full potential of “spatial omics” techniques is the need for analytical tools that maximize our ability to extract testable hypotheses from the rich but noisy data sets. Thus, the AWSOM ’23 workshop will seek to bring together Atlanta-area strengths in computational science and machine learning at the same forum as technology developers and biologists, to strategically determine the thrust areas for future research.

• Saurabh Sinha | Professor & Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Engineering
• Manoj Bhasin | Associate Professor, Dept.of Biomedical Engineering
• Maneesha R Aluru | Senior Research Scientist, School of Biological SciencesGreg Gibson | Regents Professor, Tom and Marie Patton Chair, School of Biological Sciences

Computational and Mathematical Approaches to Theoretical Neuroscience

Understanding how the human brain works is one of the major challenges of our times. There has been a lot of progress on modeling phenomena at micro scale, such as the model of a neuron, of the chemical channels in a Synapse, learning models for updating weights in neurons etc. Such models have also inspired the models behind modern deep learning architectures. Rapid developments in neuro imaging at both micro and macro levels has enabled us to look at brain phenomena at unprecedented scale. However, an overarching model that explains the macro behavior of the brain is still not found. There have been several exciting steps towards this direction in the last decade from researchers at the intersection of several fields including computational neuroscience, theoretical CS, and probability. The focus of this seminar series is to invite researchers in this space to Georgia Tech, so that students and faculty at GT can pick up and contribute to this young and emerging field.

• Maguluri, Siva Theja Assistant Professor; Industrial & Systems Eng
• Choi, Hannah | Assistant Professor, Mathematics
• Mukherjee, Debankur | Assistant Professor, Industrial & Systems Engr
• Vempala, Santosh S | Professor, School of Computer Science

Sunny Workshop: A Julia Package for The Modeling of Spin Dynamics in Quantum Materials

In recent years, working with scientists at the University of Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), we have developed a simulation package called Su(n)ny, that uses Monte- Carlo techniques to calculate the spin dynamics of systems of interests. The Su(n)ny package is written in Julia and currently hosted on Github: https://github.com/SunnySuite/Sunny.jl. Development took place in the last year and a half. Last month, we presented our work for the first time during a workshop at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as tutorials on how to use this package: https://github.com/SunnySuite/SunnyTutorials/tree/main/tutorials, see also the introductory video here: https://mourigal.gatech.edu/public/Sunny-Install-Video-Mourigal.mp4 The package was very well received by our community, and it is now time to accelerate its deployment in realistic community use cases, by coupling it to the modeling of real data, porting it on GPU/Leadership class computers, advertising it more broadly, and including AI/ML methodologies to extract models from data. Learn About the Package Here https://docs.juliahub.com/Sunny/atBCQ/0.3.0/

• Martin Mourigal | Associate Professor; School of Physics

IDEaS leverages expertise and resources from throughout Georgia Tech's colleges, research labs, and external partners, to define and pursue grand challenges in data science foundations and in data-driven discovery in various fields. For updates on these workshops and other IDEaS events, please visit our website

- Christa M. Ernst

Register & Connect Your ORCID iD

Georgia Tech is a university that receives more than $50 million in federally funded research per year; therefore, we are required by the National Security Presidential Memorandum-33 (NSPM-33) to strengthen and standardize disclosure requirements for federally funded awards.The first step in protecting your research at Georgia Tech is to register and connect your ORCID iD with Georgia Tech. Learn more.

A key goal of the research will be to correlate the color changes that occur under low-Earth orbital (LEO) exposure with variations in the materials' properties – such as structural strength, chemical composition, and electrical conductivity – to determine how these spectral changes might allow scientists and engineers to visually assess deterioration. The LEO space environment exposes materials to the damaging effects of atomic oxygen, ultraviolet radiation, and high-energy electrons.

“We want to know not only how space affects materials, but also why that happens,” said Elena Plis, a senior research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) who is leading the multi-organization research team. “For instance, we know that a commonly used material from DuPont, Kapton® polyimide film, is subject to changes in its conductivity in space, but we want to know why, how we might prevent that, or how we can use it to our benefit.”

Regularly photographing the materials in both visible and infrared spectral ranges will provide a dynamic record of what happens with optical properties in space, improving upon the knowledge that has often been limited to measurements before and after space exposure. The research team will extensively analyze the materials returned to Earth to understand better how space degradation may affect other material properties and use this information for long-term space mission planning.

“I’m interested in the dynamics of damage caused to materials in space,” explained Plis. “Up until now, we have generally only had two data points for assessing the effects of space: the pristine materials that we launch, and the cumulative effects we can see when materials are returned. The uniqueness of this experiment is in letting us watch the damage occur over time.”

Beyond GTRI, the research team includes researchers from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), NASA, the University of Texas at El Paso, and DuPont, a multi-industrial company headquartered in Wilmington, Del. Utilizing the Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) Flight Facility, the research is also supported by Aegis Aerospace Inc., the company which owns and operates the MISSE platform installed on the ISS.

Analyzing the spectral data obtained by the experiment could also allow observers to determine whether a piece of space junk is from a lightweight insulating blanket or a heavier circuit board that could damage orbiting spacecraft. Beyond providing a new way to assess the structural health of materials remotely and assessing the risks from space debris, the experiment will also help engineers evaluate novel materials that could provide designers of future spacecraft with new options.

“DuPont Kapton® HN polyimide film, for instance, is a material that has been used ever since the Apollo missions, which makes it the gold standard,” Plis said. “But there are many more materials that may offer improved properties, so we are going to see how some examples of those are affected by space.”

Many of the materials being studied are used to protect spacecraft systems and crews from the effects of rapid thermal changes that take place in orbit, and from damaging electrical charging effects. The MISSE-16 materials selection includes different types of polyimides, liquid crystal polymers (LCP), polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS), carbon and glass fiber reinforced polymers, and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) polyester films.

The samples were installed on the exterior of the ISS using a robotic arm and will be retrieved in the same way in about six months. The samples will be placed on three different faces of the ISS to receive preferential exposures to atomic oxygen, ultraviolet radiation, and high-energy electrons. The samples were delivered to the ISS by a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft that launched on July 16.

To facilitate the long-term observation on orbit, the MISSE testbed has been upgraded with a camera and illumination system to cover a broader spectral range, including infrared, which is important to observing certain aspects of degradation. The upgraded hardware will remain part of the MISSE instrumentation after the GTRI-led experiment is over.

The samples, which are one-inch squares, are expected to be returned to Earth next spring. The materials flown in space will be examined in detail to understand the degradation and compared to identical samples subjected to simulated space conditions in the laboratory. In all, the samples will be subjected to 10 different characterization techniques, including atomic force microscopy, optical characterization of reflection and absorptance, and measurements of electrical charge transfer.

“We will be trying to connect the optical properties with surface changes and chemical changes,” said Plis. “With our ground experiments, we hope to understand these changes and the physics that lies behind them.”

For Plis, who has been studying the effects of space exposure on materials since 2015, seeing the research launch into space was the result of a years-long application and development process.

“For me, launching the materials was very emotional,” she said. “It’s like a dream come true to be sending my research into space and getting data from space. This is my first project to go into space, and I hope there will be more.”

Writer: John Toon (John.Toon@gtri.gatech.edu)

About GTRI: The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, the state, and industry. For more information, please visit www.gtri.gatech.edu.