The 2025 round of Sustainability Next Research Seed Grants has been awarded to 17 transdisciplinary research teams representing a vibrant network of 51 collaborators from across Georgia Tech. These teams span 21 unique units from six of the seven Colleges, including Schools, research centers, and Interdisciplinary Research Institutes. 

The seed grant program, administered by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), reaches many faculty members from a diverse array of disciplines due to the generous support provided by broad-based partnerships in addition to the Sustainability Next funds. This year’s partners are the Georgia Tech Arts Initiative, BBISS, Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Design, School of City and Regional Planning, School of Computer Science, Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, Energy Policy and Innovation Center, Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Institute for Matter and Systems, Institute for People and Technology, Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Strategic Energy Institute, and Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education.

The goal of the program is to nurture promising research areas for future large-scale collaborative sustainability research, research translation, and/or high-impact outreach; to provide mid-career faculty with leadership and community-building opportunities; and to broaden and strengthen the Georgia Tech sustainability community as a whole. The call for proposals was modeled after the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research’s Moving Teams Forward and Forming Teams programs.

Looking ahead, BBISS will support and nurture these projects in collaboration with the relevant funding partners. Beginning in October, BBISS will host a series of focused workshops designed to foster collaboration and provide additional support to help advance these initiatives. Projects have been grouped into five thematic clusters, each of which will be the focus of an upcoming workshop:

• Circularity Programs
• Adaptation to the Changing Environment
• Community Engagement and Education
• Climate Science and Solutions
• Environmental and Health Impacts

BBISS faculty fellows, past seed grant recipients, and other interested Georgia Tech faculty are invited to participate. If you are interested in participating in the workshops, please email kristin.janacek@gatech.edu. The first session on Circularity Programs is Oct. 16 at 1 p.m. in the Peachtree Room (3rd floor) of the John Lewis Student Center.

The 2025 Sustainability Next Seed Grant awards are:

Forming Teams:

• Developing a Sustainable and Ethical Electric Vehicle Ecosystem Workforce for the Future Through Cross-Sector Partnerships. Principal Investigators (PI): Joe Bozeman. Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI): Jennifer Hirsch.
• Unlocking Circularity at Scale: Platform-Based Solutions for Advancing Material Reuse and Supply Chain Resilience. Principal Investigator: Marco Ceccagnoli. Co-PIs: Matthew Realff, Patricia Stathatou, Christos Athanasiou.
• OpenGUARD: Geospatial Utility Aggregations with Robust Differential Privacy. PI: Patrick Kastner. Co-PI: Juba Ziani.
• Regenerative Framework: A Transdisciplinary Model for Urban Climate Resilience and Soil Health. PI: Jenny McGuire. Co-PI: Nicole Kennard.
• Guiding Transportation With Community Action Through Research, Education, and Service (GT-CARES). PI: Rounaq Basu. Co-PIs: Ruthie Yow,  Sofía Pérez-Guzmán, Rebecca Watts Hull.
• Co-optimizing Design and Coordination for Sustainable Multi-Robot Construction. PI: Edvard Bruun. Co-PI: Harish Ravichanda.
• Campus as Material Ecology: Building Transdisciplinary Circular Systems for Plastic Tracking, Transformation, and Community Engagement. PI: Hyojin Kwon. Co-PIs: Michael Best, Russ Clark, Tim Trent, Meisha Shofner.
• Sonifying Climate Infrastructures: Community Outreach and Education With Shade Synthesizer. PI: Heidi Biggs. Co-PIs: Clint Zeagler, Alexandria Smith.
• Building a Georgia Tech Research Partnership for Community-Based Food System Resilience. PI: Johannes Milz. Co-PIs: Xin Chen, Inge Rocker,  Sofía Pérez-Guzmán, Nicole Kennard.

Moving Teams Forward:

• Are Data Centers the New Landfills? Social, Economic, and Environmental Tradeoffs. PI: Allen Hyde. Co-PIs: Josiah Hester, Cindy Lin, Nicole Kennard, Joe Bozeman, Elora Raymond, Tony Harding, Jung-Ho Lewe.
• Game-Based Learning in Energy Systems: A Rigorous Evaluation of Current Crisis. PI: Jessica Roberts. Co-PI: Daniel Molzahn.
• Strategic Application of Antibiotic-Independent Therapy to Treat Coral Disease Outbreaks. PI: Lauren Speare.
• Advancing Water Reuse Through Research, Education, and Community Partnerships in Atlanta, Georgia. PI: Katherine Graham. Co-PIs: Amanda Nolen, Yeqing Kong.
• Assessing the Accuracy and Reliability of Low-Cost Particulate Matter (PM) Sensors Across Diverse Ambient Environments. PI: Nga Lee (Sally) Ng. Co-PI: Ted Russell.
• Developing a Georgia Community Center Into a Sustainability Hub. PI: Ashutosh Dhekne, Co-PIs: Umakishore Ramachandran, Danielle Willkens, Ruthie Yow.
• What, When, Where of Air Pollution: PM2.5 and How It Impacts Health. PI: Shuichi Takayama. Co-PI: Nga Lee (Sally) Ng.
• Enabling Communities to Baseline the Performance of Energy Systems. PI: Jung-Ho Lewe. Co-PIs: Scott Duncan, David Solano Sarmiento, Danielle Willkens, Anna Tinoco-Santiago.

This round of funding was highly competitive, with 45 proposals submitted. BBISS extends its gratitude to all the individuals and groups who applied, as well as to the faculty and staff who contributed their time and expertise to evaluate the proposals. Their thoughtful input was essential to achieving a fair and collaborative selection process, ensuring that the awarded proposals align strongly with the BBISS’ strategy and show promise for long-term impact and future research opportunities.

According to BBISS Executive Director Beril Toktay, and Brady Family Chair in Management, “The high level of participation demonstrates the enduring commitment to sustainability research and engagement by the Georgia Tech community. BBISS honors this commitment by looking for collaboration opportunities with all who are driving sustainability efforts at Georgia Tech.”

Beril Toktay, Regents’ Professor and Brady Family Chair, Scheller College of Business
Executive Director, Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems
Board of Directors, New York Climate Exchange

I returned from Climate Week NYC energized by what I witnessed: Georgia Tech faculty, students, and startups showcasing the breadth and depth of our climate innovation work on one of the world's biggest stages.

Climate Week NYC brings together more than 900 events, but what stood out wasn’t the scale — it was the substance. Across five New York Climate Exchange partner events, the Georgia Tech community demonstrated something essential. Georgia Tech bridges research and real-world impact where it matters most — in people’s lives.

At the Super South event, we flipped the script on where climate innovation happens and demonstrated the Southeast as a climate tech powerhouse. Too often, conversations about climate tech center on coastal hubs. But Georgia Tech-affiliated entrepreneurs Tarek Rakha (Lamarr.AI), Mya Love Griesbaum (Mycorrhiza Fashion), Joe Metzler (Metzev), Laura Stoy (Ph.D. ECE 2021, Rivalia Chemical), Charlie Cichetti (MGT 2004, Skema), Joseph Mooney (research engineer, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, WattAir), Lewis Motion (MBA 2017, WEAV3D), and Ramtin Motahar (IE 2004, ECON 2004, M.S. AE 2017, Joulea) showed that the Southeast isn’t just participating in the clean energy transition — we’re leading it.

The Climate Tech Fellowship Showcase was personal. Seeing two Georgia Tech teams — Patricia Stathatou and Christos Athanasiou’s yeast-based water purification system, and Xiao Liu’s AI-powered wildfire management platform — selected for the inaugural cohort reminded me why partnerships like the New York Climate Exchange matter. These early-stage innovators need more than good ideas. They need networks, mentorship, and funding pathways. NYCE provides those connections.

From flooding to batteries, two symposia highlighted GT faculty doing research that matters. At Weathering the Future, Iris Tien joined experts from AECOM, NVIDIA, and the NYC Department of Environmental Protection to discuss integrating resilience into urban infrastructure. Her work on coastal adaptation and infrastructure resilience addresses real vulnerabilities that cities face today. The Global Battery Alliance Leadership Meeting and Urban Battery Forum brought Yuanzhi Tang into conversations about building sustainable, circular battery value chains. As EVs scale and stationary storage grows, how we manage battery lifecycles — from securing raw resources to manufacturing to second-life reuse/recycling — will determine how we balance electrification, sustainability, environmental considerations, and economics; more details can be found in the NYCE report on battery circularity co-authored by Wyatt Williams (M.S. CEE 2024, MBA 2024).

Nicole Kennard’s leadership in the Climate Storytelling Workshop reinforced something I believe deeply: Technical solutions alone won’t solve the climate crisis. We need approaches that center community voices, acknowledge environmental justice concerns, and build trust. This became particularly clear in Kennard’s lecture for NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress: "Food, Place, and Belonging: From Global Visions to Local Sustainability." Presented with Janelle Wright (M CP 2022) from the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, this lecture demonstrated how sustainable food systems can draw on global frameworks but must center community values and honor the history of place.

A few insights emerged from the week:

1. Geography matters — and so does bridging it. Collaborative platforms like NYCE that create genuine partnerships across regions will be more effective in achieving Georgia Tech’s vision of doing climate work that is grounded in Georgia and global in impact.

2. Visibility accelerates impact. Several faculty and entrepreneurs told me that Climate Week NYC opened doors — to investors, to funders, to partners, and to media. Platforms like NYCE amplify work that might otherwise stay local.

3. Students are passionate about climate opportunities. Every conversation about internships, fellowships, and experiential learning generated immediate interest. We need to build more pathways for students like Rohan Datta and Amanda Ehrenhalt to engage in climate work across both New York and Atlanta ecosystems — creating opportunities for hands-on experience, knowledge diffusion across regions, and the professional networks that will define their careers.

4. Our community extends far beyond campus. Meeting alumnus Alan Warren (PHYS 1978) drove this message home. Alan brings a unique vantage point on coastal resilience challenges faced in New York — and he’s energized by what our partnership can achieve. His offer to serve as Georgia Tech’s “envoy” in NYC, connecting our climate work to networks and opportunities there, is exactly the kind of volunteer leadership that accelerates impact. Alan’s own inspirational story of resilience and regeneration makes his commitment to climate resilience work even more meaningful.

Looking ahead, I see Georgia Tech’s partnership with the NYCE creating a powerful platform: NYCE amplifies our work through capital and convening; Georgia Tech anchors deployment with Southeast roots and global reach. Working alongside a distinguished board led by incoming chair Andrea Goldsmith, president of Stony Brook University, gives me confidence in this direction.

President Ángel Cabrera met with Goldsmith this week and reaffirmed our shared vision for bridging research and impact. “Georgia Tech’s mission has always been about translating knowledge into progress that serves society,” said Cabrera. “The New York Climate Exchange partnership exemplifies this commitment to innovative solutions that can be scaled to create real human impact. By connecting our strengths in community-engaged climate research with networks that can amplify and accelerate solutions, we’re living our motto of Progress and Service as we address one of humanity’s most urgent challenges.”

The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) convenes faculty, students, and partners to address sustainability challenges through research, education, and collaboration. Connect with BBISS on LinkedIn to be part of the ongoing discussion and/or reach out to Susan Ryan (susan.ryan@gatech.edu) to be added to BBISS’ climate science and solutions community of practice.

Every summer for the last eight years, Georgia Tech students, from engineering and computer science to sustainable energy and environmental management, have lent their talents and creative energy to metro Atlanta sustainability-oriented organizations to increase their capacity in the community.

The  Sustainable Communities Summer Internship Program in the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) taps students from across the Institute, who gain real-world experience in both sustainability and community engagement, while participating partners scale their operations and deepen their relationship with Georgia Tech.

“It is a nontraditional internship, but it is so effective,” says Kristina Chatfield, director of business administration for the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), who manages the operational components of the program.

Impact on Atlanta’s Sustainability Community

Now in its eighth summer, the program has placed more than 200 students with over 60 Atlanta community organizations. Many return year after year, like WunderGrubs, an Atlanta-based insect farm that wants to bring a sustainable, nutritious form of protein to communities.

“I can’t overstate the value that Georgia Tech students bring to our company every summer through the SCoRE internship program,” says CEO and co-founder Akissi Stokes-Nelson, explaining that WunderGrubs’ mission is rooted in food equity and social impact. “We’re constantly innovating to support smallholder farmers, develop educational programs, and expand our reach both locally and globally. The SCoRE interns have been instrumental in helping us realize this vision.”

Stokes-Nelson says they add immediate capacity to WunderGrubs’ small team, bringing fresh perspectives and technical expertise — whether it’s developing new curricula for STEAM summer camps, introducing technology like Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and Arduino controllers, or helping the company build and scale its modular “grub shed” farming systems. She credits them with enabling her to reframe her business, pilot new programs, and even expand internationally, citing a recent partnership in Rwanda.

“What sets the Georgia Tech interns apart is their maturity, technical skill, and genuine passion for social impact. They’re not just here to learn — they’re here to contribute, innovate, and help us grow,” she says.

“The program is unique in its focus on both student development and organizational impact, particularly for underrepresented and first-generation students,” says Ruthie Yow, associate director of SCoRE, who leads partner engagement and student learning.

Georgia Tech covers all costs, including stipends for the full 12 weeks. Students take part in a seminar one evening a week to learn about grassroots sustainability innovation. They can also earn an internship course credit.

Connecting With Students in STEM

Intern Ridoine Idrissou, a computer science undergraduate at Tech, supported WunderGrubs’ “Tech Avengers” STEM summer camp. “We taught kids about cybersecurity, IoT, how to be safe online, and they learned about mealworms. They got rid of almost one ton of trash,” recalls Idrissou, who also developed IoT kits for the company’s farm sheds. “It’s not all about coding,” adds the Togo, West Africa, native. “It’s about connecting to the environment. It’s given me a whole different type of experience than I normally have as a computer science major.”

Idrissou, who has spent his last three summers interning, credits the program with giving him a chance when nobody else would. “My internship experience makes me appreciate the field I’m in, and it gives me a good idea of how to be mindful, when building software or other products, of the well-being of other people.” He plans to pursue a career in cybersecurity and system administration after he graduates next spring.

This positive internship experience isn’t the only one. Another organization benefiting from Georgia Tech’s talented students is the Lifecycle Building Center (LBC) in Atlanta.

Shannon Goodman, a Georgia Tech architecture program alumna, serves as executive director of the LBC. She considers her interns foundational to her nonprofit, which reduces waste in the built environment by salvaging materials like lumber, cabinets, flooring, and appliances, and making them available to the community, nonprofits, and for reuse in new projects. The organization runs a 70,000 square-foot warehouse and provides free materials and services to nonprofits across Atlanta.

“Our interns have been the connective tissue that helps all the different resource-constrained CEOs and community-based organizations build strong, trusted relationships with each other and lay the groundwork for our training program,” Goodman says.

Assessing the Lifecycle of Salvaged Building Materials

Morgan Hale interned at LBC while completing her graduate degree in sustainable energy and environmental management. “This internship program bridges sustainability with all the academic pathways at Georgia Tech. It does a great job of engaging students and educating them on ways to take what they're learning from school and map that into a career in sustainability,” says Hale, whose capstone project focused on the lifecycle assessment of salvaged building materials. “This internship perfectly aligned with my academic and career interests in sustainability and policy,” she adds. “And the extra workshops and networking opportunities are invaluable.”

For Goodman, education remains a key part of her team’s role. “Our job at the end of the day is helping people understand all the different types of opportunities that get lost when we just throw materials away. I don't know how we would do it without our interns. Through her capstone project, Morgan developed tools and procedures for calculating the embodied carbon and GHG emissions of the materials we salvage to create Environmental Product Declarations, or EPDs, for reclaimed materials, which don’t currently exist in the U.S. EPDs allow us to prove exactly how much better salvaged materials perform compared to new products, and will enable the material reuse industry to scale in the U.S. at a rate never seen before.”

LBC’s connection to Georgia Tech doesn’t stop with the internship program, however. “We have had countless professors from different departments of Georgia Tech bring their students here to learn about what we do, engage with us, and get materials from us,” says Goodman, noting that back in 2022, Georgia Tech was instrumental in helping her assemble community organizations like the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance and many others to form the ReBuildATL Coalition. Today, the coalition includes more than 40 nonprofits, academic institutions, industry partners, and local government agencies that empower Westside Atlanta neighborhoods.

Learn More

The Sustainable Communities Summer Internship Program is a partnership between SCoRE and the Office of Community-Based Learning. It is co-sponsored by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, the Strategic Energy Institute, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, the Office of Commercialization, and the Sustainability Next initiative.

To learn more about the program, including how to contribute financially to the program or to become a participating partner, visit https://scre.research.gatech.edu/sustainable-communities-summer-internship-program.

By Anne Wainscott-Sargent

For more than 15 years, Georgia Tech has provided the City of Atlanta with the foundational data and insight that shape how the city tracks, understands, and plans for changes in its tree canopy. The latest cycle of this research — delivered through the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics (CURA) — continues that legacy by offering a high-resolution, citywide canopy assessment using satellite imagery and field validation.

The assessment, funded by the city’s Tree Recompense Fund, uses advanced remote sensing tools such as WorldView-2 satellite data and a random forest classification model to categorize land into three land cover types. These include tree canopy, non-tree vegetation (grass, shrubs, and low lying vegetation) and non-vegetation (water, pervious surface). The methodology delivers a detailed spatial picture of land cover across the city.

“This is simply a tool in their planning arsenal,” said Anthony Giarrusso, who has led every canopy study since 2008. “Before they did any of this work in 2008, everything was anecdotal. It was reactionary.”

The new study is not advocacy — it’s information. Giarrusso emphasized that while researchers stay neutral in the politics of urban growth and conservation, their work equips city leaders with science-based knowledge to make more effective zoning and planning decisions.

In addition to mapping existing conditions, the Georgia Tech team developed the Potential Planting Index (PPI), a scalable tool that identifies where tree planting is physically possible based on current land cover. The tool quantifies the difference between tree canopy and non-tree vegetation, indicating zones with restoration potential.

Another key insight is the challenge of interpreting canopy change without understanding land use patterns. “It gives you a false sense of stability if you don’t understand the underlying land use,” said Giarrusso. “You might see canopy regrowth on paper, but that land could be cleared again tomorrow.” He explained that this false signal is particularly common in stalled development sites: “We saw a lot of properties where trees had regrown after initial clearing, but it was temporary and monoculture, low quality canopy. Several of those areas were cleared again for construction later.”

Giarrusso pointed to these “loss-gain-loss” cycles as one of the more misleading aspects of tree canopy analysis without strong land use context. “Some of them were pipe farms — land cleared for development with infrastructure like water and sewer lines installed, but then construction never happened. So trees grow back, and you get a canopy gain that doesn’t last and is nowhere near the quality of the trees originally cleared.”

He stressed that policymakers need to consider the permanence of canopy when using the data. “If it’s just going to be cleared again in two years, it’s not really a gain. That’s why long-term tracking and land use analysis together are so important.”

The city has incorporated these tools into broader planning efforts, including zoning reform and tree ordinance revisions. The research supports recommendations such as restricting full lot clearing in certain zoning categories and adjusting setback or lot coverage limits to better preserve existing canopy.

Giarrusso underscored the urgency of protecting larger, intact forested tracts. “If you can see it from space and it’s still forest — save it,” he said. “Once it’s cleared, you don’t get it back.”

Nicole Kennard’s passion for sustainability and food justice took root as a Georgia Tech undergraduate in materials science and engineering. It then blossomed across the Atlantic in the U.K., where she studied sustainable food systems as a Fulbright Scholar and later as a doctoral student.

Today, she’s back at Georgia Tech as assistant director for Community-Engaged Research in the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS). Kennard supports faculty in building meaningful and co-creative research partnerships with local communities to address pressing sustainability and societal challenges.

“I find food very interesting because it’s interdisciplinary by necessity. Food is the great connector,” says Kennard.

She calls her journey back to Georgia Tech “a full-circle moment,” particularly since, as an undergrad, she worked on a community-engaged sustainability project for the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, now the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE).

While a Tech student, Kennard served for three years as president of the student chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World, which started her interest in urban agriculture. She recalled a day when a nonprofit contacted her with a strange donation offer: hydroponic equipment they had received from the set of The Hunger Games. Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil.

“I googled it and thought, why not?” recalls Kennard, who started a campus hydroponics project. “We were just a group of students across different disciplines who took over the greenhouse on top of the biology building that hadn’t been used for a long time,” she said. “We got good at experimenting — we were growing food for the Atlanta Community Food Bank.”

The students’ expertise led them to build systems for other nonprofits and classrooms in the Atlanta area. From there, Kennard met Atlantans working in food justice and sustainable agriculture. It sparked a thirst for furthering her education, and Kennard was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a master’s in sustainable agriculture and food security at Newcastle University in the U.K. She stayed through the Covid pandemic, earning her Ph.D. in chemistry and biosciences from the University of Sheffield in 2023.

Now, she’s excited to be home and connecting faculty with community partners. She hopes to build co-creative research partnerships that are “meaningful, sustainable, and long-lasting.”  Her vision is to make Tech’s research more locally beneficial by working directly with surrounding communities.

“Sustainability is so broad that I feel it can touch anyone. At Georgia Tech, we have so much expertise that is perfect for this field.”

Kennard is also passionate about training and connecting graduate students doing community-engaged research. She recently received a seed grant to build a cross-university network with Georgia State University, Emory University, and Spelman College.

Kennard’s research projects include mapping Atlanta's local food system and addressing challenges for local urban growers. She notes that accessing food can be an issue for many in Atlanta, complicated by financial and transportation barriers. At the same time, Atlanta is one of the leading U.S. cities in urban agriculture and has a rich agricultural history and food culture. The city has a wealth of urban farms, community gardens, and local nonprofits working together to increase access to fresh, healthy foods and build community through food.

An outdoor enthusiast, the Acworth, Georgia, native enjoys hiking, camping, traveling, foraging, and gardening in her free time.

— written by Anne Wainscott-Sargent

Georgia Tech students played a pivotal role in the award-winning Coffee County Memory Project, an oral history initiative that preserves the stories of school desegregation in rural Georgia.

Launched in 2016, the project was supported by the Institute’s Sustainable Communities Summer Internship Program, run by the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain (now the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education), in which students work full time with community partners across Atlanta and Georgia.

Beginning in 2017, trusted advisers contributed to the success of this work, including Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Christopher Lawton, Ann McCleary and G. Wayne Clough. Clough, who served as Georgia Tech’s president from 1994 to 2008, long advocated for public service, community-engaged research, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning.

In 2019, Georgia Tech students and participating interns Brice Minix and Nabil Patel combed through decades of local newspapers, digitized school board records, and conducted interviews with community members who lived in Coffee County during desegregation. In 2020, Kara Vaughan Adams and Bennett Bush transcribed countless interviews. Samina Patel’s contributions in 2020 and 2021 included graphic and web design.

All their work laid the foundation for two virtual museum exhibits: emergingVOICES of Coffee County and Overcoming Segregation: A Journey Through Coffee County’s Forgotten Stories. The latter received the 2023 Award of Excellence from the American Association of State and Local History. Further recognition came this year when the project earned the 2025 Georgia Association of Museums’ Special Project Award for the PLAYBACK & FASTFORWARD seminar series.

T. Cat Ford, Project Director said, “The Serve-Learn-Sustain interns we partnered with from Georgia Tech were all graduates of Coffee High School. Their efforts turbo-charged our work—not only because they worked tirelessly but also because, as they preserved their own history, they offered valuable insights into their lived experience of this legacy.

Click here to learn more about SCoRE’s Sustainable Communities Internship Program.

Kristina Chatfield has been hired as the Director of Business Administration for the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), a new role that will provide administrative leadership and oversight for BBISS’ growing portfolio of programs and activities. Chatfield began her Georgia Tech career as program and operations manager at the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS) in 2015. In 2023, SLS transitioned into the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) housed within BBISS, with Chatfield assuming the program and portfolio manager role.

At first glance, she wasn’t a typical sustainability hire at Georgia Tech.

She was a business management consultant for a law firm who had also helped a national survey data firm with their data crunching. Higher ed was “like a different planet,” she recalls.

Chatfield realized early on that she could apply her management and operations background to any field. “You can’t run any successful organization unless you have operational efficiency and program and project management.” Without them, she says, “Things don’t work properly.”

But equally important was her commitment to learning about academia and sustainability, areas that were not in her wheelhouse a decade ago. With support from Jennifer Hirsch, senior director of SCoRE (and formerly of SLS), Chatfield embraced both with gusto.

“I’ve learned to approach sustainability from a holistic standpoint,” Chatfield explains, noting that sustainability isn’t just about the environment or systems — it’s primarily about the people.

“If you have a passion for community engagement and sustainability, there’s a lot of commonality you can find with people from all different persuasions. As human beings, we mostly care about the same things.”

“Kris is a master at setting up and managing complex operational and financial systems, and she is passionate about sustainability, communities, and Georgia Tech. This combination, together with her decade of management experience in SLS and SCoRE, makes her perfect for her new leadership role,” says BBISS Executive Director Beril Toktay.

Chatfield says a key highlight of her work in sustainability has been connecting community organizations and nonprofit partners with the Institute through the SCoRE summer internship program. Georgia Tech students are partnered with community organizations throughout Atlanta. Now in its eighth year, the program allows students “to learn about the social aspects of sustainability, innovation, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the context of actual work that’s being done in the Atlanta area,” Chatfield says. “Partners benefit tremendously because the program expands their capacity by having these amazing Georgia Tech students working for them.”

Chatfield says the internship program often serves as the first interaction partners have with Georgia Tech. “It opens the door to a much broader and deeper relationship.”

In her free time, Kris enjoys her family life with five adult children, and soon she will welcome her third grandchild. “Being a grandparent is the best thing ever,” she says.

She also enjoys playing pickleball with her husband and traveling. With one of her sons about to be stationed in Germany with the Army, she hopes to combine her passions of travel and family time.

Written by Anne Wainscott-Sargent

A longstanding mystery of the periodic table involves a group of unique elements called lanthanides. Also known as rare earth elements, or REEs, these silvery-white metals are challenging to isolate, given their very similar chemical and physical properties. This similarity makes it difficult to distinguish REEs from one other during extraction and purification processes. 

The world has come to depend on lanthanides’ magnetic and optical properties to drive much of modern technology — from medical imaging to missiles to smart phones. These metals also are in short supply, and because they’re found in minerals, lanthanides are difficult to mine and separate.   But that may change — thanks to a Georgia Tech-led discovery of a new oxidation state for a lanthanide element known as praseodymium.  

For the first time ever, praseodymium achieved a 5+ oxidation state. Oxidation occurs when a substance meets oxygen or another oxidizing substance. (The browning on the flesh of a cut apple, as well as rust on metal, are examples of oxidation.)
   
As far back as the 1890s, scientists suspected lanthanides might have a 5+ oxidation state, but  lanthanides in that state were too unstable to see, said Henry ”Pete“ La Pierre, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Discovering an element’s new oxidation state is like discovering a new element. As an example, La Pierre noted how plutonium’s discovery opened up a whole new area of the periodic table. 

“A new oxidation state tells us what we don’t know and gives us ideas for where to go,” he explained. “Each oxidation state of an element has distinct chemical and physical properties — so the first glimpse of a novel oxidation presents a roadmap for new possibilities.”
 
La Pierre and colleagues at University of Iowa and Washington State University recently discovered the 5+ oxidation state for lanthanides. 

“It was predicted but never seen until we found it,” said La Pierre, corresponding author of the study, “Praseodymium in the Formal +5 Oxidation State,” which was recently published in Nature Chemistry. “Lanthanides’ properties are really fantastic. We only use them commercially in one oxidation state — the 3+ oxidation state — which defines a set of magnetic and optical properties. If you can stabilize a higher oxidation state, it could lead to entirely new magnetic and optical properties.”
 
The researchers’ breakthrough will broaden the lanthanides’ technical applications in fields such as rare-earth mining and quantum technology and could lead to new electronic device architectures and applications. 

“Research in lanthanides has already yielded significant dividends for society in terms of technological development,” La Pierre added.
    
The researchers hope to discover new tools for mining critical REEs, including improving lanthanide separation and recycling processes. When mining these elements, lanthanide elements are frequently mixed together. The separation process is painstaking and inefficient, generating a significant amount of waste. But with increasing global demand for REEs, the U.S. faces a supply issue. Figuring out how to improve lanthanides separation, potentially through oxidation chemistry, will ultimately enhance the supply of these critical elements. 

— Anne Wainscott-Sargent
 
Funding: This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. 
 

Ocean waters are getting greener at the poles and bluer toward the equator, according to an analysis of satellite data published in Science on June 19. The change reflects shifting concentrations of a green pigment called chlorophyll made by phytoplankton, photosynthetic marine organisms at the base of the ocean food chain. If the trend continues, marine food webs could be affected, with potential repercussions for global fisheries. 

“In the ocean, what we see based on satellite measurements is that the tropics and the subtropics are generally losing chlorophyll, whereas the polar regions — the high-latitude regions — are greening,” says first author Haipeng Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech working with Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Sutherland Chair at Georgia Tech and Nicolas Cassar, the Lee Hill Snowdon Bass Chair at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

Since the 1990s, many studies have documented enhanced greening on land, where global average leaf cover is increasing due to rising temperatures and other factors. But documenting photosynthesis across the ocean has been more difficult, according to the team. Although satellite images can provide data on chlorophyll production at the ocean’s surface, the picture is incomplete. 

The study analyzed satellite data collected from 2003 to 2022 by a NASA instrument that combs the entire Earth every two days, measuring light wavelength. The researchers were looking for changes in chlorophyll concentration, a proxy for phytoplankton biomass. For consistency, they focused on the open ocean and excluded data from coastal waters. 

“There are more suspended sediments in coastal waters, so optical properties are different than in the open ocean,” Zhao explains.  

The satellite data revealed broad trends in color, indicating that chlorophyll is decreasing in subtropical and tropical regions and increasing toward the poles. Building on that finding, the team examined how chlorophyll concentration is changing at specific latitudes. To work around background noise and gaps in data, they had to get creative. 

“We borrowed concepts from economics called the Lorenz curve and the Gini index, which together show how wealth is distributed in a society. So, we thought, let’s apply these to see whether the proportion of the ocean that holds the most chlorophyll has changed over time,” Cassar says.

They found similar but opposing trends in chlorophyll concentration over the two-decade period. Green areas became greener, particularly in the northern hemisphere, while blue regions got even bluer. 

“It’s like rich people getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” Zhao says.

Next, the team examined how the patterns they observed were affected by several variables, including sea surface temperature, wind speed, light availability and mixed layer depth — a measure that reflects mixing in the ocean’s top layer by wind, waves and surface currents. Warming seas correlated with changes in chlorophyll concentration, but the other variables showed no significant associations.

The authors cautioned that their findings cannot be attributed to climate change. 

“The study period was too short to rule out the influence of recurring climate phenomena such as El Niño,” Lozier says. “Having measurements for the next several decades will be important for determining influences beyond climate oscillations.” 

If poleward shifts in phytoplankton continue, however, they could affect the global carbon cycle. During photosynthesis, phytoplankton act like sponges, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When these organisms die and sink to the ocean bottom, carbon goes down with them. The location and depth of that stored carbon can influence climate warming.

“If carbon sinks deeper or in places where water doesn’t resurface for a long time, it stays stored much longer. In contrast, shallow carbon can return to the atmosphere more quickly, reducing the effect of phytoplankton on carbon storage,” Cassar says. 

Additionally, a persistent decline in phytoplankton in equatorial regions could alter fisheries that many low- and middle-income nations, such as those in the Pacific Islands, rely on for food and economic development — especially if that decline carries over to coastal regions, according to the authors.

“Phytoplankton are at the base of the marine food chain. If they are reduced, then the upper levels of the food chain could also be impacted, which could mean a potential redistribution of fisheries,” Cassar says. 

 

Funding: National Science Foundation and NASA.

Citation: “Greener green and bluer blue: Ocean poleward greening over the past two decades,” Zhao H., Manizza M., Lozier S.M. and Cassar N. Science, June 19, 2025, DOI: 10.1126/science.adr9715 

This story by Julie Leibach is shared with the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment newsroom.