A new eBook, "Climate Change and the Design of the Built Environment," written by Michael Gamble, Academic and Research Council Chair at the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design and associate professor in the College of Design at Georgia Tech is now available!

Written as a series of dialogues with leaders from various disciplines, the book positions design as an essential component of entrepreneurial approaches which explore the sociocultural and eco-political dimensions of climate change.  Economist, Architects, Planners, Sociologist, Lawyers, Policy Makers, Landscape Architects, and MBA’s contribute to a spirited discussion around climate change and design.

Global climate change has already resulted in a wide range of impacts across every region of the country. Many sectors of the economy are expected to grow related to climate and health in the coming decades.  The design and retrofit of buildings, infrastructure and cities will be a major part of future efforts.  

All interviews are Kendeda Building based on Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus with experts participating from around the world.

“Georgia Tech is a beacon of innovation that aims to empower entrepreneurs to create ventures with a positive impact on society and the environment. As a hub of forward-thinking ideas, Georgia Tech is leading Atlanta, Georgia, and the United States into a more sustainable future,” said Andre Calmon, assistant professor of operations management, at the launch event for Sustainable-X. An offshoot of the successful CREATE-X entrepreneurship initiative at Georgia Tech, Sustainable-X gives students, faculty, staff, and community members the tools and confidence to create and grow startups that address social and environmental challenges.

Sustainable-X is supported by Sustainability Next, the implementation roadmap for sustainability goals within Georgia Tech’s Strategic Plan 2020-2030. The new program launches in tandem with a climate action plan, a living learning campus initiative, seed funding for teaching through the lens of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and more.

CREATE-X and the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business (“Center”) are partnering on Sustainable-X programming. Organizers include Scheller College of Business faculty and staff: co-directors Andre Calmon and Karthik Ramachandran (Dunn Family Professor), advisor Beril Toktay (Brady Family Chair and Regents’ Professor), and program manager Kjersti Lukens (program support coordinator for the Center).

The program kicked off with the Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs Bootcamp, held at the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design from November 5-6, 2022. Twenty participants from Georgia Tech and the community learned how to tackle complex sustainability problems and create startup solutions. The bootcamp was facilitated by Jackie Stenson, an expert in sustainable innovation and co-founder of multiple social enterprises. Participants progressed through problem framing and ideation exercises to design solutions inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The participants shared their projects in a pitch session, where judges and peers listened to an array of business solutions related to STEM education in under-resourced communities, meal preparation kits to help reduce food waste, water management for golf courses, and infrastructure and innovation to accelerate the transition to renewable energy. First prize was awarded to the group that focused on water management. Team members included Isha Dogra (environmental engineering graduate student at Georgia Tech), Emma Vail (student at University of North Georgia), and Michelle Wong (assistant director of the Petit Institute at Georgia Tech ).

Tanju Özdemir, a first-year materials science and engineering major who is also serving as a 2022-23 Scheller College Undergraduate Sustainability Ambassador, remarked, “I signed up for the bootcamp because it felt relevant to my future career goal of being an entrepreneur in the energy sector. The SDG innovation process was completely new to me and exposed me to how difficult and exciting it is to explore solutions to different problems.” The bootcamp revealed to Özdemir how “even the seemingly chaotic process of creativity can have structure.”

Next Steps and Resources

Participants in the bootcamp will be invited to take part in a series of forthcoming events and opportunities related to mentoring, transitioning from idea to prototype (through CREATE-X programming), and funding. The Sustainable-X 2022-23 program will culminate in a showcase in March in which selected participants, along with their counterparts in CREATE-X, will pitch their startups in hopes of obtaining support from investors.

Reflecting on the weekend launch event, Toktay said, “I enjoyed seeing how teams including students, staff members, and community participants – which we intentionally included in the bootcamp – gelled so well. They helped each other stay grounded in real problems while exploring creative solutions.” She said that she and her fellow organizers look forward to the growth of the program. “We believe that the teams have great potential to make a positive impact.”

“With the new Sustainable-X program, Scheller College is creating a new wave of impact at the intersection of sustainability, entrepreneurship, and innovation,” stated Dean Maryam Alavi. She continued, “This program will empower a new generation of Georgia Tech community members as they address some of the most pressing sustainability challenges of our time. I look forward to seeing what results.”

Co-directors Calmon and Ramachandran have worked with student and faculty entrepreneurs at Georgia Tech, INSEAD, and MIT. They recognize Georgia Tech’s potential to produce the next generation of sustainability and climate-impact startups, and look forward to building the pathway to support these startups through Sustainable-X.

Click here to sign up for updates.

Interested in getting involved? Contact Kjersti Lukens for more information.

Written by Jennifer Holley Lux

Nine new Faculty Fellows were appointed to the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS). In addition to their own work, BBISS Fellows serve as a board of advisors to the BBISS; foster the culture and community of sustainability researchers, educators, and students at Georgia Tech; and communicate broadly the vision, mission, values, and objectives of the BBISS. Fellows will work with the BBISS for three years, with the potential for a renewed term.

The BBISS Faculty Fellows program has been in place since 2014. Fellows will number between 10 and 15, will be drawn from across all 6 colleges and GTRI at Georgia Tech. It is expected that annual allowances provided to each BBISS Fellow will range from $1000 to $1500 depending on number of fellows in the program and availability of funds.

The new BBISS Faculty Fellows are:

• Joe Bozeman – Assistant Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Dylan Brewer - Assistant Professor, School of Economics
• Andre Calmon – Assistant Professor, Scheller College of Business
• Brian Gunter - Associate Professor, Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
• Jenny McGuire – Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
• Jessica Roberts – Assistant Professor, College of Computing
• Ilan Stern – Senior Research Scientist, Georgia Tech Research Institute
• Anjali Thomas - Associate Professor, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs
• Zhaohui Tong - Associate Professor, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

These faculty members join the current roster of Faculty Fellows:

• Baabak Ashuri - Associate Professor, School of Building Construction
• Kevin Caravati – Principal Research Scientist, Georgia Tech Research Institute
• Ellen Dunham-Jones – Professor, School of Architecture
• Daniel Matisoff - Associate Professor, School of Public Policy
• Kate Pride Brown - Associate Professor, School of History and Sociology
• Perry Yang – Professor, School of City and Regional Planning

More information can be found on the BBISS website.

At first glance, the new maker space opening in the Kendeda Living Building for Innovative Sustainable Design might look like many others. However, the space, named EcoMake, has some important differences. Because it is housed in the Kendeda Building, there are strict standards for what types of materials and equipment can be used there in order to maintain its Living Building Certification. For example, you will find several 3-D printers there, like almost all maker spaces, but the plastic filament used in them is made from recycled plastic, perhaps recycled on-site with equipment in the lab itself.

Some might regard such restrictions as too limiting to their creativity or design goals. Viewed another way, this approach opens up a unique set of possibilities. Biologically Inspired and Green Design (BIG-D) is a field of study (sometimes referred to by different names, like “biomimicry”) that has demonstrated a lot of promise in the past few decades. This approach aims to translate the billions of years of knowledge and design wisdom embodied in our biological world into innovative green products. However, no matter how green the design of a product, they are often manufactured with traditional processes with limited consideration for energy, toxicity, water, or material use. Having a lab like EcoMake will help to usher in the field of study of Biologically Inspired and Green Manufacturing (BIG-M). BIG-M will require knowledge, equipment, and resources that are much different than traditional fabrication methods. Like natural systems, this new facility will operate within the means of nature, using no more energy or water than can be generated from its geometric footprint, and producing no more waste than it can assimilate on site.

EcoMake has the following tools and equipment (so far):

• 8 - Prusa I3S+ 3-D Printers
• 5 - Ender 3 Pro 3-D Printers
• EinScan-SP 3-D Object Scanner
• Mark-10 ESM303 Mechanical Tester
• 300-X Digital Microscope
• 3Devo Filament Extruder
• Shini SG-16N Plastic Granulator
• Plastic Chip Dryer
• Singer Heavy Duty 4423 Sewing Machine
• Complement of Standard Fabric Crafting Equipment

EcoMake, the bio-inspired maker space will be open to students from all disciplines. It is supported by the Colleges of Design, Engineering, and Biology, and the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. Contact Michael Gamble for more information.

The American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology Engineering has announced that they are awarding a “Best Paper Award” for 2021 to John Crittenden and co-authors Jinming Luo, Deyou Yu, Kiril D. Hristovski, Kaixing Fu, Yanwen Shen, and Paul Westerhoff for their article “Review of Advances in Engineering Nanomaterial Adsorbents for Metal Removal and Recovery from Water: Synthesis and Microstructure Impacts.” The article was first published online on March 12, 2021 for the April 20^th print edition of ACS ES&T.

The paper presents the possible approaches to create novel adsorbents that can be used to recover strategically important metals that are necessary for advancing technologies that contribute to the green economy. These strategic metals are key to the manufacturing of military, consumer, electronic, and industrial products including batteries, specialty alloys, electrical conductors, catalytic converters, lasers, lenses, LED lights, and magnets. The approach proposed in the paper is to recover strategic metals from aqueous sources, where they are often considered contaminants, and avoid the deleterious environmental impacts of traditional hard rock mining. Geopolitical complexity will also be avoided, since these materials are currently sourced from only a few places in the world.

The 2021 Best Paper Award will be formally announced on the front cover and in an editorial in the September 2022 issue of ACS ES&T Engineering, which will be published in the upcoming September, 2022 edition. The paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c07936

The American Chemical Society (ACS) held a series of symposia over three days at their recent Fall 2022 conference in Chicago “in honor of John Crittenden's long-term accomplishments in sustainability and physical chemical treatment processes for the engineered water infrastructure systems.” The symposia, entitled “Greener Strategies in Environmental Sustainability in Honor of John Crittenden,” featured 37 talks given by colleagues from institutions and companies from around the world, several of whom were Crittenden’s former students. The talks covered a wide variety of subjects which were all impacted by Crittenden’s five decades of research in topics such as adsorption, ion exchange, air stripping, advanced oxidation, membranes, sustainable urban development, urban ecology, resilient infrastructure systems analysis, sustainable community research, and sustainable engineering education.

The way that waste streams are treated has evolved markedly in the last 50 years. The primary scope of concern for waste treatment strategies started with mechanical, biological, and chemical treatment, to pollution prevention, to green chemistry/engineering, to the sustainability triangle of economic, environmental, and societal sustainability. John’s research agenda has followed, and usually anticipated, this development arc. The Honor Award for Scientific Excellence was presented to Crittenden at the ACS conference by the Division of Environmental Chemistry of the American Chemical Society “in recognition of his contributions to ‘Greener Strategies in Environmental Sustainability’ through outstanding research and publications.”

John Crittenden is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Environmental Technologies in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering where he continues his research and teaching. He recently stepped down as director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems which he led since 2009.

The list of presentations given in honor of Crittenden’s research and career can be found here:
https://acs.digitellinc.com/acs/live/28/page/905/2?eventSearchInput=crittenden

I am excited to step into the interim executive director position at the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, with sincere gratitude to John for his pioneering leadership, to the Brook Byers Professors and Faculty Fellows for their high-profile contributions to sustainability research and education, and to Mr. Byers for his generous support of BBISS over the years. 

I am also delighted to have the opportunity to work with a very committed team in Mike, Susan, Gay, and Brent, whose combined tenure with BBISS adds up to more than 40 years, not to mention Mike and Brent’s early involvement with defining Georgia Tech’s role in sustainability going back to the late 90s! I invite you all to engage with us over the next year: a small step is to sign up for the BBISS newsletter.

Some colleagues will remember that I had an office at ISTD, BBISS’ precursor, when I was on sabbatical at Georgia Tech from INSEAD about 20 years ago. I was introduced to the campus sustainability community by former executive directors and mentors Carol Carmichael and Bert Bras. When I moved to the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business in 2005, I was excited to become part of this sustainability community, with whom I have since had many productive and enjoyable collaborations leading to the creation of the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, Serve-Learn-Sustain, the Carbon Reduction Challenge, and more. Rejoining BBISS on its leadership team is bringing things full circle for me and feels a bit like a homecoming. 

Over the last year, I have had the privilege of working as co-chair of Sustainability Next, the Georgia Tech Strategic Plan 2020-2030 Implementation Task Force tasked with developing an Institute-wide implementation plan for sustainability cutting across all core missions of Georgia Tech and encompassing both environmental and social sustainability issues defined by UN Sustainable Development Goals. Many of you contributed through the task force, surveys, townhalls, and individual conversations, for which I am grateful. Through this work, I have come to appreciate not only the depth of the sustainability expertise at Georgia Tech but also the unique point at which we find ourselves in terms of the opportunity to have transformative impact in our city, region, nation, and globe. 

Assets that collectively provide that opportunity include: the cutting-edge Georgia Tech sustainability research community spanning all six colleges and GTRI; successful sister IRIs, centers, and initiatives; a commitment to campus sustainability exemplified in flagship projects like the Kendeda Building;  a student base that is eager to have positive societal impact in their careers; many strong industry partnerships including the Drawdown Georgia Business Compact focused on climate action; federal government and philanthropic dollars poised to invest in climate solutions with an emphasis on social justice; a state government working to bring “new economy” companies into Georgia; many city- and county-level sustainability and climate initiatives; GT-led regional and international sustainability networks including RCE Greater Atlanta and the University Global Coalition; a coalescence around taking Metro Atlanta and Georgia to the next level in entrepreneurial activity; and ELT-level support and resources for sustainability through Institute Strategic Plan funding and Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech theme definition.  There is also a set of challenges, of course, but things worth doing are never straightforward!

I look forward to working with you all to capitalize on these assets and the momentum of the present day. My hypotheses about what our priorities should be for this year are the following, and I look forward to hearing your input and suggestions as we finalize them together:

• Grow the community of faculty, students, and staff who see themselves as part of the BBISS family and strengthen ties within;
• Expand BBISS’ research foci to reflect the full richness of sustainability scholarship on campus (here I see a clear focus on climate that draws on all colleges and GTRI as a must);
• Advance BBISS’ capacity to support interdisciplinary grant writing and community-engaged research;
• Partner with schools and colleges to help grow sustainability and climate-related interdisciplinary academic program offerings;
• Accelerate commercialization and entrepreneurship activity in sustainability and climate solutions;
• Contribute to philanthropic success in sustainability both at BBISS and Georgia Tech-wide;
• Grow the visibility of Georgia Tech sustainability thought leadership.

I plan to hold “listening sessions” and a retreat to crystallize BBISS’ research foci and priority activities. To engage with this process and explore whether BBISS is a good “home” for you, please sign up for the BBISS newsletter.

I look forward to working with you all!

Beril

L. Beril Toktay
Professor of Operations Management and Brady Family Chairholder
Interim Executive Director, Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems
Faculty Director, Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business
Scheller College of Business
Georgia Institute of Technology

John Crittenden will be stepping down as executive director of BBISS effective August 31, 2022. Beril Toktay, Professor of Operations Management, Brady Family Chairholder, and Regents’ Professor, will serve as BBISS’ interim executive director. Beril said, “John took the inclusion of the word ‘Systems’ in BBISS’ name to heart at a time when large interdisciplinary research collaborations at Georgia Tech were still a rarity. The bold vision now coming out of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Plan 2020-2030 and the Sustainability Next strategic plan initiative can be directly linked to John’s leadership and his challenge to ‘go bigger.’ I am delighted to accept the baton and run the next leg in advancing BBISS’ mission in collaboration with the Georgia Tech sustainability community.”

John will continue as faculty member, educator, mentor, and researcher at Georgia Tech in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, maintaining his appointments as GRA Eminent Scholar in Sustainable Technologies. John has led BBISS since 2009, when the prior Institute for Sustainable Technology and Development (ISTD) was renamed in honor of Brook Byers (a Georgia Tech alumnus, sustainability advocate, and founding president of the Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm).

As a world-renowned researcher, John has made, and continues to make, critical contributions in the fields of water treatment (having co-authored the preeminent book on the subject which is used by 300 universities around the world), pollution prevention, energy harvesting technologies, the food-energy-water nexus, sustainable materials, sustainable urban infrastructure, sustainable engineering pedagogy, advanced modeling of urban systems, and urban form and policy.

Among John’s many awards and honors are: Member of the National Academy of Engineering; Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers; Member of the European Union Academy of Sciences; Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering; American Institute of Chemical Engineers 100 Eminent Chemical Engineers in Modern Times; Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke Prize from the National Water Research Institute; Simon W. Freese Environmental Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers; and the Chinese Friendship Award. The American Chemical Society will host a special symposium series to honor John’s long-term accomplishments in sustainability and physical chemical treatment processes for engineered water infrastructure systems at the Fall 2022 ACS meeting in Chicago.

As the leader of BBISS, John also fostered a dedicated team of staff, students, and faculty. The many students who have participated in sustainability research inherited his systems perspective and have carried it into their careers. He oversaw the development of several programs to support career development and collaboration, including the BBISS Graduate Fellows, the BBISS Faculty Fellows, and the Brook Byers Professors, all made possible with donations from Brook and Shawn Byers. He has been a tireless sponsor of early- and mid-career researchers, nominating them for awards and memberships on committees, and providing valuable advice. He has hosted visiting scholars from all over the world, engaging them in interdisciplinary research and the development of solutions to global sustainability challenges.

Julia Kubanek, Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research, shared the following comments: “Thank you, John, for the many programs you have initiated and the research that you have supported and inspired while leading BBISS. On behalf of all the faculty, students, and staff at Georgia Tech, I look forward to continuing to engage with you as a faculty member of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.”

Beril Toktay has made varied high-impact contributions to sustainability at Georgia Tech since she joined the Institute in 2005. She is the founding faculty director of the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business in the Scheller College of Business. Beril served as the co-architect and co-executive faculty director of Serve-Learn-Sustain, Georgia Tech’s campus-wide academic initiative offering students opportunities to collaborate with diverse partners on key sustainability challenges to help create sustainable communities. She was also Scheller College’s ADVANCE Professor, a role dedicated to the advancement of women and underrepresented minorities in academia. Beril is currently serving as co-chair of Sustainability Next, the sustainability and climate-focused strategic planning initiative of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Plan 2020-2030.

Beril is regarded as one of the most influential scholars in the field of sustainable operations management. Her research helped to introduce sustainability into the field of operations management, and she has had a significant hand in shaping its ongoing development, including serving as area editor in Environment, Energy and Sustainability for Operations Research, co-editor of the Business and Climate Change special issue for Management Science, and as department editor in Health, Environment and Society in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM). For her pioneering role in advancing sustainable business scholarship and her leadership in building a sustainable operations community, respectively, she was elected Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS MSOM Society in 2017 and received the MSOM Distinguished Service Award in 2018.

Beril values interdisciplinary research and education. Earlier in her Georgia Tech career, she served as the coordinator of ECLIPS (Georgia Tech Focused Research Program on Expanding Closed-Loops in Production Systems), an interdisciplinary group of faculty from management, engineering, and public policy interested in circular economy solutions. Her NSF-funded research on circular economy enterprise solutions involved collaborators from mechanical engineering and industrial and systems engineering. For her translational work in this area, she received the 2021 Sustainability Champion Award from the Global Electronics Council (formerly known as the Green Electronics Council). In 2017, Beril co-developed the Carbon Reduction Challenge program in collaboration with the Georgia Tech Global Change Program. This program challenges undergraduate student interns to identify a project that achieves significant reductions in carbon emissions and yields cost savings for their host company.

Through her role in the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, Beril has been instrumental in creating the Drawdown Georgia Business Compact, a statewide, business-led, collective action initiative aimed at achieving a just, prosperous, and sustainable transition towards net-zero carbon emissions in the state by 2050. In 2019, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce selected her as an E3 Impact Award Finalist, an award that recognizes “visionary individuals advancing sustainability in Atlanta.”

“Beril’s sustainability and business expertise as well as her experience leading teams and initiatives will ensure that BBISS remains on a strong footing and can continue to grow its impact,” said Julia Kubanek. “I’m especially excited about new ideas coming out of the Sustainability Next strategic planning effort that can contribute to the evolution of BBISS.”

Beril will lead BBISS until a new executive director is selected through a process that will be announced by the Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research later this year.

For decades, engineers and scientists have looked to nature for inspiration. One of the most famous examples is Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral. In 1955, he invented the hook and loop fastener (which he later named Velcro) after studying burdock burrs that kept sticking to his clothes during a hunting trip. For the birth of flight, the Wright brothers studied how birds change the angle of their wings to roll right or left while in the air. They would use the example to refine their control systems in the world’s first successful motor-operated airplane.  

A number of Georgia Tech researchers are also focused on biologically inspired design, ranging from the study of how honey bees transport pollen pellets to how small, snakelike lizards move.  

With the assistance of a $3 million National Science Foundation grant, Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) and the Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID) are partnering on a three year research project that introduces biologically inspired design to high school students throughout metro Atlanta.

Read the Full Story at the College of Engineering Website

“Thirty years ago not many folks were interested or thinking about sustainability. BBISS was. At Georgia Tech, we do cover many areas in sustainability, and right now after 30 years, BBISS has the history and the ability that can provide expertise to those that are seeking solutions.” 
Chaouki Abdallah, Executive Vice President for Research

The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) is one of Georgia Tech’s 10 interdisciplinary research institutes.