Does a dependency on a smart phone make you a cyborg? Does riding a bicycle? What about throwing spears at wooly mammoths?

The people behind the mics at the Georgia Tech Sci Fi Lab are deep in discussion. It’s Two-Minute Madness time on the WREK radio show. The hosts and special guests speed-talk through mentions of Dr. Who, iPhones, Lance Armstrong, Luke Skywalker, Neanderthals, the Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek, Terminator and zombies — all in the quest of determining, what, specifically, makes something a cyborg.

“We can say that this week's topic is ‘cyborgs,’ for example, but that can mean different things to different people: from Darth Vader, to Google Glass, to Daft Punk,” said Adam Le Doux, program manager and a host of the show. When not on the air, he’s a computational media major, a joint studies program between the College of Computing and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) in Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. LMC is one of the coordinators of Sci Fi Lab along with the Georgia Tech Library and WREK 91.1 FM.

Since 2006, Sci Fi Lab has taken to the radio waves to discuss all things science fiction. Every Thursday at 7 p.m. a group of culture studies researchers and computer thinkers gather to discuss the spectrum of science fiction. The show has been picking up traction with the science fiction community, both locally and nationally.

"Six years into the program, we find that now we're approached by authors and artists who want to appear on the show, and we've even been studied in the University of Liverpool's grad program in Science Fiction Studies as an example of living science fiction," said Lisa Yaszek, a professor in LMC and a behind-the-scenes Sci Fi Lab organizer.

October’s guests included players from the Atlanta Radio Theater Co., the director of an independent zombie apocalypse film, Georgia Tech computing professors and actor Frank Langella from “Robot and Frank.”

“We try to cover the best in current and popular science fiction from all media — literature, film, television — and we try to tie that in with the real science and research that occurs on campus every day,” said Justin Ellis, who shares hosting duties with Le Doux.

Ellis serves as associate producer for the show and works at the Georgia Tech Library. His time on the development committee for the science fiction collection connected him with Yaszek. She thought there was a strong role for the library to provide academic foundations for the show, so Ellis signed on.

“I think the fact that we try and tackle both the ‘pop’ side — literature and entertainment — and the real science, research side is one way to bridge the gap between the sciences and the liberal arts,” said Ellis. “Many of the topics discussed in Sci-Fi literature and media are extrapolated from, or have some root in, real science.”

At the start of two-minute madness during the cyborg hour, Ellis shares his enthusiasm for wearable computing. He muses that he would be game for a cybernetic implant in his arm.

Le Doux quickly counters that that could be problematic in a light saber battle.

It’s a discussion that underscores how Le Doux describes the show, as “a living laboratory for the intersection of liberal arts and science.” It’s a concept with which he identifies personally.

“My studies are evenly split between computer science and the liberal arts — communication, culture, design — so this kind of cross-pollination is something I'm into,” said Le Doux.

It’s also something that’s unique to Georgia Tech and its students. Sci Fi Lab is one way to expand that intersection beyond the campus and into the greater community.

“In the wider culture we tend to have a gap between the arts and the sciences, but both sides would gain a lot if they worked more closely together, and I like to think there is an increasing awareness of this,” said Le Doux. “I think what makes the Sci Fi Lab unique are the combined perspectives of the participants.”

During the cyborg hour, Ellis interviewed Georgia Tech faculty about their work. In a telling demonstration, Thad Starner, associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, challenged Clint Zeagler, a research scientist in the College of Architecture, to a picture race. Starner tapped his Google Glasses and secured a photo nearly instantaneously. Zeagler was forced to wait for his phone to turn on before launching a photo app.

Then they talked about getting inspiration from fashion design and Terminator movies. The intersection of arts and science is unavoidable. Sci Fi Lab serves as the petri dish for deeper investigation.

Sci Fi Lab airs weekly on Thursdays at 7 p.m., WREK 91.1 FM. Archived shows can be found at www.wrek.org/scifilab. Photos courtesy Jason Ellis.

Does a dependency on a smart phone make you a cyborg? Does riding a bicycle? What about throwing spears at wooly mammoths?

The people behind the mics at the Georgia Tech Sci Fi Lab are deep in discussion. It’s Two-Minute Madness time on the WREK radio show. The hosts and special guests speed-talk through mentions of Dr. Who, iPhones, Lance Armstrong, Luke Skywalker, Neanderthals, the Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek, Terminator and zombies — all in the quest of determining, what, specifically, makes something a cyborg.

“We can say that this week's topic is ‘cyborgs,’ for example, but that can mean different things to different people: from Darth Vader, to Google Glass, to Daft Punk,” said Adam Le Doux, program manager and a host of the show. When not on the air, he’s a computational media major, a joint studies program between the College of Computing and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) in Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. LMC is one of the coordinators of Sci Fi Lab along with the Georgia Tech Library and WREK 91.1 FM.

Since 2006, Sci Fi Lab has taken to the radio waves to discuss all things science fiction. Every Thursday at 7 p.m. a group of culture studies researchers and computer thinkers gather to discuss the spectrum of science fiction. The show has been picking up traction with the science fiction community, both locally and nationally.

"Six years into the program, we find that now we're approached by authors and artists who want to appear on the show, and we've even been studied in the University of Liverpool's grad program in Science Fiction Studies as an example of living science fiction," said Lisa Yaszek, a professor in LMC and a behind-the-scenes Sci Fi Lab organizer.

October’s guests included players from the Atlanta Radio Theater Co., the director of an independent zombie apocalypse film, Georgia Tech computing professors and actor Frank Langella from “Robot and Frank.”

“We try to cover the best in current and popular science fiction from all media — literature, film, television — and we try to tie that in with the real science and research that occurs on campus every day,” said Justin Ellis, who shares hosting duties with Le Doux.

Ellis serves as associate producer for the show and works at the Georgia Tech Library. His time on the development committee for the science fiction collection connected him with Yaszek. She thought there was a strong role for the library to provide academic foundations for the show, so Ellis signed on.

“I think the fact that we try and tackle both the ‘pop’ side — literature and entertainment — and the real science, research side is one way to bridge the gap between the sciences and the liberal arts,” said Ellis. “Many of the topics discussed in Sci-Fi literature and media are extrapolated from, or have some root in, real science.”

At the start of two-minute madness during the cyborg hour, Ellis shares his enthusiasm for wearable computing. He muses that he would be game for a cybernetic implant in his arm.

Le Doux quickly counters that that could be problematic in a light saber battle.

It’s a discussion that underscores how Le Doux describes the show, as “a living laboratory for the intersection of liberal arts and science.” It’s a concept with which he identifies personally.

“My studies are evenly split between computer science and the liberal arts — communication, culture, design — so this kind of cross-pollination is something I'm into,” said Le Doux.

It’s also something that’s unique to Georgia Tech and its students. Sci Fi Lab is one way to expand that intersection beyond the campus and into the greater community.

“In the wider culture we tend to have a gap between the arts and the sciences, but both sides would gain a lot if they worked more closely together, and I like to think there is an increasing awareness of this,” said Le Doux. “I think what makes the Sci Fi Lab unique are the combined perspectives of the participants.”

During the cyborg hour, Ellis interviewed Georgia Tech faculty about their work. In a telling demonstration, Thad Starner, associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, challenged Clint Zeagler, a research scientist in the College of Architecture, to a picture race. Starner tapped his Google Glasses and secured a photo nearly instantaneously. Zeagler was forced to wait for his phone to turn on before launching a photo app.

Then they talked about getting inspiration from fashion design and Terminator movies. The intersection of arts and science is unavoidable. Sci Fi Lab serves as the petri dish for deeper investigation.

Sci Fi Lab airs weekly on Thursdays at 7 p.m., WREK 91.1 FM. Archived shows can be found at www.wrek.org/scifilab. Photos courtesy Jason Ellis.

Adolfo Rocco, a graduate student assistant studying under SCL faculty members Alan Erera and Alejandro Toriello, recently earned his PhD after successfully defending his thesis "Service Network Design for Parcel Trucking". Adolfo's research focuses on applications and technologies that use optimization techniques to solve complex real-world problems. Its relevance to supply chain and logistics revolves around last-mile logistics, an essential part of the economy involving the transportation of goods from producers to end-consumers. As a result of the explosive growth of e-commerce in the past decade, e-commerce sales ratios have nearly tripled globally and demand for last-mile delivery is expected to grow 78% globally by 2030. One of the main objectives of last-mile delivery logistics is to deliver packages as affordably, quickly, and efficiently as possible.

Adolfo’s dissertation research involved a large-scale package express service network design in collaboration with one of the largest courier companies in China. The objective of the project was to support the growth and evolution of the intercity logistics network (expanding coverage, offering tighter service levels, and improving efficiency). The challenge was to build flat network models given large problem size, time requirements for package movement, and consideration for relevant operational constraints. The first phase of the project focused on a detailed intracity scheduling service network design problem for megacities and developing a simple rated-based model to design shuttle and commodity paths. The next project phase focused on linehaul consolidation planning, and specifically, determining the most cost-effective hubs for cross-docking activities through developing decomposition greedy approaches that employ smaller tractable integer programming problems. In the final project phase, the focus was on a freight flow plan that conforms generalized in-tree structure and which basically generalize the in-tree concept. A main goal of the project was to build a large-scale plan when hub selection is not a concern, time requirements are relevant, and conformity and enforcement of a generalized in-tree structure that enhances operational realism is accomplished. 

When asked why Rocco was interested in this specific research area, he commented, "I am passionate about employing operations research techniques to solve challenging real-world problems. I strongly believe that city logistics plays a major role in the economy because of the growth in world population and e-commerce in past years. City logistics directly impacts the lives of people and, if not addressed correctly, can have a negative impact on quality of life. Advances in scientific methodologies and computer capabilities permit us to employ enabling cutting-edge technology to tackle these challenges appropriately. This is an exciting field that I yearn more people get involved with."
 
Before being accepted into the PhD program, Adolfo worked for five years at an operations research consulting firm in Chile building optimization models for a Workforce Management technology system. In the summer of 2019 he interned at Delta, developing an approach to increase revenue through routing optimization. In the summer of 2020, Rocco interned with the worldwide capacity planning operations research group at Amazon, enhancing scheduling models for customer service agents. After earning his PhD, Adolfo will join Amazon as a Research Scientist working with the team he previously interned with. 

Karen Fite, who, for the past 18 months has led the Georgia Institute of Technology’s economic development efforts as interim vice president and director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2), has retired after more than 27 years of service.

David Bridges, director of EI2’s Economic Development Lab (EDL), will assume the interim vice president role effective Jan. 1, 2021.

EI2 is the largest and most comprehensive university-based program of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization, and economic development in the United States. 

Prior to leading EI2, Fite ran the unit’s Business & Industry Services group of programs, comprised of the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP), EI2’s largest economic development offering. The group also includes the Safety, Health, and Environmental Services (SHES), Atlanta MBDA Centers, Contracting Education Academy, Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center (GTPAC), and the Southeastern Trade Adjustment Assistance Center (SETAAC) programs.

Before taking on that role, Fite was GaMEP director.

“Over the years at Georgia Tech, I have been privileged to serve in a wide variety of capacities — assisting companies with government procurement, their implementation of quality management systems and Lean Manufacturing protocols, the launch of a Lean Healthcare initiative, creating community economic development research and strategic plans, and directing the GaMEP,” Fite said.

“As interim vice president, I have had the opportunity to interact with virtually every EI2 employee. Working with such a talented group of employees of EI2 has been an honor because across the board they are passionate about their work, dedicated to Georgia Tech’s mission of progress and service by serving clients, and continually looking to innovate, improve, and expand our services to help create long lasting and meaningful impact not only in Georgia and across the country, but around the world.”

Chaouki T. Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research said Fite was a valued member of his leadership team.

“She has been a very effective and engaging leader,” Abdallah said. “She’s brought me solutions, given me critical feedback and has been an invaluable partner. Georgia Tech is lucky to have had her contributions for so long.”

Fite has a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Miami and a bachelor’s in health systems from Georgia Tech. In 2018, she achieved the faculty rank of principal extension professional, Georgia Tech’s highest professional extension faculty rank.

“We are fortunate to have someone of David Bridges’ caliber who can not only build on Karen’s legacy but also brings a wealth of experience and economic development successes,” Abdallah said.

Bridges, who joined EI2 in 1994, authored, co-authored or contributed to more than 100 economic development grants totaling more than $40 million. He assisted in the formation of the two proof-of-concept units — the Global Center for Medical Innovation, a Tech affiliate in the medical device space, and I3L, a health information technology innovation hub.

Beyond Georgia, Bridges helped catalyze the development of the Soft Landings program to bring companies from overseas to the United States. He also helped to establish the I-Corps Puerto Rico program as the National Science Foundation’s first I-Corps program ever offered to teams from that community.

He also supported the expansion of technology extension programs in Chile and Colombia, built a new program in professional development around innovation and technology commercialization, and expanded Georgia Tech’s presence by helping to build startup ecosystems around the Institute’s international campuses and in Latin America.

Bridges and his EDL team have also implemented ecosystem building projects for numerous countries including Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Argentina, Guatemala, South Africa, China, Korea, and Japan.

- Péralte Paul 

Jialei Chen, a doctoral student in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and a graduate research assistant in the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI), won two Best Student Paper Awards at this year’s 2020 INFORMS Conference. The annual INFORMS conference on business analytics and operations research brings together nearly 1,000 leading analytics professionals and industry experts to share ideas, network and learn about a range of current topics and trends that can help businesses and organizations improve their analytics prowess by applying science to the art of business.

Chen won the Best Student Paper Award in the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability track for “Adaptive Design for Gaussian Process Regression under Censoring.” This paper presented an experimental design and modeling method for censored physical experiments. Censoring is commonly encountered in experimentation due to the limits in a measurement device, safety considerations of the experimenter, and a fixed experimental time budget. To tackle this, he proposed a novel adaptive design method, which first estimates the possibility of censoring and then adaptively chooses design points to minimize predictive uncertainty under censoring. He demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method in two real-world applications on surgical planning and wafer manufacturing.

Chen received the Best Student Paper Runner-up Award in the Data Mining track for “APIK: A Physics-Informed Kriging Model with Partial Differential Equations.” This paper presented a learning framework that combines limited data and the auxiliary partial differential equations. One of the key challenges in applying state-of-the-art machine learning methods in real-world engineering applications is that the available measurement data is scarce. In this work, he proposed to incorporate the auxiliary partial differential equations in the learning model and therefore improve the predive performance. The proposed APIK model can leverage linear and nonlinear PDEs and enjoy simple and closed-form prediction and uncertainty quantification. He applied the proposed method to two real-world applications on flow dynamics and thermal processes.

Chen’s advisors for both papers are A. Russell Chandler III Professor Roshan Joseph and Harold E. Smalley Professor Chuck Zhang.

“I’m honored to have won best student paper award in the quality, statistics, and reliability track at INFORMS 2020, and to have another paper win second place in the data mining track,” said Chen. “My research focuses on engineering-driven learning methodologies, and data-driven modeling for complex engineering and manufacturing systems. The two awards are a great encouragement for me and inspire me to accomplish more in-depth and impactful works in the future. I would like to express my highest gratitude to my supervisors, professors Chuck Zhang and Roshan Joseph. I would also like to thank the support and assistance from GTMI, which helped to make the two projects possible.”

The Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute (SCL) is the largest such group in the world, and it provides researchers with many opportunities to help solve global supply chain and logistics problems. The latest addition is the SIReN (Sentient Immersive Response Networks) Lab, dedicated to research leveraging immersive technologies to enhance human capabilities for engineering and managing supply chains and logistic systems.

The SIReN Lab is an associate international laboratory, the result of a partnership between SCL’s Physical Internet Center and IMT Mines Albi, part of the Mines-Telecom Institute in France. The two organizations have historically collaborated on research surrounding artificial intelligence and its interface with these immersive technologies. The SIReN Lab is an extension and formalization of that relationship.

The U.S. arm of the lab is housed in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and is directed by Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and professor in ISyE. Montreuil is also co-director
of SCL and director of the Physical Internet Center. The French lab is led by Frederick Benaben, head of the Interoperability of Organizations research team at IMT Mines Albi. Because of the virtual nature of the work, it is possible to have researchers from both labs working on the same experiment, in the same environment, at the same time.

SIReN Lab research is centered around four main types of response networks — demand, health, humanitarian, and crisis — and the human response to them. A demand response network focuses on how the supply network responds to demand and how to prepare for this response, rather than the other way around. The health and humanitarian response networks, which have become increasingly visible due to the Covid-19 pandemic, relate to issues like disaster recovery and various healthcare supply chains.

The French lab has a significant emphasis on crisis response networks, in which a group of people work together to respond to a crisis in a smart, fair, and efficient manner.
“We currently have a crisis management project where 10 people in France and a few in the U.S. are working together at the same time in a digital twin environment,” said Benaben. “For example, we can have everyone in a building where they can fight a fire, but we can also have some of them in a virtual control room exchanging ideas and making decisions. The options are limitless.”

Researchers are using tools such as dashboards, simulations, games, and in some cases virtual or augmented reality to allow participants to see — and in some cases experience — a vivid picture of a situation with other players in the network.

“In augmented reality, we reinforce what participants see with facts, maps, graphs, and other information that enhance what they are experiencing,” explained Montreuil. “In virtual reality, we project the user into a virtual world, which can be a very vivid representa-tion of the current world, or it can be an abstract world. It can be a very powerful tool.”
“When we put someone in an environ-ment where they can touch, learn, train, experiment, and ultimately decide, it changes the way they approach the problem,” added Benaben. 
The French lab launched on Nov. 15, 2019. While the spring 2020 launch of the U.S. lab was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the team already has several projects underway and is fully operational. Eventually, they would like to see additional SIReN labs join the network to further scale the work being conducted.

“We want to become a global leader in making response networks become more sentient and immersive,” said Montreuil. “This is an exciting new approach that we are bringing to ISyE and to the domain.”

The Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute (SCL) is the largest such group in the world, and it provides researchers with many opportunities to help solve global supply chain and logistics problems. The latest addition is the SIReN (Sentient Immersive Response Networks) Lab, dedicated to research leveraging immersive technologies to enhance human capabilities for engineering and managing supply chains and logistic systems.

The SIReN Lab is an associate international laboratory, the result of a partnership between SCL’s Physical Internet Center and IMT Mines Albi, part of the Mines-Telecom Institute in France. The two organizations have historically collaborated on research surrounding artificial intelligence and its interface with these immersive technologies. The SIReN Lab is an extension and formalization of that relationship.

The U.S. arm of the lab is housed in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and is directed by Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and professor in ISyE. Montreuil is also co-director
of SCL and director of the Physical Internet Center. The French lab is led by Frederick Benaben, head of the Interoperability of Organizations research team at IMT Mines Albi. Because of the virtual nature of the work, it is possible to have researchers from both labs working on the same experiment, in the same environment, at the same time.

SIReN Lab research is centered around four main types of response networks — demand, health, humanitarian, and crisis — and the human response to them. A demand response network focuses on how the supply network responds to demand and how to prepare for this response, rather than the other way around. The health and humanitarian response networks, which have become increasingly visible due to the Covid-19 pandemic, relate to issues like disaster recovery and various healthcare supply chains.

The French lab has a significant emphasis on crisis response networks, in which a group of people work together to respond to a crisis in a smart, fair, and efficient manner.
“We currently have a crisis management project where 10 people in France and a few in the U.S. are working together at the same time in a digital twin environment,” said Benaben. “For example, we can have everyone in a building where they can fight a fire, but we can also have some of them in a virtual control room exchanging ideas and making decisions. The options are limitless.”

Researchers are using tools such as dashboards, simulations, games, and in some cases virtual or augmented reality to allow participants to see — and in some cases experience — a vivid picture of a situation with other players in the network.

“In augmented reality, we reinforce what participants see with facts, maps, graphs, and other information that enhance what they are experiencing,” explained Montreuil. “In virtual reality, we project the user into a virtual world, which can be a very vivid representa-tion of the current world, or it can be an abstract world. It can be a very powerful tool.”
“When we put someone in an environ-ment where they can touch, learn, train, experiment, and ultimately decide, it changes the way they approach the problem,” added Benaben. 
The French lab launched on Nov. 15, 2019. While the spring 2020 launch of the U.S. lab was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the team already has several projects underway and is fully operational. Eventually, they would like to see additional SIReN labs join the network to further scale the work being conducted.

“We want to become a global leader in making response networks become more sentient and immersive,” said Montreuil. “This is an exciting new approach that we are bringing to ISyE and to the domain.”

Decarbonizing U.S. electricity production will require both construction of renewable energy sources and retirement of power plants now operated by fossil fuels. A generator-level model described in the Dec. 4 issue of the journal Science suggests that most fossil fuel power plants could complete normal lifespans and still close by 2035 because so many facilities are nearing the end of their operational lives.

Meeting a 2035 deadline for decarbonizing U.S. electricity production, as proposed by the incoming U.S. presidential administration, would eliminate just 15% of the capacity-years left in plants powered by fossil fuels, says the article by Emily Grubert, a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher. Plant retirements are already underway, with 126 gigawatts of fossil generator capacity taken out of production between 2009 and 2018, including 33 gigawatts in 2017 and 2018 alone.

“Creating an electricity system that does not contribute to climate change is actually two processes — building carbon-free infrastructure like solar plants, and closing carbon-based infrastructure like coal plants,” said Grubert, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “My work shows that because a lot of U.S. fossil fuel plants are already pretty old, the target of decarbonization by 2035 would not require us to shut most of these plants down earlier than their typical lifespans.”

Of U.S. fossil fuel-fired generation capacity, 73% (630 out of 840 gigawatts) will reach the end of its typical lifespan by 2035; that percentage would reach 96% by 2050, she says in the Policy Forum article published in Science. About 13% of U.S. fossil fuel-fired generation capacity (110 gigawatts) operating in 2018 had already exceeded its typical lifespan. 

Because typical lifespans are averages, some generators operate for longer than expected. Allowing facilities to run until they retire is thus likely insufficient for a 2035 decarbonization deadline, the article notes. Closure deadlines that strand assets relative to reasonable lifespan expectations, however, could create financial liability for debts and other costs. The research found that a 2035 deadline for completely retiring fossil fuel-based electricity generators would only strand about 15% (1,700 gigawatt-years) of capacity life, along with about 20% (380,000 job-years) of direct power plant and fuel extraction jobs that existed in 2018. 

In 2018, fossil fuel facilities operated in 1,248 of 3,141 counties, directly employing about 157,000 people at generators and fuel extraction facilities. Plant closure deadlines can improve outcomes for workers and host communities — providing additional certainty, for example, by enabling specific advance planning for things like remediation, retraining for displaced workers, and revenue replacements.

“Closing large industrial facilities like power plants can be really disruptive for the people who work there and live in the surrounding communities,” Grubert said. “We don't want to repeat the damage we saw with the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and ’80s, where people lost jobs, pensions, and stability without warning. We already know where the plants are, and who might be affected. Using the 2035 decarbonization deadline to guide explicit, community grounded planning for what to do next can help, even without a lot of financial support.”

Planning ahead will also help avoid creating new capital investment that may not be needed long-term. “We shouldn't build new fossil fuel power plants that would still be young in 2035, and we need to have explicit plans for closures both to ensure the system keeps working and to limit disruption for host communities,” she said. 

Underlying policies governing the retirement of fossil fuel-powered facilities is the concept of a “just transition” that ensures material well-being and distributional justice for individuals and communities affected by a transition from fossil to non-fossil electricity systems. Determining which assets are “stranded,” or required to close earlier than expected, is vital for managing compensation for remaining debt or lost revenue, Grubert said in the article.

CITATION: Emily Grubert, “Fossil electricity retirement deadlines for a just transition” (Science, 2020). https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6521/1171

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Writer: John Toon

When one or more coronavirus vaccines receives FDA emergency use authorization, it will launch a public health and logistics initiative unlike any in U.S. history. 

Hundreds of millions of doses will have to distributed nationwide and kept cold until healthcare professionals can administer not one, but two doses to each person. And enough skeptical members of the population will have to be persuaded to receive the vaccine to slow virus transmission.

Beyond those challenges, the distribution effort will have to adapt to unexpected and uneven demand; accommodate recipients who may not return on time for a second dose; train hundreds of thousands of staff from clinics, pharmacies, doctor’s offices, and hospitals; prioritize serving high-risk groups first while encouraging others to wait — all while under tremendous pressure to get the much-anticipated vaccines into use as case counts and the death toll continue rising.

“Time is of the essence because the virus is already so widespread,” said Pinar Keskinocak, the William W. George Chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “With the pressure on our timeline, knowledge of how quickly the disease is spreading, and the broad U.S. and global need, I can’t think of a comparable public health initiative that has ever been undertaken.”

Shipping and Keeping Hundreds of Millions of Doses Cold

Three vaccines, produced by Moderna, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and Oxford-AstraZeneca, are expected to be available first. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will need to be kept ultra-cold — minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit — on its journey to individual Americans. The Moderna drug won’t have such demanding conditions, but both it and the Pfizer vaccine will tax the existing “cold chain” that keeps vaccines and other temperature-sensitive products in a narrow range of conditions during transport and storage. 

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will have much less stringent requirements and faster ramp-up in capacity, though early testing suggests its efficacy may be lower than the others. That will create tradeoffs between efficacy versus access and speed in distribution.

Plans already exist to get the vaccines from manufacturers to the states, each of which has developed its own distribution plan. Keskinocak worries mostly about “last mile” plans — getting the vaccines to where they will be injected — and getting individuals to those locations.

“Access is going to be a challenge,” she said. “You may be able to get it to locations where it can be distributed, but you have to make sure the people who really need the vaccine can easily access those locations.”

Cold chain transportation, tracking, tracing, and storage already exist in most areas, but refrigeration could be challenging for rural areas that may be at the end of the chain, especially for the vaccine requiring very cold temperatures beyond the capability of freezers found in most doctor’s offices and clinics. And cold can sometimes be too cold, Keskinocak said.

“We often think about keeping it cold, but sometimes it may be too cold, which is not good. It’s not just whether the temperature exceeded the required level, but also whether it went below that. It is important to keep the vaccine exactly at the required temperature level.”

Pfizer has developed a shipping container that includes a temperature tracking device — and 50 pounds of dry ice to maintain the right temperature during transit. Because it is contained in small vials and the liquid vaccine is diluted for use, the overall volume being shipped will be relatively small, limiting the number of packages that will be moved and stored, Keskinocak noted.

Ultimately, the cold chain may play a significant role in vaccine effectiveness. Currently, the vaccines being produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are reported to have a higher efficacy than the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine — but only if they can be maintained at the proper temperatures. The timing, magnitude, and duration of temperature fluctuations during transport and before administration could affect that in ways that may be difficult to assess.

“Our current modeling shows that a vaccine that is less effective but that can be distributed more quickly and more widely might work better in some settings than a more effective vaccine, thereby reducing the total number of infections in the population,” Keskinocak said.

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Expectations are that the nation is hungry for a vaccine to escape the horrors of Covid-19. But a recent Gallup survey shows that only 58% of respondents said they planned to receive the vaccine when it becomes available. Boosting that percentage will require a massive communications effort to overcome vaccine reluctance and concerns fueled by the uneven nature of the U.S. pandemic response.

“If we can get the vaccine to locations where people can access it, and we have the necessary syringes, supplies, and PPE, as well as the healthcare staff to administer the injections, it’s not clear that people will come to receive it in large enough numbers,” Keskinocak said. “That’s one major component missing from a lot of the plans that I see at the state level.”

The communications program will have to run in parallel to the vaccine distribution, and they have to be coordinated so that supply meets demand.

“Public health communication and dissemination of information at the right time and in the right language is going to be at least as important and challenging as the logistics of distributing the vaccine,” Keskinocak said. “Communication is going to shape demand to a large extent. If one is more effective than the other, we will have a mismatch between demand and supply.”

Different demographic populations have different levels of trust for medicine in general and vaccines in particular, she said, so communications campaigns will have to focus on issues of concern to those groups. Unexpected variations in vaccine demand caused by these concerns could also create logistical uncertainties.

“We can try to forecast demand, and ship supplies to those locations,” she said. “But historically, we have seen that demand can exceed supply in one location while inventory builds up in another location. We need to avoid this situation of unmet demand and unused vaccine.”

Another issue will be the two doses necessary for the vaccine. The second dose must be received within a narrow range of time for the two-dose vaccine to be effective. Should a second dose be reserved for every person receiving a first dose, or should the goal be to get as many doses out as possible?

“Some people may never show up to be vaccinated, while others will receive the first dose, but may not come back for the second dose,” she said. 

Getting the Program Started

The first available doses will likely go to healthcare workers and first responders who are on the front lines of battling Covid-19. That is expected to be the easier part of vaccination logistics, and the lessons learned there should help with the much more massive vaccination campaign for high-risk individuals and the general public.

As vaccine production and distribution capacity ramp up, other groups will be next in line. While distributing small batches as manufacturers produce it can create some supply challenges, that also allows the system to more easily adjust to unexpected demand.

Even though distributing and administering vaccines is something the U.S. healthcare system does routinely, the size and timeline of this project are unprecedented, Keskinocak noted.

Beyond the logistical and communications needs, the vaccination program will also have a strong information technology component. Administration will likely be by appointment, and each injection will have to be reported to a vaccine registry to provide a record of which vaccines people have received and when.

Vaccinating People Who May Already Be Immune

It’s estimated that the number of reported Covid-19 cases may be just 10% of the actual number of infections in the U.S. Assuming recovery from the virus confers immunity for some period of time means there may be quite a few people who don’t actually need the vaccine right away to be protected. But there are currently no plans to determine whether recipients are already immune before they receive the vaccine.

“There are a lot of people out there who have some level of immunity to the coronavirus,” Keskinocak said. “The plans I’ve seen don’t include the serological testing that would be needed to identify people with some level of immunity, which could be around 30% of the population by the time the vaccine gets out to the general public.”

Testing for immune antibodies could be done ahead of the vaccination program, but that would create an extra step in a process that is already quite complicated. Healthcare systems such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs or certain private insurance plans could include that step, especially if vaccine supplies lag behind demand.

“The big complexity is timing,” she said. “Once vaccines become available, you’ll want to deliver them as quickly as possible to as many people as possible in a very short time frame.”

Annual vaccination campaigns for the seasonal flu set ambitious goals for the population levels they want to reach, but the time challenges will be much greater for the coronavirus vaccine.

“The seasonal flu vaccine becomes available months before the virus spreads broadly, so we have quite a bit of time to administer it before we get into the peak of the flu season,” she said. “We have been in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic for several months now. We are really late in the game, so we don’t have the luxury of time.”

Keskinocak is cautiously optimistic that the challenges will ultimately be addressed.

“There are certainly still lots of unknowns,” she said. “But the state plans I have seen look reasonable from a supply chain standpoint. Some of the decisions will be made once the states receive the vaccine, and exactly how they do it will be somewhat up to the local jurisdictions. There are still many things that need to be decided to make this unprecedented initiative live up to its goals.”

Research News
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: John Toon

Georgia Institute of Technology is a governing member of the BioIndustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE), a nonprofit that recently won a seven-year, $87 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

Created by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, BioMADE will collaborate with public and private entities to advance sustainable and reliable bioindustrial manufacturing technologies. Headquartered at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, BioMADE includes some of the largest bioindustrial manufacturing employers in the U.S. working in conjunction with some of the top educators in the world.

In support of this collaboration, the $87 million in DoD funding will be combined with more than $187 million in non-federal cost-share from 31 companies, 57 colleges and universities, six nonprofits, and two venture capital groups across 31 states. 

Pamela Peralta-Yahya, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is Tech’s representative to BioMADE’s Leadership Council, which will set the organization’s funding priorities.

Peralta-Yahya says, “An incredible cross section of Georgia Tech faculty contributed to the BioMADE proposal; over 30 faculty members, spanning five Schools across the College of Science, College of Engineering, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.”

She notes: “Georgia Tech’s involvement in BioMADE is poised to catalyze interdisciplinary collaborations across the university, from data science and downstream processing to supply chain logistics and the policy, legal, and biosafety implications of bioindustrial applications. The projects funded by BioMADE will give undergraduates and graduate students a springboard to the emerging biomanufacturing and related areas.”

Mark Styczynski, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular who is Tech’s representative to the BioMADE Technical Committee, says: “Georgia Tech will be a member of BioMADE at the governing level, the highest level of engagement for academic institutions. We are excited about the resulting opportunities for Georgia Tech to bring to bear its manufacturing, chemical, and biochemical expertise on new applications and focus areas in the biomanufacturing space.”

He adds: “Our involvement in this area is a great complement to other biomanufacturing efforts at Georgia Tech and will contribute to a rapidly growing bioeconomy in Georgia.”

Through a close relationship with DoD and the Military Services, BioMADE will work to establish long-term and dependable bioindustrial manufacturing capabilities for a wide array of products. Anticipated bioindustrial manufacturing applications include the following products: chemicals, solvents, detergents, reagents, plastics, electronic films, fabrics, polymers, agricultural products (e.g. feedstock), crop protection solutions, food additives, fragrances, and flavors.  

BioMADE’s efforts will examine and advance industry-wide standards, tools, and measurements; mature foundational technologies; foster a resilient bioindustrial manufacturing ecosystem; advance education and workforce development; and support the establishment and growth of supply chain intermediaries that are essential for a robust U.S. bioeconomy. Other important focus areas include challenges related to biosafety and security and ethical, legal, and societal considerations.

Stefan France, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry is Tech’s representative to BioMADE’s Education and Workforce Committee, which will help craft and implement the organization’s strategic plan.

France explains that this committee “will concentrate its efforts in three major areas: curriculum and training for the bioindustrial workforce, promoting awareness of career opportunities, and coordination across the STEM community, the biomanufacturing ecosystem, and the training pipeline—everything from K-12 to community and technical colleges to four-year colleges, graduate programs, and post-graduate training.”