While Italy’s 2026 Winter Olympics draw the world’s attention to snow and ice, Georgia Tech researchers are also confronting cold at its most extreme.

Some labs in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) use liquid nitrogen and liquid helium to chill cryogenic test systems to as low as 4 Kelvins (K), or -452.47 degrees Fahrenheit (F), temperatures that rival the coldest regions of deep space.

At this point, materials and electronic devices stop behaving in familiar ways, which is exactly why ECE researchers use these extreme conditions to explore and develop new semiconductor technologies.

“Electronics are very temperature dependent,” Professor John Cressler said, whose lab houses some of these cryogenic test systems. “Whether you see it or not, every electronic you buy has a tested temperature spec associated with it.”

Current commercially sold devices, including most cell phones, are made to run between 32 F and 85 F. Researchers in ECE test across a far wider range, as they develop technology with extraterrestrial and quantum computing applications in mind.

Other ECE teams work in natural extremes, carrying instruments into polar regions where cold creates challenges that no lab can fully replicate.

Just as cold pushes athletes in different ways, it guides ECE research down its own distinct paths.

Read the full story on the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering's website.

A new robot could solve one of the biggest challenges facing indoor farmers: manual pollination.

Indoor farms, also known as vertical farms, are popular among agricultural researchers and are expanding across the agricultural industry. Some benefits they have over outdoor farms include:

• Year-round production of food crops
• Less water and land requirements
• Not needing pesticides
• Reducing carbon emissions from shipping
• Reducing food waste

Additionally, some studies indicate that indoor farms produce more nutritious food for urban communities. 

However, these farms are often inaccessible to birds, bees, and other natural pollinators, leaving the pollination process to humans. The tedious process must be completed by hand for each flower to ensure the indoor crop flourishes.

Ai-Ping Hu, a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), has spent years exploring methods to efficiently pollinate flowering plants and food crops in indoor farms to find a way to efficiently pollinate flower plants and food crops in indoor farms.

Hu, Assistant Professor Shreyas Kousik of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and a rotating group of student interns have developed a robot prototype that may be up to the task.

The robot can efficiently pollinate plants that have both male and female reproductive parts. These plants only require pollen to be transferred from one part to the other rather than externally from another flower.

Natural pollinators perform this task outdoors, but Hu said indoor farmers often use a paintbrush or electric tootbrush to ensure these flowers are pollinated. 

Knowing the Pose

An early challenge the research team addressed was teaching the robot to identify the “pose” of each flower. Pose refers to a flower’s orientation, shape, and symmetry. Knowing these details ensures precise delivery of the pollen to maximize reproductive success. 

“It’s crucial to know exactly which way the flowers are facing,” Hu said.

“You want to approach the flower from the front because that’s where all the biological structures are. Knowing the pose tells you where the stem is. Our device grasps the stem and shakes it to dislodge the pollen.

“Every flower is going to have its own pose, and you need to know what that is within at least 10 degrees.”

Computer Vision Breakthrough

Harsh Muriki is a robotics master’s student at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, who used computer vision to solve the pose problem while interning for Hu and GTRI.

Muriki attached a camera to a FarmBot to capture images of strawberry plants from dozens of angles in a small garden in front of Georgia Tech’s Food Processing Technology Building. The FarmBot is an XYZ-axis robot that waters and sprays pesticides on outdoor gardens, though it is not capable of pollination.

“We reconstruct the images of the flower into a 3D model and use a technique that converts the 3D model into multiple 2D images with depth information,” Muriki said. “This enables us to send them to object detectors.”

Muriki said he used a real-time object detection system called YOLO (You Only Look Once) to classify objects. YOLO is known for identifying and classifying objects in a single pass.

Ved Sengupta, a computer engineering major who interned with Muriki, fine-tuned the algorithms that converted 3D images into 2D.

“This was a crucial part of making robot pollination possible,” Sengupta said. “There is a big gap between 3D and 2D image processing.

“There’s not a lot of data on the internet for 3D object detection, but there’s a ton for 2D. We were able to get great results from the converted images, and I think any sector of technology can take advantage of that.”

Sengupta, Muriki, and Hu co-authored a paper about their work that was accepted to the 2025 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Atlanta.

Measuring Success

The pollination robot, built in Kousik’s Safe Robotics Lab, is now in the prototype phase. 

Hu said the robot can do more than pollinate. It can also analyze each flower to determine how well it was pollinated and whether the chances for reproduction are high.

“It has an additional capability of microscopic inspection,” Hu said. “It’s the first device we know of that provides visual feedback on how well a flower was pollinated.”

For more information about the robot, visit the Safe Robotics Lab project page.

Written by: Shweta Ram and Seungho Lee

What does it mean to design systems that endure even after major disruptions? This question framed the 2026 Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Sustainability Showcase, where conversations over two days spanned the Georgia coast, wildfire modeling, AI data centers, infrastructure, community engagement, and the joy of working for a more sustainable and resilient world. Across disciplines and scales, a unifying theme emerged: resilience is not a single solution. It is a systems-level challenge requiring integration across science and technology, policy, communities, and human experience.

From Coastlines to Communities

The showcase opened with a keynote from President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough on wildlife management and resiliency along Georgia’s coast. The conversation that followed between Clough and BBISS Executive Director Beril Toktay highlighted the interconnection between public policy, wilderness conservation, community leadership, and scientific research. The session highlighted not only the urgency of protecting fragile ecosystems, but also that resilience works best when it is community-focused and community-driven.

Subsequent panels continued this systemic perspective. Sessions on community engagement, biotechnology-derived, climate-resilient plants, the flood resilience of Georgia coastal communities, wildfire prediction and prevention, and infrastructure resilience analytics all emphasized that resilience depends on the synthesis of many disciplines.

Across sessions, researchers emphasized that infrastructure resilience must include governance frameworks informed by good science, community engagement based on trust, and sustained collaboration that seeks to constantly improve the science, policy, and stakeholder relationships. The researchers demonstrated that they understand their role to be greater than merely modeling risk, but as collaborators who translate research into practical solutions that communities can adopt, maintain, and trust.

AI Data Centers: A New Resilience Frontier

Day two shifted attention to data centers, which are emerging as a critical resilience frontier. As artificial intelligence systems scale rapidly, so does the infrastructure that powers them, as well as the growing realization that digital systems are physical systems. Conversations examined the feedback loops that play a significant role in determining environmental impacts, such as chip architecture, AI workloads, data center sustainability, appropriate AI usage, and who makes the decisions on data center infrastructure development. 

One of the most fascinating sessions came from Alexandria Smith, assistant professor in the School of Music at Georgia Tech. She presented an artistic yet algorithmic composition that sonified data from AI data centers. Through translating kilowatt-hour usage and interconnection data into immersive soundscapes, she reframed data centers not as static input-output machines, but as adaptive, living systems. Drawing inspiration from Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold without a brain or nervous system known for its innate problem-solving abilities, she invites the listener to imagine infrastructure that senses, adapts, and self-optimizes.

Campus as a Living Laboratory

In her session, Professor Jennifer Chirico, associate vice president of Sustainability, highlighted Georgia Tech’s 2024 Climate Action Plan, focusing on building energy efficiency, renewable integration, materials management, and mobility transitions. The plan frames the Georgia Tech campus as a test bed for resilience strategies — an ecosystem where research, operations, and policy intersect. Chirico highlighted several examples where the alignment between research and implementation was essential in moving projects from modeling to pilot projects to sustained institutional change.

Finding Joy in Climate Action

Rebecca Watts Hull, Matthew Realff, and Christie Stewart led an interactive discussion inspired by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s framework for accelerating long-term climate action. Participants were asked three simple questions: What are you good at? What work needs doing? What brings you joy? Sustainability and climate research are fields often defined by serious urgency, crisis narratives, and burnout. This session offered a personal framework for resilience where emotional sustainability, professional fulfillment, and joy matter just as much as the motivation to drive a mission ever forward.

Building a Shared Vision

The Sustainability Showcase concluded with a facilitated visioning session led by Kristin Janacek, associate director for Interdisciplinary Research Impact, and Beril Toktay. In small groups, leaders, researchers, and community members worked to define what resilience looks like for them.

After the conversations, several themes emerged:

• Resilience must move from research to practical and community-based solutions to sustained action.
• Networks create opportunity but require long-term stewardship to endure.
• Choosing the right metrics to measure resilience will galvanize efforts to strengthen it.
• Community capacity is at least as important as built infrastructure.

Over two days, it became clear that Georgia Tech is not approaching resilience as a narrow technical problem. It is approaching it as a systems challenge — one that spans coastlines, campuses, disciplines, data centers, the Appalachian Mountains, data models, the arts, and human relationships. Designing systems that endure requires more than innovation. It requires collaboration, stewardship, and a shared commitment to long-term impact. The conversations launched at this year’s BBISS Sustainability Showcase laid the foundation for continued coordination and ambitious action in the months ahead.

Traveling to the moon for scientific discovery is expensive. And even once you get there, operating a rover on the moon is nothing like driving on Earth — the uneven terrain, deep shadows, and unpredictable soil make autonomy essential.

So, what do you do if you want to design robots and their controlling algorithms for future moon visits? If you’re Yashwanth Nakka, you bring the moon to you.

Nakka has recreated the moon in a research lab at Georgia Tech, hauling in seven tons of basalt rock to mimic the look and feel of the lunar surface. With dark black walls and a bright light that simulates the sun’s glare, the Aerospace Robotics Lab (ARL) is the only one of its kind in a university setting.

This lab will help Nakka’s team of researchers understand how robotic rovers interact with the environment on the moon — how they perceive the terrain in different sunlight conditions, for example, and how they navigate across a surface that can easily swallow a rover wheel. 

“From a research perspective, many of today’s space mobility solutions still build upon algorithms developed two decades ago. This new lab positions us to pioneer the next generation of autonomous mobility technologies that can overcome unstructured terrain, environmental, and operational challenges. Advancing autonomous systems is critical to enabling deep-space exploration, supporting resource utilization, and empowering scientists to investigate new frontiers such as icy moons that may harbor subsurface oceans,” said Nakka, assistant professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

Unlike the Moon’s ultra-fine, clingy regolith that can coat equipment and cause severe wear and damage, Nakka’s lab uses carefully selected, gem-sized basalt rocks. This material allows researchers to realistically study how robots interact with granular terrain while avoiding the need for extensive protective equipment, making experimentation safer, more efficient, and easier to conduct. When robots are driving on the surface, they experience the same shifts and movements they would in the moondust.

Beginning this March in Perry, Georgia, the Georgia Arts Innovation Network (GAIN) will support arts‑related nonprofits and small businesses in Perry, Houston County, and surrounding counties in Middle Georgia. The six‑month pilot is funded by a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town grant and is the first EI² program dedicated specifically to the arts.

“Arts organizations contribute so much to the vibrancy of a community,” said Caley Landau, program manager for GAIN and marketing strategist at EI². “They help create a sense of place and provide the ‘something to do’ that small cities and towns want to offer residents, new workers, and prospective businesses. Our hope is to enhance the arts and cultural ecosystem in Middle Georgia by providing training and technical assistance to the organizations that produce art in the region.”

A Rural Community Already Investing in Placemaking

Perry was selected as the pilot location in part for its active downtown revitalization work and commitment to placemaking. Through the Georgia Economic Placemaking Collaborative, Perry city staff partnered with EI²’s Center for Economic Development Research to develop strategies for arts‑based community development.

“Working alongside the Georgia Tech team has been a wonderful experience,” said Alicia Hartley, downtown manager for the City of Perry. “We hope that participants walk away from the cohort inspired and empowered to activate their organizations in creative and meaningful ways.”

Listening First, Then Providing Targeted Support

The program will begin with a listening session to understand participating organizations’ needs. EI² will then design tailored workshops drawing from experts at Georgia Tech and beyond. Every other month, cohort members will meet for sessions on business practices, digital tools, operational efficiency, marketing, placemaking partnerships, and other areas that support long‑term sustainability.

“They sound like great ideas — murals, pop‑up exhibits, outdoor performances — but how do you really get down to the nuts and bolts of making them happen?” Landau said. “And how do you bring the right partners to the table? That’s what we’ll explore together.”

A Statewide Mission, Strengthened Through the Arts

As Georgia Tech’s economic development arm, EI² administers programs that support entrepreneurs, manufacturers, communities, and municipalities across the state and around the world.

“GAIN represents an important part of EI²’s comprehensive approach to economic development,” said David Bridges, vice president of EI². “It gives us another way to create impact in Georgia by applying our expertise to serve arts organizations that are vital to Georgia communities.”

Jason Freeman, associate vice provost for Georgia Tech Arts, noted that the pilot aligns with the Institute’s broader commitment to supporting arts, culture, and creativity statewide.

“Through GAIN, I’m excited to learn more about the arts ecosystem in Middle Georgia,” Freeman said. “The lessons we learn will inform both statewide collaborations and new initiatives emerging through our Creative Quarter innovation district on campus.”

Program Funding and Support

The pilot is funded through the NEA’s Our Town program, which supports projects integrating arts, culture, and design into community development. The Georgia Council for the Arts is partnering with EI² on cohort recruitment, curriculum development, and arts‑based placemaking strategies.

Recruitment has begun. Arts nonprofits and arts‑based businesses in Middle Georgia may apply at innovate.gatech.edu/gain/.

When Sam Lucas arrived at Georgia Tech in the summer of 2018 for the NNCI Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), he didn’t know that it would set the course for the next seven years of his academic and personal life.

At the time, he was an undergraduate at Mississippi State University (MSU) studying chemical engineering. He was fresh off a series of research opportunities, but was still unsure of what doing research full-time would look like or what he wanted to do post-undergraduate.

Now, Lucas has earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Georgia Tech with a focus on nanomaterial drug delivery for cancer immunotherapy. And according to him, the path from undergraduate to Ph.D. can be traced directly back to his REU.

Previously, Lucas had worked in labs in high school and his early college career, but those roles were mostly task-based.

“I'd started working in a lab at the University of Southern Mississippi my senior year of high school,” he said. “I was doing polymer coatings for corrosion resistance. Then I did some miscellaneous stuff at MSU. But the REU was interesting because it was in some ways the most structured research experience that I'd had to that point.”

During that summer, Lucas worked with Kim Curtis’ group in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He worked to understand how incorporating titanium oxide particles into cement can absorb pollutants when exposed to sunlight. It was his first hands-on, interdisciplinary research experience.

“That summer was significant both in starting to make sense what research could actually look like on a full-time day-to-day basis and also what being at Tech might be like.” 

Beyond the research, Lucas discovered that being on Georgia Tech’s campus was just as formative. Surrounded by peers who were similarly driven, and often similarly unsure about their paths, he began to see himself as a “real” researcher. Meetups with fellow REU students, sessions on research communication, and structured mentorship all gave him confidence.

The impact of Lucas’ REU experience didn’t end there. It helped him earn a spot in Cornell’s international research experience program (iREU) the following year. There, he worked on nanomaterials for cancer vaccine applications. The transition from cement technologies to vaccine applications became the bridge to his eventual Ph.D. focus. 

“The REU truly became a launchpad for Sam's career, as it has for others who have come through our program,” said Leslie O’Neill, education outreach manager. “Several of our former participants have returned to Georgia Tech for their Ph.D., and it’s because the experience gives them clarity about research and opens doors they didn’t even realize existed."

In 2020, Lucas arrived back on campus, where he enrolled in the  Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering’s Joint Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering program. As part of Susan Thomas’ lab, his research focused on nanomaterial drug delivery for cancer immunotherapy. He spent the next five and a half years working on immune system engineering and drug delivery systems. 

Although he had once imagined a career in oil and gas — a common trajectory for Mississippi State engineers — his REU experience pointed him in a new direction.

After defending his dissertation in 2025, Lucas is now continuing as a postdoctoral researcher in the Thomas Lab, contributing to nanomedicine projects while preparing for a future career in biotech or pharmaceuticals.

He credits the REU with giving him the clarity and confidence to pursue research at the highest level. His advice to undergraduates considering the program is simple: Go for it.

“If you apply for it and get an offer, just go ahead and do it,” said Lucas. “There’s not really a downside.” 

Christos Athanasiou, assistant professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2025 Eshelby Mechanics Award for Young Faculty. Presented annually by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the award recognizes rapidly emerging junior faculty who exemplify originality, depth, and impact in the development and application of mechanics.

The Eshelby Mechanics Award was established in 2012 in memory of Professor John Douglas Eshelby to promote the field of mechanics, among young researchers. The award will be formally presented at the 2026 Applied Mechanics Division Awards Banquet during the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in November.

Athanasiou and his team advance the fundamental mechanics and physics of materials and translates these insights into systems-level design strategies that address global challenges in resource efficiency and sustainable development. His research integrates advanced experimental methods capable of capturing material behavior under realistic operational conditions, mechanics-based design principles, and tailored AI- and physics-informed modeling frameworks.

Together, these efforts enable the development of life-cycle-efficient, cost-effective materials and structures for applications ranging from sustainable packaging to aerospace systems and space construction. His recent work published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) introduced a bioinspired framework to improve plastic recycling while addressing a foundational mechanics question: how can we build reliable structures from inherently variable materials?

Athanasiou is also the recipient of the 2024 NSF CAREER Award and the ASME Orr Early Career Award, and is a Climate Tech Fellow at the New York Climate Exchange.

The future of clean energy depends on algorithms as much as it does atoms.

Georgia Tech’s Qi Tang is building machine learning (ML) models to accelerate nuclear fusion research, making it more affordable and more accurate. Backed by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Tang’s work brings clean, sustainable energy closer to reality.

Tang has received an Early Career Research Program (ECRP) award from the DOE Office of Science. The grant supports Tang with $875,000 disbursed over five years to craft ML and data processing tools that help scientists analyze massive datasets from nuclear experiments and simulations.

Tang is the first faculty member from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing and School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) to receive the ECRP. He is the seventh Georgia Tech researcher to earn the award and the only GT awardee among this year’s 99 recipients.

More than a milestone, the award reflects a shift in how nuclear research is done. Today, progress depends on computing and data science as much as on physics and engineering.

“I am honored and excited to receive the ECRP award through DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, an organization I care about deeply,” said Tang, an assistant professor in the School of CSE. 

“I am grateful to my former colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory and collaborators at other national laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Argonne. I am also thankful for my Ph.D. students at Georgia Tech, whose dedication and creativity make this award possible.”

[Related: New Faculty Applies High-Performance Computing, Scientific Machine Learning Interests to Studies in Plasma Physics]

A problem in nuclear research is that fusion simulations are challenging to understand and use. These simulations generate enormous datasets that are too large to store, move, and analyze efficiently.

In his ECRP proposal to DOE, Tang introduced new ML methods to improve the analysis and storage of particle data.

Tang’s approach balances shrinking data so it is easier to store and transfer while preserving the most important scientific features. His multiscale ML models are informed by physics, so the reduced data still reflects how fusion systems really behave.

With Tang’s research, scientists can run larger, more realistic fusion models and analyze results more quickly. This accelerates progress toward practical fusion energy.

“In contrast to generic black-box-type compression tools, we aim at preserving the intrinsic structures of the particle dataset during the data reduction processes,” Tang said. 

“Taking this approach, we can meet our goal of achieving high-fidelity preservation of critical physics with minimum loss of information.”

Computing is essential in modern research because of the amount of data produced and captured from experiments and simulations. In the era of exascale supercomputers, data movement is a greater bottleneck than actual computation.

DOE operates three of the world’s four exascale supercomputers. These machines can calculate one quintillion (a billion billion) operations per second.

The exascale era began in 2022 with the launch of Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Aurora followed in 2023 at Argonne National Laboratory. El Capitan arrived in 2024 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

With Tang’s data reduction approaches, all of DOE’s supercomputers spend more time on science and less time waiting for data transfers.

“Qi’s work in computational plasma physics and nuclear fusion modeling has been groundbreaking,” said Haesun Park, Regents’ Professor and Chair of the School of CSE. 

“We are proud of Qi and what this award means for him, Georgia Tech, and the Department of Energy toward leveraging computation to solve challenges in science and engineering, such as sustainable energy."

 

Previous Georgia Tech recipients of DOE Early Career Research Program awards include:

Itamar Kimchi, assistant professor, School of Physics

Sourabh Saha, assistant professor, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Wenjing Lao, associate professor, School of Mathematics

Ryan Lively, Thomas C. DeLoach Professor, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

Josh Kacher, associate professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering

Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair and professor, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

ATLANTA (Feb. 12, 2026) -- The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has ranked Georgia Tech among the top 20 universities worldwide for U.S. utility patents granted in 2025. The Institute climbed to No. 19 internationally and 13 nationally as a result of its technology licensing office generating 128 patents. The recognition underscores the Institute’s success in moving research breakthroughs from the laboratory into the commercial marketplace, reflecting a coordinated intellectual property (IP) strategy that supports faculty, staff, and student inventors. 

“Our global ranking is a testament to the culture of research innovation we are fostering at Georgia Tech,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, Georgia Tech’s vice president of Commercialization and chief commercialization officer. “Our goal is to ensure that every breakthrough in the lab has a clear, protected pathway to become a startup or product that changes lives. Breaking into the top 20 for the first time demonstrates the impact of our commercialization ecosystem in taking IP to market.” 

Over the past five years, Georgia Tech has shown steady growth in its patent output, issuing more than double the number of patents as in 2020. With utility patents as a key indicator of bench-to-market success, they serve as the legal foundation for licensing agreements, industry partnerships, and the launch of new ventures. Through Technology Licensing at Georgia Tech, researchers receive guidance on disclosure, patent strategy, and protection pathways that help translate research outcomes into real-world applications.

“Our team’s mission is to serve as the gateway to smoothly transfer technologies from the lab to the real world,” said Mary Albertson, director of Technology Licensing at Georgia Tech. “By partnering with researchers early in the discovery process and navigating the complexities of patent protection, we help ensure Georgia Tech innovations are positioned for meaningful economic and societal impact.”

Released annually since 2013, the Top 100 Worldwide Universities Granted U.S. Utility Patents ranking highlights the critical role academic institutions play in the global innovation ecosystem. Through the translation of research into protected technologies, these institutions advance societal progress, while strengthening national and global economies.