A team of researchers from Emory University and Georgia Tech, led by IBB researcher Wilbur Lam, have developed a groundbreaking, non-invasive way to screen and monitor anemia using just a smartphone photo of a fingernail. The AI-powered app analyzes the fingernail’s paleness to detect anemia with high accuracy instead of requiring a conventional blood test. The technology can be personalized for users with chronic anemia by incorporating their clinical hemoglobin levels to enhance precision. This approach makes anemia screening more accessible, particularly for underserved communities, and removes barriers to care. The team’s findings were recently published in PNAS, with Lam as the paper’s senior author.

Read the full press release here. 

Citation: Robert G. Mannino, Julie Sullivan, Jennifer K. Frediani, Wilbur A. Lam. “Real-world Implementation of a Noninvasive, AI-augmented, Anemia-screening Smartphone App and Personalization for Hemoglobin Level Self-monitoring,” PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2424677122

When Marielle Frooman joined the McShan Lab, she brought a strong passion for chemistry, but no lab experience. Today, the fourth-year Georgia Tech biochemistry student is the first co-author of a groundbreaking malaria study published in Scientific Reports, a Nature Portfolio journal. Through extensive experimentation coupled with computer modeling, Frooman led a team of undergraduate and graduate researchers that uncovered eight peptides that can help the immune system recognize and fight the malaria parasite. 

“Malaria kills over 500,000 annually with the mortality rate substantially higher in Africa,” says Frooman. “Our research explores how specific peptides bind to proteins that trigger immune responses.”

Frooman originally hoped the research would help her learn how to think like a scientist and gain basic lab knowledge.

She gained those skills and more, quickly becoming recognized as an exceptional researcher.

“Marielle is one of the most passionate and talented undergraduate researchers I have ever worked with,” says Andrew McShan, McShan Lab principal investigator and associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “She is also a caring mentor and motivated future leader who wants to change the world. Her malaria research has the potential to provide real therapeutic outcomes, including better designs for vaccines and immunotherapy.” 

From curiosity to contribution

Frooman’s journey into undergraduate research began with persistence. After a year and a half of searching for lab opportunities, she attended a School of Chemistry and Biochemistry research showcase. She approached several graduate students and professors with no success, until she met McShan.

“Our first meeting was so relaxed and friendly that I didn’t even realize Professor McShan was the principal investigator,” admits Frooman. “That’s how it all started.”

Once she officially joined the lab, Frooman contributed to every stage of the research, including designing experiments, performing computational and wet lab work, analyzing data, and writing and presenting the paper.

Lessons in resilience

The team faced several challenges.

“The research was delayed by failure after failure,” says Frooman. “But each setback taught us something valuable.”

The team’s biggest challenge involved trying to grow crystals of the peptide/HLA (protein) complexes to determine how they fit together. They spent two years attempting various methods, but nothing worked.

Guided by McShan, Frooman and the team then came up with the idea of using computational modeling to enable a deeper understanding of how the peptides and proteins interact at both biophysical and structural levels.

“Utilizing the computational modeling enabled us to see the best bindings and turned into a game-changing insight for our research, potentially leading to the design of more effective malaria treatments and vaccines,” explains Frooman.

She is quick to credit Georgia Tech and McShan for providing her with such a valuable learning experience.

“At many universities, undergraduates rarely do meaningful research, but at Tech, it’s a priority,” explains Frooman. “I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to grow in such a supportive environment, and to learn from mentors like Professor McShan who lead by example and make time for every student.”

Her advice to other undergraduates entering research?

“Embrace your failures. They make the successes even more rewarding,” shares Frooman.

Outside the lab

On campus, Frooman is president of the Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society and Cleanup Crew at GT, a member of Alpha Phi International Fraternity, and a campus tour guide who serves on their executive board. 

She especially loves being a tour guide as it allows her to share her love of Georgia Tech and its people:

“Everyone is unapologetically themselves and fully invested in their major or interests. As someone who loves chemistry, I enjoy being surrounded by people who are just as dedicated to their passions.”

Frooman is a recipient of the Chance Family Scholarship, presented to two School of Chemistry and Biochemistry upperclassmen, recognizing their academic excellence, research contributions, and potential for career success in the field.

Recently, she shifted her research focus to organic synthetic chemistry and now works in the Gutekunst Lab. Her career goals include earning a Ph.D. in Chemistry with an emphasis on natural product synthesis, the lab-based creation of complex chemical compounds found in nature.

“I’ve seen what university labs can do,” says Frooman. “I hope to one day lead my own lab, advancing impactful research and mentoring the next generation of scientists.”

Biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech created a treatment that could one day unlock a universal strategy for treating some of the hardest-to-treat cancers — like those in the brain, breast, and colon — by teaching the immune system to see what it usually misses.

Their experimental approach worked against those kinds of cancers in lab tests and didn’t damage healthy tissues. Importantly, it also stopped cancer from returning.

While the therapy is still in early stages of development, it builds on well established, safe technologies, giving the treatment a clearer, quicker path to clinical trials and patient care.

Reported in May in the journal Nature Cancer, their technique is a one-two punch that flags tumor cells so they can be recognized and then eliminated by specially enhanced T cells from the patient’s own immune system.

Get all the details on the College of Engineering website.

As Rocket Lab prepares to launch a mission to Venus next year, a multidisciplinary research team led by Georgia Tech braved an erupting volcano recently to test an instrument custom-built to explore Venus’ clouds and look for signs of organic chemistry. If successful, the 2026 launch will mark the first private spacecraft to reach Venus, and the first U.S. mission to study its sulfuric acid-filled clouds in nearly 40 years.

The instrument, the autofluorescence nephelometer (AFN) built by Droplet Measurement Technologies, will fire a laser beam out a window and use light scattering from individual particles to measure the size and composition of the planet’s aerosols, the tiny particles that make up the clouds. The AFN will only have about five minutes to collect data as the small probe falls through the clouds, and another 15 minutes to send data back to Earth before things get too extreme. The probe is not expected to reach the surface, where it is hot enough to melt lead, and the pressure is 90 times that of Earth’s surface.

Georgia Tech oversees all of the instrument’s field tests and modeling. The project, called VENUSIAN, is led by Christopher E. Carr, assistant professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, with funding from NASA’s PSTAR program. Carr holds a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

NASA also built a heat shield for Rocket Lab’s spacecraft and will provide navigation and communications support through the Deep Space Network.

“Is there life in the clouds of Venus? I don’t think so, but if it’s there, I want to find it,” says Carr, who admits that the more he studies Venus, the more interesting it becomes. 

Collecting Volcanic Molecules

In March, his team tested the AFN in the field, flying it on a drone through Hawaii’s volcanic fog, a haze that forms because of volcanic emissions. The droplets are rich with sulfuric acid, similar to Venus’ atmosphere. 

“We got some valuable data,” says Carr. “This was the first time for our whole team from different institutions to be together in one place.” 

Collaborators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Colorado-Boulder, which managed and flew the drones, and Droplet Measurement Technologies joined the Georgia Tech contingent in Hawaii.

Sara Seager, professor of physics, professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science at MIT, who serves as the science principal investigator for the Rocket Lab mission, emphasized the critical testing role Georgia Tech is playing ahead of the mission to Venus.

“Building the instrument is important, but what is also important is knowing how you’re going to interpret data when you get back. To understand that you need to use the instrument over and over again here on Earth. Professor Carr taking a lead on that from a science perspective is important,” says Seager, who will oversee two subsequent Morning Star Missions to Venus that the team envisions will culminate in an atmosphere sample return.

The Kilauea volcano, located in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island, began erupting as soon as the team started their first drone flight. The eruption grew more intense on the second day, giving the researchers a chance to run the AFN through its paces. While the flight test results are still preliminary, the team indicated that the instrument did detect volcanic ash and volcanic smog, which bodes well for the Venus mission. 

“It was cool to see our instrument in action,” says Snigdha Nellutla, a research engineer and data modeler, who recently finished her master’s in aerospace engineering. She simulates the AFN’s output in different environmental conditions, both during the Hawaii field tests and on the actual mission to Venus.

In Search of a Carbon Cycle

“We’re seeking evidence of a carbon cycle in the Venus atmosphere,” she said. “Life as we know it on Earth is carbon-based. Carbon compounds are delivered to Venus from meteorites. Are they rapidly degraded or do they persist in some form?”

Billions of years ago, Venus may have had as much water as Earth — but at some point in its evolution, carbon dioxide in the planet's atmosphere triggered an intense runaway greenhouse effect. This sent temperatures soaring, causing the planet's water to evaporate, and the hydrogen part of the water (H2O) was lost to space.

In 2020, astronomers detected phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere. This gas, often associated with biological activity on Earth, could signal signs of life. While the presence of phosphine is now debated, a rash of recent discoveries suggests that organic chemistry in the clouds could be much more complex than previously considered.

While Venus’ extreme surface temperatures are well documented, the one exception is found in the middle cloud layers, which have habitable temperatures. By looking at individual particles within the Venus atmosphere, researchers hope to learn about other compounds that could exist, including organic molecules that could influence a carbon cycle. The Hawaii measurements will serve as an important baseline to compare against what will be gathered on Venus. 

The Smoking Gun of Organics

The mission to Venus will also measure fluorescence, considered “a smoking gun” for possible organic materials, says Carr. 

On Venus’ super-rotating atmosphere, clouds take four Earth days to travel around the planet, while the planet spins in the same direction approximately 50 times slower.

“The differences with Venus’s atmosphere compared with Earth have forced our whole team to look at how we approach astrobiology completely differently,” he explains. “When we think of finding signs of life, we follow the water, but Venus has no water; it’s sulfuric acid.”

To Carr, the importance of the mission is to better understand Venus’ chemistry, given that sulfuric acid and water have different properties, which can contribute to or limit the kind of chemistry that can occur. 

“By understanding what might be possible, we can learn if different types of life might be possible. It also helps us know what to look for when we look for life,” he says. Even if there is no life in the clouds of Venus, there is likely to be interesting chemistry, based on extensive testing by members of the science team. This chemistry could be detected by the AFN as fluorescent aerosol particles.

VENUSIAN has enabled Georgia Tech aerospace engineering students to get a rare opportunity to test and model hardware that will fly in space. 

Students Celebrate Teamwork, Space Aspirations  

“As a first-year, I’ve had a variety of tasks, and that’s been fun for me as someone who is just starting to explore my career possibilities,” says Violet Oliver, who oversees the ground sampling tests. “This has been a really good introduction — getting my feet wet in what future space missions might look like and, more broadly, what the engineering test cycle looks like.”

“The biggest thing we learned was how to work together as a team,” adds Cassius Tunis, a senior in aerospace engineering. He managed the logistics, designed hardware to integrate the AFN and the drone, and served as the field study’s test engineer during the flights, where he communicated with the pilots and tracked their flight pattern.

“It’s been a goal of mine to work in the space industry since high school,” he said, crediting VENUSIAN with helping him pinpoint his career direction. “I see myself as the resident test engineer. Test engineering is a very operational, multidisciplinary field within aerospace. You get to wear a lot of different hats and interact with people of all different backgrounds.”

Carr indicated that the team will return to Hawaii later this year for final AFN field testing before the Venus mission. 

Looking to the 2026 launch, Seager says, “I’m looking forward to a safe launch and getting exciting data back. It’s Venus’ moment to shine,” she added, calling Venus the “quiet, overlooked gem” to Mars and Earth.

Carr expressed admiration for Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, Peter Beck, whose passion for the Venus mission is well documented. 

“He exudes the true curiosity of a scientist and explorer. In Rocket Lab, we have a partner that is excited by discovery.”

Military drone pilots, disaster search and rescue teams, and astronauts stationed on the International Space Station are often required to remotely control robots while maintaining their concentration for hours at a time.

Georgia Tech roboticists are attempting to identify the most stressful periods that human teleoperators experience while performing tasks remotely. A novel study provides new insights into determining when a teleoperator needs to operate at a high level of focus and which parts of the task can be delegated to robot automation.

School of Interactive Computing Associate Professor Matthew Gombolay calls it the “sweet spot” of human ingenuity and robotic precision. Gombolay and students from his CORE Robotics Labconducted a novel study that measures stress and workload on human teleoperators.

Gombolay said it can inform military officials on how to strategically implement task automation and maximize human teleoperator performance.

Humans continue to hand over more tasks to robots to perform, but Gombolay said that some functions will still require human input and oversight for the foreseeable future.

Specific applications, such as space exploration, commercial and military aviation, disaster relief, and search and rescue, pose substantial safety concerns. Astronauts stationed on the International Space Station, for example, manually control robots that bring in supplies, move cargo, and make structural repairs.

“It’s brutal from a psychological perspective,” Gombolay said.

The question often asked about automating a task in these fields is, at what point can a robot be trusted more than a human?

A recent paper by Gombolay and his current and former students — Sam Yi Ting, Erin Hedlund-Botti, and Manisha Natarajan — sheds new light on the debate. The paper was published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and will be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Atlanta.

The NASA-funded study can identify which aspects of tedious, time-consuming tasks can be automated and which require human supervision. If roboticists can pinpoint the elements of a task that cause the least stress, they can automate these components and enable humans to oversee the more challenging aspects.

“If we’re talking about repetitive tasks, robots do better with that, so if you can automate it, you should,” said Ting, a former grad student and lead author of the paper. “I don’t think humans enjoy doing repetitive tasks. We can move toward a better future with automation.”

Military officials, for example, could measure the stress of remote drone pilots and know which times during a pilot’s shift require the highest level of attention.

“We can get a sense of how stressed you are and create models of how divided your attention is and the performance rate of the tasks you’re doing,” Gombolay said.

“It can be a low-stress or high-stress situation depending on the stakes and what’s going on with you personally. Are you well-caffeinated? Well-rested? Is there stress from home you’re bringing with you to the workplace? The goal is to predict how good your task performance will be. If it indicates it might be poor, we may need to outsource work to other people or create a safe space for the operator to destress.”

The Stress Test

For their study, the researchers cut a small river-shaped path into a medium-density fiberboard. The exercise required the 24 participants to use a remote robotic arm to navigate through the path from one end to the other without touching the edges.

The experiment grew more challenging as new stress conditions and workload requirements were introduced. The changing conditions required the test participants to multitask to complete the assignment.

Gombolay said the study supports the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which states that moderate levels of stress increase human performance.

The experiment showed that operators felt overwhelmed and performed poorly when multitasking was introduced. Too much stress led to poor performance, but a moderate amount of stress induced more engagement and enhanced teleoperator focus. 

Ting said finding that ideal stress zone can lead to a higher performance rating. 

“You would think the more stressed you are, the more your performance decreases,” Ting said. “Most people didn’t react that way. As stress increased, performance increased, but when you increased workload and gave them more to do, that’s when you started seeing deteriorating performance.”

Gombolay said no stress can be just as detrimental as too much stress. Performing a task without stress tends to cause teleoperators to become disinterested, especially if it is repetitive and time-consuming.

“No stress led to complacency,” Gombolay said. “They weren’t as engaged in completing the task.

“If your excitement is too low, you get so bored you can’t muster the cognitive energy to reason about robot operation problems.”

The Human Factor

Roboticists have made significant leaps in recent years to remove teleoperators from the equation. Still, Gombolay said it’s too early to tell whether robots can be trusted with any task that a human can perform.

“We’re a long way from full autonomy,” he said. “There’s a lot that robots still can’t do without a human operator. Search and rescue operations, if a building collapses, we don’t have much training data for robots to go through rubble by themselves to rescue people. There are ethical needs for humans to be able to supervise or take direct control of robots.”

Every time you use your phone, open your computer or listen to your favorite music on AirPods, you are relying on critical minerals.

These materials are the tiny building blocks powering modern life. From lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite in batteries to gallium in telecommunication systems that enable constant connectivity, critical minerals act as the essential vitamins of modern technology: small in volume but vital to function.

Yet the U.S. depends heavily on imports for most critical materials. In 2024 the U.S. imported 80% of rare earth elements it used, 100% of gallium and natural graphite, and 48% to 76% of lithium, nickel and cobalt, to name a few.

Read more »

Jason Azoulay is an associate professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is the Georgia Research Alliance Vasser-Woolley Distinguished Investigator in Optoelectronics and serves as co-director of the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics.

This story by Janette Neuwahl Tannen is shared jointly with the University of Miami newsroom. 

Today, most of us carry a fairly powerful computer in our hand — a smartphone.

But computers weren’t always so portable. Since the 1980s, they have become smaller, lighter, and better equipped to store and process vast troves of data.

Yet the silicon chips that power computers can only get so small.

“Over the past 50 years, the number of transistors we can put on a chip has doubled every two years,” says Kun Wang, assistant professor of physics at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences. “But we are rapidly reaching the physical limits for silicon-based electronics, and it’s more challenging to miniaturize electronic components using the technologies we have been using for half a century.”

It’s a problem that Wang and many in his field of molecular electronics are hoping to solve. Specifically, they are looking for a way to conduct electricity without using silicon or metal, which are used to create computer chips today. Using tiny molecular materials for functional components, like transistors, sensors, and interconnects in electronic chips offers several advantages, especially as traditional silicon-based technologies approach their physical and performance limits.

But finding the ideal chemical makeup for this molecule has stumped scientists. Recently, Wang, along with his graduate students, Mehrdad Shiri and Shaocheng Shen, and collaborators Jason Azoulay, associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia Research Alliance Vasser-Woolley Distinguished Investigator; and Ignacio Franco, professor at the University of Rochester, uncovered a promising solution.

This week, the team shared what they believe is the world’s most electrically conductive organic molecule. Their discovery, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, opens up new possibilities for constructing smaller, more powerful computing devices at the molecular scale. Even better, the molecule is composed of chemical elements found in nature — mostly carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen.

“So far, there is no molecular material that allows electrons to go across it without significant loss of conductivity,” Wang says. “This work is the first demonstration that organic molecules can allow electrons to migrate across it without any energy loss over several tens of nanometers.”

The testing and validation of their unique new molecule took more than two years.

However, the work of this team reveals that their molecules are stable under everyday ambient conditions and offer the highest possible electrical conductance at unparalleled lengths. Therefore, it could pave the way for classical computing devices to become smaller, more energy-efficient, as well as cost-efficient, Wang adds.

Currently, the ability of a molecule to conduct electrons decreases exponentially as the molecular size increases. These newly developed molecular “wires” are needed highways for information to be transferred, processed, and stored in future computing, Wang says.

“What’s unique in our molecular system is that electrons travel across the molecule like a bullet without energy loss, so it is theoretically the most efficient way of electron transport in any material system,” Wang notes. “Not only can it downsize future electronic devices, but its structure could also enable functions that were not even possible with silicon-based materials.”

Wang means that the molecule’s abilities might create new opportunities to revolutionize molecule-based quantum information science.

“The ultra-high electrical conductance observed in our molecules is a result of an intriguing interaction of electron spins at the two ends of the molecule,” he adds. “In the future, one could use this molecular system as a qubit, which is a fundamental unit for quantum computing.”

The team was able to notice these abilities by studying their new molecule under a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Using a technique called STM break-junction, the team was able to capture a single molecule and measure its conductance.

Shiri, the graduate student, adds: “In terms of application, this molecule is a big leap toward real-world applications. Since it is chemically robust and air-stable, it could even be integrated with existing nanoelectronic components in a chip and work as an electronic wire or interconnects between chips.”

Beyond that, the materials needed to compose the molecule are inexpensive, and it can be created in a lab.

“This molecular system functions in a way that is not possible with current, conventional materials,” Wang says. “These are new properties that would not add to the cost but could make (computing devices) more powerful and energy efficient.” 

 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.4c18150

Funding: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy
Sciences; National Science Foundation (NSF); Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under support provided by the Organic Materials
Chemistry Program; Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Graduate
Student Researcher Fellowship Program (GSFP). Computational resources were provided by the Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) at the
University of Rochester.

Along with Jason Azoulay, Georgia Tech co-authors also include Paramasivam Mahalingam, Tyler Bills, Alexander J. Bushnell, and Tanya A. Balandin.

More than 100 researchers, faculty, industry representatives, alumni, and students came together on April 14 to explore the future of space research and exploration at the 2025 Yuri's Day Symposium. Hosted by Georgia Tech’s Space Research Initiative (SRI), Yuri’s Day serves as an annual celebration of space research across the Institute, the state of Georgia, and beyond. It built on the success of Yuri’s Day 2024, and was designed to be interactive and drive participation through panel discussions, a poster session, and networking opportunities.

The day began with opening remarks from Georgia Tech’s Executive Vice President of Research Tim Lieuwen, Vice President of Interdisciplinary Research Julia Kubanek, and the SRI executive committee, comprised of Professor Glenn Lightsey and Associate Professors Mariel Borowitz and Jennifer Glass. They provided an update on the SRI's latest achievements and its elevation to the Space Research Institute, one of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Institutes, on July 1.

“Space research is much broader than building spacecraft…it includes science, policy, business, and culture. We are here to celebrate all aspects of space research at Georgia Tech,” said Lightsey.

Borowitz lead a panel discussion on the implications of current space policies and the role of academic institutions in shaping the future of space exploration. It highlighted the importance of policy decisions in advancing space research and ensuring sustainable development. Jonathan Goldman, director of Quadrant-i at Georgia Tech, and his panel of entrepreneurs then discussed the commercialization of space technologies and the opportunities arising. They shared how collaboration between academia and industry can drive innovation and bring these new technologies to market.

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) organized a space poster session during the lunch break to provide insight into the various space research projects happening there. This networking opportunity highlighted the breadth of work at GTRI and enabled researchers and students to present their projects to attendees. 

The Keynote speaker, Georgia Tech Alumnus Griff Russell, M.S. ME 1999, president of Gryphon Effect, LLC, and former SpaceX F9 vehicle manager, shared his personal journey to inspire future researchers. His talk, “From a letter to an astronaut to the trenches of Falcon 9 and beyond: Setting the foundation for accelerated Moon to Mars exploration” followed Russell’s path to the space industry, chronicling a letter he wrote to an astronaut early in his career to his current role as an entrepreneur. Russell shared his thoughts on the future of space exploration and encouraged students in the room to move fast and develop innovative new space technologies. “The time is now for you to make a difference,” he said. 

Professor Thom Orlando then led a panel of experts from other Georgia universities on the Human Space Initiative in the State of Georgia. Orlando and the panelists discussed the state's contributions to human spaceflight and the potential for future missions. This was followed by a panel on Earth analog field studies led by Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernandez. Panelists including students explained how studying Earth analogs, like lava tubes and deserts, can help researchers better understand other planetary environments. Georgia Tech graduate students gave brief presentations chronicling recent fieldtrips and the data they gather in the field. The final session of the day led by Professor Lightsey showcased Georgia Tech’s space-related student organizations and the importance of engaging the next generation of scientists and engineers in space exploration.

As the Space Research Initiative transitions into the Space Research Institute, Georgia Tech is prepared to lead groundbreaking research, and Yuri’s Day gave attendees a preview of things to come. For more information about the SRI and the research at Georgia Tech, visit our website.