Researchers at Georgia Tech will work to develop new controllable materials for 3D printing, electronics made from plastics, and semiconductors that convert infrared light into electrical signals as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) efforts to create advanced materials.

Altogether, the agency is investing $3 million in the three projects led by faculty members in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME) and the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). Georgia Tech is a contributing partner on a fourth project led by Notre Dame researchers to explore materials that can be switched from an insulator to a metal with an external trigger.

The new awards are part of NSF’s Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program, which is intended to discover and create advanced materials twice as fast and at a fraction of the cost of traditional research methods.

Read more about the researchers' plans on the College of Engineering website.

The list of titles following Wilbur Lam’s name is long, given his appointments at Georgia Tech, Emory University, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Now he has a new one: member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).

Lam is one of 100 newly elected members of the Academy for 2023, an honor reserved for people who’ve made major contributions to medicine, healthcare, and public health. He joins a roster of just 2,400 or so individuals. Membership is considered one of the highest recognitions in health and medicine.

“This honor is extremely humbling because it’s given to me as one person. But it really reflects the team effort that’s surrounded me all these years,” said Lam, W. Paul Bowers Research Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“If you look at all the work that they’re recognizing me for, it starts with my laboratory, then goes beyond — into the centers that we’ve developed related to diagnostic technologies, and then, all the work that we’ve done for the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic.”

New NAM members are nominated and elected by current members, and they’re expected to contribute to National Academies activities providing independent analysis and advice to help the nation tackle complex problems.

Lam, who is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta in addition to a researcher, was cited “for outstanding contributions in point-of-care, home-based, and/or smartphone-enabled diagnostics that are changing the management of pediatric and hematologic diseases as well as development of microsystems technologies as research-enabling platforms to investigate blood biophysics.”

Read the full article on the College of Engineering website

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Computer-Aided Design (GTCAD) Laboratory in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering have received this year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC) Best Paper Award For Research.

The award-winning paper was co-authored by Motorola Solutions Foundation Professor Sung Kyu Lim and Yi-Chen Lu (ECE Ph.D. ’23, currently at Apple), in collaboration with a team from Synopsys, Inc comprised of Wei-Ting Chan, Deyuan Guo, Vishal Khandelwal, and Sudipto Kundu.

The research, titled “RL-CCD: Concurrent Clock and Data Optimization using Attention-Based Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning,” received Best Paper recognition out of 1,157 submissions. It presents a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent in Concurrent Clock and Data (CCD) optimization — a technique used in modern computer design tools to improve the performance and reliability of digital circuits. The introduction of an RL agent enables systems to intelligently enhance their ability to correctly rank violating endpoints according to machine learning-based optimization strategies. This contributes to an optimization flow that maximizes the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the system's performance.

The team was presented the award at DAC 2023 — the flagship conference in electronic design automation (EDA) — in San Francisco this July.

Last year, Lim and his research team were presented with the Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award for their research on Compact-2D physical design tools at DAC. The work was recognized as the best paper published in IEEE’s Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (IEEE TCAD), the flagship journal of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA).

Top photo caption: The team receiving the Best Paper Award For Research this July at the Design Automation Conference. Left to right: Sung Kyu Lim, Wei-Ting Chan, Yi-Chen Lu, and Deyuan Guo (not pictured: Vishal Khandelwal, and Sudipto Kundu).

Using ultraviolet light instead of extremely high temperatures, a team of Georgia Tech researchers has developed a new approach for 3D printing small glass lenses and other structures that would be useful for medical devices and research applications.

Their process reduces the heat required to convert printed polymer resin to silica glass from 1,100 degrees Celsius to around 220 degrees C and shortens the curing time from half a day or more to just five hours. They’ve used it to produce all kinds of glass microstructures, including tiny lenses approximately the width of a human hair that could be used for medical imaging inside the body.

Led by George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Professor H. Jerry Qi, the team described their approach Oct. 4 in the journal Science Advances.

“This is one of the exploratory examples showing that it is possible to fabricate ceramics at mild conditions, because silica is a kind of ceramic,” Qi said. “It is a very challenging problem. We have a team that includes people from chemistry and materials science engaged in a data-driven approach to push the boundary and see if we can produce more ceramics with this approach.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.