More than 70 people convened at Duke University and virtually on April 3 to highlight successes, challenges and opportunities across research, industry and policy on regional electric mobility in the Southeast.

The April 2025 Southeast Electric Transportation Regional Initiative (SETRI) meeting provided an information-sharing forum for a multisector group of electric mobility organizations from across the region. SETRI is a collaborative network connecting, informing and advancing transportation electrification in the Southeast. The event was hosted by the Duke University Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability and Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute, in collaboration with SETRI partner organizations.

“Bringing this multisector community together is important to share ideas on how to best advance electric mobility—a key emerging industry in the southeastern United States and important strategy for reducing transportation emissions,” said Trey Gowdy, Nicholas Institute research lead and SETRI co-facilitator.

Throughout the morning, speakers shared insights about the electric vehicle (EV) landscape in North Carolina and throughout the Southeast, the state of the EV market and manufacturing, charging infrastructure, consumer education and local engagement and more. The event also featured a poster session, networking and an electric vehicle display.

SETRI organizers announced during the meeting that the Southeast Portal for Electric Transportation Opportunities has shared more than 500 opportunities since launching two years ago. The portal lists active funding sources, comment solicitations, research opportunities, events and other timely information related to transportation electrification in the region.

“A focus of the SETRI network has been to deepen connections within our region, with the aim of accelerating progress between utilities, charging companies, investors, NGOs and universities. It was great to be in Durham after our session in Atlanta last year,” said Richard Simmons, principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute and SETRI co-facilitator.

Read Full Story on the Duke Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability Newspage

This week, Professor Joel Kostka was awar­ded the pres­ti­gi­ous Humboldt Research Award by the Al­ex­an­der von Hum­boldt Found­a­tion during its annual meeting and reception with Germany’s Federal President Steinmeier in Berlin. Every year, the Foundation grants up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards worldwide, which recognize internationally leading researchers of all disciplines.

The award’s €80,000 endowment will support a research trip to Germany for up to a year — during which Kostka will collaborate with Professor Mar­cel Kuypers, director of the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy in Bre­men, Germany — to as­sess the role of mar­ine plant mi­cro­bi­o­mes in coastal mar­ine eco­sys­tem health and climate re­si­li­ence.

Kostka, who holds joint appointments in the School of Bio­lo­gical Sci­ences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is also the as­so­ci­ate chair for re­search in Bio­lo­gical Sci­ences. He was ​​recently named the inaugural faculty director of Georgia Tech for Georgia's Tomorrow. The new Center, announced by the College of Sciences in December 2024, will drive research aimed at improving life across the state of Georgia. 

Wetlands in a changing climate

“Human population is centered on coastlines, and coastal ecosystems provide many services for people,” Kostka says. “Although they cover less than 1 percent of the ocean, coastal wetlands store over 50 percent of the seafloor’s rich carbon reserves.” But researchers aren’t sure how these ecosystems will respond to a changing climate.

Microbes may be the key. Microbes play a critical role in maintaining plant health and helping them adapt to stressors, Kostka says. Similar to human bodies, plants have microbiomes: a community of microbes intimately associated with the plant that help it take up nutrients, stimulate the plant’s immune system, and regulate plant hormones. 

“Our research indicates that plant microbiomes are fundamental to wetland ecosystem health, yet almost everything we know about them is from agricultural systems,” he adds. “We know very little about the microbes associated with these important marine plants that dominate coastal ecosystems.”

Kostka’s work in Germany will investigate how microbiomes help coastal marine plants adapt to stress and keep them healthy. From there, he will investigate how plant microbiomes contribute to the carbon and nutrient cycles of coastal ecosystems — and how they contribute to ecosystem resilience.

Expanding collaboration — and insights 

One goal of the collaboration is to exchange information on two types of marine plants that dominate coastal ecosystems worldwide: those associated with seagrass meadows and salt marshes.

“I’ve investigated salt marsh plants in the intertidal zone between tides, and my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute have focused on seagrass beds and seagrass meadows, which are subtidal, below the tides,” Kostka says. “While these two ecosystems have some different characteristics, they both cover large areas of the global coastline and are dominated by salt-tolerant plants.” 

In salt marshes, Kostka has shown that marine plants have symbiotic microbes in their roots that help them to take up nitrogen and deal with stress by removing toxic sulfides. He suspects that these plant-microbe interactions are critical to the resilience of coastal ecosystems. “The Max Planck Institute made similar observations in seagrass meadows as we did in salt marshes,” Kostka explains. “But they found different bacteria.”

From Georgia to Germany

Beyond supporting excellence in research, another key goal of the Humboldt Research Award is to support international collaboration — something very familiar to Kostka. “I've been working with Professor Kuypers and the Max Planck Institute in Bremen for many years,” he says, adding that he completed his postdoctoral research at the Institute. “Max Planck's labs are some of the best in the world for what they do, and their imaging technology can give us an unprecedented look at plant-microbe interactions at the cellular level.”

“This project is also special because I am collaborating with other scientists in northern Germany,” Kostka adds. “The University of Bremen is home to the Cen­ter for Mar­ine En­vir­on­mental Sci­ences (MARUM), which is designated as a Cluster of Excellence by the German National Science Foundation, so there are a number of fantastic research centers in Bremen to work with.”

His hope is that this project will deepen collaboration between the research at Georgia Tech and research in Germany. “I look forward to seeing what we can uncover about these critical systems while working together.”

Solar cells account for approximately six percent of the electricity used on Earth; however, in space, they play a significantly larger role, with nearly all satellites relying on advanced solar cells for their power. That’s why Georgia Tech researchers will soon send 18 photovoltaic cells to the International Space Station for a study of how space conditions affect the devices’ operation over time.

“The main goal here is to improve power generation in space,” said Jud Ready, principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and Associate Director of External Engagement with Georgia Tech’s Institute for Matter and Systems. “The limiting factor on the performance of a spacecraft is usually how much power you can produce. Power, size, weight, complexity, cost – all of these are tied closely to the electrical generation of the solar panels.”

Read the story in the GTRI newsroom.

When NASA’s PRIME-1 Mission landed on the moon in March, an Intuitive Machine’s lander named Athena ended up on its side. The faulty landing meant the instruments couldn’t drill into the moon to measure water and other resources, as intended. But the mission wasn’t a total loss: PRIME-1’s The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) and Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSOLO) could still operate and gather some data. The mission, led by Georgia Tech alumni who collaborated with Georgia Tech faculty, is already pivotal to future NASA missions.

PRIME-1, or Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1, is a combination tool of two instruments: TRIDENT and MSOLO. PRIME-1’s objective is to help scientists determine resources available on the moon, with the eventual goal of sending humans to live there. TRIDENT is a space-rated drill designed and built by Honeybee Robotics that can extract lunar soil up to 3 feet deep. MSOLO is a mass spectrometer that can analyze TRIDENT’s soil samples for water and other critical volatiles. Together, this data can show how viable living on and mining from the moon could be.

Two Georgia Tech alumna, Jackie Williams Quinn and Janine E.  Captain, led the PRIME-1 team for NASA. They had help with computer modeling of PRIME-1’s mass spectrometer data from Georgia Tech’s Regents’ Professor Thom Orlando and Senior Research Scientist Brant Jones in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

Georgia Tech to the Moon

Georgia Tech’s expertise influenced all areas of developing PRIME-1, but perhaps their biggest contribution was the collaboration across disciplines. 

Quinn, a civil engineering graduate, wrote the initial proposal. She also managed TRIDENT’s development, through a contract with Honeybee Robotics, ensuring it was also built to operate in the harsh lunar environment (a process known as ruggedizing). The team worked with Honeybee’s Jameil Bailey, fellow Tech alumnus.

Captain, the MSOLO principal investigator and chemistry Ph.D. graduate, never planned to work at NASA. But her advisor, Orlando, got her interested. 

“What drew me to NASA’s In-Situ Resource Utilization team is that I could apply the instrumentation techniques that I learned in my Ph.D.  to measuring vital things like oxygen on the moon,” Captain said. 

Ruggedization Redux

When it was confirmed in 2008 the moon had water, NASA wondered if humans could one day live there. Having a functional mass spectrometer on the moon was paramount to determining where the water was and how much of it existed. Captain’s team modified a commercial mass spectrometer and tested it in a harsh environment comparable to the moon: Hawaii’s dormant shield volcano, Mauna Kea. Once they demonstrated the mission operation in this environment, they worked to ruggedize an existing one manufactured by instrumentation company INFICON. The team worked with INFICON and through lab tests, they showed that all components of the mass spectrometer functioned in a lunar vacuum environment.  

In Orlando’s lab, his team experimented with lunar material to determine how water interacts with lunar soil. From there, they created a theoretical model that simulated how much water they might find from what PRIME-1 sampled.  

“To create the model, we used the data of how water sticks to the lunar surface — from controlled experiments carried out in our ultra-high vacuum chambers at Georgia Tech,” Orlando said. “We approached the problem from a surface physics point of view in these lab experiments, but then in our model, we were able to connect to the actual mission activity.”

Once PRIME-1 hardware validation testing was finished, NASA was ready to launch.  That’s when things got hairy.

“We don't fully understand everything that happened during the landing, but the fact that PRIME-1 was fully functional is pretty amazing,” Captain said. “We got the data. It was so cool to know that all this work we did was worth it.” 

Moon Milestones

Although they didn’t get the chance to drill into the moon as planned, they can still analyze the data PRIME-1 pulled from the lunar atmosphere. This data includes how the spacecraft may have contaminated the local atmosphere.

“PRIME-1 was the only instrument that got to fully run and check out everything because when the lander fell over, the instrument was on top,” Quinn noted. “They were able to extend the drill all the way out a meter. It was drilling into empty space, but we were able to show that the drill got the signal from Earth, fully extended, and was able to auger and percuss. We were also able to fully operate MSOLO and gather data on gases coming off the lander in its final resting orientation.” 

In a unanimous vote on June 2, the Atlanta City Council approved a significant ordinance requiring all new and replacement roofs to be built with light-colored, reflective materials, commonly known as “cool roofs.” The ordinance, set to take effect in one year, is part of a growing effort to reduce the city’s vulnerability to extreme heat.

Georgia Tech researchers say the new policy marks a major step forward in climate adaptation, especially for heat-vulnerable communities, and could help position Atlanta as a national leader in urban resilience.

How Cool Roofs Can Help Hotlanta 

”On any given summer afternoon, temperatures in Atlanta’s intown neighborhoods can be as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in the city’s most forested areas,” said Brian Stone, professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and associate director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics.

That spike is partly due to the urban heat island effect — a phenomenon driven by heat-trapping materials like concrete, asphalt, and dark rooftops, combined with the loss of trees and natural landscapes. The impacts are not just uncomfortable — they’re dangerous. Extreme heat is now one of the deadliest forms of weather in the U.S., with disproportionate effects on low-income communities, elderly residents, and those without access to air conditioning.

According to Patrick Kastner, assistant professor in the School of Architecture, rooftops are key contributors. “A major driver [of heat buildup] is dark, heat-absorbing material that stores solar energy during the day and then re-radiates it at night. If you look at a satellite image, for most of the day rooftops have more exposure to the sun than building facades — so the material choice there matters a lot.”

The Power of Reflective Roofs — and Trees

Stone and his students conducted modeling that found that widespread adoption of cool roofs across Atlanta could lower summer afternoon temperatures by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit in many neighborhoods. That’s comparable to findings in other global cities like London, where cool roofs have reduced average temperatures by up to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F).

But cool roofs are only one part of a broader urban cooling strategy. In the same study, Stone’s team showed that planting trees in just half of Atlanta’s available planting zones could yield an even more dramatic effect, reducing temperatures by 4 F or more in some areas.

“Cool roofs are highly effective, but pairing them with increased urban tree cover would multiply the benefits, especially for neighborhoods currently lacking shade,” Stone said.

Equity and Energy Impacts

Atlanta’s ordinance requires cool roofing materials on new commercial construction and when existing commercial roofs are replaced. While that may sound like a technical design tweak, Stone emphasized its equity implications.

“Residents in South and West Atlanta, where tree canopy is sparse, and energy costs take up a larger share of household income, stand to gain the most,” Stone said. “When a cool roof is installed as part of a required roof replacement, those households will see meaningful reductions in cooling costs month after month.”

Kastner added that cool roofs could ease pressure on the electrical grid, lowering peak energy demand required for cooling during extreme heat and possibly reduce the risk of outages.

Durability, Maintenance, and Design Trade-offs

Stone noted that cool roofs tend to extend the life of roofing materials by limiting thermal degradation. However, he and Kastner also flagged some trade-offs.

For example, highly reflective coatings can create glare, especially on sloped roofs near neighboring buildings. The ordinance accounts for this by setting different standards for flat and pitched roofs. Maintenance is another consideration: over time, reflective coatings may degrade or become dirty, requiring periodic cleaning to maintain performance.

“Aesthetics and material compatibility may also challenge adoption when it comes to historic buildings or for roofs already outfitted with solar panels,” Kastner said. “But advancements in roofing technology, including high-performance materials that aren’t plain white, offer more flexible options than ever before.”

A Cool Roof Policy With National Impact

While cities like New York and Chicago have implemented cool roof programs for over a decade, Atlanta’s proposed ordinance is one of the most comprehensive in the country — applying to all roof types, not just flat industrial ones.

“Atlanta is steadily emerging as one of the most climate-resilient cities in the U.S.,” said Stone, pointing to the city’s urban forest and growing network of floodable parks as complementary resilience strategies. “Adding a best-in-class cool roofing ordinance to that portfolio is a bold step forward.”

And it could spark innovation across the region.

“Georgia Tech is uniquely positioned to help advance climate-resilient design,” Kastner said. “From research on advanced coatings to urban planning tools that target the most heat-vulnerable areas, we’re bringing science and policy together to shape cooler, healthier cities.”

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from electric cars to laptops to leaf blowers. Despite their widespread adoption, lithium-ion batteries carry limited amounts of energy, and rare overheating can lead to safety concerns. Consequently, for decades, researchers have sought a more reliable battery. 

Solid-state batteries are less flammable and can hold more energy, but they often require intense pressure to function. This requirement has made them difficult to use in applications, but new research from Georgia Tech could change that. 

The research group of Matthew McDowell, professor and Carter N. Paden Jr. Distinguished Chair in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering, has designed a new metal for solid-state batteries that enables operation at lower pressures. While lithium metal is often used in these batteries, McDowell’s group discovered that combining lithium with softer sodium metal results in improved performance and novel behavior.

McDowell and his collaborators presented their findings in the paper, “Interface Morphogenesis with a Deformable Secondary Phase in Solid-State Lithium Batteries,” published in Science on June 5.

Stackable Solution

Lithium-ion batteries have been the industry standard because they combine compact size, reliability, and longevity. However, they contain a liquid “electrolyte,” which helps lithium ions move in the battery but is also flammable. In solid-state batteries, this electrolyte is a solid material that is less flammable. The challenge is that when the battery is used, the lithium metal in the battery changes its shape, potentially losing contact with the solid electrolyte, which degrades performance. A common way to ensure the metal doesn’t lose contact is to apply high pressure to these batteries.

“A solid-state battery usually requires metal plates to apply this high pressure, and those plates can be bigger than the battery itself,” McDowell said. “This makes the battery too heavy and bulky to be effective.”

The researchers, led by Georgia Tech research scientist Sun Geun Yoon, sought a solution. The solid-state batteries would still require some pressure to function, but they found that by also using a softer metal, less pressure is required. The researchers decided to pair the commonly used lithium metal with a surprising element: sodium. 

“Adding sodium metal is the breakthrough,” McDowell noted. “It seems counterintuitive because sodium is not active in the battery system, but it’s very soft, which helps improve the performance of the lithium.”

How soft can sodium be? In a controlled environment, a person could stick their gloved finger into sodium metal and leave an imprint. 

From Biology to Battery

To understand the enhanced performance of their battery, the researchers borrowed a concept from biology called morphogenesis. This concept explains how tissues or other biological structures evolve based on local stimuli. Morphogenesis is rarely seen in materials science, but the researchers found that the combination of lithium and sodium behaves according to this concept. 

McDowell’s research group has been working on applying morphogenesis to battery materials as part of a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in collaboration with several other universities. Their battery is among the first viable demonstrations of this concept — effectively, the sodium deforms readily at the low pressures needed for solid-state batteries to function. 

Battery Boon

The possibilities of a viable, smaller solid-state battery are vast. Imagine a phone battery that could last much longer or an electric vehicle that could drive 500 miles between charges. With this in mind, McDowell and his team have filed for a patent for this battery system.

While solid-state batteries still have some way to go before commercial use, results like these could mean that solid-state batteries can compete with lithium-ion. McDowell’s lab continues to experiment with other materials to further improve performance. 

Funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.