This Earth Month more than 100 campus and community stakeholders gathered near the Georgia Tech EcoCommons for the 2024 Frontiers in Science: Climate Action Conference and Symposium.

On April 18, the College of Sciences hosted more than 20 speakers and panelists from across the Institute and Atlanta community presenting groundbreaking research and discussing innovations and ideas in climate change, challenges, and solutions. 

Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera (M.S. PSY 1993, Ph.D. PSY 1995) kicked off the morning sessions by highlighting the Institute’s new Climate Action Plan, which outlines the pathway to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Cabrera’s remarks focused on Georgia Tech’s role on the frontlines of research and education informing how we respond to climate challenges — and noted that the Institute’s work must extend beyond our laboratories and classrooms.

“It is essential that we not only do the science, but that we also tell that science to the world,” Cabrera says.

Interdisciplinary inquiry

This year, Frontiers in Science featured an array of climate research and initiatives led by the College of Sciences, fellow colleges across Georgia Tech, and the wider Atlanta community.

Following a three-year hiatus of the Frontiers series, the 2024 edition re-envisioned the signature annual event as a research conference and symposium to convene campus experts — and to incubate seed grant proposals to support the work of early career faculty.

Frontiers previously hosted Nobel laureates and invited thought leaders for individual talks across the College’s six schools, and celebrated milestones like the International Year of the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements.

“This year, we wanted to showcase what we are doing right here in the College of Sciences and throughout the Institute,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences, Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Our faculty are at the forefront of broadening our knowledgebase and uncovering solutions in areas critical to the planet and our well-being. We wanted to uplift that work and see what sort of connections could be made.”

Connections and collaboration were key themes of the day as faculty, staff, students, and alumni participants representing all six Georgia Tech colleges shared research results and ongoing work and discussed collaborative ideas for horizons ahead.

“Scientists alone cannot [create accurate models],” noted Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and associate chair for Research, who shared her own research alongside Lozier, who presented a version of her 2024 TED Talk on ocean overturning. “Engineers alone cannot do it. We need social scientists, policy makers, communicators.”

The importance of an interdisciplinary approach was reinforced by the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech (SEI) and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), which announced an interdisciplinary seed grant funding opportunity for assistant professors with ideas for new climate solutions.

Frontiers in focus

Across three themed sessions, faculty and leadership from the Colleges of Sciences, Engineering, and Design spearheaded talks on the ocean and cryosphere, biodiversity, carbon cycling, coastal wetlands, biofuels production, and beyond.

Panels on climate challenges across community, technological, and policy initiatives were hosted by Georgia Tech Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research and Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Julia Kubanek.

Following a networking lunch with climate table topics, Georgia Tech Executive Vice President for Research and Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Chaouki T. Abdallah (M.S. ECE 1982, Ph.D. ECE 1988) kicked off the afternoon sessions — which also announced the scholarship recipients of a student video competition and featured videos with a pair of alumnae working in meteorology, climate research, and policy.

Afternoon highlights also included discussions on the Georgia Tech Climate Action Plan and Sustainability Next initiative, led by Jennifer Chirico (B.S. MGMT 1997, Ph.D. PUBP 2011), associate vice president of Sustainability for Georgia Tech Infrastructure and Sustainability, and Jennifer Leavey (B.S. CHEM 1995), assistant dean for Faculty Mentoring in the College of Sciences and interim assistant director for Interdisciplinary Education in the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

Although many of the presentations provided a stern outlook of the state of our ecosystems, the conference concluded with a sense of hope. This optimism was grounded in the range of opportunities that exist to address climate challenges — thanks, in part, to the body of knowledge and solutions being tested and explored by Georgia Tech researchers.

At the end of the day, Katie Griffin, a first year undergraduate student in Environmental Science, read Amanda Gorman’s poem Earthrise and provided this reminder:

All of us bring light to exciting solutions never tried before
For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core,
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for.

 

Experience the event in pictures with the College of Sciences’ Flickr account, and discover the highlights through the day’s live tweets on College of Sciences’ X account.

More than 400 people participated in Energy Materials Day on March 27, as researchers and industry leaders came together to discuss and advance energy materials technologies such as solar energy, carbon-neutral fuels, and batteries.

Energy materials are the things — natural, manufactured, or both — that aid the use of energy. They also play a key role in developing cleaner, more efficient energy solutions.

Energy Materials Day was co-hosted by Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), the Institute for Materials (IMat), and the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center. The event evolved out of last year’s Georgia Tech Battery Day.

“As an engine of innovation in science and technology, Georgia Tech has incredible opportunities and the responsibility to conduct research to benefit society,” said Chaouki Abdallah, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. “We call this ‘research that matters.’”

Events like Energy Materials Day are part of an ongoing, long-range effort to position Georgia Tech, and Georgia, as a go-to location for modern energy companies. Tech was recently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the top public university for energy research. Abdallah also outlined why Georgia Tech, with more than 1,000 researchers across campus working in the energy space, is a natural fit for events that foster collaboration between the public and private sectors.

“Right here, right now, we have the opportunity to harness our collective powers, our collective knowledge, our collective resources to become a global engine of innovation,” he said.

Plenary speaker Danielle Merfeld, global chief technology officer at QCells, highlighted opportunities for the current and future clean energy infrastructure in the United States.

"At the heart of our discussions today [are these questions]: What is new technology, and how do you make it ... and make it at scale, in an affordable, accessible, and reliable way?” she said.

"... [The] good news is this country has taken a very deliberate step toward creating the most robust industrial policy we've had in decades. ... This is driving opportunity and creating the foundation for manufacturing. So, [we can] use that industrial base of making and consuming power [and] decarbonize the electric grid by 2035...."

“Events like this are so important to forwarding progress in research and industry,” said Eric Vogel, IMat’s executive director. “It’s important to bring together professionals throughout the industry to keep these lines of communication open.”

The day was divided into three tracks: battery materials and technologies, photovoltaics and the grid, and materials for carbon-neutral fuel production. Attendees were encouraged to listen to talks from all three areas. Each track included academic speakers who shared their research and private-sector speakers who described how technological advancements are affecting the industry.

“With its rich history in energy research, Georgia Tech remains a leader in addressing global energy challenges,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive director of SEI. “The success of Energy Materials Day is encouraging, and I eagerly anticipate continuing these discussions in 2025.”

Jud Ready, a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), has been selected to join the National Academy of Inventors’ (NAI) 2024 Class of Senior Members – a group of 124 academic inventors from NAI’s Member Institutions who have made significant contributions to innovation and technology.

Holding a dual appointment as Deputy Director of Innovation Initiatives for Georgia Tech’s Institute for Materials, one of Tech’s 10 Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRI) focused on advancing materials research and innovation, and with over two decades of experience as an adjunct professor in Tech’s School of Materials Science & Engineering, Ready has established himself as a leader in materials science and engineering.

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Georgia Tech Launches Quadrant-i, a New Unit to Enhance Research Commercialization

Georgia Tech's Office of Commercialization introduces Quadrant-i, a new unit dedicated to helping faculty, researchers, and students translate their research into startups.

The name is inspired by Pasteur’s quadrant in the Daniel Stokes innovation-impact model and will emphasize the translation of deep scientific research into products. (See more information about Pasteur’s quadrant here.)

Quadrant-i will join the other units in commercialization — the Office of Technology Licensing, VentureLab, and CREATE-X — in making Georgia Tech the premier campus for startups and commercialization.

“As we grow our efforts toward delivering impact through commercialization, creating a unit that is solely focused on helping our faculty, students, and researchers launch startups based on their research is essential,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, vice president of Commercialization and chief commercialization officer.

The functions of Quadrant-i have historically been supported by VentureLab, a national leader in entrepreneurship training and research. The reorganization will also allow VentureLab to amplify its impact in making Georgia Tech a thought leader for entrepreneurship.

Quadrant-i will be a comprehensive resource for the thriving research community on campus, facilitating the journey from innovations to impact. The unit will offer programs, resources, and services tailored to expedite and enhance the commercialization process, including:

• Advocating for policy changes and incentive structures to foster a culture of impact.
• Securing non-dilutive grant funding.
• Navigating conflicts of interest to maintain research integrity.
• Providing mentorship on the business aspects of innovation.
• Interfacing with customers, investors, and mentors.
• Launching startups with essential resources and support.

A search is currently underway for a director, who will report to Sivakumar.

The Office of Commercialization invites faculty, researchers, students, investors, mentors, industry leaders, and innovators to collaborate with Quadrant-i and learn more about its programs and services.

For more information, visit: commercialization.gatech.edu/quadrant-i.

A new study by Associate Professor Omar Isaac Asensio and a team of students in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy finds that federal housing policies accelerate energy efficiency participation among low and moderate-income households — even when those policies don’t directly address energy efficiency. 

The research, published in Nature Sustainability, shows how community development block grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) generated an average of 5% to 11% energy savings in economically burdened households in Albany. The savings equate to the cost of roughly two months of groceries per household per year. 

"These housing participants who didn't come in thinking about energy efficiency saved anywhere from $75 to $482 per year in energy bills," Asensio said. "Those are meaningful savings that really impact people. So, we ended up finding very significant hidden social benefits from these policies that were previously unknown." 

The findings are surprising because HUD grants do not specifically target energy efficiency or sustainability measures in exchange for governmental assistance. Instead, they are given at the discretion of the local government to residents facing housing emergencies such as deteriorating roofs or broken HVAC systems in the hot summer. Because of the high amount of deferred maintenance in these homes, the fixes have a spillover effect of significantly reducing energy use — for example, by adopting more efficient technologies and bringing structures up to building codes — and saving money for people who receive them.  

The multidisciplinary research team in Asensio’s Data Science & Policy Lab, including current and former Public Policy students Olga Churkina and Becky D. Rafter and industrial engineering alumna Kira E. O'Hare, also found that the cost-effectiveness of housing-based interventions rivals standalone energy efficiency policies, offering a promising alternative for reaching marginalized communities.  

"For decades, we’ve struggled to get meaningful participation with conventional policies in these lower and moderate-income communities, including among renters and people in multi-family homes,” Asensio said. "Using housing block grants as an entry strategy to drive efficiency is an important policy innovation.” 

With support from the National Science Foundation, ESRI, Inc., and the Georgia Smart Communities Challenge, Asensio and his co-authors spent nearly four years collecting, cleaning, and combining Albany's previously siloed city data into one community analytics repository. They linked records for 5.9 million utility bills per month from 2004 to 2019, allowing them to see long-run impacts of policy intervention, energy consumption, and payments by household — an uncommonly granular level of data.  

"Overall, HUD-funded block grants in Albany reduced electricity use by 4.72 million kilowatt hours over the study period versus the control group," the researchers wrote. "The reduction in non-baseload emissions is equivalent to 3.70 million pounds of coal not being burned or the carbon sequestered by 3,695 acres of forest." 

Asensio's research is timely because the Southeast has some of the country's highest energy-burdened households. In the U.S., spending over 6% of net income on energy is considered a burden. In Albany, renters' and homeowners' energy costs can surpass ten or even 20% of household budgets, Asensio said, and many housing applicants are elderly and on fixed incomes.  

Unlike conventional energy initiatives that are reliant on self-selection, housing programs can provide a more equitable and localized strategy. That's because "most of the standalone policies for energy efficiency have two main outcomes," Asensio said. "First, the programs generally attract more affluent and informed homeowners, in which case, questions arise as to whether this might be a good use of public funds. Second, when these policies are restricted to certain income eligibility limits, we don't get enough participation from lower income residents for a long list of reasons. So, reaching low- and moderate-income households has become a fundamental challenge." 

In contrast, housing block grants naturally target a broader range of residents with high energy burdens and help circumvent the problem of low participation. Rather than trying to market an energy-saving offer to people who aren't interested or are distrustful of the government, HUD grants have long waiting lists.  

"There are thousands and thousands of communities that look very much like Albany within and outside of major metro areas,” Asensio said. "This is a relatively untapped opportunity for driving energy efficiency within households who may not necessarily have an awareness of or interest in energy efficiency measures.”  

The paper, “Housing Policies and Energy Efficiency Spillovers in Low and Moderate Income Communities,” was published online in Nature Sustainability on March 18. It is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01314-w. This work was partially supported by awards from the National Science Foundation (Award No. 1945332), ESRI, Inc., the Georgia Smart Communities Challenge, and the Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society at Harvard Business School. 

In January, Georgia Tech researchers were awarded three grants as a part of the Department of Energy’s Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization multi-topic funding. The awards include 49 high-impact, applied research, development, and pilot-scale technology validation and demonstration projects that will reduce energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions in conjunction with cross-sector industrial decarbonization approaches.

The Georgia Tech funding includes a project, in the topic area of Decarbonizing Forest Products, on innovative refining, paper forming, and drying to eliminate CO2 emissions from paper machines. Funded at $3.1 million, the project is led by Carson Meredith, professor and James Harris Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and executive director of the Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI). Collaborators include co-PI Cyrus Aidun, professor of mechanical engineering; Patritsia Stathatou, research scientist at RBI; and Aruna Weerasakura, senior research engineer. External collaborators include Fort Valley State University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and several RBI member companies.

Meredith’s project focuses on decarbonization in energy-intensive drying, paper forming, and pulping processes and will combine recent deflocculation breakthroughs in fiber refining with low-water, multiphase paper forming. The innovations will facilitate the cost-effective implementation of advanced electrical drying technologies in the paper industry. By taking advantage of the increasing fraction of non-fossil electricity in the U.S., electrified drying, if implemented partially (50%), has the potential to reduce the generation of non-biogenic emissions by over 10 million metric tons of CO2e annually.

"I am excited because the new project will utilize the multiphase forming laboratory that is under construction in the Paper Tricentennial Building, representing the first major expansion in lab space there since the 1990s,” said Meredith.

Valerie Thomas, the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and professor of industrial and systems engineering and public policy, is a co-PI in a $1.45 million project titled “Mild Co-Solvent Pulping to Decarbonize the Paper and Forest Products Sector,“ led by the University of California, Riverside.

Thomas’ project, also under the topic area of Decarbonizing Forest Products, aims to enhance Co-solvent Enhanced Lignocellulosic Fractionation (CELF) technology into a more environmentally sustainable alternative to traditional kraft pulping. CELF technology will be applied to optimize the production of dissolving pulp used in the manufacturing of extruded textile fibers and will also produce dissolving lignin as a by-product that can serve as a natural resin binder or a renewable ingredient for producing industrial adhesives and binders. This technology has the potential to reduce carbon intensity by 50 – 75% and operating costs by 10 – 20%.

Tim Lieuwen, David S. Lewis Jr. Chair and professor in aerospace engineering and executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute, along with Vishal Acharya, principal research engineer and Benjamin Emerson, principal research engineer at Georgia Tech is a co-PI in a $3.25 million project titled “Omnivore Combustion System,” led by GTI Energy, an Illinois-based technology company.

Lieuwen’s project, under the topic area of Low-Carbon Fuels Utilization R&D, will design and demonstrate a scaled, adaptable omnivore combustion system (OCS) that can accommodate a continuously varying blend of low-carbon fuels with ultra-low nitrous oxide emissions, including natural gas-hydrogen blends, syngas, and biogas. The project will demonstrate a full-scale OCS for at least 100 hours and will focus on three aspects — improving performance, operation stability and safety, and fuel flexibility — and can potentially be used for industrial furnace applications in high carbon-emitting industries.

“The industrial sector is large in both its significance for our economy and its negative climate impacts, and each of these projects addresses significant challenges for the decarbonization of this critical sector,” Lieuwen said.

The projects are part of DOE’s Technologies for Industrial Emissions Reduction Development (TIEReD) Program, which invests in fundamental science, research, development, and initial pilot-scale demonstrations projects to decarbonize the industrial sector — currently responsible for a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Matthew McDowell, Woodruff Faculty Fellow and associate professor in the G. W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the  School of Materials Science and Engineering and initiative lead for energy storage at the Strategic Energy Institute, has received $1.3 million in funding through the Pioneering Railroad, Oceanic, and Plane Electrification with 1K energy storage systems (PROPEL-1K) program. Aimed at accelerating the electrification of the aviation, railroad, and maritime transportation sectors, PROPEL-1K is one of the latest ARPA-E grants with projects to develop energy storage systems that can achieve over 1,000 watt-hour per kilogram and 1,000 watt-hour per liter. These technologies will improve energy density fourfold over current technologies.

Inspired by fuel injectors in internal combustion engines and conventional flow batteries, McDowell’s project will advance an alkali hydroxide triple phase flow battery to enable reversible operation of ultrahigh-energy density battery chemistries. The project’s proposed design will increase energy density by leveraging innovative pumping and handling of molten alkali metal and hydroxide species to maximize the volume of reactants over inactive components.

McDowell will work with Asegun Henry, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to MIT, Henry was an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Created in 2007, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in the Department of Energy advances high-potential, high-impact energy technologies. The agency focuses on transformational energy projects that can be meaningfully advanced with a small amount of funding over a defined period through a streamlined awards process that enables quick action and catalyzes cutting-edge areas of energy research.

Georgia Tech is developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) based method to automatically find and stop threats to renewable energy and local generators for energy customers across the nation’s power grid.

The research will concentrate on protecting distributed energy resources (DER), which are most often used on low-voltage portions of the power grid. They can include rooftop solar panels, controllable electric vehicle chargers, and battery storage systems. 

The cybersecurity concern is that an attacker could compromise these systems and use them to cause problems across the electrical grid like, overloading components and voltage fluctuations. These issues are a national security risk and could cause massive customer disruptions through blackouts and equipment damage. 

“Cyber-physical critical infrastructures provide us with core societal functionalities and services such as electricity,” said Saman Zonouz, Georgia Tech associate professor and lead researcher for the project. 

“Our multi-disciplinary solution, DerGuard, will leverage device-level cybersecurity, system-wide analysis, and AI techniques for automated vulnerability assessment, discovery, and mitigation in power grids with emerging renewable energy resources.”

The project’s long-term outcome will be a secure, AI-enabled power grid solution that can search and protect the DER’s on its network from cyberattacks. 

“First, we will identify sets of critical DERs that, if compromised, would allow the attacker to cause the most trouble for the power grid,” said Daniel Molzahn, assistant professor at Georgia Tech. 

“These DERs would then be prioritized for analysis and patching any identified cyber problems. Identifying the critical sets of DERs would require information about the DERs themselves- like size or location- and the power grid. This way, the utility company or other aggregator would be in the best position to use this tool.”

Additionally, the team will establish a testbed with industry partners. They will then develop and evaluate technology applications to better understand the behavior between people, devices, and network performance.

Along with Zonouz and Molzahn, Georgia Tech faculty Wenke Lee, professor, and John P. Imlay Jr. chair in software, will also lead the team of researchers from across the country. 

The researchers are collaborating with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab, the Idaho National Labs, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, and Fortiphyd Logic. Industry partners Network Perception, Siemens, and PSE&G will advise the researchers. 

The work will be carried out at Georgia Tech’s Cyber-Physical Security Lab (CPSec) within the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). 

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a $45 million investment at the end of February for 16 cybersecurity initiatives. The projects will identify new cybersecurity tools and technologies designed to reduce cyber risks for energy infrastructure followed by tech-transfer initiatives. The DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) awarded $4.2 million for the Institute’s DerGuard project.