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.”

The Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE — formerly SLS), in collaboration with the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), the Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI), and the Social Equity and Environmental Engineering Lab (SEEEL), launched the Energy Equity, Environmental Justice, and Community Engagement Faculty Fellows Program in November 2023. In this program, Georgia Tech faculty learn how to work with communities, bringing together their academic knowledge and the local expertise of communities that has been developed through lived experience and long-standing social action.

The inaugural fellows include 24 Georgia Tech faculty from five Colleges, as well as a faculty colleague from Georgia Gwinnett College and a partner from the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance, who are building relationships with each other and with community partners in the areas of energy equity and environmental justice. Since the launch, they have engaged in a wide array of events, including community benefit and development workshops, site visits to community-based organizations across the Atlanta region, and university-community gatherings and symposia.

The program is expected to result in both collective and individual deliverables. Collective deliverables include the development of network mapping tools to facilitate collaborations inside and outside Georgia Tech, a set of principles for conducting community-engaged research, a reflective essay on faculty training for community-engaged research, and ideas for future activities to facilitate university-community and interdisciplinary team formation. Fellows individually determine their deliverables, which run the gamut from exploring partnerships for a specific research project to writing a societal impact statement for a tenure package.

More broadly, the program aims to grow Georgia Tech’s collaborative expertise in community-engaged research by forming a supportive network of faculty interested in community-engaged sustainability research and education.  

Faculty Affiliate: Patritsia Stathatou, Research Scientist, Renewable Bioproducts Institute, Georgia Tech

Sustainable energy sources and environmental justice go hand in hand. Although such technologies aim to minimize environmental impacts of modern societies, without considering issues of environmental justice and energy equity, these solutions can inadvertently perpetuate disparities by disproportionately benefiting certain communities while harming others. Bridging the gap between technological advancements and community benefits is paramount to creating an equitable energy future for all.

This program provides a unique opportunity to explore these interconnections, enhancing my knowledge in integrating community values and concerns into my research on alternative fuels and renewable energy sources. I am particularly excited about the hands-on approach of the program, which emphasizes listening sessions and workshops, allowing fellows to gain direct insights from various stakeholders. I hope that, through active participation in these sessions, I can further my understanding of the challenges faced by local communities and incorporate these insights into actionable solutions in my research.

In my project, I'm in a group crafting a reflective essay about our experiences with Community Engaged Research training. Our goal is to translate the insights gained from this pilot program into a publishable piece. Additionally, I'm acquiring valuable insights into the development of Broader Impact Statements and Community Benefits Plans, crucial parts of proposals for securing federal funding from NSF and DoE, respectively.

Faculty Affiliate: Sofia Perez-Guzman, Assistant Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Tech

The fellowship program has been a fantastic experience. I never imagined how much I would learn from this program about properly engaging with communities. As researchers, we might think we want to hear the needs that communities face to provide them with solutions. That is different than the way community-driven research should work. I’ve learned that researchers need to gain the communities’ trust, be present and participate in their events, and, more importantly, work at their pace and for their interests rather than push our research agendas for our professional benefit. I know there is still a lot more I must continue learning, but what I’ve learned so far has been an eye-opener that is making me rethink how to approach my research and its social aspect.

My project focuses on the social performance of supply chains, and I am seeking to put more emphasis on the “social” part of my research by making it more community-driven. That is why I applied for the fellowship. I am advancing two current projects as part of the fellowship. One relates to increasing food accessibility to vulnerable populations via community-driven freight transportation solutions. I want to bring food closer to people and do it by co-designing solutions with the communities. The second project relates to forming a team to pursue research on enhancing community resilience to extreme weather events for the mobility of people and goods. The fellowship and a Sustainability Next seed grant from BBISS are helping me move forward with this project.

Faculty Fellow Sofia Perez-Guzman (third from right) joins SCoRE staff on a site visit to the ArtsXchange in East Point to explore mutual interests related to community resiliency (April 5, 2024)

Georgia Tech Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) senior director, Jennifer Hirsch, presented a paper to a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop, Developing and Assessing Ideas for Social and Behavioral Research to Speed Efficient and Equitable Industrial Decarbonization.

The two-day workshop was organized by the National Academies’ divisions of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education and Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Boards on Environmental Change and Society and Energy and Environmental Systems. The workshop sought to “lay the foundation for a national interdisciplinary social sciences research program to support an efficient and equitable clean energy transition in the industrial sector.” Sponsors included the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation. It built on the National Academies 2023 publication, Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States: Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions.

Hirsch’s paper, “The Crucial Role of Just Process for Equitable Industrial Decarbonization: An Action Research Agenda for Carbon Management and Other Emerging Technologies,” was one of four commissioned by the National Academies. Lead author Hirsch collaborated with five co-authors from across the country. Workshop proceedings will be published in early summer, 2024.

She and four of her co-authors serve as Community Benefit Plan (CBP) leads on Direct Air Capture Hub or CarbonSafe projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, and Hirsch and SCoRE are the CBP leads for the Southeast Direct Air Capture Hub, led by the Southern States Energy Board.

SCoRE is a new center at Georgia Tech that grew out of the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain. Established in August 2023 within the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), its mission is to engage faculty, students, and staff in long-term, strategic research and education collaborations with community partners, focusing on sustainability in the Atlanta region, the state of Georgia, and the Southeast. Its key research partners are the sustainability cluster of IRIs, including BBISS, the Strategic Energy Institute, and the Renewable Bioproducts Institute.

Workshop materials are available on the workshop website. Hirsch’s paper can be found here and her PowerPoint presentation is here. Her recorded presentation can be found within this video at time stamp 59:30.

Georgia Tech is supporting career growth for its research faculty, who do critical work at the heart of the research enterprise.

The word faculty is often synonymous with tenure-track professors — the individuals who teach courses and run major labs with their surnames in the title. But while groundbreaking discoveries regularly happen at Georgia Tech, the people doing the day-in, day-out research aren’t always visible.

Research faculty are non-tenure track faculty who carry out crucial research in labs, centers, and departments across campus. They are the lifeblood of research enterprises at major universities like Georgia Tech, but their work often occurs behind the scenes.

To support these essential employees, Georgia Tech launched an initiative to recognize and develop research faculty, who comprise 60% of the nearly 4,400 total faculty currently employed at the Institute. It is part of the second phase of Research Next, the strategic plan for Georgia Tech’s research enterprise.  

Maribeth Coleman, interim assistant vice provost for Research Faculty, and Michelle Rinehart, vice provost for Faculty, were appointed as co-chairs of a Research Next implementation team tasked with finding ways to recognize, support, and retain research faculty. Building on years of effort and collaboration with campus partners, the group took on several projects to improve the research faculty experience and environment at Georgia Tech.  

“Research faculty are critical members of the Georgia Tech community, and their contributions to our billion-dollar research enterprise and the state’s economic development cannot be overstated,” Rinehart said. “We wanted to understand what it’s like for research faculty as they come on board at Georgia Tech, what the hiring process is like, and how we as an Institute can more effectively mentor and develop research faculty in terms of advancing in their careers.”

At the outset, the implementation team identified and examined several facets of the research faculty experience. They reviewed policies in the faculty handbook, giving special attention to existing guidance for promotion and career growth for research faculty.

Promotion guidelines are generally clear for tenure-track faculty. Research faculty, on the other hand, are often not actively encouraged to seek promotion, and may not even know that promotion is an option, according to Rinehart and Coleman. One issue is that funding for research faculty often comes from external research dollars. At least nine months of a tenure-track faculty member’s salary, however, comes from the state budget.

“When you’re constantly having to bring in all of your own salary, as research faculty do, it can be a stressful experience,” Coleman said. “It can also mean you’re more isolated, because you’re focused on bringing in those research dollars that will help you keep your position. But we want research faculty to know that we want them to build their careers here.”

To address these issues, the team developed reference materials and workshops for research faculty seeking promotion. The workshops are offered on a regular basis, and resources and recordings are available on the Georgia Tech faculty website. The team also created educational materials for promotion committees, often composed of tenure-track faculty who are unfamiliar with the research faculty experience.  

“We saw a need for better consistency across campus with regards to guidance for research faculty promotion committees,” Rinehart said. “Tenure-track faculty need guidance on not just how to properly hire research faculty, but also in how to mentor and retain them.”

According to Coleman and Rinehart, the implementation team’s most significant achievement was the launch of a research faculty mentoring network. The mentoring network connects junior research faculty mentees with senior research faculty mentors who have grown their careers at Georgia Tech.

“When new tenure-track faculty arrive, they are usually assigned a mentor within their School or department, but that method doesn’t generally work for research faculty,” Coleman said. “There may not be a large research faculty community in their unit, and research faculty roles and responsibilities vary significantly from person to person. For this reason, the mentoring network is meant to foster cross-pollination and build community across units.”

The mentoring network is a collaboration with MentorTech, a program run by Georgia Tech Professional Education. The program is ongoing, and enrollment is always open. 

To foster inclusivity and belonging, the team established an orientation program for research faculty, modeled after the tenure-track faculty orientation. The Provost’s Office hosted the inaugural research faculty orientation in Fall 2023. Because research faculty are hired throughout the year, the team decided the orientation should take place semiannually. The second orientation took place on March 13. 

In addition to the workshops, mentor network, and orientations, the implementation team also launched a program to welcome research faculty in a personal way. When a new research faculty member is hired, another more senior research faculty member is assigned to welcome them in person, provide them with important information for getting oriented to campus, tell them about relevant professional opportunities, and give them Georgia Tech-branded swag.

“All of this work is about recognizing that research faculty are a tremendously valuable part of our community,” Rinehart said. “They also really enhance our reputation internationally.”

According to Coleman, research faculty can sometimes be viewed as disposable, because of their support from grants that may be limited in time and scope. But she believes that line of thinking is a disservice to both the individual and the Institute.

“It’s important that we recognize the value of research faculty, nurture them, and retain them long term,” she said. “We need to make it possible for people to spend their careers here, as I have, and help make sure research faculty positions at Georgia Tech can be both viable and fulfilling long-term careers.”

To read more about Georgia Tech's strategic research initiatives, visit the Research Next website.

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.