This year marks the 25th anniversary of celebrating Earth Day at Georgia Tech. A four-day schedule of events is planned for this campuswide program to celebrate nature, the preservation of our planet, and the Georgia Tech community’s contributions to campus sustainability. A few events are already collecting items or have opened registration — so get a head start on your Earth Day plans.

The keynote event on Monday, April 18, features Maria Cimilluca, vice president of Infrastructure and Sustainability, who will share the path forward for sustainability at Georgia Tech. The event will also feature the presentation of the Student Sustainability Champion Award. Register here.

If sustainable transportation is your thing, you can join a Group Bike Ride led by President Ángel Cabrera on Tuesday, April 19. The 4.75 mile ride requires registration and will begin in front of the Campus Recreation Center. 

The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Fellowship for Sustainability Research Program is recruiting PhD-seeking students of exceptional potential from a diversity of backgrounds and intellectual interests for our second class of fellows. With the support of a faculty advisory board, the fellows will work, study, and train as an interdisciplinary team on a program of research that aligns with the priorities of the BBISS and contributes to their personal development as future leaders in sustainability.

This fellowship pays a stipend, graduate student health benefits, and tuition remission for up to two full years. It is expected that 6 to 8 fellows will be selected for the program each academic year. The first class of 7 fellows was selected in Spring 2021 and began the program in Fall 2021.

To apply, students must be nominated by a faculty member from the Georgia Tech academic unit in which they are enrolled in the PhD program or to which they are applying for acceptance to the PhD program. The nominating faculty member will serve as the 
student’s faculty advisor, and commits to serving on the BBISS Graduate Fellowship Faculty Advisory Board. Nomination packets should be submitted by April 15, 2022.

Please help spread the word. Share this opportunity widely with faculty and students.

Since June, Lalith Polepeddi and Akhil Chavan have been using their skills in computer science and machine learning to help study biodiversity in Georgia Tech’s new EcoCommons.

Both research staff at the Georgia Tech Global Change Program, Polepeddi and Chavan teamed up to apply for a micro research grant from the Kendeda Living Building last summer. The grants empower research and innovation at a student, staff, and faculty level through small, accessible, amounts of seed funding.

A majority of Georgia residents strongly support new solar and wind power capacity over new coal-fired plants and believe the state should set a carbon emissions reduction goal, according to a new survey conducted for researchers at Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia.

The survey, conducted by polling firm Dynata, found that 60% of Georgia residents back the creation of a state carbon emissions reduction goal. That includes 74% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 52% of independents, and 45% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

The poll also found that 70% of Georgians support new solar power and 64% support new wind power, with new hydroelectric and natural gas capacity also receiving relatively favorable marks.

The survey found only 30% of respondents supported new coal-fired power plants.

“This survey demonstrates that many Georgians across the political spectrum are in favor of green energy solutions that will benefit the state’s environment, create new jobs, and support our economy,” said Marilyn Brown, Regents Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy.

Cory Struthers, assistant professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, and Brown designed the survey with help from graduate students in Georgia Tech’s Climate and Energy Policy Lab (CEPL).

Brown and Struthers are affiliated with Drawdown Georgia, a project of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, which provided funding to universities and stakeholders across Georgia to identify promising climate solutions for the state. The Foundation provided support for this survey, in addition to other activities to translate research into action, including the Drawdown Business Compact.

“This survey provides important new information about how people in Georgia feel about climate solutions,” said Blair Beasley, the Foundation’s director of climate strategies. “We are pleased to see that the results validate Georgians' support of many high-impact solutions that Drawdown Georgia has identified for their potential to reduce emissions in our state this decade.”

The Busbee Endowment at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems also provided support for the survey.

Support for a Range of Climate Solutions

The survey of 1,788 Georgia residents was conducted online from Aug. 20, 2021, to Sept. 5, 2021.

All survey participants answered a set of common questions about their demographics, energy bills, knowledge of climate solutions, values, and more. The respondents were then divided into three groups, with participants in each answering additional questions that focused on one of three transformational climate solutions: rooftop solar, retrofitting, or electric vehicles.

The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points for questions in the larger, common, sample and plus or minus 4 percentage points for those in the smaller sample.

Overall, 75% of Democrats, 55% of independents, and 49% of Republicans supported development of a climate resiliency plan for Georgia to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

When asked about new energy infrastructure, new solar panels and wind farms received 70% and 64% support, respectively. In contrast, 36% of those surveyed showed support for new nuclear power plants, somewhat higher than for new coal plants. Seventy-one percent of respondents favored energy efficiency strategies and smart-meter infrastructure.

Climate technologies that individuals can adopt at home were also well-viewed. A majority of respondents either already had residential energy-saving technologies or were interested in adopting them. The highest combined level of interest and adoption was for using LED lights at 93%, followed by efficient HVAC systems (80%), rooftop solar (59%), community solar (59%), and electric vehicles (55%).

Many respondents were also willing to support government funding for financial incentives to go green: 50% said they would support $5,000 rebates for electric vehicles, 55% said they would look favorably on up-front financing for heat pumps, and 64% said they would support a similar strategy for rooftop solar projects.

“These high-impact solutions have the potential to both reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency in Georgia,” Struthers said. “A cleaner, more efficient Georgia means increased air and environmental quality, job creation, and gains in public health.”

Survey Also Reveals Details of Energy Poverty, Low Energy Literacy

The survey findings also shed light on the prevalence of “energy poverty” in Georgia. A household is energy-poor when it spends more than 6% of its income on energy. The survey found that while households with incomes greater than $150,000 spent about 2% of their income on energy bills each month, households with incomes less than $20,000 spent, on average, between 14% and 21% of their monthly earnings on energy.

The survey also found low levels of literacy in regard to climate solutions, energy technology, and policy among respondents. Fewer than 35% of respondents knew the correct answer to questions related to energy and climate, including what energy sources are fossil fuels and the relative cost of operating electric and gasoline-powered vehicles. Only 4% of those surveyed correctly answered that solar panels generate energy in full sunlight, in the shade, and on rainy days.

“We want to use this data to continue to answer questions about the diffusion of, and support for, clean and equitable energy technology transition in Georgia,” Brown said. “How can this data help us overcome ambivalence toward clean energy and design programs that make the energy transition work for all Georgians, especially the most vulnerable? How can it help us to raise knowledge and awareness about the promise of high-impact climate solutions?”

A PowerPoint of the full findings can be downloaded from the CEPL website.

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top-10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

The Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, home of the School of Public Policy, provides innovative, human-centered perspectives at the intersections of humanities, social sciences, arts, and STEM, developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. Nearly 350 tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure track, and permanent research faculty, prepare students to be leaders capable of balancing a richly defined base of expertise with a well-grounded sense of responsibility. Our programs encompass traditional fields as well as unique and professional disciplines. Many of our faculty members engage in ground-breaking, interdisciplinary research to solve complex issues of the world.

About the University of Georgia

Chartered by the state of Georgia in 1785, the University of Georgia is the birthplace of public higher education in America. What began as a commitment to inspire the next generation grows stronger today through global research, hands-on learning, and extensive outreach. A top value in public higher education and research, the University of Georgia tackles some of the world’s grand challenges, from combating infectious diseases and creating a dependable food supply to advancing economic growth and strengthening cyber and global security.

As Georgia’s flagship institution, the university is recognized for its commitment to student excellence through an emphasis on rigorous learning experiences both inside and outside the classroom, including hands-on research and leadership opportunities. These experiences contribute to the university’s exceptional rates in retention, graduation, and career placement. Among public universities, the University of Georgia has been one of the nation’s top three producers of Rhodes Scholars over the past two decades. The university is also home to the Peabody Awards, the most prestigious prize in electronic media.

Since 2001, the School of Public and International Affairs has been dedicated to enhancing civic engagement, public leadership, scholarship on political institutions and policy, and effective governance. Now, more than ever, the nation and the world require scholars and students to focus their attention on the pressing policy and governance issues of the day. Guided by an award-winning teaching faculty and innovative research, the School offers critical training to future public servants and a deep understanding of national and international politics.

Sustainable management of natural resources like water is critical as communities grow -  particularly in California, the most populous state in the U.S. where droughts are extremely common.

Surface water, such as rivers, lakes, and wetlands, typically fills most of the state’s needs, while groundwater, such as subterranean aquifers and wells, provides about 40 % of the state’s water. But in drought years (like right now), that can increase to 60 percent. To prevent overdraft of all those wells – when groundwater is pumped out faster than snowmelt or rainfall can replenish it – California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014.

Five years later, a team of public policy researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California (USC) started examining the progress made and the obstacles stakeholders face as the state aims for sustainable groundwater use.

Georgia Tech’s Brian An, along with researchers William Leach and Shui-Yan Tang from USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, recently published their work in two journals. Their work sheds light on how local, regional, and state resource authorities can work effectively together to achieve sustainable outcomes.

“What we discovered is that inclusive and egalitarian rules that protect stakeholders’ autonomy leads to higher confidence in these sustainability efforts and outcomes,” said An, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy. “Mandated collaboration is more likely to succeed when the mandate embraces local entities’ autonomy.”

The team’s findings could help inform other states who are now, or eventually will, grapple with resource management and sustainability issues, according to An.

“Our research illustrates that a collaborative approach among resource users with a state top-down mandate can be successful,” he said, adding that such an approach could be relevant to other states, such as Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, that have been engaged in an ongoing Tri-state water war.

While the focus of the research is squarely on California and SGMA, the law has implications for the rest of the country as well – about 80%of California’s water goes to the state’s massive agricultural enterprise, which provides two thirds of the nation’s fruits and nuts.

Under SGMA, local stakeholders, such as municipal governments and irrigation districts, organize Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs), which are charged with developing sustainability plans that should eliminate overdraft by 2040. An took the lead in developing the survey tools, sketching out the research ideas, and collecting and analyzing the data for both papers, which relied heavily on surveys of nearly 70 GSAs and 140 member agencies across California.

Enticing Participation

An is lead author of the first paper, published in the journal Environmental Science & Policy. In that study, the researchers address concerns local stakeholders may have over losing autonomy. They write, “rules designed to protect autonomy can entice participation,” from a diverse range of stakeholders.

“Specifically, the governing rules should address whether underprivileged groups’ interests are represented,” said An. “Our research illustrates that a mix of collaborative approach among resource users and a state top-down mandate can be successful if the mandate can respect the local actors' autonomy.”

Designers of state or federal laws that mandate local and regional collaborative governance should anticipate this need by allowing member stakeholders to craft protective governing rules, he added. 

This first paper serves as a guidebook, providing insights into how organizations can address constitutional issues to improve the collaborative process and environmental sustainability outcomes. An is co-author on the second paper, essentially a progress report of SGMA, published in The Journal of the American Water Resources Association.

The researchers reported that issues such as too many diverse interests and lack of trust among stakeholders have been the main hurdles to forming GSAs, and the most common obstacles to groundwater planning include a lack of financial resources and SGMA’s requirement to coordinate plans among GSAs in a shared basin.

But five years in, the study authors write, “most respondents are optimistic that SGMA will enhance groundwater sustainability locally and statewide. If successfully implemented and fully funded, SGMA could become a model worldwide for sustainable resource governance that combines top-down mandates and local incentives.”

An initially developed the idea for both papers with Tang, and the work was supported by a grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. An was a Ph.D. candidate at USC when the research began.  Now based in the Southeastern U.S., An believes that jurisdictions here can learn from the SGMA example. For years, he noted, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida have been engaged in a dispute over water allocation rights for two major river basins.

“There hasn’t been an easy answer but there have been efforts to settle these disputes in the courts, just like stakeholders in California traditionally resorted to,” said An. “But our research suggests that regulatory approaches that use incentives for collaboration among resource users, while respecting their autonomy, can be one viable to achieve sustainable management of common natural resources in multi-jurisdictional territories.”

CITATION: B. An, S.Y. Tang, W. Leach, “Managing Environmental Change through Inter-agency Collaboration: Protective Governance in Mandated Sustainability Planning.” (Environmental Science & Policy, Sept. 2021)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2021.08.024

CITATION: W. Leach, B. An, S.Y. Tang, “Evaluating California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act: The First Five Years of Governance and Planning.”  (Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Nov. 2021)

https://doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.12967

For electric vehicles (EVs) to become mainstream, they need cost-effective, safer, longer-lasting batteries that won’t explode during use or harm the environment. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology may have found a promising alternative to conventional lithium-ion batteries made from a common material: rubber.

Elastomers, or synthetic rubbers, are widely used in consumer products and advanced technologies such as wearable electronics and soft robotics because of their superior mechanical properties. The researchers found that the material, when formulated into a 3D structure, acted as a superhighway for fast lithium-ion transport with superior mechanical toughness, resulting in longer charging batteries that can go farther.  The research, conducted in collaboration with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

In conventional lithium-ion batteries, ions are moved by a liquid electrolyte. However, the battery is inherently unstable: even the slightest damage can leak into the electrolyte, leading to explosion or fire. The safety issues have forced the industry to look at solid-state batteries, which can be made using inorganic ceramic material or organic polymers.

“Most of the industry is focusing on building inorganic solid-state electrolytes. But they are hard to make, expensive and are not environmentally friendly,” said Seung Woo Lee, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, who is part of a team of researchers who have uncovered a rubber-based organic polymer superior to other materials. Solid polymer electrolytes continue to attract great interest because of their low manufacturing cost, non-toxicity and soft nature.  However, conventional polymer electrolytes do not have sufficient ionic conductivity and mechanical stability for reliable operation of solid-state batteries.

Novel 3D Design Leads to Jump in Energy Density, Performance

Georgia Tech engineers have solved common problems (slow lithium-ion transport and poor mechanical properties) using the rubber electrolytes. The key breakthrough was allowing the material to form a three-dimensional (3D) interconnected plastic crystal phase within the robust rubber matrix. This unique structure has resulted in high ionic conductivity, superior mechanical properties and electrochemical stability.

This rubber electrolyte can be made using a simple polymerization process at low temperature conditions, generating robust and smooth interfaces on the surface of electrodes. These unique characteristics of the rubber electrolytes prevent lithium dendrite growth and allow for faster moving ions, enabling reliable operation of solid-state batteries even at room temperature.

“Rubber has been used everywhere because of its high mechanical properties, and it will allow us to make cheap, more reliable and safer batteries,” said Lee.

“Higher ionic conductivity means you can move more ions at the same time,” said Michael Lee, a mechanical engineering graduate researcher. “By increasing specific energy and energy density of these batteries, you can increase the mileage of the EV.”

The researchers are now looking at ways to improve the battery performance by increasing its cycle time and decreasing the charging time through even better ionic conductivity. So far, their efforts have seen a two-time improvement in the battery's performance / cycle time. 

The work could enhance Georgia’s reputation as a center for EV innovation.  SK Innovation, a global energy and petrochemical company, is funding additional research of the electrolyte material as part of its ongoing collaboration with the Institute to build next-generation solid-state batteries that are safer and more energy dense than conventional LI-ion batteries. SK Innovation recently announced construction of a new EV battery plant in Commerce, Georgia, expected to produce an annual volume of lithium-ion batteries equal to 21.5 Gigawatt-hours by 2023.   

“All-solid-state batteries can dramatically increase the mileage and safety of electric vehicles. Fast-growing battery companies, including SK Innovation, believe that commercializing all-solid-state batteries will become a game changer in the electric vehicle market,” said Kyounghwan Choi, director of SK Innovation’s next-generation battery research center. “Through the ongoing project in collaboration with SK Innovation and Professor Seung Woo Lee of Georgia Tech, there are high expectations for rapid application and commercialization of all-solid-state batteries."

CITATION: M. Lee, et. al, "Elastomeric electrolytes for high-energy solid-state lithium batteries," (Nature, 2022) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04209-4

***

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Meet Michael Chang, associate director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) at Georgia Tech.

BBISS is one of Georgia Tech's 10 interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs) within the Georgia Tech Research enterprise.

What is your field of expertise and why did you choose it? 

My first degree and first career were in aerospace engineering. In the late 1980s with a new diploma in hand from Georgia Tech, I moved to Long Beach, California to work for McDonnell Douglas. Living in the pollution of Los Angeles, however, I discovered that I was more interested in what was in the air than in the military transport plane I was helping to design to fly through it. A couple years later, I decided a career change was in order. I chose to come back to Georgia Tech for graduate school mostly based on location and proximity to family and friends. I got lucky when the Institute suddenly became THE center and place to be for air quality research.  

What makes the way in which your IRI enables campus research unique?         

Sustainability is an exceptionally broad topic. With its three legs of “people, planet, and profit,” nearly every subject is relevant and can be analyzed through the lens of sustainability and made better – water, air, transportation, manufacturing, materials, energy, buildings, computing, forests, agriculture, public health, and more. There is a sustainability angle to all these topics and more. We’re the one IRI that knits every topic together. We enable research on campus by enabling the people that are doing the knitting and connecting topics to the environment, to equity, and to the costs and benefits that society cares about. 

What couldn’t have happened without your IRI?    

Sustainability is a popular research topic at Georgia Tech. So, in the last few years, with BBISS assistance and with the BBISS Director, John Crittenden, providing an example, more investigators at Tech are now thinking big, taking more risks, and trying to go after the biggest opportunities.   

What impact is your IRI research having on the world?       

The decade long Southern Oxidants Study was a massive congressionally funded research project to figure out why the Southern U.S. air was different from everywhere else in which air quality had been studied previously (e.g., Los Angeles, London, Mexico City) and why what worked to improve air quality elsewhere did not work here. That study changed the way air quality is managed in Atlanta, across the South, in the U.S., and around the world. And I had a front row seat to not just watch it, but to play a role too. It was fun and it made a real difference in people’s lives. Among other projects, today I still participate in the daily forecasting of air quality (smog alerts) for the Atlanta, Columbus, and Macon metro areas, a project I was asked to start while still in graduate school in support of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. 

What do you like to do in your spare time when you are not working on your research or teaching?  

I like to be outdoors, but I’m not an outdoorsman. I don’t like to exercise, but I like to be active. I guess I like to play and do the things I’ve loved doing since I was a kid: biking, swimming, paddling, gardening, gazing at the moon/clouds/stars, making stuff for no reason, fixing things that aren’t broken, and doing things I probably shouldn’t be doing, anything that gets me outside and away from a screen.

The cycle of rising temperatures leads to increases in precipitation as well as droughts.  But what impact will these weather extremes, especially heavier precipitation, have on the earth’s most effective water cleansers – wetland sediments?  

That question is driving a new $1 million, three-year grant awarded to a Georgia Institute of Technology interdisciplinary research team of geochemistry, biology and applied mechanics experts.

The award is part of the Department of Energy’s $7.7 million funding of 11 studies to improve the understanding of Earth system predictability and the Department’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model, a state-of the-science climate model. The researchers intend to develop a new scalable model that can analyze and ultimately predict where and when sediment disruptions are most likely to occur. 

Wetlands – Where Water and Land Meet

Found at the boundary between land and water, wetlands function as natural sponges that trap, cleanse, and slowly release surface water – they also serve as a natural climate change buffer, since they act as carbon “sinks,” storing vast amounts of carbon and methane in the ground. Swamps, marshes, and bogs are all examples of wetlands. What isn’t known is if wetlands that become damaged or degraded from excess water will still absorb carbon at the same level.  

By better understanding how wetlands work, Georgia Tech hopes to shed light on how wetlands will function with more frequent and more intense rainstorms.   

“A lot of work has been done in polar regions where there has been melting because of global warming, which has been shown to release a lot of methane. That’s the main motivation behind the work we’re going to do,” said the project’s principal investigator, Martial Taillefert, a geochemist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

As water levels rise, below ground oxygen is consumed very quickly, he explained. Then microbial processes take over, leading to methane forming as well as carbon dioxide, that can escape to the atmosphere.

In this project Taillefert will characterize the physical and chemical processes taking place in a wetland, mainly using electrochemical sensors deployed at different locations in the wetland. Taillefert will be able to follow the chemical response to microbial processes and study how perturbations of the water cycle affect the release of greenhouse gases. This data will then be used to fine tune the models that will predict greenhouse gas emissions.

Micro to Macro Scale
Initial studies will involve samples on the scale of a few grains of soil, but the researchers hope to eventually run simulations on the scale of a riverbed or watershed (where surface water drains into a common stream channel or other body of water).

“The goal is twofold – first, to satisfy our scientific curiosity and understand how those microbial processes can actually change the level of oxygen and trigger greenhouse gas emissions, and second, to develop a model that can predict what processes will be in the next cycle to better prepare and perhaps reduce carbon emissions in some cases,” said project collaborator Chloé Arson, associate professor of Geosystems Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

While Taillefert focuses on the chemistry component and Arson on the mathematical modeling, collaborator Thomas DiChristina serves as the microbe expert.

“My lab looks at what kind of hidden microbial processes are going on that we can't detect with the sensors because the methane is getting recycled so fast in the ground,” said DiChristina, professor in the School of Biological Sciences. 

DiChristina will be looking at multiple gene expressions without having to grow the bacteria in a laboratory. 

“Genomics allows you to deduce expression of metabolic potential. For example, which gene is producing methane, and which gene is inhibiting methane production,” he said.

Since methane won’t release into the atmosphere unless a certain condition occurs, the model will enable researchers to predict under what conditions methane would pour out of the sediments versus being retained and recycled, DiChristina explained.

The calculations that predict how much methane and carbon dioxide go into the atmosphere depend on an accurate description of what's happening in the subsurface -- in the sediment and in groundwater, Taillefert added. 

“We cannot yet quantify that really well. We think using our approach will enable us to get more data and a better understanding of how the process works and translate that knowledge into the models,” he said.

Taillefert and DiChristina have been working on improving Georgia Tech’s models for predicting these processes for over three decades.  With this latest award, they hope to better understand and model the processes of oxidation and reduction that change the microstructure of sediments during cycles of flood.

New Research Thrust – AI and Machine Learning  

Arson is most interested in predicting the changes in the size, shape, and arrangement of the grains of soil to understand how the porous space between the grains is affected by bio-chemical reactions. 

“Understanding the evolution of the porous space will help predict transport properties within the sediments, and the expected emissions of greenhouse gases,” said Arson. 

An expert in applied mechanics, she will use AI to build a model that can single out dominant reactions within the soil microstructure and disregard those that have minimal impact. Such insight will help simplify the model and allow it to more quickly correlate certain criteria that leads to spikes in greenhouse gases. 

“If you have a predictive model that actually attempts to explain the processes, as well as predicting them, then you have a more versatile approach that can be transferred to many other sites or environments,” she said. “I also could envision using this model and the machine learning algorithm to map locations where you expect higher emissions, and identify sites as risky, moderately risky or safe.”

Georgia Tech is partnering with two Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories: Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) in Aiken, SC, and Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, IL.

“Georgia Tech has a unique capability here that we don't have, and that capability is this combination of using state-of-the-art genomics capabilities, along with state-of-the-art electrochemistry, two attributes that Georgia Tech is internationally known for,” said Daniel Kaplan, senior research fellow with SRNL, which will serve as the study site.

Kaplan noted that Georgia Tech’s research fits perfectly with the DOE’s goal to better understand how wetlands function, enabling scientists to better understand their role in controlling water quality.

“Wetlands do a great job of cleaning out all the impurities and getting rid of a lot of the contaminants to clean the water up as it moves through a watershed,” said Kaplan. 

Atomic-scale Analysis  

Argonne National Laboratory plans to take Georgia Tech’s sediment samples and examine them at the atomic scale of individual atoms and electrons using the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a football-field-sized synchrotron that produces x-rays 10 billion times clearer than what is produced at a doctor’s office.

“The fundamental reactions that are controlling the quality of the water happen at the microorganism or nano scale,” said Kenneth Kemner, senior physicist and group leader of the Molecular Environmental Science Group at the Argonne National Lab. “By bringing all the different ways of looking at wetlands together, we'll actually have a much deeper understanding of how they function.”

From one of several x-ray ports operated 24x7, the APS can capture images of single microorganisms about 100 times smaller than the diameter of the human hair. In fact, when the APS first came online, it successfully analyzed hair strands of Ludwig van Beethoven, with the analysis deducing that the great German composer suffered from lead poisoning.

Kemner acknowledged that Georgia Tech brings unique capabilities to the wetlands research effort. He explained that answering the hard questions such as those posed by climate change will require this transdisciplinary and integrated problem-solving approach. 

Additional unfunded collaborators for this study include Christa Pennacchio, PMO Lead with the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (JGI), and Stephen Callister, scientist with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a U.S. DOE national scientific user facility managed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.   

BBISS Director John Crittenden outlines his framing of "the Gigaton Problem" and "Gigatechnology" and how using the transdisciplinary principles of Infrastructure Ecology can provide a framework for solving it. View the virtual talk here.