School of Physics Professor Rick Trebino has received the 2024 R.W. Wood Prize in recognition of his invention and development of techniques for the complete and rigorous measurement of ultrashort laser pulses. The R.W. Wood Prize is presented by Optica, (formerly OSA), Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, in recognition of an outstanding discovery, scientific, or technical achievement or invention in the field of optics.

”I’m ecstatic to receive this recognition from Optica,” said Trebino, who serves as the Eminent Scholar Chair of Ultrafast Optical Physics in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech. “The vast majority of science’s greatest discoveries have resulted directly from more powerful techniques for measuring light, so I decided to devote my career to this important field, and it’s very satisfying to receive this honor for my work."

Ultrashort pulses are brief bursts of light, millionths of billionths of a second long — the shortest technological events ever created. Trebino’s techniques for measuring them have made possible a host of new research and technology applications in many areas, including the fundamental studies of matter and micro-material processing.

Trebino has pioneered ultrashort-pulse measurement techniques for over three decades. In 1991, he invented the frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) technique, the first method for completely measuring arbitrary ultrashort light pulses in time. It took pulse measurement from blurry black-and-white artifact-ridden snapshots to high-resolution full-color images. The FROG technique remains the gold standard in ultrashort pulse measurement and is used worldwide in physics, chemistry, engineering, biomedical, and telecommunications applications. 

More recently, Trebino has developed devices for measuring pulses with ever shorter and ever more complex temporal — and also spatial — variations. Thanks in large part to Trebino’s techniques, these exotic light pulses have become much better understood and hence much shorter, more stable, and much more useful. His devices have also played key roles in work resulting in several recent Nobel Prizes.

Rick Trebino received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University and joined Georgia Tech in 1998 after having worked at Sandia National Laboratories. He has received numerous other awards and is a Fellow of four international scientific societies, including Optica, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and SPIE: the international society for optics and photonics.

Learn more about Trebino’s Ultrafast Optics Research Group here: frog.gatech.edu

About Optica

Optica (formerly OSA), Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, is the society dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving, and dissemination of knowledge in the field. Founded in 1916, it is the leading organization for scientists, engineers, business professionals, students, and others interested in the science of light. Optica’s renowned publications, meetings, online resources, and in-person activities fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications, and accelerate scientific, technical, and educational achievement.

A new member of the Georgia Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing (Georgia AIM) leadership team will serve as a key connector between industry and Georgia AIM innovations and workforce development programs.

Steven Ferguson, who begins March 16 as a principal research scientist with the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, comes to Georgia AIM from the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG). In his previous role, Ferguson served as chief information officer, where he led information technology, research, innovation, and data enterprises across Georgia’s technical colleges.

Now, Ferguson will leverage his experience working in technical education and workforce development to connect with Georgia companies. In this new role, he will also be the executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing 4.0 Consortium. This new collaborative within Georgia AIM gives manufacturers exclusive access to emerging technologies at Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility.

“I’m excited to join the team at Georgia Tech as I will get to work extremely close with both manufacturers and the research community,” said Ferguson. “For years, I’ve helped translate knowledge gained through research into hands-on training for the workforce. Now, I get to dedicate my time to that — I’m committed to working hand-in-hand to bridge the knowledge gap and get cutting-edge technology to Georgia’s manufacturers.”

Ferguson said one of his passions is serving the incumbent workforce — specifically, employees who have significant on-the-job experience. This will be key in his new role with the Manufacturing 4.0 Consortium, Ferguson said, as he can work closely with manufacturers to better understand their current and future workforce needs.

Addressing gaps in the workforce is also a main goal for Georgia AIM, which is working to connect artificial intelligence to manufacturers across the state. Automation, collaborative robots, sensors, and data collection are all part of smart technologies revolutionizing manufacturing. But a trained workforce is essential in order to implement these changes.

After a long and successful career with TCSG, Ferguson said he is eager to tackle the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead with Georgia AIM.

“To truly integrate AI technology into manufacturing, we need to ensure that the incumbent workforce is not just familiar but comfortable with these advancements,” he said. “While manufacturing inherently focuses on production, our aim is to make technology a fundamental aspect of this sector’s growth and evolution.”

View the story on Georgia AIM's website >>

Computers and dolphins don’t typically occupy the same space. However, Georgia Tech researchers and marine biologists from the Wild Dolphin Project have been swimming with the two for more than a decade.

The Wild Dolphin Project is the world’s longest-running underwater dolphin research project, and this week, the organization is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

Georgia Tech is marking the occasion with a fun and engaging video illustrating the interactive computing technology its researchers have created to help marine biologists studying dolphin behavior and communication in the open ocean.

Referred to as the “Jane Goodall of the sea” by National Geographic, Denise Herzing is the founder and research director of the Wild Dolphin Project. She and Georgia Tech College of Computing Professor Thad Starner began collaborating in 2011 on interactive technologies to aid the project’s study of a specific pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins.

The initial CHAT (cetacean hearing augmented telemetry) device developed by Starner’s Contextual Computing Group was a large chest-worn submersible computer that produced and recorded sounds underwater. Fast forward to today and CHAT is now two smaller units that fit on the chest and wrist.

CHAT works by having two marine biologists wear both units while swimming with the dolphins. The wrist device emits dolphin-like whistle sounds, while the chest device includes a hydrophone to detect and record sounds. The researchers made up the sounds to designate items they handle while in the water.

The Georgia Tech video features an animated example of marine biologists passing a red scarf back and forth while triggering the designated sound for the scarf.

“The hope is that the dolphins watching all of this can figure out the social context and repeat that sound to ask for the scarf,” said Scott Gilliland, CHAT developer and Georgia Tech senior research scientist.

“If that happens, it means that our dolphins can mimic one word in our tiny, made-up language.”

Gilliland and Starner continue to push CHAT forward to ensure the team captures this breakthrough when it happens. They are now collecting auditory field data to optimize their machine-learning model for identifying dolphin sounds in the open ocean.

Ultimately, they expect CHAT to recognize if a dolphin repeats one of the preset sounds in real-time. The advanced system will notify researchers in the water of this event through bone-conducting headphones paired with CHAT.

“Discoveries in dolphin cognition will serve to further elevate the status of all animals on the planet and help us define our relationship with them,” says Herzing, affiliate assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University. 

CHAT is an ongoing collaboration between Herzing and Starner’s Contextual Computing Group. The Wild Dolphin Project is a Florida-based nonprofit research organization.­­

Shreyes Melkote, who holds the Morris M. Bryan, Jr. Professorship in Mechanical Engineering in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, was recently honored with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s outstanding achievement in research engagement and outreach award. The annual award is given by Georgia Tech’s Office of the Executive Vice President for Research.

Melkote was nominated for his contributions to building and growing industry partnerships through the Georgia Tech-Boeing University Innovation Program and the Novelis Innovation Hub at Georgia Tech.

“Shreyes has invested considerable time and effort to build enduring professional relationships with these industry partners which has ensured that the partnerships deliver long-term benefits to Georgia Tech faculty and students in their research and educational endeavors while enabling external partners to achieve their current and future technology and workforce development objectives,” said Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair.

More than 169 graduate students and 81 undergraduate students along with several post-doctoral students, visiting scholars, and research engineers have benefited from industry support in programs led and fostered by Melkote.

Melkote also serves as the associate director for the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI). GTMI is Georgia Tech's interdisciplinary research institute tackling the challenges facing manufacturers and helping to ensure future global competitiveness. Recently, Georgia Tech’s advanced manufacturing pilot facility managed by GTMI is supporting a statewide initiative that combines artificial intelligence and manufacturing innovations with transformational workforce and outreach programs called Georgia AIM.

“Shreyes has a passion for initiating collaborative industry and student partnerships that address strategic challenges faced by industry,” said Thomas Kurfess, chief manufacturing officer of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the executive director of GTMI. "He is an important part of Georgia Tech’s advanced manufacturing leadership helping to make the U.S. more globally competitive by engaging our best students and offering them valuable industry insight with world-class companies.”

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.

Muhannad Bakir has been named director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology’s 3D Systems Packaging Research Center (PRC).

"We’re thrilled to have Professor Bakir joining us as the new director,” said Michael Filler, IEN’s interim executive director. “His wealth of experience and pioneering work in advanced packaging make him an excellent fit to lead the PRC into an exciting new era of innovation and technological impact.”

Originating as a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in 1993, the PRC is a national leader in the advanced packaging of microelectronics. Advanced packaging in microelectronics refers to innovative techniques for merging and interconnecting multiple components within a single electronic entity. This enables more powerful, efficient, and versatile microelectronic systems, driving innovation across various industries. The Center conducts research and education in all aspects of electronics packaging, including design, materials, process, assembly, thermal management, and system integration. Its work is driven by a wide range of applications, such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, automotive systems, wireless communications, and space exploration.

“I am honored for the opportunity to lead the PRC and look forward to working with the campus community and our industry, government, and academic partners on a research agenda that tackles the multifaceted challenges in advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration,” said Bakir.

As director, Bakir will guide the PRC into the future of advanced packaging through his vision and expertise. He is responsible for ensuring that the PRC's world-class facilities support the emerging needs of advanced packaging of microelectronics and supports members of the campus community who uses these facilities.

“We are excited to lead the science and engineering that culminates in system level prototyping and demonstrators for AI, mm-wave, photonic systems, and beyond,” he said.

Bakir, who also serves as the Dan Fielder Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and leads the Integrated 3D Systems Group, brings a wealth of experience to his new role as PRC director. He and his research group have received more than 30 paper and presentation awards including seven from the IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference, four from the IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference, and one from the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference. His group was also awarded the 2014 and 2017 Best Papers of the IEEE Transactions on Components Packaging and Manufacturing Technology.

Bakir is the recipient of the 2013 Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Award, 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2011 IEEE CPMT Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and was an Invited Participant in the 2012 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He is the co-recipient of the 2018 IEEE Electronics Packaging Society Exceptional Technical Achievement Award “for contributions to 2.5D and 3D IC heterogeneous integration, with a focus on interconnect technologies.” He is also the co-recipient of the 2018 McKnight Foundation Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards. In 2020, Bakir received the Georgia Tech Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award.

He serves as a senior area editor for the IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology and was previously an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. He has also served as a distinguished lecturer for IEEE EPS.

Learn more about PRC

The skin on our hands and feet collectively makes up roughly 5% of our surface area — at least, when it comes to our bodies. When you look at an important sensory area of the brain called the somatosensory cortex, which receives information about things like touch and pain from everywhere on the body’s surface, that number jumps to about 30%.

Liang Han recently received $550k from the National Science Foundation to uncover where in our nervous system that discrepancy in neural real estate might stem from. 

“The somatosensory cortex is like the output of the whole neural circuit — but the neural circuit takes multiple steps,” explains Han, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “How does this neural circuit generate such a biased representation, and exactly which neurons are involved?”

Pinning down which step in the neural circuit is causing areas like the hands and feet to take up so much of the somatosensory cortex may give us insights into how our sensory systems evolved — and where best to treat them when things go wrong.

Itching for answers

The somatosensory cortex is on the surface of the brain and receives information from specialized sensors on the surface of the body about touch, bodily movement, pain, temperature, and itch. Though it’s organized in a way that roughly matches our body’s structure — areas receiving information from the feet light up next to areas sensing the legs versus the ears, for example — the surface area of the somatosensory cortex is heavily biased towards certain body parts, like the hands. 

To find out where in the nervous system this bias originates, Han and her team are planning to examine the cellular mechanisms of one particular sensation: itch. Specifically, itch on glabrous (or hairless) skin, like that on the hands and feet.

“We’ve been studying itch sensation for a long time, and our previous study identified a group of neurons that control glabrous skin itch sensation,” says Han. Led by Haley Steele, a former Ph.D. student working with Liang, the research gave Han and her team the ability to isolate and study the neurons responsible for sending glabrous skin itch sensation all the way from the fingertips, through the spinal cord, and finally to the somatosensory cortex in the brain.

Interestingly for Han’s team, recent data collected by Yanyan Xing, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Han lab, suggested that there were potential physical differences in the itch-sensing neural circuits for central body parts (like the torso) versus the overrepresented peripheral body parts (like the hands).

“If you ask me why we started this project, that's why,” says Hand, “because we saw that data and we thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’”

Going more than skin deep

Those physical differences are just one potential piece of the puzzle. When it comes to the cellular origins of brain’s sensory biases, there could also be more itch-sensing neurons in peripheral areas of the body, their physiology could be different, their signals could be amplified somewhere down the line (like in the spinal cord or brain stem), or it could be a combination.

Using their previously developed tools to genetically label neurons specific to glabrous skin itch sensation in mice, Han and her team plan on studying all that — plus how these neural circuits develop over time.

“Our nervous system evolved in a way that our central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) allocated more neural resources to those distal (peripheral) parts of the body for sensory processing,” explains Han. From exploring our environment to manipulating objects, having keen sensation in distal body parts like the hands and feet has been crucial for our survival. By understanding these sensory circuits, Han is hopeful that “this study will help us to understand how the nervous system evolved.”

Beyond gaining key insights into the sensory system, understanding this particular sensation may help improve treatments for chronic itch — an experience that roughly one in five people will have in their lifetime. 

“Itch is associated with so many different conditions,” says Han. “Understanding the basic mechanisms of the neural circuit will help us to eventually treat the condition.”

This research will be funded by the National Science Foundation.

Georgia Tech's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) reviews all research and teaching activities that involve vertebrate animal subjects. IACUC approval is required in advance for all activities conducted by faculty, staff, or students, regardless of location and funding source.

This press release is shared jointly with the UC Irvine newsroom.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $15 million to an interdisciplinary team spanning 21 institutions across the country.

The six-year funding will support the Integrative Movement Sciences Institute (IMSI), an innovative group conducting groundbreaking research in the mechanics of muscle control during agile movements in changing environments.

NSF IMSI includes several key Georgia Tech researchers:

• Co-PI Simon Sponberg, Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics and School of Biological Sciences
• Lena Ting, professor and McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Engineering and co-director of the Neural Engineering Center
• Greg Sawicki, associate professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first US-based integrative center on the fundamental biology of muscle and movement that aims to bridge from the molecule to the whole animal to understand dynamic locomotion,” co-PI Sponberg says.

The research team also includes PI Monica Daley (UC Irvine), and additional Co-PIs Kiisa Nishikawa (Northern Arizona University), Jill McNitt-Gray (USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences), and Anne Silverman (Colorado School of Mines).

Leveraging expertise

“The Georgia Tech contingent will leverage the Institute's expertise in the multiscale biophysics of muscle, neuromechanics, integrative physiology and bio-robotic movement,” Sponberg says, “including the Institute’s expertise in fundamental muscle biology and movement technologies.”

The group will also collaborate with Tom Irving and Weikang Ma at the Argonne National Lab to leverage multiscale imaging, which will help connect the team’s understanding of the function of muscle at the nanoscale to the properties of that tissue during motion.

A central theme of the new Integrative Movement Sciences Institute will bridge fundamental discoveries about the biophysics and physiology of muscle and movement from insects to humans — research that Sponberg’s lab specializes in.

Last year, Sponberg also received a prestigious Curci grant to study coordinated movement in hawk moths. The team’s goal is to understand how muscle integrates with the rest of a body’s biology and the surrounding environment to allow animals and humans to move through so many varied environments. 

“Muscle is unlike any other tissue,” Sponberg says. “It enables movement in all animals and allows them to negotiate nearly every environment on this planet. For humans, it is the key piece of our physiology that translates our brain’s intentions into the movement that lets us get around in our world.

Creating models that can understand muscular control in dynamic, complex environments is vital, and could have applications spanning biotechnology, like building more dynamic robotics, and bioeconomy, creating avenues to develop new physical therapy and rehabilitation protocols.

“By integrating across scale and bringing to bear an interdisciplinary team of biologists, biophysicists, and bioengineers that span the scale from molecule to ecosystem, the new Integrative Movement Science Institute will create the next generation of muscle and movement models and experiments to understand locomotion in diverse settings,” Sponberg adds.

Funding for this research is provided by the National Science Foundation.