Inside the College of Sciences Strategic Plan: 2021-2030
Initiated in November of 2019, our new ten-year strategic plan has come together as a result of the efforts of many individuals across and beyond our community. Now, all College of Sciences staff, students, and faculty are invited to submit proposals for the funding of activities, projects, and initiatives that are relevant to the goals in the strategic plan and to the metrics of success in the implementation plan. Proposals are due January 29, 2021.

Cheers to 30 Years: Three Colleges Celebrate Three Decades
Georgia Tech students were able to major in topics related to the sciences and liberal arts since the early 1900s. But in 1990, the Institute officially organized those academic programs as colleges. The College of Sciences and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts were joined that year by the College of Computing — one of the first of its kind in the country. Learn more about our shared history through a collaborative timeline.
 

Our Research: 12 Reads

🔎 #StraightToTheSource Cuts through Covid-19 Confusion, Finds the Facts
The College of Science’s new social media series answers Covid-19-related community and frequently asked questions by directly examining scientific findings and research with resident experts.

➕ Theory Plus Data, Across Disciplines: Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology
The first two years of existence for Georgia Tech’s SCMB, which is led by center director Christine Heitsch with associate director Hang Lu, have been busy. A unique arrangement of senior scientists paired with postdoctoral and graduate researchers is currently studying six projects that sit squarely at the intersection of both disciplines.

👩‍🔬 New Advances for Old Problems: CCE Celebrates 10 Years Exploring Chemical Origins of Life
The NSF and NASA-funded Center for Chemical Evolution has completed its decade-long run with a deep impact on origins of life studies — and a cadre of early career scientists ready to take the reins on future research efforts. 

🙌 Fierce Collaboration: The Competitions that Drive Innovation
In the Georgia Tech community, creative friction between collaborators leads to better solutions. Greg Gibson and Joshua Weitz join Tamara Bogdanović and Laura Cadonati to share their stories of teamwork and partnership with Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine.

🧬 Bridging the Genomic Divide: Focusing on Precision Public Health in the U.S.
King Jordan and collaborators are working to bridge the pharmacology and genomics, or pharmacogenomic, research gap — and they’re sharing new findings and potential paths forward through a paper recently published in the journal BME Biology.

🐭 Survival of the Smallest: Uncovering Unequal Effects of Human Activity on Mammals
In a recent paper published in PNAS, Jenny McGuire and former postdoctoral researcher Silvia Pineda-Munoz examined fossil records spanning almost 12,000 years to determine the effects of human activity on where animals live — and were surprised by what they found.

📄 Hidden Symmetries and Periodic Origami: Folding New Physics into an Ancient Art
Physicists have applied the concepts behind the Japanese paper-folding art of origami to various scientific disciplines. Now, David Zeb Rocklin and his research team may have found some new ways to incorporate the folding techniques to "metamaterials."  

🔭 Exploring Oceans on Earth and Beyond: Reinhard Looks to the Skies and Seas
Chris Reinhard rounded out the end of 2020 with a pair of research successes — winning NASA funding for a new agency astrobiology push and co-authoring a Nature Geoscience paper on Earth’s oceanic “biological pump” with postdoctoral researcher Mojtaba Fakhraee.

⚡️ Shedding New Light on Polymer-based Electrochemical Cells
Led by Carlos Silva and John Reynolds, chemists and materials scientists have teamed up to investigate the complex nature of electrochemically induced charges in redox-active conjugated polymers. Their findings will help further research and engineering in the field of electro-active devices.

🤖 Spontaneous Robot Dances Highlight a New Kind of Order in Active Matter
Jeremy England and Daniel Goldman have joined fellow physics researchers in proposing a new principle by which active matter systems can spontaneously order, without need for higher level instructions or even programmed interaction among the agents — and they have demonstrated this principle in a variety of systems, including groups of periodically shape-changing robots called "smarticles."

📊 The Tension Between Awareness and Fatigue Shapes Covid-19 Spread
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, two human factors are battling it out: awareness of the virus’s severe consequences and fatigue from nine months of pandemic precautions. The results of that battle can be seen in the oddly shaped case, hospitalization, and fatality-count graphs, a new study led by Joshua Weitz suggests.