To request a media interview, please reach out to School of Physics experts using our faculty directory, or contact Jess Hunt-Ralston, College of Sciences communications director. A list of faculty experts and research areas across the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech is also available to journalists upon request.
New research focusing on the remarkable tower-building abilities of fire ants continues to attract attention from top media outlets, such as this story from the Washington Post. Also, study co-author Craig Tovey, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, takes us behind the scenes of the research in this post for The Conversation. David Hu also worked on the study. Hu is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. He is also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
graduation 2023 2017-07-13T00:00:00-04:00Ants as energetic engineers – that's clear from the latest study led by School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor David Hu. The work reveals in great detail how fire ants can build Eiffel Tower-like structures with their own bodies. Applications could lead to structure-building robots. This New York Times video shows off the Tech research team's experiments, including an X-ray video highlighting the ants' remarkable ability to quickly build wide-base towers. Hu is also an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
Extension of Self 2017-07-12T00:00:00-04:00For the past nine years, Georgia Tech President G.P. "Bud" Peterson, along with faculty and other Institute officials, have taken summer tours of the state to meet with business leaders, lawmakers, alumni, and others with an interest in Tech's mission. This year's tour of South Georgia is the most extensive yet: nearly 1,000 miles, 44 counties, and 12 cities. The Tech entourage includes School of Physics Professor Deirdre Shoemaker, who at 1:48 into the video talks about what she hopes to learn on the tour.
sophia university 2017-06-21T00:00:00-04:00
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), an international group of scientists that includes Georgia Tech researchers, is being recognized for its recent work confirming the existence of gravitational waves. The Princess of Asturias Foundation, established by Spain's monarchy to celebrate worldwide achievement in the arts and sciences, has announced that LIGO and its founders/principal investigators will receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Science and Technical Achievement during ceremonies in October. The award puts LIGO in good company; previous winners include primatologist Jane Goodall, human genome pioneer Craig Venter, Internet founding fathers Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, and physicist Peter Higgs (of Higgs boson fame.) Laura Cadonati, School of Physics associate professor, is the deputy spokesperson for LIGO.
phased array systems 2017-06-14T00:00:00-04:00Here is Yahoo! News reprinting a Reuters story on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its recent announcement that it had detected a third gravitational wave signal. This particular ripple through space and time originated from a black hole collision approximately 3 billion light-years from Earth. Georgia Tech researchers are well-represented within LIGO, and Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics, is the international research team's deputy spokesperson.
Jerel Harris 2017-06-01T00:00:00-04:00
A "black hole tango," the imagery in the headline for this Science story, hints at the implications of the latest news coming from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The international team of scientists, which includes Georgia Tech faculty and students, says it has recorded evidence of a third black hole collision and the gravitational waves it produced. "These black holes are not like two aligned tornadoes orbiting each other, but like two tilted tornadoes," says Laura Cadonati, School of Physics associate professor and LIGO deputy spokesperson, adding that the research may prompt new theories regarding how these massive collapsing stars pair up in the first place. The latest LIGO findings are also covered at Space.com and National Geographic.
sustainability award 2017-06-01T00:00:00-04:00
More than a dozen Georgia Tech faculty members, students, and postdoctoral fellows are working with the large international research team that makes up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). This is the team that made its own splash in the science world in 2015 with the first detection of a gravitational wave signal, the result of a black hole collision 1.5 billion light years from Earth. Now LIGO announces that a third gravitational wave was observed and confirmed in January from even farther away: about 3 billion light years. Once again, Albert Einstein has been proven right, and once again the science media can't resist a story that features black holes acting mysteriously and ripples of space and time flying through the cosmos at lightspeed. In addition to this USA Today story, coverage includes the Washington Post, BBC News, Scientific American, The Verge and Phys.org, among others. School of Physics associate professor Laura Cadonati is LIGO's deputy spokesperson, and research scientist James Clark from the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics worked on the latest discovery.
sustainable fuels 2017-06-01T00:00:00-04:00
Science News is the latest stop for media coverage of David Hu and Patricia Yang's poop paper. This story contains details on how much work the researchers had to do to get information on mammal defecation, including trips to Zoo Atlanta to gather feces, and studying YouTube videos of animals pooping (are you really that surprised such videos exist?) Hu is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics and an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Yang is a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
C-130H aircraft 2017-05-11T00:00:00-04:00
This story does indeed sing the praises of the humble honeybee, focusing on special Atlanta projects designed to study and provide homes for our four-winged pollen pals. One of those is the Georgia Tech Urban Honeybee Project, located on the roof of Clough Undergraduate Learning Center. That's where Jennifer Leavey, program director and senior academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences, rules the hives. The story also mentions a recent study from School of Biological Sciences associate professor David Hu, who used the Project to research honeybee hairs and the role they play in pollen collection.
All hail the bee 2017-05-11T00:00:00-04:00Scientific American has reprinted David Hu and Patricia Yang's April 26 article from The Conversation detailing their new research on the defecation habits of mammals. (The Conversation also lists that article as one of its most read items for the past week). In addition to being an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, Hu is also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics and an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Yang is a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
work family interactions 2017-05-06T00:00:00-04:00An international team has discovered a way to produce graphene from ethene, also called ethylene, through a high-temperature step-by-step process. The team includes two Georgia Tech researchers who are members of the School of Physics' Center for Computational Materials Science: Bokwon Yoon, a research scientist, and professor Uzi Landman, who is also CCMS director.
Wideband Millimeter Wave Transmit 2017-05-06T00:00:00-04:00Science Daily picked up the Georgia Tech news story about the ethene-to-graphene research study, which included two members of the School of Physics' Center for Computational Materials Science: Bokwon Yoon, a research scientist, and professor Uzi Landman, who is also CCMS director.
Juneteenth Celebration 2017-05-04T00:00:00-04:00- ‹ previous
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Experts in the News
Researchers have long known that when two galaxies approach each other and merge, the supermassive black holes at their centers form a pair and are eventually expected to merge as well. It is precisely these mergers that are considered one of the sources of the gravitational-wave background — a faint “hum” of spacetime detected in recent years. However, the role played by the geometry of the collision in this process has remained an open question.
Graduate student Sena Ghobadi of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Physics, along with her colleagues, has developed three-dimensional dynamic models of such collisions.
A similar story appeared in Sky & Telescope.
Universe Magazine 2026-04-28T00:00:00-04:00Research led by Georgia Tech physicist Itamar Kolvin has found that the presence of small imperfections or heterogeneities in materials can have a dual effect on their strength and resilience. While heterogeneities were historically believed to make materials stronger by creating an obstacle course for cracks, the new study shows that in some complex materials, heterogeneities can actually accelerate crack propagation and weaken the overall structure. The findings have implications for how engineers design and reinforce materials to optimize their toughness.
Atlanta Today 2026-02-27T00:00:00-05:00Assistant Professor Zhu-Xi Luo and Ph.D. student Yi-Lin Tsao from Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Physics have demonstrated a novel mechanism for stabilising physical phases vulnerable to topological defects. Their work addresses a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics: the destabilisation of phases like superfluids by thermally-induced defects such as anyons and vortices.
Quantum Zeitgeist 2026-02-25T00:00:00-05:00In an article published in Physics Magazine, School of Physics Ph.D. student Jingcheng Zhou and Assistant Professor Chunhui (Rita) Du review efforts to optimize diamond-based quantum sensing. According to Zhou and Du, the approach used in two recent studies broadens the potential applications of nitrogen-vacancy center sensors for probing quantum phenomena, enabling measurements of nonlocal properties (such as spatial and temporal correlations) that are relevant to condensed-matter physics and materials science.
Physics Magazine 2025-07-14T00:00:00-04:00Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and India's National Center for Biological Sciences have found that yeast clusters, when grown beyond a certain size, spontaneously generate fluid flows powerful enough to ferry nutrients deep into their interior.
In the study, "Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast," published in Science Advances, the research team — which included Georgia Tech Ph.D. scholar Emma Bingham, Research Scientist G. Ozan Bozdag, Associate Professor William C. Ratcliff, and Associate Professor Peter Yunker — used experimental evolution to determine whether non-genetic physical processes can enable nutrient transport in multicellular yeast lacking evolved transport adaptations.
A similar story also appeared at The Hindu.
Phys.org 2025-06-24T00:00:00-04:00Other planets, dwarf planets and moons in our solar system have seasonal cycles — and they can look wildly different from the ones we experience on Earth, experts told Live Science.
To understand how other planets have seasons, we can look at what drives seasonal changes on our planet. "The Earth has its four seasons because of the spin axis tilt," Gongjie Li, associate professor in the School of Physics, told Live Science. This means that our planet rotates at a slight angle of around 23.5 degrees.
"On Earth, we're very lucky, this spin axis is quite stable," Li said. Due to this, we've had relatively stable seasonal cycles that have persisted for millennia, although the broader climate sometimes shifts as the entire orbit of Earth drifts further or closer from the sun.
Such stability has likely helped life as we know it develop here, Li said. Scientists like her are now studying planetary conditions and seasonal changes on exoplanets to see whether life could exist in faroff worlds. For now, it seems as though the mild seasonal changes and stable spin tilts on Earth are unique.
Live Science 2025-05-05T00:00:00-04:00
