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.
Scientists at Georgia Tech and Clark University have developed robotic lizards in a collaboration combining robotics, math, biology, and artificial intelligence. The robots helped solve an evolutionary puzzle and could be the first step towards a new generation of wiggling robots. The team used artificial intelligence to study the movement of various lizard species. “We were interested in why and how these intermediate lizards use their bodies and limbs to move around in different terrestrial environments,” says one of the study’s authors, Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. “This is a fundamental question in locomotion biology and can inspire more capable wiggling robots.” Other School of Physics scientists involved in the research include Ph.D. students Baxi Chong and Tianyu Wang, and Eva Erickson (B.S. PHYS '22).
Meet the Lizard Robot That Could Save Your Life 2022-08-01T00:00:00-04:00Elisabetta Matsumoto, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, is featured in a documentary directed by Shruti Mandhani, a research fellow for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the United Kingdom, and a Ph.D. student at Sheffield Hallam University. The documentary focuses on imposter syndrome, a psychological condition in which individuals doubt their skills and abilities, and fear being discovered as frauds. Mandhani interviewed other women in STEM (science, technology, mathematics, and engineering) disciplines for the documentary, which is shortlisted for the Bristol Science Film Festival in August.
Meeting my Role Models: An Insight into Imposter Syndrome 2022-07-19T00:00:00-04:00Small robots that have two flapping arms and can’t move around on their own can spontaneously link up and glide together instead. This self-organization may be related to how complex structures arise from simple building blocks in nature. Daniel Goldman, professor in the School of Physics, and his colleagues used small robots called smarticles — short for “smart active particles” — to observe self-organization in the lab.
Alan Gilbert (MS Phys 93) was recently named co-chairman of The Foundry Inc., a private non-profit learning-based high school in Fayetteville, Ga. The news is highlighted in the Class Notes listings of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine's Ramblin' Roll section.
Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine's Class Notes 2022-04-14T00:00:00-04:00Those who are allergic to yeast but still crave a pizza every now and then may get a rise out of this report: A materials scientist at the University of Naples Federico II has led a team of researchers to develop a yeast-free pizza dough. The results of the study were published in the Physics of Fluids journal. David Hu, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the School of Physics, was not involved in the study, but weighs in on the function of yeast in pizza dough, .
Roll over sourdough. Italian scientists develop a new way to rise pizza crust 2022-03-22T00:00:00-04:00Black soldier fly larvae devour food waste and other organic matter and are made of 60% protein. But they’re increasingly dying before they reach livestock facilities as animal feed. Researchers, recognizing the culprit is the collective heat generated when the maggots eat in crowded conditions, have found that delivering the right amount of airflow could help solve the overheating issue. A study with those findings, published in Frontiers in Physics, is co-authored by David Hu, professor in the Georgia W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of Biological Sciences; and Daniel Goldman, professor in the School of Physics.
How To Raise Larvae on Food Scraps to Feed Livestock 2022-01-05T00:00:00-05:00The Georgia Tech women's volleyball team has a shot to play in their first-ever NCAA Final Four, and third-year School of Physics major Julia Bergmann is a big reason why. The 6' 5'' outside hitter, the ACC's player of the year, made some key kills and serves in the team's Thursday night win over Ohio State. That gives Georgia Tech its second-ever appearance in the Elite 8. Bergmann, whose hometown is Munich, Germany, went to high school in Brusque, Brazil. (Here's the AJC's story on Bergmann being named ACC player of the year, becoming the first Georgia Tech player to win that honor since 2004.)
Julia Bergmann leads Georgia Tech into volleyball Sweet 16 2021-12-10T00:00:00-05:00Ants are among the most industrious creatures on Earth, so it's only fitting that engineers would look to them for inspiration when designing small robots that can collaborate on complex tasks and maneuver through uneven territory. Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, was part of a team that created a simple but effective swarm of six-inch "robot" ants that were able to overcome obstacles and terrain individually, and link up to form longer chains when they couldn't accomplish a task alone.
Engineers design 3D-printed robot 'ants' that can walk over leaves, link up like a centipede and call for help by themselves 2021-11-08T00:00:00-05:00The 17th annual University System of Georgia (USG) Regents’ Scholarship Gala, sponsored by the USG Foundation, included the announcement of the six 2021 recipients of the Felton Jenkins Jr. Hall of Fame Faculty Award. This prestigious teaching award recognizes faculty’s important contributions to their schools and fields of study, and for their strong commitment to teaching and student success. Michael F. Schatz, interim chair and professor, School of Physics, is one of the award recipients.
omsc webinar 2021-10-15T00:00:00-04:00Andras Karsai, a graduate student researcher and Ph.D. candidate in the School of Physics, will present research he has conducted with Dunn Family Professor Daniel Goldman at the 74th annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Phoenix November 21-23. Karsai, a member of Goldman's Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab, will present the findings of a research study titled Pinned Bubble Dynamics in Locally Fluized Granular Media on Sunday, Nov. 21st.
master of science in cybersecurity 2021-10-12T00:00:00-04:00Researchers have discovered that environments favoring clumpy growth are all that’s needed to quickly transform single-celled yeast into complex multicellular organisms. Georgia Tech scientists report that over the course of nearly two years of evolution, they have induced unicellular yeasts to grow into multicellular clusters of immense size, going from microscopic to branching structures visible to the naked eye. Those scientists include William Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences, G. Ozan Bozdag, research scientist, and Kai Tong, Ph.D. student, all School of Biological Sciences; and Peter Yunker, assistant professor, Thomas C. Day, graduate student, and Seyed Alireza Zamani-Dahaj, former graduate student, all in the School of Physics.
Metz Mayor 2021-09-22T00:00:00-04:00
According to a new Georgia Tech study, honeybees have developed a way to convert pollen particles into viscoelastic pellets, allowing them to be efficiently, quickly, and reliably transported to the hive. The study also suggests that insects remove pollen from their bodies at a rate 2-10 times slower than normal grooming rates. College of Sciences researchers who worked on the study include David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Peter Yunker, assistant professor, and Gabi Steinbach, postdoctoral researcher, both in the School of Physics. (The study was also reported at Phys.org.)
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School of Physics Spring Colloquium Series- Dr. Stephanie Palmer
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Experts in the News
Researchers 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 2025-05-05T00:00:00-04:00Biofilms have emergent properties: traits that appear only when a system of individual items interacts. It was this emergence that attracted School of Physics Associate Professor Peter Yunker to the microbial structures. Trained in soft matter physics — the study of materials that can be structurally altered — he is interested in understanding how the interactions between individual bacteria result in the higher-order structure of a biofilm
Recently, in his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yunker and his team created detailed topographical maps of the three-dimensional surface of a growing biofilm. These measurements allowed them to study how a biofilm’s shape emerges from millions of infinitesimal interactions among component bacteria and their environment. In 2024 in Nature Physics, they described the biophysical laws that control the complex aggregation of bacterial cells.
The work is important, Yunker said, not only because it can help explain the staggering diversity of one of the planet’s most common life forms, but also because it may evoke life’s first, hesitant steps toward multicellularity.
Quanta Magazine 2025-04-21T00:00:00-04:00Postdoctoral researcher Aniruddha Bhattacharya and School of Physics Professor Chandra Raman have introduced a novel way to generate entanglement between photons – an essential step in building scalable quantum computers that use photons as quantum bits (qubits). Their research, published in Physical Review Letters, leverages a mathematical concept called non-Abelian quantum holonomy to entangle photons in a deterministic way without relying on strong nonlinear interactions or irrevocably probabilistic quantum measurements.
Physics World 2025-04-09T00:00:00-04:00Peter Yunker, associate professor in the School of Physics, reflects on the results of new experiments which show that cells pack in increasingly well-ordered patterns as the relative sizes of their nuclei grow.
“This research is a beautiful example of how the physics of packing is so important in biological systems,” states Yunker. He says the researchers introduce the idea that cell packing can be controlled by the relative size of the nucleus, which “is an accessible control parameter that may play important roles during development and could be used in bioengineering.”
Physics Magazine 2025-03-21T00:00:00-04:00School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada provided brief commentary on KM3NeT, a new underwater neutrino experiment that has detected what appears to be the highest-energy cosmic neutrino observed to date.
“This is clearly an interesting event. It is also very unusual,” said Taboada, spokesperson for the IceCube experiment in Antarctica. IceCube, which has a similar detector-array design as KM3NeT but is encased in ice rather than water, has detected neutrinos with energies as high as 10 PeV, but nothing in 100 PeV range. “IceCube has worked for 14 years, so it’s weird that we don’t see the same thing,” Taboada said. Taboada is not involved in the KM3Net experiment.
The KM3NeT team is aware of this weirdness. They compared the KM3-230213A event to upper limits on the neutrino flux given by IceCube and the Pierre Auger cosmic-ray experiment in Argentina. Taking those limits as given, they found that there was a 1% chance of detecting a 220-PeV neutrino during KM3NeT’s preliminary (287-day) measurement campaign.
This also appeared in Scientific American and Smithsonian Magazine.
Physics Magazine 2025-02-12T00:00:00-05:00
