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Georgia Tech has selected Troy Hilley as the recipient of the 2019 Process Improvement Excellence Award. Hilley is an academic and research IT support engineer lead in the College of Sciences’ Academic and Research Computing Services (ARCS).

The award celebrates staff who consistently invent or improve tools, processes, or systems and ask: How can we do this better? Why do we do it that way?

For years Hilley was responsible for the day-to-day operations and maintenance of faculty, research group, and administrative computing infrastructure in the School of Biological Sciences. In that capacity he established himself as a leader in thinking creatively and acting proactively to prepare the school for the rapidly changing environment for integrative computing.

“With no budget and limited resources, he used free open-source software to completely overhaul OS X management from installation to end-user software management.”

Hilley’s leadership is evident in the improvements he initiated with the management and support of Apple OS X computers on campus. This problem had been adversely affecting faculty, staff, and students and causing substantial frustration.

Whereas other IT staff merely accepted the status quo, “Troy did a clean sweep of the status quo,” according to a colleague. “With no budget and limited resources he used free open-source software to completely overhaul OS X management from installation to end-user software management.”

Hilley then implemented a system to completely automate most of the software updates. This ensured that systems and end users have the latest security and feature updates immediately.

Still seeing room for improvement, Hilley then put in place a system that enables IT staff to get detailed information on the status of the computers under ARCS management. With this system, IT staff could proactively assist users, saving time and frustration.

The process and tooling improvements Hilley established increased the speed and accuracy of support while simultaneously decreasing the frustration among both IT staff and end users. That they were achieved at no cost is a “rare optimization gem,” a colleague says.

Hilley “continues to innovate and improve tools, processes, and systems that directly help our clients and enhance the organization’s effectiveness,” another colleague says. 

Georgia Tech has named William Ratcliff and Peter Yunker as recipients of the 2019 Sigma Xi Faculty Best Paper Award.

Ratcliff was recently promoted to associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a member of the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection. Yunker is an assistant professor in the School of Physics. Both are members of the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience.

The award recognizes the authors of an outstanding paper. Ratcliff and Yunker are co-principal authors of the paper “Cellular packing, mechanical stress and the evolution of multicellularity,” published in Nature Physics in 2018.

“[The paper] exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and best reflects Georgia Tech’s institutional culture of creative and rigorous exploration.”

The paper was the first to recognize the role of mechanics in the early evolution of multicellular organisms. Ratcliff and Yunker showed “how physical stress may have significantly advanced the evolutionary path from single-cell to multicellular organisms,” according to a 2017 story about this work. “In experiments with clusters of yeast cells called snowflake yeast, forces in the clusters’ physical structures pushed the snowflakes to evolve.

“Like the first ancestors of all multicellular organisms, in this study the snowflake yeast found itself in a conundrum: As it got bigger, physical stresses tore it into smaller pieces. So, how to sustain the growth needed to evolve into a complex multicellular organism?

“In the lab, those shear forces played right into evolution’s hands, laying down a track to direct yeast evolution toward bigger, tougher snowflakes.”

The partnership has profoundly shaped the two scientists’ research programs. “The paper reflects the deep collaboration between the Yunker and Ratcliff labs,” a colleague says. “It exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and best reflects Georgia Tech’s institutional culture of creative and rigorous exploration.”

 “There are few things better than doing exciting, creative science with good friends,” Ratcliff says.

“I’m delighted to share this recognition with such a great team,” Yunker says.

Georgia Tech has named Martin Mourigal as the recipient of two awards: The 2019 Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award and the 2019 CTL/BL Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. Mourigal is an assistant professor in the School of Physics.

Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award

This award recognizes a faculty of rank no higher than assistant professor for outstanding research achievements at Georgia Tech, as evidenced by publications, program development results, and other research contributions.

Since Mourigal joined Georgia Tech in 2015, he rapidly assembled a group of talented students and postdocs working in the area of quantum magnetism, a new research direction in the School of Physics. Mourigal’s scientific productivity raised Georgia Tech’s profile in a research area of strategic importance for the National Quantum Initiative spearheaded by the U.S. Congress in 2018. “This is not only admirable,” a colleague says. “It is truly exceptional. Martin now leads an exceptionally vibrant and creative experimental physics laboratory focusing on intriguing new states of matter found in quantum magnetic materials, called spin liquids.”

Spin liquids are exotic magnetic materials in which dipole moments – atomic-scale compass needles also known as “spins” – never organize in periodic patterns, even at very low temperatures. Definitely not your typical fridge magnets! As spins do not freeze and remain dynamic, they can form highly entangled states. Entanglement is an essential ingredient to realize quantum computers. Although spin liquids are primarily studied for their fundamental properties, they also have promising technological potential.

Mourigal’s team uses neutron scattering experiments, simulation techniques, and cryogenic characterization tools to study new crystalline materials in search for elusive spin liquids. Mourigal’s laboratory is supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

“I am honored that the efforts of my laboratory are recognized by Sigma Xi” Mourigal says. “It has been really fun and exciting to work with brilliant and very creative team members, and to have wide access to top research infrastructure, such as the neutron sources at nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the cryogenic equipment in my laboratory.”

CTL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award

Jointly supported by the Center for Teaching and Learning and BP America, this award recognizes the excellent teaching and educational innovations that junior faculty bring to campus.

According to colleagues, Mourigal is extremely enthusiastic about teaching and has demonstrated unusual skills and determination to engage, motivate, and care for students in his classes. Mourigal has taught different flavors of Electromagnetism at all undergraduate levels.

In Introduction to Physics II, a course required for all engineering and science majors and known for its conceptual rigor and depth, Mourigal brought a liberal-arts flavor by offering many office hours and posting hand-written notes after class to make the course feel more personalized and warm.

In higher level classes, such as Electro-Magnetostatics and Solid-State Physics, Mourigal has increased students’ appreciation for mathematics-heavy courses that tackle the inner workings of matter. For instance, Mourigal asks Solid-State Physics students to participate in a poster session and present on modern topics well beyond the content of the lectures. The foundational concepts and methods exposed in these courses train a future workforce that will embrace the quantum technologies revolution.

Mourigal is a former Class of 1969 Teaching Fellow and a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award.

“I am surprised and delighted to be recognized by this award, and I am thankful to those students and colleagues who supported my nomination” Mourigal says. “Overall my teaching style is relatively traditional, yet I love to be in a classroom and ‘relearn’ the material through my students. The highlight of my week is often to walk in the legendary L5 auditorium in the Howey Physics building to interact with students and share with them what I love about physics.”

Editor's Note: This story by Tess Malone was first published in the Georgia Tech News Center on Aprl 9, 2019. The headlines have been revised for the College of Sciences website.

Georgia Tech researchers have been awarded $6.25 million from the Department of Defense (DoD) to use collective emergent behavior to achieve task-oriented objectives. 

DoD’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) Program funds projects that bring researchers together from diverse backgrounds to work on a complex problem. Institute for Data Engineering and Science co-director, Professor Dana Randall, is project investigator and leads a team of six that includes Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. The Formal Foundations of Algorithmic Matter and Emergent Computation team also includes chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, and computational science researchers from other universities.  

The researchers are trying to predict and design emergent behavior within computation by using basic algorithms on simple machines to perform complex tasks. Emergent behavior is when a microscopic change in a parameter creates a macroscopic change to a system. This collective behavior is easy to find in nature, from a swarm of bees to a colony of ants, but also appears in other scientific disciplines. 

“A MURI lets us take a deep dive toward understanding how many computationally limited components at the micro-scale can be programmed to work collectively to produce useful behavior at the macro-scale,” said Randall, who is also the ADVANCE Professor of Computing. “Our interdisciplinary team combines expertise in many fields, mimicking the research by forming a collaboration that is also greater than the sum of its parts."

The MURI hybrid approach to algorithmic matter combines traditional logic-based programming with non-traditional computational methods, such as using physical characteristics of the interacting matter to drive a system toward collective behavior. One of the goals is to program based on this predictable emergent behavior. The approach also predicts basic properties of the collective’s emergent behavior, like whether it will behave like a gas, fluid, or solid. In this context, emergent behavior turns into emergent collective computation.

“MURI promises basic algorithms that allow very simple machines to work collectively to perform amazingly complex tasks,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chemical engineering Professor Michael Strano said. “Our team will examine systems of autonomous cell-like particles that interact and respond to the movement of their neighbors in a programmable way. Theorists will be able to test ideas of emergent computation from these simple devices and learn how to execute tasks from the behavior of relatively simple, autonomous particles.”

Although the behavior has footing in physics, computer science, and swarm robotics, there is no underlying framework to explain why until this research. The multidisciplinary approach allows theory and experiment to continuously inform each other and determine the computational capabilities of emergent behavior. The team has an ideal range of expertise in machine learning, control theory, and non-equilibrium physics and algorithms. They are also working with experimentalists who build collective systems at granular and microscopic scales.  

“An exciting aspect of this collaboration will be our attempts to interface and integrate ideas and tools from robotics, non-equilibrium physics, control theory, and computer science to develop task-capable swarms,” Goldman said.

This MURI project will run for five years and is funded by the Army Research Office. In addition to Randall, Goldman, and Strano, the team also includes Arizona State computational science and engineering Professor Andrea Richa, MIT physics Associate Professor Jeremy England, and Northwestern mechanical engineering Professor Todd Murphey.

The overarching goal is to find how simplistic the computation can be for this complexity. This could lead to advances in engineered systems achieving specific task-oriented goals.

“The MURI promises nothing short of the transformation of robots,” Strano said, “from the large, bulky constructions that we think of today, to future clouds or swarms that enable functions that are currently impossible to realize.”

Writer: Tess Malone

Editor's Note: This story by Susie Ivy appeared first today in the Provost's Office Website. The photo of CEISMC Executive Director Lizanne DeStefano was added for the College of Sciences website.

Effective immediately, the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC) will become a unit within the Center for 21^st Century Universities (C21U). Following a detailed assessment, including interviews with key stakeholders and a K-12 summit event in fall 2017, the organizational adjustment moves CEISMC out of its current structure within the College of Sciences.

“For many years, CEISMC has been leading Georgia Tech’s outreach to K-12 schools across the state and has a successful track record of enhancing the education in STEAM areas by developing innovative curricula, training teachers, and rallying the interest of students and parents,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs and K. Harrison Brown Chair. “The Georgia Tech Commitment to a Lifetime Education described in the report by Georgia Tech’s Commission on Creating the Next in Education calls for closer collaboration and integration of K-12 as part of a future of lifelong education. Discussions and studies indicated that this strategic goal will be better served with CEISMC responding centrally and closely integrated within our education innovation ecosystem.”

The CEISMC mission is to serve as a connection point between Georgia Tech and the K-12 community through education research, outreach and teacher professional development, including management of the Georgia Tech K-12 Connection, an online portal of activities within various schools and units across campus that also supports requests for help from available for teachers, school administrators and district superintendents. Annually, CEISMC programs impact more than 39,000 students, 1,720 teachers, 74 school districts and 200 schools.

C21U functions as the research branch of the Office of the Provost at Georgia Tech, serving as a “living laboratory for fundamental change in higher education.” Now home to the Commission on Creating the Next in Education (CNE) Program Office, the C21U portfolio is expanding to include projects and support the research of teams working to redefine the entire pipeline of learning through development of next generation educational practices and technologies.

This expanded role reflects the vision set forth in the CNE report, further aligns both C21U and CEISMC with the future-oriented vision of the Institute’s Strategic Plan, and reflects the broad objectives outlined in the system-wide Comprehensive Administrative Review (CAR). While the missions of CEISMC and C21U will remain distinct in the new structure, the organizational consolidation allows for greater efficiency around general operations support, and enables CEISMC to be more visible and accessible to all colleges, schools, and external partners.

“CEISMC has a rich legacy of impactful partnerships with the public, private, and corporate sectors,” said Lizanne DeStefano, executive director of CEISMC. “Greater coordination of our K-12 efforts as a campus means that Georgia Tech can have on an even greater influence on the how students are supported on their journey to a future in STEM.”  

DeStefano’s role as executive director of CEISMC will remain unchanged, but the move will result in a reporting line change from Interim Dean David Collard of the College of Sciences to Rich DeMillo, executive director of C21U and the CNE Program Office.

“CEISMC’s long-standing mission to prepare the next generation of STEM learners is one of the major tenets of the ‘Georgia Tech Commitment,’” said DeMillo. “CEISMC was a core contributor to the CNE report, where the bold idea of the Commitment was first conceived. Together with C21U and the CNE Program office, we can take deliberate steps towards making the Commitment a reality.”

Editor's Note: This story is a slightly revised version of the March 26, 2019, press release from The Optical Society 

The Optical Society (OSA) has named Rick Trebino the recipient of the 2019 Esther Hoffman Beller Medal. Trebino is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. He is recognized for pioneering educational optics practices, including the only textbook on ultrashort-pulse measurement, innovative short courses, and the creation of high-quality graduate and undergraduate optics lectures that are shared freely with students and instructors worldwide.

“The ability to truly engage students in the study of optical sciences requires a creative mind like Rick Trebino’s,” says 2019 OSA President Ursula Gibson. “That his lectures are often translated into other languages demonstrates the global reach of his pioneering teaching methods and is further proof that he is rightly bestowed the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal.”

“The ability to truly engage students in the study of optical sciences requires a creative mind like Rick Trebino’s.”

Trebino received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1977 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University, in 1983. After spending 12 years at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, he accepted a chair in Ultrafast Optical Physics at Georgia Tech, where he studies ultrafast optics, specifically pulse measurement and optics education. Trebino has received numerous prizes for his research. He is a Fellow of OSA, American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). 

His award-winning research involves developing techniques to measure light with ever shorter and more complex ultrafast temporal and microscopic spatial variations. He is best known for frequency-resolved optical gating, the first technique—and still the gold standard—for measuring arbitrary ultrashort pulses in time. Trebino’s recent inventions measure the complete spatiotemporal pulse electric field.

Frustrated by “chalk-and-talk”- style lectures when he was a student, Trebino utilizes PowerPoint to create lecture materials with detailed drawings, pictures, animations, and movies to make complex ideas easier to understand. His colorful and informative lectures have been shared with professors, teachers, and students all over the world. They have also been translated into several languages including Spanish, French, and Chinese.

Established in 1993, the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal is presented for outstanding contributions to education in optical science and engineering. It is endowed by a bequest from the estate of Esther Hoffman Beller.