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.
Rovers tend to be designed like little cars, equipped with wheels that spin on fixed axles. But that can leave the vehicles vulnerable to getting stuck, as Spirit infamously did on Mars. That's why School of Physics Daniel Goldman's team is finding new ways for rovers to move.
GradIO 2019-03-16T00:00:00-04:00Dating back more than 3,000 years, knitting is an ancient form of manufacturing, but Elisabetta Matsumoto of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta believes that understanding how stitch types govern shape and stretchiness will be invaluable for designing new "tunable" materials. For instance, tissuelike flexible material could be manufactured to replace biological tissues, such as torn ligaments, with stretchiness and sizing personalized to fit each individual. Matsumoto is an assistant professor in the School of Physics.
Katherine Roberts 2019-03-06T00:00:00-05:00Struck by climbing suicide rates, third-year School of Biological Sciences major Collin Spencer organized the first Intercollegiate Mental Health Conference, which kicked off on Feb. 15, 2019. "Mental health is one of the most pressing issues for adolescents in the country right now," Spencer says.
early admit 2 2019-02-20T00:00:00-05:00That's what scientists found while studying the dinnertime of black soldier fly larvae, or maggots. When vast quantities of these larvae feed together, their surging movement around their food creates a living fountain of writhing bodies. That may sound revolting, but the strategy makes maggots uniquely efficient at devouring meals en masse, scientists reported in a new study. [Ear Maggots and Brain Amoeba: 5 Creepy Flesh-Eating Critters] Larvae of the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) typically hatch, live and eat together in the hundreds and thousands, and each voracious grub can consume up to twice its body mass in a day, lead study author Olga Shishkov, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, told Live Science. Shishkov works with mechanical engineering professor David Hu, who holds concurrent appointments in the Schools of Biological Sciences and of Physics. Story was also covered by Fox News and Science Friday
"Research can always wait. Life is irreplaceable," writes John Wise in his feature for Astronomy behind the scenes of his most recent paper. He's explaining his decision to put his work on hold during his wife's cancer treatment (quoted here). Wise initially set out to answer this question: How do supermassive black holes form in the first place? The feature offers a rare look at the intersection between a researcher's work and his perosnal life. In January, we covered his work on black holes here.
yanni 2019-01-24T00:00:00-05:00
"Even a horse's tail shouts out secrets," says David Hu, who holds joint appointments in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Mechanical Engineering. For the past few months, Hu had been plagued by a simple question: What's the purpose of a horse's tail? Using biology and engineering, Hu and his team found the answer. Hu is also an adjunct professor in the School of Physics.
work family interactions 2018-10-16T00:00:00-04:00Once more, this ultrapopular story about School of Physics' Dan Goldman's lazy-ant research has been picked up. Maybe we're just really relieved to find out that laziness has some benefits?
campus drone 2018-10-01T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech has received an award for $3.7 million from the National Science Foundation to cover 70 percent of the cost of a new high-performance computing (HPC) resource that will be established at the Coda building at Tech Square, which is set to open next spring. Project participants include two from the College of Sciences: David Sherrill, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Deirdre Shoemaker, professor of physics.
Brett Aiello 2018-09-11T00:00:00-04:00To revive antibiotics and devise new drug designs, Georgia Tech researchers team up with Oak Ridge’s Titan supercomputer....Knocking out efflux pumps is a promising strategy both to create new drugs and bring old antibiotics back to life, says physicist James C. Gumbart of the Georgia Institute of Technology...Gumbart and his team have used Titan, the Cray XK7 supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a Department of Energy (DOE) user facility, to simulate the shape and related stability of proteins related to cells' machinery to expel toxic substances.
jonsson 2018-09-03T00:00:00-04:00Is there a good excuse for laziness? Maybe, if you're in a colony of ants. When they set out to dig a tunnel, only a few of them actually work. The majority just get out of the way. It turns out that their laziness is a key strategy to getting work done efficiently and avoiding traffic jams, found Daniel Goldman of the School of Physics. Find the original Georgia Tech story on his research here and more coverage at Quartz and Popular Mechanics.
John Lewis Student Center 2018-08-17T00:00:00-04:00Ants are renowned for their industriousness. However, new research at Georgia Tech suggests that although ant colonies are very efficient, that may be because 70 percent of them are doing very little — at least when it comes to tunnel digging. Daniel I. Goldman, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his colleagues, found that the secret to efficient tunnel digging by fire ants was that 30 percent of the ants did 70 percent of the work. The work is published in Science. Find more coverage at The Washington Post, ScienceNews and Cosmos.
New evidence has surfaced suggesting that exoplanet Kepler-186f could have changing seasons and a climate, much like Earth. The discovery is exciting astronomers and leading to calls for newer, more detailed studies of this alien world. If Kepler-186f sounds familiar, that's because it's been in the news before: the Earthlike world has been a subject of scientific inquiry since it was first discovered in April 2014, with the help of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which revealed it to be an Earth-size planet whose orbit is located within a habitable distance from its sun. A new study published in the Astronomical Journal corroborates the previous findings and suggests there is even more reason to believe it could be an Earth 2.0. Using simulations, authors Yutong Shan and Gongjie Li analyzed the planet's spin-axis dynamics, meaning the relationship between the planet's axis of orbit relative to its orbit around its host star… “Our study is among the first to investigate climate stability of exoplanets and adds to the growing understanding of these potentially habitable nearby worlds,” said Li, an author of the study and assistant professor in the School of Physics.
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Events
Special Condensed Matter Seminar | Tuesday, October 20, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm | Speaker: Prof. Ignacio Salgado Linares | Host Dr. Mourigal | Howey N201/N202
Title: Thermal Transport and Chiral Spectroscopy from Semiclassical Spin Dynamics.
Soft Matter Seminar| Prof. Kimberly Weirich | Clemson UN | Host: Dr. Itamar Kolvin
Soft Matter Seminar| Prof. Kimberly Weirich | Clemson UN | Host: Dr. Itamar Kolvin
CRA SEMINAR | Federico Testagrossa | DESY Zeuthen | Host: David A. Raudales O.
CRA SEMINAR | Federico Testagrossa | DESY Nat'l Institution | Host: David A. Raudales O.
Observatory Public Night
On select Thursday evenings during the academic year, the Georgia Tech School of Physics invites you to observe various bright celestial objects through telescopes.
The Ever-Changing Georgia Coast with President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough
Join us for a special author conversation, reading, and Q&A followed by a book-signing reception with refreshments, Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow swag, and drawing for signed books.
2026 College of Sciences Homecoming Tailgate
Reconnect with fellow College of Sciences alumni, friends, faculty, and students while enjoying food, drinks, and Georgia Tech spirit.
School of Physics Fall Colloquium Series- Dr. Andreas Karch(UT Austin)
Dr. Andreas Karch(UT Austin) Making the Great Desert Bloom
Experts in the News
In an article published by The Conversation, Shiladitya Banerjee, associate professor in the School of Physics, discusses new research suggesting that single bacterial cells exhibit learning-like behavior in changing environments.
This article was also published by The Scientist.
The Conversation 2026-09-10T00:00:00-04:00If you dropped the exact same pulse of food onto two identical bacteria, you'd expect the exact same response. That's not what happened. In a study published in PRX Life in May 2026, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Tech found that E. coli exposed to unstable, feast-and-famine conditions adapted to new food far faster than bacteria pulled from a stable environment, even when the immediate conditions in front of them were identical.
You may think that one cell has no place to keep things such as memories. Scientists, including Josiah Kratz, a postdoctoral fellow in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics, observed tens of thousands of individual E. coli bacteria through a special microfluidic apparatus and found that the cause was ribosomes, the components of the cell responsible for building proteins and determining the growth rate.
The News International 2026-09-09T00:00:00-04:00Researchers in the School of Physics, working with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, have found that standard methods for identifying chirality in topological phases fail when applied to mixed quantum states. The study reveals that established diagnostics, including bulk-boundary correspondence and the modular commutator, are unreliable in these complex systems. Consequently, the research presents two new measures, based on relative entropy, to accurately diagnose chirality and determine the chiral central charge in decohered topological phases, indicating a need for a new set of tools when investigating mixed-state topology.
Quantum Zeitgeist 2026-07-16T00:00:00-04:00Bacteria have no neurons or memories in the human sense. Yet in a new study, researchers at Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon University — including School of Physics Associate Professor Shiladitya Banerjee and Postdoctoral Fellow Josiah Kratz — found that individual E. coli cells carried traces of past hardship into the future. When nutrients repeatedly rose and fell, the cells changed how quickly they grew, suggesting that even simple microbes can use experience to prepare for what may come next.
ZME Science 2026-06-10T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech researchers have recreated the effects of solar wind on lunar minerals in a laboratory experiment, providing new evidence that the constant stream of charged particles from the sun plays a major role in shaping the moon’s surface.
The team exposed ilmenite, a mineral commonly found on both Earth and the moon, to a synthetic version of solar wind. The experiment produced nanophase iron, tiny metallic particles that are widely observed in lunar soil and are considered a key signature of space weathering.
Interesting Engineering 2026-06-10T00:00:00-04:00A new study led by researchers, including School of Physics graduate student Julia Esposito and Associate Professor Gongjie Li, used 1,500 virtual planetary systems to examine how planet-planet scattering may have influenced the formation of Jupiter-sized planets.
American Astronomical Society NOVA 2026-05-22T00:00:00-04:00
