Experts in the News

Can Alzheimer’s disease be slowed by flickering lights and sound?

That is the question that drives Annabelle Singer, a McCamish Foundation Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. In her lab on Tech’s campus in Atlanta, Singer is trying to better understand patterns of neural activity in the brain and what goes wrong with Alzheimer’s patients. Building on that knowledge, she hopes to develop new ways to treat the disease.

“We are taking a really different approach to Alzheimer’s,” she said. “We’ve determined how neural activity that is essential for memory fails in Alzheimer’s disease. We’re then using that information to develop brain stimulation that could improve brain health.”

Until now, no one had built a synthetic material that could simultaneously absorb chemical building blocks, polymerize them into its own network, relieve the mechanical stresses that accumulate during the process, and reverse the whole sequence on demand. A new study published in Advanced Materials ("Rewriting Polymer Fate via Chemomechanical Coupling") reports a polymer platform that accomplishes exactly that. A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology including Associate Professor Will Gutekunst of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, with collaborators at North Carolina State University, created what they call a "living" polymer: a material that can grow, shrink, heal, change its stiffness by roughly 100-fold, and be recycled back to raw monomers, all post-fabrication.

The rate at which artificial intelligence is able to replicate human behavior has increased in recent years. Does that mean it's thinking like us? The third episode of "Brainwaves" explores what artificial intelligence teaches us about our own capacity for thought. The episode includes expert commentary from Anna Ivanova, assistant professor in the School of Psychology.

In an article published by Eos, Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, comments on a new study published in Nature which found that a major part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was warmer during the peak of Earth’s last ice age than previously thought.

According to Lynch-Stieglitz, the findings give scientists an additional benchmark with which to test the accuracy of climate models. “Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) circulation is a good target, and the more that we can refine the benchmarks…that’s a really good thing,” she said. “This is another really nice dataset that can be used to better assess what the Last Glacial Maximum circulation was really doing.”

The Conversation U.S. compiled a set of five stories from its archives to help readers gauge both practical considerations around vaccination and the bigger picture of what the return of measles might mean for public health. The compilation includes an article by School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor Peter Kasson that reviews the near- and long-term risks associated with a measles infection.

Research done in recent years after Florida's last historic cold snap reveals that the temperature at which iguanas become cold-stunned may be lower than what was commonly believed before.

"As a scientist, I was fascinated why these lizards can now tolerate a colder temperature than they had recently, prior to this cold snap," reptile researcher James Stroud of Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences told Gulf Coast News via Zoom.

Stroud has been studying invasive lizards of all sizes with a particular focus on understanding their tolerance for cold temperatures. His work has revolved around studying lizards that survive significant cold snaps and then testing to see how their tolerance changes afterward.

"Prior to the cold snap event, all lizards could tolerate temps around 46 to 50 degrees," Stroud said. "After they experienced colder temps than they had experienced in the previous few winters, they could suddenly tolerate colder temps, down to around 42 Fahrenheit."

Flu rates are still high in Georgia this month but appear to be dropping slightly as people resume regular schedules after the winter holidays.

Vaccination remains the best way to protect against the flu, said M.G. Finn, a professor of biochemistry at Georgia Tech and an expert in viruses and immunology.

Finn said there is a gap between this year’s vaccine and the variant of flu that is circulating widely, in part because scientists design the vaccine well in advance of the flu season. Still, the vaccine reduces the risk of hospitalization by about 40%, he said, making it a valuable tool for protecting health.

“You want to bias the odds in your favor of not getting seriously ill if you happen to come across somebody who has the flu, and you want to minimize the chances of you passing it along to people around you,” Finn said. “It’s completely and utterly safe, so there is no risk whatsoever for taking it.”

Green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are not native to the U.S. but were brought to Florida in the 1960s, where they have, for the most part, flourished—except, that is, when temperatures have dropped below 50 degrees F (10 degrees C). 

These chilly conditions can cause a cold shock in the lizards. And because the iguanas tend to sleep in trees, getting cold shocked can sometimes cause the animals to fall from the skies in an infamous Florida phenomenon. 

“These tropical lizards were experiencing conditions that they’ve never experienced in their entire evolutionary history before, tens of millions of years,” says James Stroud, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

But in Florida, colder conditions occur every few years—albeit less often as temperatures rise because of climate change. The experience of the iguanas that have been forced to confront the cold in the state can teach scientists more about how animals respond to new climates more generally, Stroud says.

Jennifer Glass, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was recently quoted in an article published in Scientific American that discusses the evolution of Wikipedia:

As Wikipedia’s use grew, some educators softened their stance, encouraging its use to find leads to sources that students could dig into directly. Others took a different approach, assigning students to edit Wikipedia entries—many through Wiki Education.

Jennifer Glass, a biogeochemist at Georgia Institute of Technology, is one of those professors; she has incorporated Wikipedia editing into her teaching since 2018. She wanted a student project that emphasized the concise and technical but understandable writing style that the site uses. And although she hadn’t done much editing for Wikipedia herself, she was impressed by the website’s breadth of content.

Each semester, her students write one article from scratch about a topic they research, from dolomitization to the tropopause. Glass says the project teaches them the value of institutional access to published literature and the skill of fact-checking their writing line by line.

For their leadership across various industries and positive contributions to their communities, 12 Georgia Tech alumni are among Georgia Trend’s 100 Most Influential Georgians for 2026. The list includes two College of Sciences alumni, Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera (M.S. PSY 1993, Ph.D. PSY 1995) and President and Dean of Morehouse School of Medicine Valerie Montgomery Rice (CHEM 1983).

In the mid-1990s, a Department of Energy-funded project helped catalyze one of the most transformative breakthroughs in American energy history: the development of a horizontal drilling bit capable of withstanding the extreme conditions of shale formations. 

Before this innovation, natural gas trapped in tight shale rock was considered too expensive and technically challenging to extract. 

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In an article published by The Conversation, Benjamin Freeman, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, discusses his research, including a recent study on how mountain birds in the Pacific Northwest are responding to climate change.