The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has awarded the Georgia Institute of Technology a $400k grant for graduate student fellowships. The grant supports education in nuclear science and engineering, to develop a workforce capable of supporting the design, construction, operation, and regulation of nuclear facilities and the safe handling of nuclear materials.

The Georgia Institute of Technology was one of 40 academic institutions to benefit from more than $15 million in grants recently awarded for scholarships, fellowships, and faculty development by the NRC through its Nuclear Education Program. Recipients include four-year universities and colleges, two-year trade schools and community colleges, and minority serving institutions.

The fellowship program awarded to the Georgia Institute of Technology will provide eight one-year fellowships covering up to the cost of tuition, mandatory student fees, books, supplies, and stipends for highly qualified students. The program will focus on the recruiting and retention of top nuclear engineering students who come to the Georgia Institute of Technology to obtain an M.S. or Ph.D. degree in nuclear engineering.

“The funding from NRC will be very important to our Nuclear Engineering Program,” said Dr. Samuel Graham, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “We are excited to have the opportunity to recruit and support top graduate students who are pursuing their degrees in this field. Nuclear Engineering is important to the U.S. both as an energy source and for national security. The Woodruff School is looking forward to producing the engineers that will contribute to solving the challenges seen in this field.”

The Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Nuclear Engineering was established in 1962. Nuclear engineering students pursue their program in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, which merged with the School of Nuclear Engineering in 1984. The Woodruff School offers training in Nuclear and Radiological Engineering (NRE) and Medical Physics (MP) through one undergraduate degree (BSNRE), two master’s degrees (MSNE and MSMP), and one doctoral degree (PhD NRE). It is consistently nationally recognized for excellence and is ranked eighth in the nation, according to US News & World Report.

Congress authorized the NRC to provide federal funding opportunities to qualified academic institutions to encourage careers and research in nuclear, mechanical and electrical engineering, health physics, and related fields to meet expected future workforce needs.

“We are excited to have this fellowship opportunity for our graduate students. The fellowships will be targeted for top graduate students who are aiming to make an impact with their research in nuclear engineering,” said Dr. Steven Biegalski, Nuclear & Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Program Chair in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “The nuclear engineering field is in a state of rapid progression where next generation reactor designs will change the world’s nuclear energy portfolio. These fellowships will help Georgia Tech in our goal to educate the next generation of nuclear engineers who will revolutionize this field.”

The grant program is approaching its 10-year anniversary. More than 3,200 students in 35 states and Puerto Rico have been beneficiaries of the NRC’s program. The NRC has specifically focused on developing individuals with the skills and competencies necessary to accomplish nuclear safety, including health physics, radiochemistry, probabilistic risk assessment, seismology, and other nuclear-related areas. Through this program, NRC has funded multiple research and development, educational and training, and experiential learning projects to enhance academic excellence and to produce a future skilled workforce. The NRC announces grant opportunities on www.grants.gov, which enables the public to find and apply for federal funding opportunities. A panel of expert reviewers, from academia and the NRC, evaluates the grant proposals. The panel composition is diverse, with most reviewers having experience reviewing proposals for government agencies and advanced credentials in nuclear engineering, health physics, radiochemistry or related disciplines. Each panelist must certify no conflict of interest for the proposals they evaluate. The complete list of grants awarded and general information about the grant program are available on the NRC’s website.

Meet Nichelle Compton, Event Coordinator for the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

Hometown?

Louisville, Kentucky

How long have you been at Georgia Tech?

4 months on August 17th.

What is your role at the Woodruff School?

Event Coordinator.

What led you to work in in your field? 

My attention to detail and wanting to see people happy.

Favorite thing about working at the Woodruff School?

The interesting people.

Favorite thing about Georgia Tech?

The amazing minds on this campus!!

Before working here, what was an interesting job you had?

Semi-Professional Cheerleader.

If you could do any other job, what would it be?

Sports and Entertainment Lawyer.

What hobbies and interest do you have outside of work?

Cooking, Decorating, Shopping and Travel.

What is your hidden talent?

I love to dance.

What inspires you?

My Mom and my desire to always make her proud.

Words of wisdom to live by?

Let the people around you know how much you appreciate them each day, because you never know if today is your last. 

Meet Bianca Tenney, Academic Assistant in ME's Office of Student Services! 

The interdisciplinary research team of Professors Alper Erturk, Costas Arvanitis, Levent Degertekin, and Massimo Ruzzene has been awarded an NSF LEAP-HI (Leading Engineering for America’s Prosperity, Health, and Infrastructure) grant. NSF’s new LEAP-HI program“challenges the engineering research community to take a leadership role in addressing demanding, urgent, and consequential challenges for advancing America’s prosperity, health and infrastructure.”

The proposed research by the Georgia Tech team aims to explore the coupling of skull-brain vibroacoustics and ultrasound toward enhanced therapy and diagnosis. Dr. Erturk stated that “the team will investigate vibration and wave propagation characteristics of the skull-brain system over a broad frequency range, from low frequencies to the ultrasound regime, by using synergistic analytical, computational, and experimental methods.” The proposed investigation of the skull and brain as a combined dynamical system will not only advance our understanding of ultrasound-based treatments, but also open new possibilities for diagnosis and therapy, which currently view the skull as a major obstacle, far from leveraging its dynamic properties.

The PIs believe that the state-of-the-art medical ultrasound research for brain can strongly benefit from a coupled investigation of skull-brain combination as a vibroacoustic system. “We are excited to work on this truly interdisciplinary project that might lead to unprecedented opportunities in the diagnosis and therapy of brain diseases” said Dr. Arvanitis, who has done extensive research in transcranial focused ultrasound over the past years.
The outcomes of this LEAP-HI research project are expected to have broad societal impacts in areas related to the public health, especially for disorders and diseases related to brain and central nervous system.

From left to right: Costas Arvanitis, Levent Degertekin, Massimo Ruzzene, and Alper Erturk

Woodruff School alumna Stacey Dixon (MSME '95, Ph.D. 2000) has been chosen to fill the role as director for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). For over 15 years, Dr. Dixon has served in key science and technology positions within the intelligence community, tackling some of its hardest technical challenges. From 2003 to 2007, she worked on advanced satellite systems for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology, while assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate. From 2007 to 2010 she worked on the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence staff, after which she served as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Chief of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs. In 2013 she joined NGA’s Research directorate, first to lead the Office of Information Integration, and later as Deputy Director of the directorate. Dr. Dixon became IARPA’s Deputy Director in January 2016, and has co-led the organizations through a period of dramatic growth.

Dr. Dixon holds doctoral and masters’ degrees in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. She was a chemical engineering postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota.

This year, 35 Woodruff School graduate students obtained prestigious fellowship awards:

ASNT Fellowship
Katherine Scott (advised by Larry Jacobs)

Becas-Chille Fellowship
Torio Caceres

DOD (SMART) Fellowship
Angelica Connor (advised by Devesh Ranjan)

Fulbright Fellowship
Auwais Ahmed (advised by Anrei Fedorov)
Ahsan Jamal Cheema
Zulfiqar Haider Zaidi

Goizueta Fellowship
Lindsey Trejo (advised by Gregory Sawicki)

Hearst Fellowship
Elijah Hammond
Alexander McQuire-Guzman
Heidi Ramsower

NIH Fellowship
Nicholas Beskid (advised Julie Babensee)

NSF Fellowship
Bettina Arkhurst (advised by Shannon Yee)
Marshall Johnson (advised by Surya Kalidindi)
Marguerite Matherne (advised by David Hu)
Alexander Murphy (advised by Julie Linsey)
Jared Tippens (advised by Matthew McDowell)

President's Fellowship
Sonja Brankovic (advised by Shannon Yee)
Sam Ehrlich
Thomas Feldhausen (advised by Tom Kurfess)
Adam Foris (advised Anirban Mazumdar)
Geordan Gutow (advised by Jonathan Rogers)
Elliott Jost (advised by Tom Kurfess)
Brian Kelly (advised by Samuel Graham)
Daniel Kimmel (advised by David Hu)
Daniel Newman (advised by Tom Kurfess)
Daniel Potter (advised by Todd Sulchek)
Michelle Quizon (advised by Andrés García)
Ivan Ren (advised by Tom Kurfess)
Issac Robinson (advised by Andrés García and Hang Lu)
Andrew Schulz (advised by David Hu)
Ju Hwan Shin (advised by Min Zhou)
Divya Srivastava
Benjamin Stewart (advised Suresh Sitaraman)
Austen Thien (advised by Tom Kurfess)
Justin Yarrington
 

U.S. News & World Report rankings for undergraduate programs were released on September 10, 2018.  The Woodruff School is proud to announce that its undergraduate program ranking has climbed from number three to now number two in the nation!  Congratulations to the entire Georgia Tech Mechanical Engineering community that has helped make this possible!   

Associate Professor Dr. Tequila Harris recently received the L.E. Scriven Young Investigator Award. This award is given in recognition of outstanding sustained achievements or one-time breakthroughs in the area of continuous liquid film coating science and technology. Dr. Harris is a recipient of this award for her work on developing an innovative hybrid tooling system that enables an additive approach for continuously creating discrete or non-discrete patterned films.

Existing high-throughput coating technologies are able to manufacture thin films in continuous single sheets but generally require a secondary etching or ablation process to pattern the coating. Emergent technologies, such as organic electronics, are compatible with these processes and can also be processed in ambient conditions, making them low cost and conducive to mass production. However, the market is currently limited to rigid slot die designs that only allow for the extrusion of lines or stripes that are the width of the shim opening. Thus, there exists a need for a high-throughput technology that can process materials with different patterns such as circles, lines, and wafers. Such a technology would have energy, environmental, and electronics applications including organic solar cells, organic LEDs, batteries, thin film transistors, radio frequency identification tags, and other devices whose manufacturing methods are currently restricted to ink jet printing and vapor deposition.

Based on a novel method of controlling flow, Dr. Harris' technology systematically integrates computer-aided design (CAD), a complex algorithm, and the tool. The advantage of this hybrid tool is that it allows for a purely additive approach to making layer-based devices without the need for an additional subtractive step. With the integration of CAD into the system, the process allows for making complex patterns that cannot be realized by other technologies. This single-step process will also allow for significant cost savings over traditional methods, especially when processed at ambient conditions.

Assistant Professor Dr. Katherine Fu has received the Faculty Institute Diversity Champion Award for her leadership and commitment to building an inclusive campus community and advancing a culture of inclusive excellence.

Researchers have demonstrated an integrated technique for monitoring specific biomolecules – such as growth factors – that could indicate the health of living cell cultures produced for the burgeoning field of cell-based therapeutics.

Using microfluidic technology to advance the preparation of samples from the chemically complex bioreactor environment, the researchers have harnessed electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) to provide online monitoring that they believe will provide for therapeutic cell production the kind of precision quality control that has revolutionized other manufacturing processes.

“The way that the production of cell therapeutics is done today is very much an art,” said Andrei Fedorov, Woodruff Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Process control must evolve very quickly to support the therapeutic applications that are emerging from bench science today. We think this technology will help us reach the goal of making these exciting cell-based therapies widely available.”

By measuring very low concentrations of specific compounds secreted or excreted by cells, the technique could also help identify which biomolecules – of widely varying sizes – should be monitored to guide the control of cell health. Ultimately, the researchers hope to integrate their label-free monitoring directly into high-volume bioreactors that will produce cells in quantities large enough to make the new therapies available at a reasonable cost and consistent quality.

Development of the Dynamic Mass Spectrometry Probe (DMSP) was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), which is headquartered at Georgia Tech. The work was reported September 10 in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering.

Traditional ESI-MS techniques have revolutionized analytical chemistry by allowing precise identification of complex biological compounds. Because of complex sample preparation requirements, existing approaches to ESI-MS require too much time to be useful for continuous monitoring of cell growth in bioreactors, where maintaining narrow parameters for specific indicators of cellular health is critical. Biological samples also contain salts, which must be removed before introduction into the ESI-MS system.

To accelerate the analytical process, Fedorov and a team that included graduate research assistant Mason Chilmonczyk and research engineer Peter Kottke used microfluidic technology to help separate compounds of interest from the salts. Salt removal uses a monolithic device in which a size-selective membrane with nanoscale pores is placed between two fluid flows, one the chemically complex sample drawn from the bioreactors and the other salt-free water with conditioning compounds.

The smaller salt molecules readily diffuse out of the sampled bioreactor flow through the nanopores, while the larger biomolecules mostly remain for the subsequent ESI-MS analysis. Meanwhile, chemical additives are at the same time introduced into the sample mixture through the same membrane nanopores to enhance ionization of the target biomolecules in the sampled mixture for improved ESI-MS analysis.

“We have used advanced microfabrication techniques to create a microfluidic device that will be able to treat samples in less than a minute,” said Chilmonczyk. “Traditional sample preparation can require hours to days.”

The process can currently remove as much as 99 percent of the salt, while retaining 80 percent of the biomolecules. Introduction of the conditioning chemicals allows the molecules to accept a greater charge, improving the capability of the mass spectrometer to detect low concentration biomolecules, and to measure large molecules.

“We can detect really high molecular weight molecules that the mass spectrometer normally wouldn’t be able to detect,” Fedorov said. “The size difference in the molecules of interest can be dramatic, so the improvement in the limit of detection across a broad range of analyte molecular weights will allow this technique to be more useful in cell manufacturing.”

Because they use state of the art microfabrication techniques, the DMSP devices can be mass produced, allowing sampling to be scaled up to include multiple bioreactors at low cost. The small size of the device channels – which are just five microns tall – allows the system to produce results with samples as small as 20 nanoliters – with the potential for reducing that to as little as a single nanoliter.

“We need to monitor small concentrations of large biomolecules in this messy environment in a production line in such a way that we can check at any point how the cells are doing,” Fedorov said. “This system could continuously monitor whether certain molecules are excreted or secreted at a reduced or increased rate. By correlating these measurements with cell health and potency, we could improve the manufacturing process.”

Before the analytical techniques can be applied to quality control, the researchers must first identify biomolecules that indicate health of the growing cells. By sampling the bioreactor content locally in the immediate vicinity of cells and allowing identification of very small quantities of biochemicals, the DMSP technology can help researchers identify changes in molecular concentrations – which range from pico-molar to micro-molar – that may indicate the state of cells in the bioreactors. This would prompt adjustment of conditions in a bioreactor just in time to return to the state of healthy cell growth.

“In this situation, we often can’t see the trees for the forest,” said Fedorov. “There is a lot of material available, but we are looking for just a handful of individual trees that indicate the health of the cells. Because the forest is overgrown, the few selected trees we need to examine are hard to find. This is a grand challenge technologically.”

The research team also included Research Scientist Hazel Stevens and Professor Robert Guldberg, who is now at the University of Oregon.

CITATION: Mason A. Chilmonczyk, Peter A. Kottke, Hazel Y. Stevens, Robert E. Guldberg and Andrei G. Fedorov, “Dynamic Mass Spectrometry Probe (DMSP) for ESI?MS Monitoring of Bioreactors for Therapeutic Cell Manufacturing,” (Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 2018). https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bit.26832

Writer: John Toon