Six College of Sciences graduate students were awarded $1,000 in research travel grants after presenting their research at the 16th annual Career, Research, Innovation, and Development Conference (CRIDC) poster competition. The grants will cover expenses related to research trips or travel to other conferences (domestic or international). 

Eighty-four graduate students from across the Institute participated in the poster competition, presenting their research to faculty and staff judges.

Congratulations to the poster competition winners from the College of Sciences:

Isabel Berry, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

A second-year Ph.D. student in computational chemistry, Berry works in the Sherrill Group.

“My research focuses on advancing computational quantum mechanical (QM) methods to feasibly model biological systems,” says Berry. “A specialized QM method developed in our group, F-SAPT, has the potential to reveal why certain drug molecules are favored over others, advancing the field of rational drug design. If we can accurately model protein-ligand interactions using quantum mechanics, it could ultimately pave the way for integrating these methods into computer-aided drug discovery workflows.”

Gretchen Johnson, School of Biological Sciences

Johnson is working on a Ph.D. in ocean science, studying how corals respond to environmental stressors as part of the Kubanek Group.

“Corals can't move,” says Johnson. “Instead of hiding when it is hot or bright out, they must respond physiologically. I use a technique called metabolomics to study the cellular physiology of corals and look for metabolic changes over time. Understanding what makes a coral more resistant to stress is useful for protecting and restoring coral reefs."

Shreya Kothari, School of Biological Sciences

Kothari conducts research for the Kubanek Group and is pursuing a Ph.D. in biology. She attempts to discover natural dispersant-like biomolecules helpful for oil spill remediation.

“While some microbes can degrade and clean up oil from the contaminated sites, the process is often slow,” says Kothari. “However, dispersant-like biomolecules can speed up oil degradation by breaking oil into smaller droplets and increasing its availability to oil-degrading microbes. I aim to determine the chemical structure and function of such biomolecules and test their effectiveness in treating real-world environmental spills by applying them in small-scale experiments that mimic oil spill conditions. These biomolecules may offer an eco-friendly alternative to toxic chemical dispersants and improve existing bioremediation strategies to mitigate environmental damage caused by oil pollution."

Monica Monge, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

As part of her Ph.D. studies, Monge works in the Garg Lab and focuses on understanding marine bacteria community dynamics.

“I am specifically trying to decipher how disease-causing bacteria (pathogenic) and bacteria that doesn’t harm its host (commensal) communicate with one another via chemical signals and the metabolic changes resulting from those interactions,” says Monge. “My ultimate goal is to identify beneficial traits from commensal bacteria that we can leverage to alleviate coral diseases.” 

Sidney Scott-Sharoni, School of Psychology

Scott-Sharoni is earning a Ph.D. in engineering psychology and works in the Sonification Lab.

“My research focuses on human interaction with AI technologies,” says Scott-Sharoni. “Specifically, I examine how different features of AI agents, such as anthropomorphism and social intelligence, impact how people psychologically perceive and behave in collaboration with these agents. This work helps improve the effectiveness of AI systems by aligning them to human social and cognitive expectations, leading to better joint performance and proper trust.”

Maggie Straight, School of Biological Sciences

A third-year Ph.D. student studying ocean science and engineering, Straight conducts research in the Kubanek Group.

“Sometimes I consider myself a microbial spy as I listen in to the chemical conversation between microbes and analyze how each microbe is affected by the interaction,” says Straight. “My current work is focused on the interaction between two types of marine microbes, bacteria and microscopic algae. By understanding how bacteria can be good or bad for algal growth, I hope to shed light on the mechanisms by which bacteria can help algae form algal blooms, including harmful algal blooms. This understanding could help scientists predict the beginning and ending of harmful algal blooms and keep beachgoers and shellfish farms safe from harmful algae.”

Georgia Tech scientists are revealing how decades-long research programs have transformed our understanding of evolution, from laboratory petri dishes to tropical islands — along the way uncovering secrets that would remain hidden in shorter studies.

Through a new review paper published in Nature, the researchers underscore how long-term studies have captured evolution's most elusive processes, including the real-time formation of new species and the emergence of biological innovations.

"Evolution isn't just about change over millions of years in fossils — it's happening all around us, right now," says James Stroud, the paper’s lead author and an Elizabeth Smithgall Watts Early Career Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. "However, to understand evolution, we need to watch it unfold in real time, often over many generations. Long-term studies allow us to do that by giving us a front-row seat to evolution in action."

The paper, “Long-term studies provide unique insights into evolution,” is the first-ever comprehensive analysis of these types of long-term evolutionary studies, and examines some of the longest-running evolutionary experiments and field studies to date, highlighting how they provide new perspectives on evolution. For example, in the Galápagos, a 40-year field study of Darwin’s finches — songbirds named after evolutionary biology’s famous founder — documented the formation of a new species through hybridization. In the lab, a study spanning 75,000 generations of bacteria showed populations unexpectedly evolving completely new metabolic abilities.

“These remarkable evolutionary events were only caught because of the long-term nature of the research programs,” Stroud says. “Even if short-term studies captured similar events, their evolutionary significance would be hard to assess without the historical context that long-term research provides.”

“The most fascinating results from long-term evolution studies are often completely unexpected — they're serendipitous discoveries that couldn't have been predicted at the start,” explains the paper’s co-author, Will Ratcliff, Sutherland Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Tech.

“While we can accelerate many aspects of scientific research today, evolution still moves at its own pace,” Ratcliff adds. “There's no technological shortcut for watching species adapt across generations.” 

Decades of discovery — from labs to islands

The new paper also highlights a growing challenge in modern science: the critical importance of supporting long-term research in an academic landscape that increasingly favors quick results and short-term funding. Yet, they say, some of biology's most profound insights emerge only through multi-decadal efforts.

Those challenges and rewards are familiar to Stroud and Ratcliff, who operate their own long-term evolutionary research programs at Georgia Tech. 

In South Florida, Stroud’s ‘Lizard Island’ is helping document evolution in action across the football field-sized island’s 1,000-lizard population. By studying a community of five species, his research is providing unique insights into how evolution maintains species’ differences, and how species evolve when new competitors arrive. Now operating for a decade, it is one of the world’s longest-running active evolutionary studies of its kind.

In his lab at Georgia Tech, Ratcliff studies the origin of complex life — specifically, how single-celled organisms become multicellular. His Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE) on snowflake yeast has run for more than 9,000 generations, with aims to continue for the next 25 years. The work has shown how key steps in the evolutionary transition from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms occur far more easily than previously understood.

Important work in a changing world

Stroud says that the insights from these types of studies, and this review paper, are arriving at a crucial moment. “The world is rapidly changing, which poses unprecedented challenges to Earth's biodiversity,” he explains. “It has never been more important to understand how organisms adapt to changing environments over time.”

“Long-term studies provide our best window into achieving this,” he adds. “We can document, in real time, both short-term and long-term evolutionary responses of species to changes in their environment like climate change and habitat modification."

By drawing together evolution's longest-running experiments and field studies for the first time, Stroud and Ratcliff offer key insights into studying this fundamental process, suggesting that understanding life's past — and predicting its future — requires not just advanced technology or new methods, but also the simple power of time.

Funding: The US National Institutes of Health and the NSF Division of Environmental Biology

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08597-9

Is there a tried-and-true formula to drive achievement in the corporate world? For many College of Sciences alumni, the surprising answer lies in science fundamentals — particularly the scientific method.

We spoke to three alumni about the benefits of applying a scientific approach to business.

 Navigating the Startup Landscape

Thomas Kim graduated from Georgia Tech in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, intending to pursue a career in academia. Instead, after earning a master’s in biochemistry and a law degree, then working as a biotech attorney, he is now president and CEO of two life science startups.

“The entire startup company process can be construed as an exercise in the scientific method,” says Kim. “In the early stage, you start with preclinical data and a thesis on how that translates to human disease. Next, you pressure test everything. Depending on confidence in your results, you continue to invest and move the program forward to translate your initial idea into a potential human therapeutic, or you pivot to a different application or drug in the pipeline.”

One of his current companies, Epivario aims to develop treatments for preventing relapse in drug and alcohol addiction and PTSD.  

“We’re in the preclinical development stage, requiring constant testing – and retesting. It’s an arduous, ongoing task where not everything works the first time – or the 50th.”

In the fast-moving start-up world, decisions must be made quickly and, most importantly, accurately to stay ahead of the competition. Kim points to a background in the scientific method as foundational to making crucial business decisions. “Whether you’re responsible for research and development or company strategy, it’s a key skill to take deep analysis and translate it into quality decision making.”

On a broader level, Kim admits he sees his work more as a mission than a job.

“I feel fortunate to work in a field where our efforts can improve human lives.”

From Lab to Leadership

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from Washington State University, Maureen Metcalfe (M.S. BIO 2014) scored her dream job as a CDC electron microscopist in 2007, then enrolled part-time at Georgia Tech to earn a master’s in biology. As part of her master’s requirements, she also conducted research in Professor Ingeborg Schmidt-Krey’s laboratory, where she attempted to create conditions to crystallize a protein involved in Alzheimer's pathogenesis. Between her full-time job, academic studies, and work in the laboratory, she averaged more than 70 hours of work each week.

“I lived the scientific method – especially the test your hypothesis part,” says Metcalfe. “Over four years, I had 600 failures.”

Those failures taught her resilience and time management – skills vital to her current consulting career.

“It’s more ingrained than step by step, but almost every time there is a problem on a client project, I rely on certain aspects of the scientific method,” says Metcalfe. "I first observe, research, and analyze the data, re-tool if necessary, and then apply that data to make an informed recommendation to the client.”

Over the years, the perseverance she developed in the laboratory has helped her push on to complete complicated client projects. 

“I think the scientific process and what it gives us is unique,” says Metcalfe. “Science gives you the skill set to keep asking questions and not accept a failure or setback.”

Metcalfe can even apply aspects of her career trajectory to principles inherent in the scientific method.

“Building on what you learn and changing course is inherent in the scientific method. I realized I wanted different challenges in my life, and I left a career in government to find them. Taking my science degree into new work situations has been very gratifying. The foundation I built in science serves me well in the challenging, fast-paced, and exciting world of consulting.”

Building Career Success

A night out with friends upended and redirected Christa Sobon’s carefully constructed career plans. After earning psychology and history degrees with a minor in French from Emory University, Sobon, (M.S. PSY 1996) came to Georgia Tech to build a career in academia. Those plans changed when she talked to a friend’s wife at a party who told her that Accenture liked to hire smart people who could solve problems.

After two years at Tech in a quantitative program focused on methodology and research seeped in the scientific method, Sobon was confident of her problem-solving abilities. Forgoing academia, she accepted a job at Accenture and has spent more than 29 years leading programs that drive business success at companies including All Connect, Netspend, and Jabian Consulting. Currently, she is operations management senior director at Cox Automotive.

“I’ve been able to use elements of the scientific method in every place I’ve worked,” says Sobon. “The scientific method equips you with critical thinking skills and promotes a methodical approach to tackling challenges that works well in the corporate world.”

As a program manager for most of her career, she cites forming a hypothesis and analyzing the data as the most critical steps when figuring out how to get a product to market.

“We gather data in terms of understanding the customer pain points, then form the hypothesis (or in our case a new product) designed to solve that particular problem. When we believe we have a workable solution, we bring that product to market,” says Sobon.

She explains that they rarely stick the landing on the first try.

“I’ve led teams where we were convinced the customer would love our product…when the customer did NOT love our product, we would then refine, test in the market again, and continue to iterate until we launched a successful product – basically a mini-version of the scientific method.”

Sobon is a strong believer in a scientific education – and Georgia Tech.

“The rigor that you learn at Georgia Tech about approaching problem-solving through the scientific method has so many applications. These skills are transferable across a variety of fields and enable individuals to analyze complex problems, develop innovative solutions, and make data-driven decisions, all of which are essential in business today.”

Over 5,000 people attended Georgia Tech's Celebrate STEAM event on March 8, which showcased more than 60 demonstrations in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics.

Read more »

Second-year biology students Giuli Capparelli Sanabria and J’Avani Stinson are pursuing Georgia Tech degrees with fewer financial worries, thanks to the G. Wayne Clough Tech Promise Scholarship. Created in 2007, this need-based scholarship is the first of its kind offered by a public university in Georgia. It allows qualifying Georgia students to pursue a degree debt-free by filling the gap where other scholarships and financial aid options leave off.

From Johns Creek to Georgia Tech: Capparelli Sanabria is studying to become a veterinarian, a dream that was inspired by an internship at a veterinary clinic during high school. Read Giuli Capparelli Sanabria’s story.

From Stone Mountain to Georgia Tech: Stinson, a NASA Pathways intern and Gates Scholar, hopes to obtain an M.D. and Ph.D. to study chronic pediatric diseases, a goal first discovered during his sister’s own diabetes diagnosis when she was 9 years old. Read J’Avani Stinson's story.