Passionate about learning, discovery, and all things science? Check out more than 100 family friendly events at the 2020 Atlanta Science Festival, which will be held March 6-21 around Georgia Tech and the greater Atlanta area.
The annual two-week festival celebrates local science and technology, reaching 50,000 children and adults each year. Georgia Tech is one of the founding members of the Atlanta Science Festival and hosts and sponsors several Atlanta Science Festival events.
This year, festivities kick off on March 6 with 2100: A Climate Odyssey at Georgia Tech's Ferst Center for the Arts. This interactive and immersive, family friendly experience will be followed by a conversation with environmental scientists and meteorologists including The Weather Channel’s Carl Parker and Kim Cobb, Georgia Power Chair, ADVANCE Professor in the College of Sciences, Director of the Global Change Program, and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Friends of Georgia Tech can use discount code "HALF" to purchase $10 tickets.
Opening weekend also features one of the most unique experiences in music performance. On March 7, The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition Concert will showcase nine global finalists playing unique instruments created for the competition. It's free and open to the public.
New this year as part of the Guthman event is the Music, Art, and Technology Fair, hosted by the Georgia Tech School of Music and Cycling ’74. It's a unique opportunity to share projects at the intersection of art and technology in a hands-on, interactive, science-fair format.
The GVU Center at Georgia Tech (formerly the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center) has created interactive graphics to explore the two-week festival and find specific events connected to Georgia Tech.
2020 Atlanta Science Festival events taking place on the Georgia Tech campus; sponsored or presented by Georgia Tech units; and featuring Georgia Tech faculty, students, or staff include:
- Friday, March 6, 8:00pm to 9:30pm, 2100: A Climate Odyssey
2100: A Climate Odyssey will transport you to the year 2100, when life is a little different due to climate change As a major storm hits Atlanta in this immersive theatrical experience, we will peer into the future and discover how we can work together to mitigate disaster. 5% of proceeds will be donated to the Captain Planet Foundation to empower positive change for the earth.
- Saturday, March 7, 9:30am to 11:30am, Science in Little 5 Points: The Science of Kombucha
Kombucha is tangy and tasty, but did you know that it gets that way through the hard work of millions of microbes? Join Jennifer Leavey, Ph.D., from Georgia Tech and Lupa Irie, N.D. of Lupa’s Kitchen for a hands-on, interactive demonstration of kombucha fermentation—including samples! - Saturday, March 7, 12:00pm to 3:00pm, STEAM at Tech Day
Fun for the entire family at STEAM at Tech Day! Join us for a day of hands-on, engaging, and full-filled STEAM learning. Middle and high school students will participate in a 3-hour intensive STEAM workshop and 2nd through 5th grade students will rotate between three STEAM activities. Parents and guardians will hear from experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence about what’s next in education to help develop their future scientists and engineers. - Saturday, March 7, 4:00pm to 7:00pm, Guthman Music, Art & Technology Fair
Get a sneak peek at what goes into the latest in music technology by visiting our music, art and technology fair, just before the Georgia Tech Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. See musicians, artists, engineers, and makers showcase their latest work at this hands-on, interactive showcase. - Saturday, March 7, 7:00pm to 9:00 pm, Guthman Musical Instrument Competition
A music, engineering, and tech mashup, the Georgia Tech Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is an annual event aimed at identifying the world's next generation of musical instruments and unveiling the best new ideas in musicality, design, engineering, and impact.
- Tuesday, March 10, 9:00am to 3:30pm, Project Change: STEM Teachers @ Tech Day
Teachers! Are you looking for a way to move beyond the standards and integrate STEM connections into your curriculum? Do you thirst for more knowledge to better connect and communicate to your class of future scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians? Join us for Project Change: STEM Teacher @Tech Day. This innovative professional learning opportunity will allow teachers to engage and tour cutting-edge labs and research centers, with the goal of increasing their understanding of current, real-world applications of their content. - Tuesday, March 10, 5:00pm to 6:30pm, The Astronomy of Star Wars
One with the Force are you? Join us for this all-ages dress up sci-fi adventure where we'll lead a discussion on the worlds and aliens of the Star Wars films and compare them with the planets and life in our solar system, as well as extra-solar planets. Along the way, we'll enjoy video clips inspired by Star Wars and other sci-fi favorites. Young Jedi and Padawan alike are encouraged to attend in their favorite sci-fi attire. - Tuesday, March 10, 7:00pm to 8:00pm, Playing Mother Nature: A Night of Simulating Earth Science Phenomena!
Ever wonder how weather systems are formed in the atmosphere? Or perhaps you would like to know how an earthquake develops? How does Earth's terrain evolve over long periods of time? If you have any interest in Earth Science, this event is for you!
- Wednesday, March 11, 7:30pm to 9:15pm, Cannabis Time with Dr. Pete
Did you know? George Washington grew hemp at his home in Mount Vernon. Cannabis is being seen in a whole new light as states and nations change laws and attitudes about the plant. Come learn about the relevant technical, medical, legal, and economic issues from Georgia Tech engineering professor, local comedian, and cannabis researcher Pete Ludovice, Ph.D.
- Thursday, March 12, 7:30pm to 10:00pm, Sober Science Speakeasy
Join us for an evening soiree that will tickle your tastebuds and wake up your sense of wonder. In our throwback to the 1920s in 2020, you enjoy live prohibition-era jazz music and exotic drinks! Learn about the science of boba, butterfly peaflower tea and kombucha, foams and emulsions, nitrogen cold brew and more with Jennifer Leavey, Ph.D. - Thursday, March 12, 7:30pm to 9:30pm, Science Riot
Take some scientists, teach them the basics of comedy writing, and put them onstage for a live audience performance. Real Science. Real Experts. Real Funny.
- Saturday, March 14, 9:00am to 2:00pm, 8th Annual Latino College & STEM Fair
We invite you to our 8th Annual Latino College and STEM Fair at Georgia Tech! Come join us for bilingual workshops, fun hands-on activities for the entire family, a college fair, and inspirational conversations with Latino college students, parents, professors, and other STEM professionals. - Saturday, March 14, 11:00am to 2:00pm, Investigating the Nanoscale
How do scientists and engineers make and see nanoscale objects? What does your hair or an insect’s eye look like under a scanning electron microscope? Through hands-on demos, learn what makes the nanoscale different, how harnessing it has led to improvements in products you use every day, and about future applications you can only imagine. Take a cleanroom tour and bring a sample (not wet and not greater than an inch in diameter) to scan with our tabletop SEM. - Saturday, March 14, 3:00pm to 5:00pm, Petri Dish Picassos
Bacteria art — is it crazy, awesome, or both? Come learn about professional artists that use bacteria to make living artwork and learn how to become a petri dish Picasso yourself! Participants will be provided with agar plates, paints, and tools commonly used to “paint” with bacteria. You will get to take home your own petri dish masterpiece!
- Wednesday, March 18, 7:30pm to 9:30pm, Science Improv
It's improv comedy with a science twist! Come see experienced improv actors and professional scientists take the stage together to put on a unique entertaining and educational experience. The audience will provide scientific suggestions to drive the performance, and you're sure to have a great time and come away having learned something too! Comedy improvisation has never been geekier.
More information about the festival: Atlanta Science Festival
Event Details
This event has been postponed. Please check back here for updates on a rescheduled date.
The evolution of multicellularity is one of the most significant innovations in the history of life, but it happened so long ago that early steps in this process remain poorly understood. We've taken an unorthodox approach to this problem: rather than study ancient multicellular life, we are evolving it from scratch, leveraging the combined strengths of synthetic biology and directed evolution. In this talk, I will describe our work examining how single cells evolve into simple clumps of cells, and how, over thousands of generations, these early multicellular organisms solve fundamental physical and developmental challenges in surprising and ingenious ways. Our work has helped change the way our field views evolutionary constraints on major transitions like multicellularity, lending direct experimental support to the Jurassic Park school of thought: "Life, uh, finds a way".
About William Croft Ratcliff
William Croft Ratcliff is an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the evolution of complex life. His Ph.D. training focused on the evolutionary stability of cooperation in the legume-rhizorium symbiosis, where he developed new experimental methods to study how among-organism genetic conflict arises and can be mitigated. A similar evolutionary tension lies at the heart of all key events in the origin of complex life, termed the ‘Major Transitions in Evolution’: namely, how do new organisms arise and evolve to be more complex without succumbing to within-organism conflict? Studying the early evolution of multicellular organisms has been particularly difficult because these transitions occurred deep in the past, and transitional forms have largely lost to extinction. As a postdoc, Ratcliff circumvented this constraint by creating a new approach to study the evolution of multicellularity, evolving it de novo. Since founding the Ratcliff Lab research group at Georgia Tech in 2014, he has combined this approach with mathematical modeling and synthetic biology to examine how simple clumps of cells evolve to be more complex. This research has shown how classical constraints in the origin of multicellularity — e.g., the origin of life cycles, multicellular development, cellular differentiation, and cellular interdependence — can be solved by Darwinian evolution. Ratcliff is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, a 2016 Packard Fellowship recipient, and a 2019 NSF CAREER recipient.
About Frontiers in Science Lectures
Lectures in this series are intended to inform, engage, and inspire students, faculty, staff, and the public on developments, breakthroughs, and topics of general interest in the sciences and mathematics. Lecturers tailor their talks for nonexpert audiences.
Join a networking reception in the Clough Commons directly after this talk.
Learn more at cos.gatech.edu
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For Lewis Wheaton, Black History Month is a special opportunity to recognize African-American culture and history. However, Wheaton celebrates diversity and promotes cultural inclusion all twelve months of the year.
“As far back as I can recall, I was taught to value humanity, love those around you, and learn their perspectives,” says Wheaton, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “Our society is made great not just because of the wonderful blend of culture that we can see all around us, but in our ability to really value our neighbors.”
In both his personal and professional life, Wheaton takes direct action to improve cultural awareness and consider the interests of wider ranges of humanity.
During conversations with colleagues Manu Platt and Anne Pollock, Wheaton realized a lack of interdisciplinary focus on the relationship between scientific study and social influences. Rather than let their ideas end in conversation, the cohort launched Georgia Tech’s working group on Race and Racism in Contemporary Biomedicine in 2015. Today, the group works with various metro Atlanta Colleges to develop programming addressing race and racism in biomedical research.
When Wheaton leaves Georgia Tech’s campus, he continues to promote diversity and inclusion. And, when it comes to encouraging diversity in one's personal life, Wheaton underscores the importance of taking small daily actions to increase one’s cultural awareness.
“Whether in science, public service as an elected official, or in leadership in societies, I do all I can to ensure that we consider the needs and interests of wider-ranges of humanity,” he says.
With the encouragement of his parents and inspiration from Frederick Douglass, Wheaton says he learned the importance of cultural celebration. Each February he devotes extra attention to the black community, sharing many untold and unappreciated aspects of black culture and history. He also takes the time to learn about and celebrate those various wonderful and beautiful elements.
“We can talk to people that aren’t like us, seek opportunities to welcome people from all backgrounds into our organizations, and we can all support (by way of attendance) celebrations of diversity all around campus, even when we do not belong to that diverse group,” says Wheaton.
To read more about Lewis Wheaton:
Lewis Wheaton: Scientist, Citizen, Councilman
Lewis Wheaton: Success Comes with Responsibility
Unlocking the Mind-Body Connection
More Black History Month Features:
Celebrating Black History Month: The Importance of Representation with Crystal Bell
Celebrating Black History Month: Letting Diversity Shine with Alonzo Whyte
Black History Month: "6Ps" Relevant to Academic and Career Success
By Grace Pietkiewicz, First-Year Student, School of Literature, Media, and Communication
Marie Suver, Ph.D.
New York University Medical Center
NYU Neuroscience Institute
ABSTRACT
Normal behavior in any moving animal relies on communication between motor systems that control movements, and the sensory systems we use to guide these actions. A critical task for the brain is distinguishing between sensations created by our own actions from those caused by external sources. Yet the neural circuits that underlie these computations are generally not well understood. To understand these processes at the cellular, circuit and behavioral level, I study the small, tractable brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In this presentation, I will describe current research focusing on the neural circuits that control movements and mechanosensation in the antennae of the fruit fly. First, I will describe a novel mechanosensory circuit that computes wind direction by combining information across the two antennae. Second, I will describe ongoing and future research that focuses on mechanisms of active sensing. Through this work, I aim to discover fundamental principles underlying the brain’s ability to make sense of its own movements through the world.
Host: Simon Sponberg, Ph.D.
Event Details
Two assistant professors from the Georgia Tech College of Sciences, Jenny McGuire and Lutz Warnke, have received 2020 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
As NSF's most prestigious award, the CAREER program supports early-career faculty who integrate excellence in education and research, serve as academic role models, and lead advances in the mission of their organization. The award comes with a federal grant for research and education activities for five consecutive years.
“Never underestimate what a National Science Foundation CAREER Award can do for a young scientist,” says Julia Kubanek, College of Sciences Associate Dean for Research. “Many of our senior faculty at Georgia Tech started their funding history as NSF CAREER awardees. They act as a springboard for faculty success in so many ways.”
Kubanek, who is also a professor in Biological Sciences and in Chemistry and Biochemistry, emphasizes the length of the grant: five years. “The funding that comes with an NSF CAREER award provides substantial support to get a faculty member’s fresh and unique research ideas off to a strong start.” The NSF also likes to see research and education combined as a way to inspire creative teaching methods that give students a more hands-on approach.
For Jenny McGuire, assistant professor in Biological Sciences and in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, the CAREER grant will support paleoecological research exploring how plants and animals respond to environmental change and allow her to test these theories in a deep, ancient cave in Wyoming — where clues left by past environmental shifts could provide insights for current and future climate change.
For Lutz Warnke, assistant professor in Mathematics, the CAREER grant will support fundamental research at the interface of discrete mathematics and probability, exploring the fascinating properties of random networks (or graphs) and their remarkable applications in graph theory, extremal combinatorics, and other areas.
Jenny McGuire: Do Species Track Climate? Paleoecology to Disentangle Niche Dynamics
Since 2015, Jenny McGuire has spent her summers rappelling 30 feet into Wyoming’s Natural Trap Cave, digging for fossils that can provide some insight into the impact past climatic and environmental changes had on plant and animal species 20,000-30,000 years ago. McGuire’s work looks at how those changes in climate might have affected animal migration patterns.
“I was incredibly excited to get the award, because it is going to allow me to do some really exciting work,” says McGuire, who is also a past NSF Division of Environmental Biology awardee. “My project looks at the climate fidelity that different plant and animal species exhibited during past periods of climate change, so that we can characterize the extent to which they will respond to future change. By understanding how species respond to changing climate, we can identify which species and strategies to prioritize to conserve biodiversity going forward.”
Along with increasing our understanding of ecosystem and species-level responses to climate change and drought, McGuire’s spelunking expeditions and research help educate students and communities about how climate affects ecosystems.
Many of McGuire’s cave finds are brought back to Georgia Tech for what she calls Fossil Fridays, when the public is invited to help sift through the gravel and dirt to look for fossils. These “fossil discovery opportunities” reach people from across the broader Atlanta community, as well as East African undergraduate students who participate in workshops facilitated by the Conservation Paleobiology in Africa program.
“We are living in a time of rapid change,” McGuire notes. “Given the extent of the change, it is hard to predict how ecosystems are going to respond by observing snapshots of time. We use organisms' responses to past climatic and environmental changes to determine how things will play out, given the extreme changes that are anticipated.”
Lutz Warnke: Understanding the Evolution of Random Graphs with Complex Dependencies: Phase Transition and Beyond
Lutz Warnke — who is also a recipient of the 2014 Richard-Rado-Prize, the 2016 Dénes König Prize, a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship, and a NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences award — is fascinated by graph processes and networks, which are useful mathematical abstractions that consist of collections of points with links, or line-segments, connecting them. The more links you add, the more complex those networks become.
“Time-evolving random networks/random graph processes play an important role in several branches of mathematics and applied sciences, including statistical physics, complex networks, and extremal combinatorics,” Warnke says. “Unfortunately, for these processes, there is nowadays a widening gap between simulation-based results and theoretical understanding. I hope to develop new mathematical theory for such random graph processes, in order to better understand their properties, improve existing methods of analysis, and rigorously justify their applications.”
Warnke is using these random graph processes to attack difficult open problems in combinatorics. He explains "they provide a systematic way to give powerful probabilistic guarantees for hard-to-answer deterministic questions, such as the construction of complex graphs with unusual properties/constraints. I am particularly fascinated by the fact that the usage of randomness helps in extremal combinatorics and graph theory, and by developing new ways of analysis/new random processes I am trying to significantly increase the range of combinatorial applications."
The CAREER grant will also allow him to spend more time on the phase transition of random graphs. He explains, “This refers to a sudden change of their typical properties, as we add more and more links to the graph (similar to how the state of water changes as we increase the temperature). I am trying to understand whether the phase transition of a wide variety of random graph processes share essential ‘universal’ features, as predicted by the profound universality paradigm from physics.”
“It is a great honor to receive the NSF CAREER award,” says Warnke. “I gratefully acknowledge this recognition and support from NSF, which will now help/allow me to further advance my research program, and pursue some of the most challenging problems in probabilistic combinatorics.”
McGuire and Warnke are among a number of 2020 NSF CAREER awardees representing Georgia Tech. Learn more about Jenny McGuire and Lutz Warnke, and about the CAREER Program.
The Biological Sciences Seminar featuring Jianlong Wang, originally scheduled for April 2, 2020, has been postponed. Please visit biosci.gatech.edu for further updates.
Arjun Raj, Ph.D.
Department of Bioengineering
Department of Genetics
University of Pennsylvania
ABSTRACT
Anti-cancer therapies can often kill the vast majority of tumor cells but a few rare cells remain and grow despite treatment. Non-genetic variability has emerged as a potential contributor to this behavior. However, it remains unclear what drives this variability, and what the ultimate phenotypic consequences are. We have developed a set of new single cell barcoding technologies (Time Machine and FateMap) that have enabled us to show how different types of variability can translate into different drug-resistant outcomes upon treatment with drug. In particular, we found that even a genetically and epigenetically clonal population harbors enough latent variability to produce an entire ecosystem of different resistant cell types, and show preliminary evidence suggesting that these cell types can contribute to tumor development in distinct ways.
Hosts: Drs. Annalise Paaby & Joe Lachance
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Natalie Lai Man Wu, Ph.D.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
ABSTRACT
In the peripheral nervous system (PNS), Schwann cells are highly versatile glial cells that undertake a broad repertoire of functions, including myelination of axons for saltatory conduction, modulation of synaptic activity at the neuromuscular junction and pain initiation in the dermis. Following nerve injury, quiescent mature Schwann cells exhibit remarkable plasticity by de-differentiating to a pro-repair progenitor-like phenotype to orchestrate nerve regeneration. These highly dynamic processes need to be tightly regulated to prevent pathologies, such as cancer. To date, the molecular mechanisms and signals driving Schwann cell development, myelination and plasticity are not fully understood. In this talk, I will present 1) how Schwann cells in the PNS develop into myelin-forming cells via precise temporal control mediated by the transcriptional factor, Zeb2 and the HIPPO pathway, 2) how these differentiated cells or their progenitors are reprogrammed into tumorigenic cells in nerve cancer via HIPPO pathway dysregulation, and 3) how Schwann cells in nerve tumors demonstrate a tumor cell lineage trajectory during malignant transformation using innovative single-cell genomics. This work advocates an innovative and comprehensive approach to understand the remarkable versatility of Schwann cells in peripheral nerves.
Host: Dr. Alberto Stolfi
Event Details
Kimberly Tanner, Ph.D.
Professor & Director of The Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory (SEPAL)
Department of Biology
San Francisco State University
ABSTRACT
Through the language they use, instructors create classroom environments that have the potential to impact learning by affecting student motivation, resistance, belonging, and self-efficacy. However, despite the critical importance of instructor language to the student experience, little research has investigated what instructors are saying in undergraduate classrooms. We systematically investigated instructor language that was not directly relate to content and defined this as Instructor Talk and identified five robust categories of Instructor Talk that can characterize ~90% of non-content language found in over 60 courses: 1) Building Instructor/Student Relationships, 2) Establishing Classroom Culture, 3) Explaining Pedagogical Choices, 4) Sharing Personal Experience, and 5) Unmasking Science. The remaining ~10% of instances of Instructor Talk in these settings were categorized as negatively-phrased or potentially discouraging in nature. Attention to Instructor Talk in undergraduate classrooms may be key for instructors to create inclusive learning environments and promote student learning.
Hosts: Drs. Chrissy Spencer and Colin Harrison
Event Details
Kimberly Tanner, Ph.D.
Professor & Director of The Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory (SEPAL)
Department of Biology
San Francisco State University
How do experts structure their thinking about the concepts in their discipline? How is this different from the way those new to a discipline organized these same ideas? How, if at all, does undergraduate education in a discipline affect how an individual organizes their disciplinary knowledge? In this interactive session, participants will engage in exploring differences in expert and novice thinking, which is grounded in theories and methodologies from both science education and cognitive psychology. Attendees will participate in a card sorting exercise to explore the many ways that knowledge within a discipline can be organized. Additionally, participants will then have the opportunity to make predictions about potential organizational frameworks that might be used by novices and experts within their own disciplines. Finally, participants will make predictions about and evaluate primary research data on the influence of undergraduate education on novice-to-expert transitions in the field of biological science, as an example.
Event Details
David M. Hudson, Ph.D.
Research Scientist
The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk, Norwalk CT
ABSTRACT
Biological conservation in the Neotropics has many challenges. Direct anthropogenic alterations of environmental conditions compounded with climate change may be catastrophic to species survival and maintenance of biodiversity. The top human-mediated threats are habitat loss/degradation, pollution, and exploitation along with climate change’s effects on Andean freshwater systems. Colombia has the highest freshwater crab diversity in South America, but they remain understudied. We produced a case study demonstrates the influence of continued human impacts, including industrial extraction sites for mining and petroleum on the area available for survival of a crustacean species that will be affected by climate change. Species extinctions are likely to occur from the multiple stressors affecting these populations, meaning that those stressors should be a part of determining IUCN Red List species assessments. From this analysis, it is evident that differences exist for how widely distributed species and range restricted species will respond to these interacting stressors as climate changes.
Host: Marc Weissburg, Ph.D.
Event Details
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