Five College of Sciences students have been selected to receive the Herbert P. Haley Fellowship. The scholarship recognizes and rewards significant accomplishments and outstanding academic achievements of graduate students at Georgia Tech.
Haley scholars receive a one-time merit award of up to $4,000 thanks to the generosity of the late Marion Peacock Haley. Haley’s estate established the merit-based graduate fellowships in honor of her late husband, Herbert P. Haley (ME 1933).
Meet the 2024-2025 Haley Fellows
Emily Gleaton, School of Psychology
Gleaton specializes in engineering psychology. Since 2020, she has served as president, secretary, webmaster, and treasurer of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society student chapter and held multiple leadership positions in the Psychology Graduate Student Council. She was recognized by Georgia Tech’s Center for Student Engagement as part of the 2023 Celebrating Student Leadership Project.
“My research focuses on how to reduce the disuse of assistive technologies and improve user outcomes through enhanced instruction and training,” says Gleaton. “These technologies, from mobility aids to smart devices like wearables and conversational agents, help people perform tasks more easily. I hope my work fosters the successful adoption of assistive technology — and supports individuals aging in place, improving health, and gaining greater independence.”
Alex Havrilla, School of Mathematics
A third-year Ph.D. student studying mathematics, Havrilla focuses on both theoretical and applied topics in generative machine learning. He has published several papers in academic journals and is an active attendee/presenter in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics student chapter seminar series. Outside of Georgia Tech, Alex co-founded CarperAI, an open-source research group studying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for large language models.
"My theoretical work tries to understand how well models generalize depending on model size and the amount and makeup of training data. My applied research improves the mathematical reasoning abilities of generative models through synthetic data generation," says Havrilla. "I love the interplay between both theory and application. Knowing the theory helps give me a more principled understanding of what is done in practice, and knowing the practice helps me decide what are the most relevant questions to study theoretically.”
Charles “Ross” Lindsey, School of Biological Sciences
As part of the Rosenzweig Lab, Lindsey investigates the evolution of multicellularity and cell differentiation. He also assists Team Phoenix Supercomputing via Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects program, which engages undergraduate and graduate students in long-term, large-scale, multidisciplinary project teams led by faculty. Lindsey trains the Team Phoenix Supercomputing to compete in high-performance computing (HPC) competitions while equipping them with fundamental skills necessary for HPC research.
“My research has largely focused on a small group of freshwater green algae known informally as the ‘volvocine algae’,” says Lindsey. “The varying levels of developmental and sexual complexity make these organisms a useful model system for investigating major evolutionary questions. I infer the phylogenetic relationships of this group and perform ancestral-state reconstructions of key traits thought necessary for the evolution of differentiated, multicellularity.”
Jordan McKaig, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
McKaig has two first-author publications and has presented her research nationally and internationally. She participated in the International Space Station (ISS) analog experiment at Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo and NASA outreach for the Atlanta Science Festival. On campus, she was the 2023 President of ExplOrigins, a group of young scientists interested in the origins and evolution of life, the exploration of our solar system, and the search for habitable planets beyond Earth.
“My research focuses on detecting signs of life and characterizing microbes in very salty environments,” says McKaig. “I am interested in life at the fringe of habitability, where the environmental conditions are harsh, but adequate for living things to exist. By learning about life in the extremes on Earth, we can make predictions about what life may look like if it exists on other planets or moons, and how we might be able to detect such life forms. In my lab work, I explore the applications that nanopore instrumentation may have in the search for extraterrestrial life.”
Kellie Stellmach, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Stellmach is a Ph.D. student in chemistry. She is heavily involved in the Student Polymer Network, serving as secretary, vice president, and president. As an adamant supporter of reducing the gender gap in STEM fields, Kellie frequently invites female researchers to Georgia Tech to share their science research and assists with outreach events through the Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS) program.
"My research focuses on the chemical recycling of polymers back to their monomers, a process that enables plastic waste to be recycled in a circular fashion,” says Stellmach. “I'm particularly interested in this area of research because it combines the challenge of developing new chemical methods with the potential for significant environmental impact. By improving the efficiency of recycling processes, my work aims to reduce plastic waste and support a more sustainable future."
Hi fossil friends! Fossil Friday is finally back!
Come join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab every Friday for Fossil Fridays! Become a fossil hunter and help discover how vertebrate communities have changed through time. Experience firsthand what it is like to be a paleontologist, finding and identifying new specimens! You will be picking and sorting 3,000 to 30,000-year-old fossil specimens from rock matrix that has been brought back from Natural Trap Cave, WY. These specimens are part of many research projects examining how the community of species living around Natural Trap Cave has changed since the extinction of the cheetahs, lions, dire wolves, mammoths, camels, horses, and other megafauna that used to live in North America. You are welcome to participate anytime that is convenient, with no commitment necessary. In fact, you can drop in or leave anytime within the two-hour timeframe. All are welcome, so bring your friends!
For more information join our mailing list and/or contact Katie Slenker (kslenker3@gatech.edu) or Jenny McGuire (jmcguire@gatech.edu).
* No T. rex actually helped with the excavations of Natural Trap Cave as their arms would be much too small.
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When a pandemic starts, there are many factors that are unknown. Rapidly acquiring information becomes critical to pandemic response. Emphasis of what we don’t know is critical to advancing immediate priorities. However, in many cases, we may know more than might be assumed. I will discuss two examples where it was possible to use information and inference to inform pandemic uncertainties and guide public health decision-making: determining quarantine durations for detected cases and for international travel, and quantifying the durability of immunity against reinfection and breakthrough infection after vaccination. Our early identification of the benefit of a negative COVID-19 test on exit was cited by the CDC in their stipulation of a shorter quarantine with test, and our assessment of justifiable travel quarantines has markedly changed the conception of appropriate enforcement for public health. An oft-cited uncertainty of the early pandemic was the durability of immunity against reinfection, leading to the promulgation of an idea that perhaps sufficient infection would lead to herd immunity. We were able to show using viral antibody waning data from closely related human-infecting coronaviruses and their evolutionary relationships with SARS-CoV-1, MERS, and SARS-Cov-2 that the durability of immunity to reinfection is short, key information for public health interventions, and to further characterize the relative durability of immunity against breakthrough infection achieved by several major vaccines, and lastly to recently characterize the frequency of booster vaccination required to suppress infection given endemic transmission. These insights can be extended to future pandemics to enable increasingly rapid response upon identification of novel vectors of infection.
Hosted by William Ratcliff
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The Center of Excellence in Computational Cognition (CoCo) at Georgia Tech presents:
Big Ideas in Computational Cognition
Chalk Talk seminar series
September 18, 2024
3-4 pm EDT
J.S. Coon Bldg, Room 250 (Georgia Tech Campus)
Zoom option: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/95703973337
Assistant Professor, School of Psychology, Georgia Tech
Understanding uncertainty:
- How can we measure uncertainty as a psychological construct?
- What are the best ways to elicit subjective uncertainty from people?
- How can we map these measurements onto mathematical models?
Abstract: Psychologists, philosophers, mathematicians, and decision analysts all work with uncertainty in their scholarly work. Academics and lay people alike deal with uncertainty in their everyday lives. There are many different ways to formally represent uncertainty. Statisticians build models based on parameters and probability distributions, but behavioral researchers often wish to measure people’s subjective uncertainty. Cognitive psychologists might elicit confidence reports from subjects. Economists might compare what people are willing to pay for different prospects. Forecasters might even directly report subjective probability distributions. What can we learn by comparing the various ways people might report their uncertainty? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these different approaches, and how can we map them onto psychological measurements? Do people's representations of uncertainty change as a function of development or lifespan? Are there cognitive mechanisms that can be trained to make people better uncertainty reporters?
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Conformational Dynamics and Enzyme Evolution
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Earth’s landscape and climate are dynamic over evolutionary timescales and this dynamism is a major force shaping the diversification, evolution, and adaptation of species. Our research in the emerging field of geogenomics combines geological data that records landscape change together with population genomic data of animals and plants to understand how organisms evolve and diverge in response to those external changes. To demonstrate how we can disentangle these complex relationships, I will show examples from diverse settings: sea-level change and diversification of estuarine fishes, ecologically mediated speciation of desert tortoises, and complex co-divergence on the Baja California peninsula, Mexico. Finally, I’ll give examples of some new, generalizable statistical frameworks we can use to think about and integratively model these relationships more explicitly.
Host Jenny McGuire
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The greatest desire for most people with high-level spinal cord injury is for some amount of restored hand movement. A number of years ago, my lab developed an intracortical brain-computer interface (iBCI) that used recordings of single neurons in the motor cortex to make predictions of muscle activity. These, in turn, we used to control electrical stimulation of the temporarily paralyzed muscles of a monkey’s hand. This “Functional Electrical Stimulation” (FES) iBCI allowed the monkeys to voluntarily control not only the movement of their fingers, but also to grasp, and exert graded force on objects. This “biomimetic” iBCI, allowed more nearly natural control of hand movement than is possible with other existing iBCIs. Beyond the ability to restore voluntary limb movement, there is evidence that tight synchrony between attempted movement and peripheral neuromuscular stimulation may invoke neural plasticity that could accelerate recovery from spinal cord injury. In this talk, I will describe the basic work that led to our proof-of-concept in monkeys and our further development of the FES iBCI that would be applicable to a broader range of the activities of daily living. Finally, I will describe our most recent efforts to translate this technology to humans with spinal cord injury.
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A panel of Atlanta graduate students conducting neuro-related research in a range of PhD programs will talk about their fields and academic experiences.
Lunch will be provided.
This is the third in the six-part Professional Development Series for Neuroscience Majors and other undergraduate students interested in neuroscience, neurotechnology, and their intersections with society. Other sessions will be held September 12, October 10, February 13, March 13, and April 10.
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Hear from former GT neuroscience majors about their current jobs and how their education prepared them for success.
Lunch will be provided.
This is the second in the six-part Professional Development Series for Neuroscience Majors and other undergraduate students interested in neuroscience, neurotechnology, and their intersections with society. Other sessions will be held September 12, November 14, February 13, March 13, and April 10.
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Learn what to expect from an undergraduate research experience in neuro and how to identify opportunities that meet your goals. Gain insights from current neuroscience majors engaged in research and hear data blitzes from graduate students and postdocs at Georgia Tech.
Lunch will be provided.
This is the first in the six-part Professional Development Series for Neuroscience Majors and other undergraduate students interested in neuroscience, neurotechnology, and their intersections with society. Other sessions will be held October 10, November 14, February 13, March 13, and April 10.
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