Research & Innovation

Outsiders may envision Georgia Tech as some futuristic mothership where super-intelligent scientists-in-training walk side by side with robots. And they may be right. In recent years, professors and students at the Midtown campus have developed artificial intelligence that can feed you, bathe you, and practically tuck you in.

Imagine having a mystery illness—but also access to dozens of health experts for diagnosis. Marietta native Jared Heyman created a medical crowdsourcing platform after his sister spent three years—and saw nearly two dozen doctors—fighting a life-threatening and undiagnosed disease.

Civil War bullets. Wooden dice. Glass bottles of a then novel elixir called Coca-Cola. The Phoenix Project is researching the stories behind the approximately 100,000 pieces of trash, trinkets, and treasure that fill roughly 400 bankers boxes in Georgia State University’s Kell Hall.

The civic transformation ushered in by driverless cars could revolutionize the way Atlanta’s buildings and roads are designed, as well as upend how people move around a car-centric metro region. Eventually it might even do away with car ownership altogether.

When it comes to bacteria, salmonella steals all the headlines. But the real newsmaker should be Campylobacter jejuni. It is one of the most common causes of diarrhea, vomiting, and stomach pain.

Atlanta summers follow a predictable cycle: muggy mornings, sweltering afternoons, stormy evenings. Think thunder rumbles here more than elsewhere? You’re not imagining things. Atlanta “births” storms frequently, according to an analysis of 26,000 Southeastern storm starts.

Michael Nilan has never been one to overlook a great idea. In 2010, while on a business trip to China, the entrepreneur stumbled across a plant that produced paper without using a single tree. Inspired, Nilan shuttered his old business, which outsourced jobs for American companies like Tropicana and Westinghouse, and cofounded Atlanta-based TreeZero, which produces and distributes tree-free paper to both consumers and organizations.

Deirdre Shoemaker has known from the time she was a 12-year-old science fiction fan that she wanted to spend her life studying black holes. But when she came to Georgia Tech in 2008 as a founding faculty member of the university’s Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, she found few other female postgraduates.

Inside an office at the Comcast Regional Headquarters at the Battery at SunTrust Park is a group of local entrepreneurs who are hoping to position themselves at the forefront of Atlanta’s innovative tech scene.

We don’t want to alarm y’all, but evidently there will be a Georgia sod shortage this year.