From Idea to Action: How UN Sustainable Development Goals Come to Life in IAC

Health and well-being isn’t just addressed in hospitals. An interdisciplinary team of Georgia Tech and Emory University researchers, including Associate Dean and Public Policy Professor Aaron Levine, are taking hopeful steps toward addressing disparities in tissue biomanufacturing to ensure that new technologies work effectively for all patients.

Meanwhile, research from the School of Economics is raising questions about medical interventions in pregnancy and whether some decisions by doctors may result in unnecessary preterm deliveries, according to Assistant Professor Daniel Dench, the paper's lead author. Published in the journal Pediatrics, the study is the first to examine pandemic-era birth data at scale.

Bullinger, the Public Policy professor, received a three-year, $439,547 grant to study how school-based health centers can help reduce the impact of opioid use on children. She is examining how the delivery of primary care, behavioral health, and preventive services within schools affects children experiencing adverse childhood experiences, including parental opioid use disorder.

Kaye Husbands Fealing, Dean and Ivan Allen Jr. Chair of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, has devoted much of her research to issues of gender equality, such as analyzing gender pay gaps at U.S. federal science agencies. She is currently serving a second three-year term as an appointed member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering, where she advises the NSF on ways to broaden opportunities for women, minorities, and disabled people in science, engineering, and related fields.

In a recent study, Whitney Buser, a senior academic professional in the School of Economics, explores the nature and causes of gender bias in student evaluations of teaching. "We hope this work will highlight the presence of gender bias and encourage the development of more objective teaching evaluation tools that take this dynamic into account," Buser said. "Eliminating or reducing gender bias in teaching evaluations could have an enormous impact on women and their ability to thrive in academia."

Ivan Allen College faculty are using their expertise to make innovation more inclusive. According to the latest biennial analysis of cell phone accessibility by Georgia Tech's Center for Advanced Communications Policy, the lack of easily replaceable batteries or access to Wireless Emergency Alert messages on some cell phones can be significant barriers for people with disabilities. "When I came into this space, that became very apparent to me," said Senior Policy Analyst Salimah LaForce. "Having accessible communications matters. It matters in their work. It matters in their education. It matters in their safety. And it matters in their daily lives, being able to get things done and keep in touch with those they care about."

Artificial intelligence is another groundbreaking problem-solving tool that can spark tremendous innovation. But it also carries risks, from bias baked into AI algorithms to its potential impacts on jobs and inequality. That's why two School of Public Policy professors, Justin Biddle and Philip Shapira, are part of the team engaged with the Georgia Artificial Intelligence Manufacturing Technology Corridor. The project recently received a $65-million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration to support a statewide initiative that combines artificial intelligence and manufacturing innovations with transformational workforce and outreach programs. "Our role is to help this big project anticipate some of the issues that might arise, which could involve bias, equity, human-machine relations, or other societal implications," Shapira said.

Daniel Matisoff, professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, illuminates the role and impact of green building ecolabels in his book Ecolabels, Innovation, and Green Market Transformation: Learning to LEED. "A central premise of the book is that early adopters, whether they are creating a demonstration project — such as Georgia Tech's own Kendeda Building — or adopting an ecolabel early on, produce positive information spillovers that help accelerate adoption of green technologies," Matisoff said. This book is the first to comprehensively assess the green building movement.

Georgia Tech students also are tackling the challenge of inclusive and sustainable infrastructure. A team of students led by School of Literature, Media, and Communication Associate Professor Nassim Parvin took part in the 2022 ACCelerate Festival in Washington, DC. They showcased a project called Heart Sense, a series of installations that visualizes biometric data such as heart rate and breath as participants engage in various listening and viewing activities. The visualization showcases how our bodies come into relation with each other and are in and of the environment, as they respond to our surroundings even when we are unaware of it.

School of Public Policy alumna Thema Monroe-White and Professor and Chair Cassidy Sugimoto received a grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate how structural racism harms science. The researchers will also seek to measure how including people of color and members of historically marginalized groups in the scientific workforce benefits the field as a whole. The grant will allow them to recruit a cohort of 12 fellows, consisting of doctoral students from various disciplines and countries. Together, the fellows will discuss how their lived experiences have influenced their research design.

And the work doesn't end in the classroom — Ivan Allen College alumni Jahnavi Phalkey confronts the question of inclusive science in her career. In a moment she called "serendipity" in 2017, Phalkey — science historian, teacher, author, filmmaker, and proud alumna of the School of History and Sociology — accepted an appointment as the founding director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. Phalkey came into the project with a vision to democratize access to knowledge in her country, expanding that dynamic edge where science, academia, research, and the public can meet. Building from the ground up, she created the first public lab space in India, supporting research and public engagement in the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and the arts.

Georgia Tech and the City of Atlanta Office of the Mayor have partnered to launch the Center for Urban Research, housed in the School of Public Policy. It will focus on developing collaborative solutions to address socio-economic inequities in urban areas, connecting academic expertise across the state to work being done on the ground. The Center's mission is to build mutually beneficial partnerships with university, community, non-profit and municipal leaders across the city to support community resilience and sustainability, leverage private and philanthropic investment for research and programming, provide policy analysis and recommendations, and increase non-profit capacity.

Researchers in the School of Public Policy have found that banning e-scooters may reduce sidewalk congestion and keep would-be riders and pedestrians safer, but it comes at a cost. In a study examining the impact of Atlanta's 2019 ban on e-scooters and e-bikes in the city, Assistant Professor Omar Asensio and his team in Georgia Tech's Data Science and Policy Lab found that average commute times increased by about 10%. Travel to stadium events such as soccer games increased by almost 12 minutes per trip, or 37%, while the ban was in effect. Expanding the scope of their study, Asensio estimates that e-scooters, e-bikes, and other micro-mobility options can save an average of 17.4% in travel time for drivers nationally.

Our impact spreads beyond Atlanta to the coastal city of Savannah, Georgia, where researchers want to make communities safer from future storms by teaching local youth how to strengthen their communities against such threats. In a presentation at the Smithsonian Institution, Allen Hyde, assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology, discussed his team's work teaching youth in vulnerable communities how to advocate for change. It's part of a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Civic Innovation Challenge with a group of interdisciplinary researchers from Georgia Tech and Savannah State, in partnership with The Harambee House, City of Savannah, and Savannah-Chatham County Public School System.

In a field review published in Just Tech, Associate Professor Nassim Parvin in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication discusses how technology can create and worsen injustices and what we can do about it. Parvin has spent the past 15 years researching design ethics and the social and political impacts of emerging tech, but with new advancements in artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, "the reach and decision-making power of these technologies have brought them into the spotlight," she says.

Ivan Allen College alumni are leading two important climate change and biodiversity initiatives.

School of History and Sociology alumnus Albert George has had a long career in environmentalism. He founded the Amazon Reforestation Project, worked as the director of conservation at the South Carolina Aquarium, and is now the carbon neutral program manager at Apple, where he develops strategies to reduce the company's global supply chain emissions to net zero by 2030. George said his goal in his work has always been to dispense with the talk and make real change. To do so, he earned marine biology and chemistry degrees and completed programs at Harvard and Yale. Still, it's his Master of Science in History and Sociology of Technology and Science from Ivan Allen College that most profoundly shaped the trajectory of his career.

School of Literature, Media, and Communication alumna Sarah Adloo leads the Old-Growth Forest Network, a national nonprofit focused on connecting people to old-growth forests and preserving America's remaining old-growth forests. An old-growth forest is a forest that has been undisturbed by development or logging for long enough to allow many generations of trees to go through their entire life cycles. This process, which can take hundreds of years, creates a unique ecosystem with unparalleled biodiversity. According to the Old-Growth Forest Network website, "less than 5% of Western and only a fraction of 1% of Eastern original forests, on average, remain standing."