Research centers and institutes are units within a university established to conduct scholarly activity through collaborative research, research training, research dissemination or creative endeavors. Centers and institutes are expected to provide learning opportunities for students and to be actively engaged in academic collaboration.
Research centers and institutes promote interdisciplinary work, and institutes collaborate within their home unit and with external units.
Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics
The NSF funded Engineering Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics (CBBG) focuses on ecologically friendly, cost-effective solutions, inspired by nature, for development and rehabilitation of resilient and sustainable civil infrastructure systems. It serves as a nexus for two transformative trends in engineering: biologically-based design and sustainability. The center propels the US into a leadership role in biogeotechnical engineering, enhancing national security by providing green and sustainable solutions to important infrastructure and resource development-related challenges.
Georgia Tech Lead: David Frost
Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems
The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems enhances Georgia Tech’s research, education, and service missions, and campus operations through leadership, communications, development, and decision-making inspired and defined by the principles of sustainability. Programs and projects initiated or supported by the BBISS lie at the intersections of these themes.
Director: John Crittenden
Georgia Transportation Institute
Georgia Transportation Institute fosters communication and coordination between Georgia’s universities, transportation agencies, and transportation-related industry and promotes the development of ideas and people that will place Georgia at the forefront of transportation research. GTI's objectives include conducting research to improve the productivity and effectiveness of Georgia’s — and the nation’s — transportation system.
Director: Michael Hunter
Georgia Water Resources Institute
The GWRI is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the science and practice of water resources planning and management in ways that balance quality of life, environmental sustainability, and economic growth. GWRI pursues this mission through applied research, education, information dissemination, and technology/knowledge transfer programs at the state, national, and international levels. The institute is one of the 54 National Institutes for Water Resources in each U.S. state and territory authorized by §104 of the Water Resources Research Act of 1984.
Director: Aris Georgakakos
Southeastern Center for Air Pollution & Epidemiology
SCAPE is an EPA-funded joint research project between the schools of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
The center addresses critical issues relating to the public health impacts of ambient air pollution, with an overarching theme focusing on characterizing ambient air pollution mixtures and examining their role in human health risks associated with air pollution.
Director: Armistead Russell
The Tailings and Industrial Waste Engineering Center (TAILENG)
The TAilings and IndustriaL waste ENGineering (TAILENG) Center is a research center dedicated to advancing the state of knowledge and practice in the design of tailings and industrial waste storage facilities. Recent catastrophic failures of tailings storage facilities highlight the need for an improved understanding of the engineering properties of tailings as well as the behavior of intermediate, or transitional, soil that include mine tailings, coal combustion by-products, and other industrial sludge to develop robust design, operation, and closure plans for waste storage facilities.
Director: Jorge Macedo
University Transportation Centers
The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering is a leading partner in five U.S. Department of Transportation University Transportation Centers. These centers work with state, regional and local agencies to provide leadership on research, education and technology transfer with respect to today’s most pressing transportation issues.
Center for Advancing Research in Transportation Emissions, Energy and Health (CAR-TEEH)
CARTEEH focuses on the impact of transportation emissions on human health, bringing together experts from two disciplines that have not traditionally worked together — transportation and public health. Members of the CARTEEH consortium strongly advocate for advancing research on transportation emissions in a more comprehensive manner, mapping the holistic tailpipe-to-lungs spectrum, which includes the impact of transportation emissions on the environment and public health.
Together, our consortium is well-equipped to establish a University Transportation Center of strategic importance, producing high-quality, impactful research, technology transfer, education, and workplace development.
Georgia Tech Lead: Michael Rodgers
Inspecting and Preserving Infrastructure through Robotic Exploration (INSPIRE)
In the next 30 years, our highway and railway system will face challenges ranging from aging infrastructure and increasing congestion to declining revenues due to reduced fuel tax and increasing service interruption. Cheaper, faster, and safer inspection and preservation tools are needed to maintain our nation’s ground transportation system in a state of good repair.
In the future, with successful development and implementation of robotic platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), bridges and tunnels will be evaluated and sometimes maintained underneath bridge decks with no access equipment and no traffic control, reducing labor hours, avoiding rental, transportation and mobilization costs of equipment, saving fuel and indirect costs associated with service interruption, alleviating traffic congestion, and promoting work zone safety.
Georgia Tech Lead: Yang Wang
National Center for Sustainable Transportation
NCST provides national leadership in advancing environmentally sustainable transportation through cutting-edge research, direct policy engagement, and education of our future leaders.
To preserve the environment, we must minimize the impact of the transportation system on our natural resources, including energy, climate, air, water and land. The challenge for the nation is to reduce these impacts while meeting the mobility needs of society, fostering healthy communities, and supporting economic growth. In response to this challenge, the NCST’s research, education, and engagement programs are organized around four high-priority themes: environmentally responsible infrastructure and operations, multimodal travel and sustainable land use, zero-emission vehicle and fuel technologies, and institutional change.
Georgia Tech Lead: Randall Guensler
STRIDE: Southeastern Transportation Research, Innovation, Development and Education Center
STRIDE focuses on developing novel strategies for reducing congestion. The Center has nine partners, representing seven states in the southeastern United States. The STRIDE Center maximizes contributions to solving current and future transportation problems as well as strengthening expertise and developing new technologies. Faculty researchers within the STRIDE consortium of universities are well respected and highly sought after by government and other organizations for their knowledge and experience.
Georgia Tech Lead: Michael Hunter
Teaching Old Models New Tricks (TOMNET)
The TOMNET research team is engaged in creating and testing a variety of innovative and practical approaches to overcoming the barriers of large-scale travel-demand forecasting models. These approaches have in common that they use attitudinal data collected from one sample to inform models built on a different sample. The center conducts extensive, coordinated and systematic exploration of various machine learning and statistical data fusion approaches, involving applications to a diverse array of important topics (such as equity, vehicle ownership, the adoption of autonomous vehicles and ride-hailing apps, safety, resilience, active transportation, and land use impacts on travel) in multiple geographic regions. Through its work, the center will identify the most promising approaches for integrating attitudinal variables and latent constructs in regional travel demand forecasting models and quantifying the effects of these traditionally unobserved traits on behavioral choices and transport outcomes.
Georgia Tech Lead: Patricia Mokhtarian
Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT)
CCAT aims to advance research in the field of transportation safety, mobility, and sustainability via connected vehicles, connected infrastructure, and autonomous vehicles. Located at the focal point of the U.S. auto industry, CCAT will play a unique regional role in promoting connected and automated transportation research, education, workforce development, and technology transfer activities, which are of critical importance to the future of the region’s economy. The CCAT team’s extensive and substantive collaborations with stakeholders such as the region’s state DOTs, local governments, and the CAV industry will ensure that its research translates to practical outcomes through prototypes, field tests, technology transfer, implementation, and policies.
Georgia Tech Lead: Srinivas Peeta
Transit-Serving Communities Optimally, Responsively, and Efficiently Center (T-SCORE)
The goal of the T-Score Center is to define strategic visions to guide transit into the future and equip planners with tools to translate visions into reality. The T-SCORE Center research is based on an understanding that not all transit agencies are the same and the transit needs of regions vary widely based on the land use, socio-demographic, roadway network, economic climate, and many other factors. However, the strategic vision for the future of public transit must start from the two fundamental motivations: providing a travel option especially for those without other means of travel, and providing a resource-efficient means of moving volumes of people.