Dima Nazzal

Chairing the Faculty Executive Board

In 2023, I was elected to the Georgia Tech (GT) Faculty Executive Board (FEB), and in January of 2024, I was elected as the Chair of FEB. Many colleagues and friends have asked me since then about what that means, and what is it that the chair of the FEB does. Before I dive there, let me first talk about faculty governance. If you’re part of an academic institution, you’ve probably heard of it, but do you really know what it entails? Let’s break it down, especially focusing on the FEB.

What’s the Deal with Shared Governance?

At Georgia Tech, shared governance means that faculty members have a significant say in how things are run. It’s not just about teaching and research; it’s about shaping the whole academic environment. According to the GT Faculty Handbook, faculty have the right and responsibility to manage their own governance, handle student-related policies, and set up committees for various tasks. This is crucial for maintaining high educational standards and ensuring that the faculty’s voice is heard.

So, what exactly does the FEB do?

Think of it as the faculty’s executive branch. It’s there to tackle immediate concerns, coordinate the activities of various committees, and make decisions on urgent matters. Here’s a quick rundown of its main responsibilities:

Serving as the executive body of the faculty
Coordinating activities of standing committees
Acting on time-sensitive issues between faculty meetings
Planning faculty programs and setting meeting agendas
Updating the list of job titles within the academic or research faculty

The FEB doesn’t work alone. It oversees several standing committees that focus on different aspects of faculty and student life. These include committees on benefits, honors, grievances, curriculum, and academic integrity, among others. Each committee plays a role in ensuring that various issues are addressed comprehensively and effectively.

One of the key roles of the FEB is to represent faculty views to the administration. It’s about finding common ground and resolving any mismatches in priorities or approaches. Trust is built through open communication, presenting solutions, and balancing top-down directives with grassroots input from faculty members.

The FEB is driven by values like high academic standards, progress and strategic growth, capacity building, academic freedom, free speech, diversity, equal opportunity, and retention. These aren’t just buzzwords – they guide the FEB’s actions and ensure that the faculty’s work aligns with the broader goals of GT, creating a supportive and progressive academic environment.

The FEB is all about giving faculty a real voice in the institution’s governance. It’s a mix of handling immediate concerns, coordinating various committees, and ensuring that faculty interests are well-represented to the administration. This collaborative approach ensures that the faculty can contribute to maintaining and enhancing the high standards of education at GT.

Before taking on the role of Chair, I served as Vice Chair and worked closely with the previous Chair, Karie Davis-Nozemack, and the Secretary of the Faculty, Rhett Mayor. This experience was invaluable, allowing me to learn the ropes and understand the intricacies of faculty governance. Now, as Chair, I will continue this tradition by working with our new Vice Chair. My constant collaboration with the Secretary of the Faculty, Rhett Mayor, allows us to be efficient and effective at navigating complex situations before they boil over. This transition and collaboration ensure that our governance has a broader base of understanding, more diverse networks, and a stronger institutional memory and knowledge of policies. It’s like passing the baton in a relay race, each of us building on the work of our predecessors and preparing our successors for future challenges.

So, the next time you hear about the FEB or faculty governance, you’ll know just how crucial it is for keeping the academic wheels turning smoothly. Consider volunteering to serve on the senate or a standing committee, join us at faculty meetings and administrative town halls. Got any questions or thoughts on this? Emails me – let’s keep the conversation going!

Effect of K-12 school mask mandates and vaccination rates on Covid infection rates in Metro Atlanta counties

Here’s a graph that shows how the highest percent of recent infections in Georgia – after schools opened beginning of August – is among the age group 10 – 17 years old.

We know there is variability in vaccination rates and school mask mandates across the state, so I looked at the following Metro Atlanta counties that have different vaccination rates and mask mandates in their public K-12 schools. Here’s the list sorted from highest to lowest percent of the residents that are fully vaccinated, separated into two groups: with or without mask mandates in K-12 public schools.

Fayette = 57% – NO K-12 Mask Mandate
Cobb = 52% – NO K-12 Mask Mandate
Forsyth = 51% – NO K-12 Mask Mandate
Cherokee = 46% – NO k-12 Mask mandate
Paulding = 34% – NO k-12 Mask Mandate

Fulton = 51% – K-12 Mask Mandate
Gwinnett = 50% K-12 Mask Mandate
DeKalb = 49% K-12 Mask Mandate
Clayton = 37% K-12 Mask Mandate

First, let’s see how Georgia is doing since Jan 1, 2021 in terms of infection rates per 100K residents. During the month of August, infection rates increased to the January 2021 peak levels during

Second, let’s add the counties with higher vaccination rates and k-12 mask mandates, namely DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett. As we can see in the graph, all of them have lower infection rates than the State

Third, let’s add the counties with higher vaccination rates but NO k-12 mask mandates, namely Cobb, Fayette, and Forsyth. I will only keep Fulton as a representative county of the first group (just to declutter the graph. Higher vaccination rate in Fayette makes it closer to the Mask Mandate counties but still worse infection rates.

Fourth, how about Clayton County, which has lower vaccination rates (only 37%), but a K-12 mask mandate?

Its infection rates are on par with Fayette, which has a much higher vaccination rate but no mask mandate.

Finally, let’s look at counties with NO mask mandate and lower vaccination rates, namely Paulding and Cherokee. Both, particularly Paulding (34% Vaccination Rates), have infection rates that are similar or higher than Georgia.

ETA: Looking at the school age level by county to measure the infection rates among the K-12 students reveals the same conclusion. Here’s a comparison between Paulding (low vax and no K-12 mask mandate), Fulton (higher vax rate and K-12 mask mandate), and Cobb (high vax rate but no K-12 mask mandate). For age group 5 – 10 (unvaccinated group so that variable is irrelevant) reveals that during the August 2021 peak infection in Metro Atlanta. Infection rate among that age group measured as cases per 100k residents are: Fulton: 497.5 vs. Cobb: 704.8 vs. Paulding: 877.7

In conclusion, mask mandates + high vaccination rates are needed to control infections, especially that children under 12 are not eligible for vaccinations yet. I realize that masks are not a way-of-life, but when infection rates are high and vaccination rates have not reached the threshold for herd immunity, masks are an extremely effective tool at preventing high community spread that leads to an overloaded hospital system as we saw in August and September in Georgia and a rise in deaths.

Note that 95-97% of hospitalized patients and of deaths are among the unvaccinated.

More analysis of COVID-19 metrics in Georgia can be accessed through this Tableau Dashboard

State and county level infections data Source: https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-status-report

School age level data on infections graph source: https://chhs-gt.shinyapps.io/age_dashboard/

Semiconductor Manufacturing should come back to the US, and so should support for higher education and research

I started my professional career working at a semiconductor manufacturing facility in Florida in the late 1990s. I witnessed the investment of billions of USD in building and equipping of a “then” state-of-the-art semiconductor wafer fab. I was absolutely fascinated by the precision and rigor required to design and operate the most complex manufacturing system and made that research the focus of my MS thesis and PhD dissertation, and my early research career in academia. In 2001, that state of the art facility was completely abandoned and many other US fabs subsequently closed.

The US infrastructure plan calls for spending $50B on strengthening the US chip production and it’s important to remember that higher education should be a critical component of this plan. When we strayed away from manufacturing, our students lost interest in studying and researching manufacturing systems, including semiconductor. Academic and industry conferences used to regularly feature several session tracks dedicated to semiconductor manufacturing, which slowly dwindled down in the past decade.

US Semiconductor manufacturing fell relatively fast, but rebuilding it will be much slower. Though costly, ramping up the machine and fab capacities will be significantly easier than building up the talented workforce that will run it. In other words, adopting the “build it and they will come” strategy is short-sighted, since while building a fab can take an average of 2 years (TSMC built one in 11-months – probably a record), building a pipeline of talent will consume a good part of a decade. Funding and support should flow into the colleges and universities at earnest to sow the interest in our students and to build the new knowledge tracks it will take to educate them in this ever-changing frontier. Those overseeing the plan for the proposed National Semiconductor Center should engage promptly with universities, NOT ONLY to liaison on the science of semiconductors, but to plan for the broader workforce that will operate our national production capabilities.

Although it is my passion and profession to advocate for lean supply chains and a flat world, the pandemic and geopolitics exposed that supply chain resilience and redundancies are needed to overcome shortages. Local optimization is underrated!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-relies-on-one-chip-maker-in-taiwan-leaving-everyone-vulnerable-11624075400

Safe and Secure Elections

Our interdisciplinary group of Georgia Tech faculty members and graduate and undergraduate students have combined forces as part of the Safe and Secure Elections (SSE) research group. Our team developed tools that will allow election officials in Fulton County – Georgia’s most populous county – to balance the competing demands of election management, help enhance security and safety during the Covid-19 pandemic at polling locations, reduce voting waiting times, and expand voter access.

Read more about our Safe and Secure Elections project in Fulton County here

July 5th Update on COVID-19 Status in Georgia

– Detected cases UP 64%

– PCR Tests UP 35.4%

– Hospitalizations UP 23.4%

– ICU patients UP 35.5%

– Deaths DOWN 39.4%

– Positive test rate is 13% compared to 11% last week

What is the magic number of hospitalization cases that will breach the hospitals capacity “wall”? Most likely hospitals have learned valuable lessons about mitigation, treatment, and adjusting capacities.

Georgia Covid-19 Dashboard