Tech Innovators Honored, Six Startups Land Term Sheets, and a New Campus Key Policy

Georgia Tech closed out the week with a strong showing on the innovation front, plus a campus policy change that faculty and staff will want to read closely. Here is your roundup of the latest academics and research news from The Flats.

Campus Operations: A New Process for Physical Keys

Georgia Tech is standardizing how physical keys for campus facilities are requested and issued, in support of the Institutional Facility Access Control Policy. Beginning Monday, Nov. 9, keys and other facility access may be issued only to individuals with active employee, student, or affiliate status — a BuzzCard alone will not establish that status, so contractors and vendors will need to work with their sponsoring department on Human Resources affiliate status. Then, beginning Monday, Jan. 4, 2027, all key requests must come through a ServiceNow ticket submitted by an authorized requestor such as a building manager or facilities director; email, phone, and walk-in requests will no longer be accepted, and keys will not be issued where electronic access already exists. Recipients will pick up keys in person at Swarm Support in The Pavilion. Departments are encouraged to review their sponsored key holders now. Read the full announcement.

Innovator Awards Celebrate Research With Real-World Impact

The Office of Technology Licensing, part of the Office of Commercialization, hosted the inaugural 2026 Innovator Awards Celebration on Sept. 30 at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center, spotlighting faculty, students, and entrepreneurs who push discoveries toward practical use. Jie Xu of GTRI was named Innovator of the Year, postdoctoral researcher Christopher Bresette took Student of the Year, and Baratunde Cola — professor and founder of Carbice Corporation — was honored as CEO of the Year. InfraVana won Startup of the Year in software/AI/machine learning, while Stellar Scale Nano Fabrication Inc. took the hardware and deeptech honor. Impactful Innovation Awards went to James Dahlman and GuideRx for high-throughput nanoparticle drug delivery, Mark Prausnitz and Micron Biomedical for dissolvable microneedle vaccine patches, and Jeffrey Skolnick and Ovacens Inc. for AI-driven early ovarian cancer detection, with additional patent and disclosure leadership awards recognizing innovators across campus. See the full list of honorees.

Six Tech Ventures Hold Term Sheets After Silicon Valley RoadShow

Ten Georgia Tech ventures pitched emerging technologies to investors at the Georgia Tech Silicon Valley RoadShow on Sept. 24 in Palo Alto, and less than two weeks later six of them held investment term sheets. Hosted by Quadrant-i, the event drew 160 attendees and featured Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, a keynote from Pat Gelsinger of Playground Global, and closing remarks from President Ángel Cabrera. The participating companies — Carbice, CIMTech.ai, Falcomm, InfraVana, Nagare Labs, Piezo Therapeutics, Stellar Scale Nano Fabrication, TopoDx, UnfoldAI, and WattAir — span AI, semiconductors, health care, advanced manufacturing, and sustainability. Among the highlights: CIMTech.ai is designing chips for faster, more efficient AI processing, WattAir is working to pull water from the air using waste heat, and TopoDx aims to help labs identify effective antibiotics in hours instead of days. Read more about the RoadShow.

Coming Up on Campus

Several events worth putting on the calendar. The Center of Excellence for French and Francophone Studies presents Film Futures: Chris Marker’s Science Fiction and Cinematic Arts on Tuesday, Nov. 3 in the Scholar’s Event Theatre at Price Gilbert Memorial Library, pairing a scholarly panel on Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée with a hands-on creative arts workshop. On Monday, Nov. 23, the GTVC Education Series #5 walks through startup fundraising end to end — pitch deck, financial model, data room, investor targeting, diligence, and term sheet negotiation — in Klaus 2448.

The Digital Learning Team also has a full slate for faculty, staff, and TAs:

• CidiLabs TidyUp Training — Tuesday, Oct. 27, a 45-minute session on clearing out course clutter in Canvas.
• VoiceThread accessibility webinar — Tuesday, Oct. 27, covering closed captioning, automatic alt-text, and video comments for ASL.
• Chunking Canvas Content: Design Forward — Wednesday, Oct. 28, on breaking course content into navigable pieces using DesignPLUS.
• Your Creative Shortcut to Interactive MicroLearning — Thursday, Nov. 12, a hands-on H5P guide to quizzes, interactive video, and branching scenarios. No prior experience needed.
• Monthly virtual Digital Learning Team Office Hours for drop-in Canvas questions — Nov. 9 at 3 p.m., Nov. 12 at 10 a.m., and Dec. 14 at 3 p.m.

The Takeaway

Between an awards night honoring a decade of lab-to-market work and six ventures holding term sheets within two weeks of a single pitch event, it is a good moment to appreciate how well Tech’s innovation pipeline is running. Which of these stories caught your eye? Drop a comment below and let us know what you would like us to follow more closely.