Atlanta Magazine • Atlanta Magazine February 2026 • Field Notes

Welcome, Waymo. Teen dream engineering team. A homegrown reporting star returns.

Because she’s legally blind and doesn’t drive, Lee Rogers has always used rideshare to navigate the city. A Candler Park resident, Rogers has been enjoying a new experience: being alone in the car, ferried to her destination by a driverless Waymo. The autonomous vehicles, which have been available through the Uber app since June 2025, cover about 65 square miles of intown Atlanta. Rogers has come to prefer Waymo to traditional rideshare options, citing benefits such as safety, cleaner cars, no small talk with a driver, and no tipping. She appreciates the solo ride—a first for her.

“I think a lot of people who drive are afraid of self-driving cars because they don’t have control,” Rogers says. “But I’ve never had control because I’m blind.”

Atlanta is among the first cities in the country to offer Waymo, along with San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Phoenix. Though the software company has its own app in certain markets, it’s been using Uber as a platform to introduce Atlantans to Waymo; an option in the app’s settings allows users to opt for the autonomous ride. Waymo’s Atlanta fleet consists of about 100 vehicles, and the company plans to add more over the next few years.

“Waymo chose Atlanta almost two years ago because of the rideshare demand,” says Ethan Teicher, a spokesperson for Waymo. Teicher says Miami is the company’s next target market, with launches in other major cities soon to follow.

Midtown resident Cator Sparks chose the Waymo option on Uber out of sheer curiosity. He’d been seeing the cars around town and was happy to discover they were clean and quiet. “I thought the Waymo was easy to operate,” he says. “I touched my phone to the door to unlock it and picked 1940s jazz out of the music options.”

Still, some experiences with autonomous vehicles have resulted in frustration, and Rogers and Sparks say there’s room for improvement. “Waymo didn’t register that it had new passengers,” Sparks says of one recent ride. “We had to call for support, step out of the car, and give it a minute. Meanwhile, it blocked other cars from entering the parking lot.”

Nationwide, Waymo cars and other autonomous vehicles have come under scrutiny for failing almost two years ago because of the rideshare demand,” says Ethan Teicher, a spokesperson for Waymo. Teicher says Miami is the company’s next target market, with launches in other major cities soon to follow. Midtown resident Cator Sparks chose the Waymo option on Uber out of sheer curiosity. He’d been seeing the cars around town and was happy to discover they were clean and quiet. “I thought the Waymo was easy to operate,” he says. “I touched my phone to the door to unlock it and picked 1940s jazz out of the music options.” Still, some experiences with autonomous vehicles have resulted in frustration, and Rogers and Sparks say there’s room for improvement. “Waymo didn’t register that it had new passengers,” Sparks says of one recent ride. “We had to call for support, step out of the car, and give it a minute. Meanwhile, it blocked other cars from entering the parking lot.” Nationwide, Waymo cars and other autonomous vehicles have come under scrutiny for failing to adhere to road safety laws such as stopping for school buses; some state legislatures have considered tougher restrictions on driverless cars.

Rogers acknowledges that the driverless ride still isn’t perfect. “But if I have a choice between an Uber and a Waymo,” she says, “I’m taking a Waymo.”

At a time of life when many teenagers are more concerned with earning driver’s licenses and scoring six-packs, three Suwanee high schoolers are busy inventing a next-generation surgical robotic system.

Barghavan Mohankumar, Brandon Kim, and Brandon Whitehead—all 17-year-old juniors at North Gwinnett High School—believe their computer-aided design, or CAD, models and prototype could spark a medical breakthrough. Professionals beyond their teachers are starting to take notice.

Mohankumar, the team lead, started hanging out with Kim, the software specialist, and Whitehead, hardware aficionado, during their freshman year. The trio discussed big, entrepreneurial ideas. They brainstormed and sketched. They pooled allowance money. Finally, the teens settled on an idea: a medical robot that would help doctors with precision spinal surgery.

Then came laborious research. The trio compiled a 40-page document listing every design patent in the field of spinal surgery tools, surveyed the work of high-school robotics teams across Georgia, and read up on current research published by leading institutions, from Kennesaw State University to MIT.

A gap in the market became clear, Mohankumar says: No one was working to improve robotic surgical applications related specifically to the cervical spine—the part where the neck meets the back. (In short, minimally invasive pedicle screw placement, as the group’s focus is called, is used to stabilize and support the spine when it’s weakened, injured, or unstable, while reducing tissue damage and accelerating recovery.) This type of surgery requires submillimeter accuracy.

“We found the cervical spine [surgery] had high rates of error,” says Mohankumar. “The technology in this area is very underdeveloped. [That means] demand—high demand. And it would be helpful to automate the process.”

“Surgeons are very overworked,” adds Kim, “and we want to appeal to them. This would make their jobs way easier.”

In late 2024, the young entrepreneurs landed on a company name: Firmly Surgery. They plan to soon begin the process of obtaining provisional patents. (Why Firmly Surgery? “It rhymes,” Kim laughs.) Online fundraisers have helped to cover the cost of detailed CAD model training— partially powered by AI—and the physical hardware needed to put their 3D robot prototype together. An engineering teacher at school and a private physician have lent advice, but the product is thoroughly the brainchild of Firmly Surgery’s precocious engineers.

The students, who meet after school, are currently less concerned with profitability than with refining the prototype into a great system and finished, physical product. “Once we do that,” notes Mohankumar, “we’ll evaluate our options.” They are in talks with Georgia Tech to be featured at a large event as part of the Create-X entrepreneurial program.

Between hardware and software, these whiz kids have identified about 23 patentable concepts with their prototype that could be applied to procedures across the body, says Mohankumar. Per their calculations, there’s a market for about 25 million such devices in the U.S. alone, but that number could swell with hospital partnerships. Their goal, he says, is to keep the price down and boost accessibility for fixing cervical spine ailments.

“Everyone we have talked to has been impressed, but we have a long way to go,” says Mohankumar. “We believe wherever we end up, we will have contributed a lot to the industry.”

For Jobina Fortson-Evans, joining CBS Atlanta’s newsroom felt less like a career move and more like a homecoming to the city that first ignited her passion for storytelling. As a child, Fortson-Evans loved interviewing people with her camcorder. Years later, she joined the Tucker High School newspaper, which sparked her interest in a journalism career.

As a student at Howard University, Fortson-Evans completed internships at a local radio station and then a television station, where broadcasting caught her attention. “It was the combination of the writing, plus pictures and sound all together, that I enjoyed,” she says. “And I haven’t really looked back.”

Fortson-Evans later held on-camera jobs with TV stations in Maryland, Kentucky, and California. Before joining CBS Atlanta’s new team, she launched and hosted ATL Live, a daily lifestyle show on Atlanta News First. Along the way, she’s navigated the turbulence of the wider journalism industry, as traditional broadcast media looks for ways to incorporate social media into their model.

Her new role embodies this pivot: This year, CBS Atlanta shifted from the news desk model to debut a digitally augmented virtual-reality studio, where anchors interact with immersive visuals via a green screen. “With our set here, every single day is different, from the content to the way the show looks,” Fortson-Evans says.

As a reporter, she says she aims to root storytelling in the community. She points to CBS’s new on-screen QR code and phone number, which allows viewers to submit story ideas during each broadcast. “We are not necessarily going to lead with the news that everybody else is,” she says. “While there are shootings and fires and events that are happening here, our goal is to highlight the stories that are going to impact and help people the most.”

Representation is also a driving force for Fortson-Evans. “There is a legacy [in Atlanta] of Black women anchoring the news,” she says. “Growing up here, I watched Monica Kaufman Pearson, Brenda Wood, and Jovita Moore.” Though that legacy stretches back to the legendary Xernona Clayton, the first Black woman in the South to host a regularly scheduled prime-time television talk show, representation remains limited in the industry: A 2018 study found that nationwide, Black women comprise 2.62 percent of all journalists. Fortson-Evans sees her on-air visibility as a chance to influence the next generation of young reporters, especially women journalists of color.

Now that she’s back in her hometown—with three Emmys to her name—Fortson-Evans looks forward to amplifying the voices that make Atlanta what it is. “There are so many amazing people throughout this region that are doing great things and uplifting others,” she says. “That’s who we want to find to tell their stories.”