Dr. Boukouvala is originally from Piraeus, which is the port of Athens in Greece. As the daughter of an airforce pilot, she travelled a lot with her family. Her first international move was actually to the USA, where she spent one year in Montgomery, Alabama. She later on lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Crete, Greece, before returning to Athens to get her B.S Degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University in Athens. In 2008, she moved back to the US to obtain a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Rutgers University in NJ. She then worked as a Postdoctoral Associate in both Princeton University and Texas A&M University. In August 2016, Dr. Boukouvala returned to the South East US, as an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. 

Her research interest in Process Systems Engineering (PSE) started during her PhD years, where she worked under the supervision of Dr. Marianthi Ierapetritou, on modeling and optimization of continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing. Her background on optimization and data-driven modeling was enhanced during her years as a postdoc with the late Christodoulos A. Floudas. Dr. Boukouvala is a proud 4th generation member of the academic family tree of the father of PSE, Roger Sargent.

Marilyn Brown is a Regents' and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. She joined Georgia Tech in 2006 after a distinguished career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she led several national climate change mitigation studies and became a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. 

Her research focuses on the design and impact of policies aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, with an emphasis on the electric utility industry, the integration of energy efficiency, demand response, and solar resources, and ways of improving resiliency to disruptions. Her books include Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Green Savings: How Policies and Markets Drive Energy Efficiency (Praeger, 2015), and Climate Change and Global Energy Security (MIT Press, 2011). She has authored more than 250 publications. Her work has had significant visibility in the policy arena as evidenced by her numerous briefings and testimonies before state legislative bodies and Committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Dr. Brown co-founded the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and chaired its Board of Directors for several years. She has served on the Boards of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Alliance to Save Energy, and was a commissioner with the Bipartisan Policy Center. She has served on eight National Academies committees and is an Editor of Energy Policy and an Editorial Board member of Energy Efficiency and Energy Research and Social Science. She served two terms (2010-2017) as a Presidential appointee and regulator on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider. From 2014-2018 she served on DOE’s Electricity Advisory Committee, where she led the Smart Grid Subcommittee.

Dr. Bert Bras has been a Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology since September 1992. From 2001 to 2004, he served as the Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Sustainable Technology and Development. 

In 2014, he was named a Brook Byers Professor of Sustainability. He was named the Associate Chair for Administration for the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2016 and briefly served as Interim School Chair in 2018. 

Dr. Bras’ 25-year career as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology equips him with considerable expertise in sustainable design and manufacturing that has taken him through many areas of industry, from automotive to alternative energy.

He holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Twente (Netherlands) and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Houston. Prior to completing his Ph.D., he worked at the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN).

Ching-Hua Huang, Ph.D., is the Turnipseed Family Chair and Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Huang received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Huang’s expertise includes environmental chemistry, advanced water/wastewater treatment technology, contaminants of emerging concern, sustainable water reuse, waste remediation and resource recovery. Huang has supervised many research projects sponsored by various agencies, and has published more than 170 peer-reviewed journal papers, book chapters and conference proceeding papers. She is the Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society's Environmental Science & Technology Water and the Editorial Advisory Board member of Environmental Science & Technology. 

Josiah Hester works broadly in computer engineering, with a special focus on wearable devices, edge computing, and cyber-physical systems. His Ph.D. work focused on energy harvesting and battery-free devices that failed intermittentently. He now focuses on sustainable approaches to computing, via designing health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for conservation. 
   
His work in health is focused on increasing accessibility and lowering the burden of getting preventive and acute healthcare. In both situations, he designs low-burden, high-fidelity wearable devices that monitor aspects of physiology and behavior, and use machine learning techniques to suggest or deliver adaptive and in-situ interventions ranging from pharmacological to behavioral. 
   
His work is supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, and DARPA. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022. He was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant Ten, won the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Most Promising Scientist/Engineer Award, and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2021. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC, Popular Science, Communications of the ACM, and the Guinness Book of World Records, among many others.

Ashok Goel is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. At Georgia Tech, he is also the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Human-Centered Computing, a Co-Director of the Center for Biologically Inspired Design, and a Fellow of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. For more than thirty years, Ashok has conducted research into artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-centered computing, with a focus on computational design, modeling and creativity. His recent work has explored design thinking, analogical thinking and systems thinking in biological inspired design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiRDQ4hr9i8), and his research is now developing virtual research assistants for modeling biological systems. Ashok teaches a popular course on knowledge-based AI as part of Georgia Tech's program on Online Masters of Science in Computer Science. He has pioneered the development of virtual teaching assistants, such as Jill Watson, for answering questions in online discussion forums (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbCguICyfTA). Chronicle of Higher Education recently called virtual assistants exemplified by Jill Watson as one of the most transformative educational technologies in the digital era. Ashok is the Editor-in-Chief of AAAI's AI Magazine.

She is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and a practicing designer, researcher, and educator who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. As an avid photographer and illustrator, her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects National Photography Competition and she has contributed graphics to several exhibitions and publications. As an educator, she was recognized as one of two recipients of the 2017-2018 American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS)/ Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) New Faculty Teaching Award and a 2021 AIAS Educator Honor Award. 

Her research and practice experiences span design/build, early intervention design education, transatlantic studies, and historic site documentation and visualization. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in fall 2021 for the project "From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South," supporting research and development of the Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States seminar at Georgia Tech. 

Expanding experiences abroad to enrich both teaching and research agendas , she was the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians’ H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellow. Between June 2016 and May 2017, she traveled to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Cuba, and Japan to research the impact of tourism on cultural heritage sites; research blog posts can be found here. 

Currently, she is working with Auburn University Associate Professor Liu and an interdisciplinary team from the McWhorter School of Building Science, the Department of History, and the Media Production Group on “Walking in the Footsteps of History”, an experimental survey and modeling project to digitally reconstruct the area south of the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 'Bloody Sunday' events of March 7, 1965. This project is working to record and represent the built environment through the use of 3D LiDAR scans, UAV photogrammetry, and digital modeling. The team was awarded a $50,000 grant 2019 National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant Program to compile a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Willkens serves as a Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology initiative lead for research activities related to just, resilient, and informed communities.

Dr. Gunter is an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rice University, and later his M.S. and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in orbital mechanics. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Gunter was on the faculty of the Delft University of Technology (TU-Delft) in the Netherlands, as a member of the Physical and Space Geodesy section. His research activities involve various aspects of spacecraft missions and their applications, such as investigations into current and future laser altimetry missions, monitoring changes in the polar ice sheets using satellite data, applications of satellite constellations/formations, and topics surrounding kinematic orbit determination. He has been responsible for both undergraduate and graduate courses on topics such as satellite orbit determination, Earth and planetary observation, scientific applications of GPS, and space systems design. He is currently a member of the AIAA Astrodynamics Technical Committee, and also serves as the Geodesy chair for the Fall AGU Meeting Program Committee. He has received a NASA group achievement award for his work on the GRACE mission, and he is also a former recipient of a NASA Earth System Science Graduate Fellowship. He is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the International Association of Geodesy (IAG).

Ellen is Director of the Master of Science in Urban Design degree, an authority on sustainable suburban redevelopment, and a leading urbanist. Author of over 100 articles, she is co-author with June Williamson of the retrofitting suburbia book series documenting successful retrofits of aging big box stores, malls, and office parks into healthier and more sustainable places. Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, (Wiley, 2009, 2011) received a PROSE award as the best architecture and urban planning book of 2009 and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Harvard Business Review, NPR, PBS, TED and other prominent venues. Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley, 2020) expands on the first book examining how new retrofits are helping communities disrupt automobile dependence, improve public health, support an aging population, leverage social capital for equity, compete for jobs, and add water and energy resilience. 

Ellen serves on several national boards and committees, is former Chair of the Board of the Congress for the New Urbanism, lectures widely and conducts community workshops. In both her teaching and research she focuses on helping communities address new challenges that they were never designed for – whether that’s through her unique database of successful suburban retrofits or studio classes on anticipating autonomous vehicles, coping with climate change or suburban blight. She taught at UVA and MIT before joining Georgia Tech as Architecture Program Director from 2000-2009.

Dr. Omar I. Asensio is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the intersection of big data and public policy, with applications to energy systems and consumer behavior, smart cities, and machine learning in transportation and electric mobility. He directs the Data Science and Policy Lab at Georgia Tech, where he collaborates with the private sector and city governments on data innovations in policy analysis and research evaluation. He is a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS), the Machine Learning Center, and the Strategic Energy Institute. Dr. Asensio’s research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, and PNAS. His work uses statistical and computational tools to advance our understanding of how large-scale civic data and experiments can be used to increase participation in civic processes, while addressing resource conservation and environmental sustainability. Dr. Asensio’s research also has been featured in policy advisory communications by the European Commission, NSF Public Affairs, the World Bank, and national governments — including the U.K., and the IndiaAI initiative.

Dr. Asensio is a member of the New Voices 2021-2023 cohort of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) 40-for-40 fellowship, and the ONE-NBS Research Impact on Practice award by the Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) Division of the Academy of Management. Dr. Asensio serves as Associate Editor of Data and Policy journal published by Cambridge University Press. He holds a doctorate in environmental science and engineering from UCLA with field specialties in economics. He is a faculty participant in the Research University Alliance (RUA) Research Exchange and is engaged in multiple activities to increase the representation of women and under-represented students and professionals in STEM fields.