Stephen Balakirsky is the Chief Scientist for the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and the Director of Technical Initiatives at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) at Georgia Tech.

Balakirsky’s research interests include robotic architectures, planning, bio-automation, robotic standards, and autonomous systems testing. His work in knowledge driven robotics couples real-time sensors and knowledge repositories to allow for flexibility and agility in robotic systems ranging from assembly and manufacturing systems to surveillance and logistics systems. The framework promotes software reuse and the ability to detect and correct for execution errors.

Previously, Balakirsky worked as a project manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and was a senior research engineer at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). At ARL, Balakirsky performed mobile robotics research in several areas, including command and control, mapping, human-computer interfaces, target tracking, vision processing and tele-operated control.

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.

Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb joined Georgia Tech in summer 2007 as an assistant professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Prior to this, she was a senior engineer in the materials and device R&D group of MEMS Research and Innovation Center at QUALCOMM MEMS Technologies, Inc. Her work included characterization and optimization of optical and electric response of IMOD displays and research on novel materials for improved processing and reliability of IMOD. Bassiri-Gharb's research interests are in smart and energy-related materials (e.g. ferroelectric and multiferroic materials) and their application to nano- and micro-electromechanical systems. Her research projects integrate novel micro and nanofabrication techniques and processes and study of the fundamental science of these materials at the nanoscale, at the interface of physical and electrochemical phenomena.

Alan Ritter is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research interests include natural language processing, information extraction, and machine learning. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon.  His research aims to solve challenging technical problems that can help machines learn to read vast quantities of text with minimal supervision.  His work has been featured in the press including WIRED, TNW and VentureBeat.  Alan is the recipient of an NSF CAREER, an Amazon Research Award, a Sony Faculty Innovation Award, and several paper awards presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Alberto Dainotti is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech where is the Director of the Internet Intelligence Lab. His research is at the intersection of Internet measurement, data science and cybersecurity. He is interested in understanding when and how Internet infrastructure can fail and proposing remedies. To this end, he develops methods and builds near-real-time streaming data analytics systems (IODA, BGPStream, GRIP) that combine diverse data to monitor and improve Internet infrastructure security and reliability. He is also interested in understanding political motivations and implications of Internet cybersecurity events and phenomena. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was an Associate Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at CAIDA, the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego. He received my Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and Systems at University of Napoli "Federico II", Italy, in 2008.

Dr. Vijay Ganesh is a professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2023, Vijay was a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada from 2012 to 2023 and a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2012. Vijay completed his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2007. Vijay's primary area of research is the theory and practice of SAT/SMT solvers, and their application in AI, software engineering, security, mathematics, and physics. In this context he has led the development of many SAT/SMT solvers, most notably, STP, Z3str4, AlphaZ3, MapleSAT, and MathCheck. He has also proved several decidability and complexity results in the context of first-order theories. More recently he has started working on topics at the intersection of learning and reasoning, especially the use of machine learning for efficient solvers, and the use of solvers aimed at making AI more trustworthy, secure, and robust. For his research, Vijay has won over 30 awards, honors, and medals to-date, including an ACM Impact Paper Award at ISSTA 2019, ACM Test of Time Award at CCS 2016, and a Ten-Year Most Influential Paper citation at DATE 2008.

Mijin Kim is an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech. Her research program is focused on the development and implementation of novel nanosensor technology to improve cancer research and diagnosis. The Kim Lab combines nanoscale engineering, fluorescence spectroscopy, machine learning approaches, and biochemical tools (1) to understand the exciton photophysics in low-dimensional nanomaterials, (2) to develop diagnostic/nano-omics sensor technology for early disease detection, and (3) to investigate biological processes with focusing problems in lysosome biology and autophagy. For her scientific innovation, Kim has received multiple recognitions, including being named as one of the STAT Wunderkinds and the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 List.

Peter Kasson is an international leader in the study of biological membrane structure, dynamics, and fusion, with particular application to how viruses gain entry to cells. His group performs both high-level experimental and computational work – a powerful combination that is critical to advancing our understanding of this important problem. His publications describe inventive approaches to the measurement of viral fusion rates and characterization of fusion mechanisms, and to the modeling of large-scale biomolecular and lipid assemblies. He has applied these insights to the prediction of pandemic outbreaks and drug resistance, with particular attention to Zika, SARS-CoV-2, and influenza pathogens in recent years. See https://kassonlab.org/ for more information.

Saurabh Sinha received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2002, and after post-doctoral work at the Rockefeller University with Eric Siggia, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2005, where he held the positions of Founder Professor in Computer Science and Director of Computational Genomics in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology until 2022. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 2022, as Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Engineering, with joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering. Sinha’s research is in the area of bioinformatics, with a focus on regulatory genomics and systems biology. Sinha is an NSF CAREER award recipient and has been funded by NIH, NSF and USDA. He co-directed an NIH BD2K Center of Excellence and was a thrust lead in the NSF AI Institute at UIUC. He led the educational program of the Mayo Clinic-University of Illinois Alliance, and co-led data science education for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Sinha has served as Program co-Chair of the annual RECOMB Regulatory and Systems Genomics conference and served on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Computational Biology (2018-2021). He was a recipient of the University Scholar award of the University of Illinois, and selected as a Fellow of the AIMBE in 2018.