Valerie Thomas

Valerie Thomas

Valerie Thomas

Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems
Professor
RBI Initiative Lead: Sustainability Analysis

Valerie Thomas is the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. 

Dr. Thomas's research interests are energy and materials efficiency, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Current research projects include low carbon transportation fuels, carbon capture, building construction, and electricity system development. Dr. Thomas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Physical Society. She has been an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow, a Member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, and a Member of the USDA/DOE Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee. 

She has worked at Princeton University in the Princeton Environmental Institute and in the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

Dr. Thomas received a B. A. in physics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

valerie.thomas@isye.gatech.edu

(404) 894-0390

ISyE Profile

  • Website
    • University, College, and School/Department
    Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Engineering > School of Industrial Systems Engineering
    Research Focus Areas:
  • Biobased Materials
  • Biochemicals
  • Biorefining
  • Biotechnology
  • Gigatechnology
  • Hydrogen Storage & Transport
  • Hydrogen Utilization
  • Pulp Paper Packaging & Tissue
  • Renewable Energy
  • Social & Environmental Impacts
  • Sustainable Engineering
  • Sustainable Manufacturing
  • Use & Conservation
    • Additional Research:
    Hydrogen Transport/Storage; Biofuels; ClIMaTe/Environment; Electric Vehicles; System Design & Optimization; Energy and Materials Efficiency; Sustainability; Industrial Ecology; Technology Assessment; Science and Technology Policy

    IRI Connections:
    IRI And Role
    Sustainable Systems > Affiliated Faculty
    Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
    Renewable Bioproducts > Faculty
    Renewable Bioproducts > Leadership
    Energy > Hydrogen Group
    Energy > Research Community
    Sustainable Systems
    Data Engineering and Science
    Renewable Bioproducts
    Energy

    Fang (Cherry) Liu

    Fang (Cherry) Liu

    Fang Liu

    Senior Research Scientist | Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment
    Adjunct Faculty

    Dr. Fang (Cherry) Liu is a Research Scientist at Partnership for Advanced Computing Environment (PACE) center at Georgia Tech. She actively provides expert diagnosis and resolution of complex technical issues with High Performance Computing (HPC) resources; leverages HPC software and application stack, including compilers, scientific libraries and user applications to effectively run on HPC environment; educates campus-wide HPC community, teaching courses including introduction to Linux, intermediate Linux, introduction to Python and Python for Data Analysis courses; and does on-going research on big data with school of computational science and engineering (CSE) faculties. She is awarded the title of Adjunct Associate Professor by CSE to better serve campus HPC community in both teaching and research.

    Before joining Georgia Tech, she was an assistant scientist at mathematics and computational science division at Department of Energy (USDOE) Ames Laboratory, where she gained extensive experience with multi-disciplinary research team and worked closely with world-class domain scientists from physics, chemistry and fusion energy. The projects she participated in included scientific workflows and data management system for nuclear physics applications, GPU computing for large scale quantum chemistry applications, concurrent data processing for fusion simulation through distributed component infrastructure, and so much more.

    Her research interests broadly span parallel/distributed scientific computing, software interface design for monolithic scientific applications, multi-physics and multi-code coupling, multilevel parallelism support for Multi-Physics coupling, data management and provenance for scientific applications, big data infrastructure design and implementation, and data analytics for large graph dataset.She has been served as program committee member for various conferences including HPC, ICCS, ICCSA, CBHPC, ICPP, and she also was vice program general chair, program general chair for HPC2012 and HPC2013, now she sits in program steering committee for HPC since 2014.

    Currently her primary interest focuses on tackling big data issues with using Hadoop and Spark in graph database, security and streaming data, while she is closely working with professor Polo Chau's group.

    Dr. Liu graduated from Indiana University at Bloomington in 2009 with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science. Her dissertation titled, "Building Sparse Linear Solver Component for Large Scale Scientific Simulation and Multi-physics Coupling," and her Ph.D. advisor was Professor Randall Bramley.


    CoC Profile Page

  • PACE Website
    • University, College, and School/Department
    Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Computing > School of Computer Science
    Research Focus Areas:
  • High Performance Computing

    • IRI Connections:
    IRI And Role
    Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
    Data Engineering and Science

    John Eric Coulter

    John Eric Coulter

    John Coulter

    Research Scientist | Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment

    Eric joined PACE in 2021, and currently leads the Research Computing Facilitation team, after having worked as a Cyberinfrastructure Architect and RCF. Before joining PACE, Eric could be found at Indiana University as a systems engineer with the XSEDE Campus Bridging team, providing HPC-oriented consultations to institutions across the US. He also worked closely with the Cyberinfrastructure Research Center at IU, providing support for several different science gateway projects. Prior to that, his research in condensed matter physics at Florida State University involved computational studies of the optical properties of strongly correlated materials.

    j.eric@gatech.edu

    PACE Website

    University, College, and School/Department
    Georgia Institute of Technology
    Research Focus Areas:
  • High Performance Computing

    • IRI Connections:
    IRI And Role
    Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
    Data Engineering and Science

    Aaron Jezghani

    Aaron Jezghani

    Aaron Jezghani

    Research Scientist | Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment

    Aaron joined the PACE team in May 2019 as a computing facilitator, and currently serves as the Scheduler Architect. Through supporting users, he grew to appreciate the opportunity to improve HPC workflows through scheduler and systems configurations that lower the barrier to entry and passively optimize code execution. Additionally, Aaron has been involved in the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program since Spring 2020, mentoring multiple teams of students with the Team Phoenix VIP through international HPC competitions at the ISC-HPC and Supercomputing conferences and more recently, providing leadership for the Future Computing with the Rogues Gallery VIP as they research applications of novel compute architectures. Prior to joining PACE, Aaron studied free neutron and nuclear beta decay as a precision test of the Standard Model, which entailed a diverse range of activities, including particle simulation and detection, digital and analog signal processing, and algorithm optimization across x86, GPU, and FPGA architectures.

    j.eric@gatech.edu

    PACE Website

    Google Scholar

    University, College, and School/Department
    Georgia Institute of Technology

    IRI Connections:
    IRI And Role
    Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
    Data Engineering and Science

    Haomin Zhou

    Haomin Zhou

    Haomin Zhou

    Professor

    hmzhou@math.gatech.edu

    Personal Website

    University, College, and School/Department
    Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Sciences > School of Mathematics
    Research Focus Areas:
  • Machine Learning
    • Additional Research:

    Optimal transport and control algorithms Machine learning methods in numerical PDEs Wavelets and PDE techniques in digital image and video processing Analysis and computations of stochastic differential equations


    IRI Connections:
    IRI And Role
    Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
    Data Engineering and Science

    Dimitrios Psaltis

    Dimitrios Psaltis

    Dimitrios Psaltis

    Professor

    I am a professor of Physics at Georgia Tech. I use advanced computational techniques, hybrid computer architectures, and innovative algorithms to answer fundamental questions related to the observational appearance of black holes, the properties of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, and the interaction of matter with radiation in extreme conditions.

    I am a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope, the international mm-VLBI experiment that has taken the first picture of a black hole with the horizon-scale resolution, and served for three years (2016-2019) as the Project Scientist of the collaboration.

    Before moving to Georgia Tech in 2022, I was a professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Arizona and the Chair of the Theoretical Astrophysics Program there.

    dpsaltis3@gatech.edu

    Personal Website

    University, College, and School/Department
    Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Sciences > School of Physics
    Research Focus Areas:
  • High Performance Computing
  • Machine Learning
    • Additional Research:

    Black Hole Images General Relativity


    IRI Connections:
    IRI And Role
    Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
    Data Engineering and Science

    Feryal Özel

    Feryal Özel

    Feryal Özel

    Chair; School of Physics
    Professor

    Feryal Ozel is the Chair and Professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research in astrophysics focuses on theoretical and computational studies of the properties, formation, and environments of black holes and neutron stars. She developed new techniques to determine the properties of neutron star surfaces and interiors. She made predictions of black hole images that guided the development of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and helped constrain physics beyond General Relativity.

     

    Ozel is a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, a former member of the EHT Science Council and lead of the Modeling Working Group. In 2022, she led the announcement of the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. She was co-chair of NASA’s Next Generation Large Mission Concept Study for the Lynx X-ray Observatory and has served for three years as chair of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she was a Professor of Astronomy and Physics and the Associate Dean for Research at the University of Arizona

    feryal.ozel@gatech.edu

    Özel Group WEbsite

    Google Scholar

    University, College, and School/Department
    Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Sciences > School of Physics
    Additional Research:
    Astrophysics Cosmology

    IRI Connections:
    IRI And Role
    Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
    Data Engineering and Science

    Vidya Muthukumar

    Vidya Muthukumar

    Vidya Muthukumar

    Assistant Professor

    Vidya Muthukumar is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Muthukumar’s broad interests are in game theory, online and statistical learning. She is particularly interested in designing learning algorithms that provably adapt in strategic environments, fundamental properties of overparameterized models, and the foundations of multi-agent decision-making.

    Dr. Muthukumar received the B.Tech (with honors) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. She interned at IBM Research in the summer of 2018 as a Science for Social Good fellow. Before joining Georgia Tech, she spent a semester at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing as a research fellow for the program “Theory of Reinforcement Learning.” She is the recipient of an Amazon Research Award, NSF CAREER Award, Adobe Data Science Research Award, Simons-Berkeley Google Research Fellowship, and the UC Berkeley EECS Outstanding Course Development and Teaching Award.

    Dr. Muthukumar has served/is serving as an Area Chair for COLT (2021-2024), NeurIPS (2023 and 2024), ALT 2024 and UAI 2024. She also co-organizes several mentorship workshops as part of the Learning Theory Alliance team, and organized the ITALT symposium in 2024.

    vmuthukumar8@gatech.edu

    ECE Profile Page

  • Personal Website

    • Google Scholar

    University, College, and School/Department
    Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Engineering > School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Engineering > School of Industrial Systems Engineering
    Research Focus Areas:
  • Machine Learning
    • Additional Research:

    Statistical signal processingGame theorySequential decision-making


    IRI Connections:
    IRI And Role
    Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
    Data Engineering and Science
    Subscribe to Faculty