Christine P. Ries is Professor in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech. She received a Ph.D. in International Business Economics from The University of Chicago (1977) and came to Georgia Tech as Professor and Chair (1997-99) of the School of Economics.  She has previously held faculty positions at The Harvard Business School, The Fuqua School of Business at Duke, the Peter F. Drucker Graduate Management Center at Claremont, and at Stanford University. At Claremont she was Senior Associate at the Center for Politics and Economics.  She is now a Senior Fellow at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Adjunct Scholar at Foundation for Education in Economics, Board of Policy Advisors Heartland Institute, Faculty Associate at Georgia Tech’s Program in Science Technology and Innovation Policy, faculty member of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities and a member of the Philadelphia Society and the selective Policy@Tech Campus Partners.  Finally, she is member of the Georgia Tech Faculty Council on Big Data and Engineering and the Data Dominators Affinity Group.

Dr. Ries studies and teaches principles of free market economics and their application in corporate decision making and the creation of economic value for companies, states and countries. She is a specialist in international financial economics, corporate financial management, and organizational economics and governance.  In this context, her work has extended into issues of Big Data as it affects corporate and industrial transformation and public policy and analysis.  Her work ties together foreign exchange risk management, corporate decision-making, strategy and corporate value. This work has extended into value-based analytics in a global economy. She has addressed corporate political risk in assessing how corporate strategies predict and respond to shifts in government trade, commercial and capital controls policies. Her articles include publications in The Journal of International Business Studies, The Harvard Business Review, Euromoney, and The Financial Analysts’ Journal, among others. She is the author of over 20 widely used case studies that have been published by the Harvard Business School and reprinted elsewhere. She has served as consultant and advisor to many U.S. and foreign corporations, financial institutions, universities, and governments.  These include IBM, Citicorp, Morgan Guarantee Trust, Chase Manhattan Bank, Barclays Bank, Lucky Goldstar Corp., and others. 

For governments of states and foreign countries, especially in emerging market countries, she advises and consults on tax, regulation and capital control policies and their impacts on relative competitiveness success in attracting investment and business. Her books address the strategies and policies of international corporations, the politics and economics of emerging markets and the interface between corporate strategy and government policy. She has served on the Executive and Editorial Boards of The Academy of International Business and on the editorial boards and as referee of several major professional and academic journals.

She has experience on corporate boards of advisors and her experience on not-for-profit boards is extensive. She recently served as Trustee and Chair of Education Committee for The Atlanta International School and as Treasurer for The Care and Counseling Center of Georgia. Dr. Ries has delivered speeches and public lectures around the globe and is the recipient of several teaching awards.  In additional to teaching courses in international finance, corporate financial policy and strategy, corporate/government interface, and markets and organizations she has created innovative courses including The Global Economy, Network Economics and Economic and Financial Modeling, and a capstone course for GT economics majors. The later required students to assess the internal economies of companies and their impact on the economy of the State of Georgia. 

After being appointed to the Special Council for Tax Reform and Fairness for Georgians in 2010, Dr. Ries focused her expertise on the problem of tax structure and economic growth in Georgia. On the Council, she organized and promoted private sector teams from mining, manufacturing and agricultural industries to streamline and rationalize Georgia’s tax code describing sales tax exemptions for business. This code modernization was enacted into law in 2012 and dramatically increased code transparency and reduced the cost of compliance for businesses in Georgia. She has created a tax calculator game to facilitate much greater public understanding of tax policy dynamics and improve the quality of public discussion by providing accurate measures of the impact of various tax reform alternatives.

Active involvement in the economic health and competitive attractiveness of Georgia has led her to extend her long-standing interest and activities in children and K-12 education. She is an active proponent of a state charter school strategy that supports Georgia’s economic growth and facilitates the creation of an education-rich environment in the state.  She is currently member GCA’s Academic Oversight and Finance Committees of the board of the Georgia Cyber Academy, a state-wide K-12 virtual school system with nearly 14,000 students.  It is the largest public school in Georgia and the third largest K-12 Cyber Academy the U.S. She was recently a member of the board of the Georgia Charter Educational Foundation contributing to the governance and educational committees. Previously, she served as a Trustee of the Atlanta International School where she chaired the Education Committee and served on the Headmaster Evaluation and Support Committee and the Finance Committee. Within the university system she has longed worked on the use of computers and information technology in education, strategic planning, financial planning, endowment investment, academic standards and the integration into the curriculum of an international perspective. In the last year, she converted her class, The Global Economy, to a hybrid format mixing face-to-face and online learning and is engaged in offering increasing numbers of on-line courses. She is also an active speaker and conference contributor on the subject of on-line and hybrid learning.

Dr. Ries is a frequent speaker on radio and television on topics of economic and tax reform, education reform, government budgeting and spending, global economic issues, Big Data, Analytics and corporate investment and Georgia economic development.

Dr. Duarte is excited to join the Department of Psychology at U.T. Austin starting in Fall, 2021 after 13 years as a professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Duarte received her Ph.D. in Neurobiology from U.C. Berkeley in 2004 and conducted her postdoctoral work in cognitive neuroscience at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK. Dr. Duarte is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses multiple, complementary neuroscience methods including electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and neuropsychological methods (i.e. neurological patients), to understand the neural mechanisms of age-related changes in episodic memory, which is memory for personally experienced events. The major aim of her research program is to understand the neural changes that underlie age-related decline in episodic memory, why some people age better, from a neural and cognitive perspective, than others, and to develop and implement effective interventions to alleviate this decline. She has longstanding and active interdisciplinary collaborations with neurologists, neuropsychologists, and sleep disorder clinicians, and with mechanical engineers, to investigate experimental manipulations that may ameliorate episodic memory impairments in people with Alzheimer’s disease pathology, and to explore sleep-related biomarkers of Alzheimer’s pathology. She has a particular interest in the cognitive neuroscience of aging in racial/ethnic minorities and the psychosocial factors like race-related stress, depression, and acculturation that influence memory and underlying brain function in diverse populations. Her lab's work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Science Daily, and Ozy. 

Dr. Janet Murray is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, as well as Director of the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (http://dilac.iac.gatech.edu). She received her PhD in English from Harvard. Her primary research interests are interactive design, interactive narrative, and the history and development of representational media. Her widely known book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether we can expect this new medium to support a new expressive art form, comparable to the Shakespearean theater or the Victorian novel in its ability to move and enlighten us. She is mostly optimistic about this possibility. Her textbook, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011) unites the myriad traditional disciplines in which interactive designers are now trained into a single coherent digitally focused design vocabulary. Her Prototyping eNarrative group (PENlab) creates prototypes of emerging narrative structures including interactive television, story-games, and virtual/augmented reality (http://penlab.gatech.edu). She is an emerita member of the Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute and the Board of the Peabody Awards, an Inaugural Fellow of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance, and a frequent keynote speaker for conferences at the intersection of games and narrative.

Ruth Kanfer is a psychologist and professor at Georgia Institute of Technology in the area of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. She is best known for her research in the fields of motivation, goal setting, self-regulation, job search, adult learning, and future of work. Kanfer has received numerous awards for her research contributions including the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution in Applied Research in 1989, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) William R. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award in 2006 and the SIOP Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award in 2007. Ruth Kanfer has authored influential papers on a variety of topics including the interaction of cognitive abilities and motivation on performance, the influence of personality and motivation on job search and employment, and a review chapter on motivation in an organizational setting.

Dr. Jianjun Shi is the Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor in H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with joint appointment in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2008, he was the G. Lawton and Louise G. Johnson Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Beijing Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1987, and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1992. Dr. Shi is a pioneer in the development and application of data fusion for quality improvements. His methodologies integrate system informatics, advanced statistics, and control theory for the design and operational improvements of manufacturing and service systems by fusing engineering systems models with data science methods. He has produced 40 Ph.D. graduates, 27 of which have joined IE department as faculty members. Among them, 7 have received NSF CAREER Awards and one has received the NSF PECASE award. He has published one book and more than 180 papers. He has served as PI and co-PI for projects totaling more than 25 million dollars, which were funded by National Science Foundation, NIST Advanced Technology Program, Department of Energy, General Motors, Daimler-Chrysler, Ford, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Honeywell, Pfizer, Samsung, and various other industrial companies and funding agencies. The technologies developed in Dr. Shi’s research group have been widely implemented in various production systems with significant economic impacts. 

Dr. Shi is the founding chair of the Quality, Statistics and Reliability (QSR) Subdivision at the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS). He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IISE Transactions (2017-2020), the flagship journal of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers. He also served as the Focus Issue Editor of IISE Transactions on Quality and Reliability Engineering (2007-2017), editor of Journal of System Science and Complexity, and advisory editor of Journal of Quality Technology and Quantitative Management (QTQM). He is a Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering (IISE), a Fellow of Institute of Operations Research and the Management Science (INFORMS), a Fellow of Society of Manufacturing Engineering (SME), an Academician of the International Academy for Quality, and a member of National Academy of Engineering (NAE) of the USA. 

Dr. Shi received various awards for his research and teaching, including the George Box Medal (2022), ASQ Walter Shewhart Medal (2021), The S. M. Wu Research Implementation Award (2021), ASQ Brumbaugh Award (2019), The Horace Pops Medal Award (2018), IISE David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award (2016), the IIE Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award (2011), Forging Achievement Award from Forging Industry Educational and Research Foundation (2007), Monroe-Brown Foundation Research Excellence Award (2007), the 1938E Award (1998) at The University of Michigan, and NSF CAREER Award (1996).