Devesh Ranjan was named the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and took over the role on January 1, 2022. He previously served as the Associate Chair for Research, and Ring Family Chair in the Woodruff School. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and serves as a co-director of the $100M Department of Defense-funded University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH). At Georgia Tech, Ranjan has held several leadership positions including chairing ME’s Fluid Mechanics Research Area Group (2017 - 2018), serving as ME’s Associate Chair for Research (2019-present), and as co-chair of the “Hypersonics as a System” task-force, and serving as Interim Vice-President for Interdisciplinary Research (Feb 2021-June 2021). 

Ranjan joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2014. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a director’s research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2008) and Morris E. Foster Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at Texas A&M University (2009-2014). He earned a bachelor's degree from the NIT-Trichy (India) in 2003, and master's and Ph.D. degrees from the UW-Madison in 2005 and 2007 respectively, all in mechanical engineering. 

Ranjan’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary area of power conversion, complex fluid flows involving shock and hydrodynamic instabilities, and the turbulent mixing of materials in extreme conditions, such as supersonic and hypersonic flows. Ranjan is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and has received numerous awards for his scientific contributions, including the DOE-Early Career Award (first GT recipient), the NSF CAREER Award, and the US AFOSR Young Investigator award. He was also named the J. Erskine Love Jr. Faculty Fellow in 2015. He was invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2016 US Frontiers in Engineering Symposium. For his educational efforts and mentorship activity, he has received CATERPILLAR Teaching Excellence Award from College of Engineering at Texas A&M, as well as 2013 TAMU ASME Professor Mentorship Award from TAMU student chapter of the ASME. At Georgia Tech, Ranjan served as a Provost’s Teaching and Learning Fellow (PTLF) from 2018-2020, and was named 2021 Governor’s Teaching Fellow. He was also named Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Fellow for 2020-21. 

Ranjan is currently part of a 10-member Technical Screening Committee of the NAE’s COVID-19 Call for Engineering Action taskforce, an initiative to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Shock Waves and was a former Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering.

Julia Babensee is an Associate Professor in the Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Dr. Babensee is affiliated with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissue. 

Dr. Babensee is a member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute. She is also a permanent member of the NIH Bioengineering, Technology and Surgical Sciences study section. She is actively involved in several professional societies with service including SFB Member-at-Large (2008-2009) and Program Chair for the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Her research program is in the area of engineering of inflammatory and immune responses focused on understanding host responses to combination products. Her research interests also include: Biomaterial interactions with dendritic cells, tissue engineering for rheumatoid arthritis, and biomaterial-applied immunology.

Babensee received her Ph.D. from University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine.

Dr. Christopher Saldaña began working at Georgia Tech in 2014. Prior, Dr. Saldaña previously held the Harold and Inge Marcus Career Professorship at the Pennsylvania State University and worked as a research engineer at M4 Sciences Corporation. Dr. Saldaña has also previously held visiting affiliations/positions with the US Air Force Research Laboratory, the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India), Technische Universität Dortmund (Dortmund, Germany), Autodesk, and Sandia National Laboratories. He has received several awards, including an NSF CAREER award, the Robert J. Hocken SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer award and an R&D100 Technology Award. He serves as an Associate Editor for IISE Transactions (Design and Manufacturing) and serves on the Editorial Boards of Manufacturing Letters, Computer Aided Design and Applications, and the ASTM Journal of Smart and Sustainable Manufacturing.

Joe Lachance is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology and a member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute.

Lachance received his Ph.D. in Genetics from Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York. He conducted his postdoctoral studies as a NIH Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lachance's research is in the areas of human evolutionary genomics, population genetics, and health disparities. His lab integrates large genome-scale datasets with evolutionary theory and computer simulations. They have found evidence of ancient introgression in Africa, inferred that the leading edge of the out-of-Africa migration involved an excess of males, discovered that genetic risks of cancer have decreased over evolutionary time, and identified novel targets of positive selection.

Dr. Yunker joined Georgia Tech’s School of Physics in 2014 after finishing his biophysics postdoc at Harvard University & New England Biolabs in 2014. Before that, he earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 after earning a B.S. in Physics from Texas A&M University in 2005. He has won the Burstein Prize and the Denenstein Award both from UPenn along with the Eric R. Immel Memorial award for Excellence in Teaching at GT. 

Peter’s interests are biophysics, soft matter, and golden retrievers.

Educational Experience:
Ph.D., Ecology & Evolution, Florida International University, B.Sc. (Hons), Zoology with Conservation, University of Wales
Research Interests:
Evolutionary ecology, community ecology, species interactions, microevolution, macroevolution, herpetology, global change biology, climate change, invasive species, functional morphology

Overview:
Welcome to the Stroud Lab!

Our goal is to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes responsible for driving patterns of biodiversity across space and time. To do that, we study the evolutionary ecology of lizards: a fascinating and hyper-diverse group of organisms.

Our approach is highly multidisciplinary, integrating ecology, evolution, behavior, physiology, biomechanics, and natural history. To do this, we combine field studies in the wild with macro-ecological and evolutionary analyses.

For more information on our key research themes please take a look at our website (above; soon to be updated) and please get in contact if any of our research interests you!

Anqi Wu is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), Georgia Institute of Technology. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computational and Quantitative Neuroscience and a graduate certificate in Statistics and Machine Learning from Princeton University. Anqi was selected for the 2018 MIT Rising Star in EECS, 2022 DARPA Riser, and 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. Her research interest is to develop scientifically-motivated Bayesian statistical models to characterize structure in neural data and behavior data in the interdisciplinary field of machine learning and computational neuroscience. She has a general interest in building data-driven models to promote both animal and human studies in the system and cognitive neuroscience.

Prof. Singh has a joint appointment with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Prof. Singh started at Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in 2013 and was promoted with tenure to Associate Professor with joint appointments in the Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. At Cornell, he served as the Associate Director of the NIH T32 training grant on Immuno-engineering, executive council of the Center for Immunology, and the Cornell (Ithaca) – Weill Cornell Medicine (NYC) Academic Integration initiative. Prior to joining Cornell, he completed his postdoctoral training in cell mechanobiology, cell-matrix interactions, and stem cell engineering at Georgia Tech in Mechanical Engineering.

Dr. Pardue is a Research Career Scientist at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, and a Professor in Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Pardue received her B.S. in zoology from the University of Wyoming and her doctorate in vision science and biology at the University of Waterloo. Her post-doctorate training in visual electrophysiology was completed with Dr. Neal Peachey at Loyola School of Medicine and Hines VA Hospital in Chicago and focused on biocompatibility of retinal prosthetics. Dr. Pardue moved to Atlanta in 2000 to join the Atlanta VA Medical Center and Emory University Department of Ophthalmology. She moved her academic appointment to Biomedical Engineering in 2015. Her research interests are focused on developing treatments for people with vision loss. To this end, she has developed three research themes within her lab: 1) neuroprotective and restorative treatments for retinal degeneration, 2) early detection and treatment of diabetic retinopathy, and 3) retinal mechanisms of refractive development and myopia. Her research has been continuously supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs, NIH, and private companies (1999-present). She has served on several VA and NIH grant review panels and frequently reviews manuscripts for several journals including Journal of Neuroscience, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Molecular Vision, Vision Research, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, Journal of Neurochemistry and PlosOne.