Roger Wartell received his B.S. degree in Physics from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1966. In 1971, he received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester where he worked in the group of Elliot Montroll on the DNA helix-coil transition. From 1971-1973 he was a NIH postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Robert Wells at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1978-79, and Visiting Scholar at National Institutes of Health-Bethesda from 1987-88. 

Wartell joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1974. Roger received a NIH Career Development Award in 1979 and served as Associate Chair in School of Physics from 1987-88, and Chair of the School of Biology from 1990-2004. He is a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at Georgia Tech. His current research is focused on protein-RNA interactions relating to sRNA regulation in bacteria, and the assembly and reactions of small RNAs in ice.

T. Richard Nichols received the B.S. degree in biology from Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, in 1969, and the Ph.D. degree in physiology from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 1974. He is currently a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.,He is currently a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.

Frank Rosenzweig is a Professor in School of Biological Sciences. He holds Bachelors degrees in Comparative Literature and Zoology from University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and a PhD in Biology at University of Pennsylvania. He carried out postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan. He was a professor at University of Idaho, University of Florida, and University of Montana before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 2016. He served as the Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute funded center “Reliving the Past” from 2015 to 2019.  His research group studies the ecological and evolutionary forces that produce and preserve genetic variation using experimental evolution  to illuminate how genetic variation maps onto organismal fitness.

I graduated in Biological Sciences (B.Sc, University of Salford, 1997) prior to undertaking a Ph.D in molecular microbiology studying quorum sensing in Pseudomonas aeruginosa (University of Nottingham, 2001). I worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Nottingham on both EU and BBSRC funded grants, before obtaining a Royal Society University Fellowship (2006-2014). I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. In 2017 I moved as an Associate Professor to the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. I was promoted to Full Professor in 2022. I was appointed as the Director of the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection in January 2023. 

I currently serve as the Deputy Editor in Chief of Microbiology, where I have previously served as editor and senior editor. I have also previously served on the editorial boards of FEMS Microbiology Letters, BMC Microbiology, Microbiology Open and Royal Society Open Science. I was an elected member of the Microbiology Society Council (2012-2016) and also served on their conference and policy committees. I was selected to be an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer (2021-2023) and was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2023. 

In my spare time I play bass guitar. I recorded some original music in a band called Meaner and I currently play in a covers band called The Variants of Concern. I also have a long-standing interest in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Yajun Mei is a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Mei's research interests include change-point problems and sequential analysis in Mathematical Statistics; sensor networks and information theory in Engineering; as well as longitudinal data analysis, random effects models, and clinical trials in Biostatistics. 

He received a B.S. in Mathematics from Peking University in P.R. China, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics with a minor in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. He has also worked as a postdoc in Biostatistics for two years in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA.

Christine Heitsch is Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, with courtesy appointments in Biological Sciences and Computational Science & Engineering as well as an affiliation with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience.

She is also Director of the new Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology (SCMB), an NSF-Simons MathBioSys Research Center, and finishing her tenure directing the GT Interdisciplinary Mathematics Preparation and Career Training (IMPACT) Postdoctoral Program.

Heitsch's research interests lie at the interface between discrete mathematics and molecular biology, specifically combinatorial problems "as motivated by" and "with applications to" fundamental biomedical questions like RNA folding.

Students interested in pursuing graduate studies in discrete mathematical biology can do so through a number of GT PhD programs including Bioinformatics or Quantitative Biosciences as well as Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO), Computational Science & Engineering (CSE), and (of course) Mathematics.
 

Dr. Pamela Bhatti is Professor and Associate Chair for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech. Her research is dedicated to overcoming sensory loss in human hearing through focused neural stimulation, and novel implantable sensors. Dr. Bhatti also conducts research in cardiac imaging to assess and monitor cardiovascular disease. She received her B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley (1989), her M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington (1993), and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2006). In 2013, she earned an M.S. in Clinical Research from Emory University, and co-founded a startup company (Camerad Technologies) based on her research in detecting wrong-patient errors in radiology. Dr. Bhatti is the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, Editor-in-Chief; and, in 2017, received the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award.

Christoph Fahrni earned a master’s degree in chemistry from the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Switzerland) and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of Basel (Switzerland). After working as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), he joined the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999.