Turgay Ayer is the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Ayer also serves as the research director for healthcare analytics and business intelligence in the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech and holds a courtesy appointment at Emory Medical School.

His research focuses on healthcare analytics and socially responsible business analytics with a particular emphasis on practice-focused research. His research papers have been published in top tier management, engineering, and medical journals, and covered by popular media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, U.S. News, and NPR.

Ayer has received over $2.5 million grant funding and several awards for his work, including an NSF CAREER Award (2015), first place in MSOM Responsible Research in Operations Management (2019), first place in the MSOM Best Practice-Based Research Competition (2017), INFORMS Franz Edelman Laureate Award (2017), and Society for Medical Decision Making Lee Lusted Award (2009).

Ayer serves an associate editor for Operations Research, Management Science, and MSOM, and is a past president of the INFORMS Health Application Society. He received a B.S. in industrial engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Steve Stice is Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of ArunA Biomedical, Inc, where he directs the company’s clinical and research operations. He is also University of Georgia, DW Brooks Distinguished Professor and Director of the Regenerative Bioscience Center, and holds a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar endowed chair. 

Prior to joining ArunA, Stice was the co-founder and served as both Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Cell Technology, the first U.S. company to advance to human clinical trials using human pluripotent stem cells. He also co-founded startups Prolinia and Cytogenesis, the latter of which has since merged with ViaCyte. 

Stice was recruited to the University of Georgia by the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) and holds an endowed chair as a GRA Eminant Scholar. Additionally, Stice serves as the Director of the Univeristy of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center, co-directs The Regenerative Engineering and Medicine Research Center (REM), a joint collaboration between Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology and UGA, is a group leader of Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems, a National Science Foundation Center founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stice also sits on the toxicology Scientific Advisory Board for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

Stice received a Masters of Science in Reproductive Biology from Iowa State University and a Doctor of Philosophy, Developmental Biology and Embryology, from the University of Massachusetts.

The research focus of Boris Prilutsky's laboratory is Neural Control and Biomechanics of Movement. They study how the nervous system controls hundreds of muscles and kinematic degrees of freedom of the body to produce purposeful motor behaviors and how the neural control of motor behaviors is affected by neural and musculoskeletal injuries.

I am an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the evolution of complex life. My Ph.D. training focused on the evolutionary stability of cooperation in the legume-rhizorium symbiosis. Here I developed new experimental methods to study how among-organism genetic conflict arises and can be mitigated. A similar evolutionary tension lies at the heart of all key events in the origin of complex life, termed the ‘Major Transitions in Evolution’: namely, how do new organisms arise and evolve to be more complex without succumbing to within-organism conflict? Studying the early evolution of multicellular organisms has been particularly difficult because these transitions occurred deep in the past, and transitional forms have largely lost to extinction. As a postdoc, I circumvented this constraint by creating a new approach to study the evolution of multicellularity: we evolved it de novo. Since founding my own research group at Georgia Tech in 2014, I have combined this approach with mathematical modeling and synthetic biology to examine how simple clumps of cells evolve into multicellular organisms. Our research has shown how classical constraints in the origin of multicellularity — e.g., the origin of life cycles, multicellular development, cellular differentiation, and cellular interdependence — can be solved by Darwinian evolution. At home, I raise two kids on a hobby farm (really just a big garden) with bees, chickens, rabbits, goats, a dog, and lots of edible plants.

Michael Goodisman is interested in understanding how evolutionary processes affect social systems and how sociality, in turn, affects the course of evolution. His research explores the molecular basis underlying sociality, the nature of selection in social systems, the breeding biology of social animals, the process of self-organization in social groups, and the course of development in social species. His teaching interests are centered on the importance of behavior, genetics, and ethics in biological systems. Goodisman also works to improve and advance undergraduate education.

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 of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the director of the University of Montana Institute on Ecosystems. Rosenzweig’s research is aimed at illuminating the evolution of complex traits that augment biodiversity and drive major transitions in the history of life. His lab seeks to understand how changes in genome architecture alter global patterns of gene expression, whether such changes explain the physiology and behavior of novel genotypes, and the extent to which adaptation is shaped by trade-offs and constraints. Rosenzweig was a lead author of the 2015 NASA Astrobiology Strategy Document and member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute Executive Committee. He currently serves as co-Lead of the NASA Research Coordination Network, LIFE: From Early Cells to Multicellularity, as a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences and as Principal Investigator of the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research award ENGINE OF INNOVATION: How compartmentalization drives evolution of novelty and efficiency across scales. Rosenzweig received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Tennessee, and his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania.

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.