Ben Wang

Ben Wang

Ben Wang

Former Executive Director, Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute

Ben Wang is Professor Emeritus in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. In addition, Dr. Wang previously served as the Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute. 

Dr. Wang's primary research interest is in applying emerging technologies to improve manufacturing competitiveness. He specializes in process development for affordable composite materials. Dr. Wang is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the growing field of nanomaterials science. His main area of research involves a material known as "buckypaper", which has shown promise in a variety of applications, including the development of aerospace structures, improvements in energy and power efficiency, enhancements in thermal management of engineering systems, and construction of the next-generation of computer displays.

Dr. Wang served on the National Materials and Manufacturing Board (NMMB). NMMB is the principal forum at the U.S. National Academies for issues related to innovative materials and advanced manufacturing, and has oversight responsibility for National Research Council activities in these technology areas. Dr. Wang is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering.

Because of his contributions to advanced manufacturing and materials, Dr. Wang was invited to deliver a presentation to the U.S. National Research Council Review Panel in support of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2005. In 2012, he was invited to give testimony before the National Academies Committee on Manufacturing Extension Partnership. In 2012 he was invited to participate in the Roundtable on Strengthening U.S. Advanced Manufacturing in Clean Energy in the White House.

In addition to authoring or co-authoring more than 240 refereed journal papers, he is a co-author of three books: Computer-Aided Manufacturing (Prentice-Hall, 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, and 3rd Edition), Computer-Aided Process Planning (Elsevier Science Publishers), and Computer Aided Manufacturing PC Application Software (Delmar Publishers).

Dr. Wang earned his bachelor's in industrial engineering from Tunghai University in Taiwan, and his master's in industrial engineering and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University.

ben.wang@gatech.edu

Website

University, College, and School/Department
Research Focus Areas:
  • Energy Infrastructure
  • Materials & Manufacturing

IRI Connections:

Meisha Shofner

Meisha Shofner

Meisha Shofner

Professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering

Meisha L. Shofner is a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, joining the faculty following post-doctoral training at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. in Materials Science from Rice University. Prior to beginning graduate school, she was employed as a design engineer at FMC in the Subsea Engineering Division, working at two plant locations (Houston, Texas and the Republic of Singapore), and she is a registered Professional Engineer in Georgia.

Shofner’s research area is processing-structure-property relationships of polymers and composites. Specifically, she designs processing strategies to attain hierarchical structures in these materials to improve properties and has discovered scalable processing methods to produce auxetic structures and tensegrity-inspired structures. Additionally, she works with bioderived materials to produce composites with reduced environmental impact.  

meisha.shofner@mse.gatech.edu

404.385.7216

Office Location:
MRDC 4409

Shofner Lab

  • MSE Profile Page
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Advanced Composites
    • Materials & Manufacturing
    • Materials and Nanotechnology
    • Renewable Energy
    Additional Research:

    Biomolecular-Solids; Biomaterials; Composites; Polymers; Nanomaterials; Biofuels; Structure-property relationships in polymer nanocomposite materials; producing structural hierarchy in these materials for structural and functional applications.


    IRI Connections:

    Kamran Paynabar

    Kamran Paynabar

    Kamran Paynabar

    Assistant Professor

    Kamran Paynabar is the Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Iran in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from The University of Michigan in 2012. He also holds an M.A. in Statistics from The University of Michigan. His research interests comprise both applied and methodological aspects of machine-learning and statistical modeling integrated with engineering principles. He is a recipient of the INFORMS Data Mining Best Student Paper Award, the Best Application Paper Award from IIE Transactions, the Best QSR refereed paper from INFORMS, and the Best Paper Award from POMS. He has been recognized with the Georgia Tech campus level 2014 CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award and the Provost Teaching and Learning Fellowship. He served as the chair of QSR of INFORMS, and the president of QCRE of IISE.

    kamran.paynabar@isye.gatech.edu

    404.385.3141

    Office Location:
    Groseclose Building, Room 436

    Departmental Bio

  • Personal Website
  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Aerospace
    • AI
    • Automotive
    • Biobased Materials
    • Biochemicals
    • Biorefining
    • Biotechnology
    • Diagnostics
    • Pulp Paper Packaging & Tissue
    • Sustainable Manufacturing
    Additional Research:

    High-dimensional data analysis for systems monitoring, diagnostics and prognostics, and statistical and machine learning for complex-structured streaming data including multi-stream signals, images, videos, point clouds and network data with applications ranging from manufacturing including automotive and aerospace to healthcare.


    IRI Connections:

    Jeff Wu

    Jeff Wu

    Jeff Wu

    Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor

    C. F. Jeff Wu is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

    He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (2004), and a Member (Academician) of Academia Sinica (2000). A Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1984), the American Statistical Association (1985), the American Society for Quality (2002), and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (2009). He received the COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) Presidents' Award in 1987, which was given to the best researcher under the age of 40 per year and was commissioned by five statistical societies. His other major awards include the 2011 COPSS Fisher Lecture, the 2012 Deming Lecture (plenary lectures during the annual Joint Statistical Meetings), the Shewhart Medal (2008) from ASQ, and the Pan Wenyuan Technology Award (2008). In 2016 he received the (inaugural) Akaike Memorial Lecture Award. In 2017 he received the George Box Medal from ENBIS. In 2020 he won The Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award and the Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award both at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has won numerous other awards, including the Wilcoxon Prize, the Brumbaugh Award (twice), the Jack Youden Prize (twice), and the Honoree of the 2008 Quality and Productivity Research Conference. He was the 1998 P. C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lecturer at the Indian Statistical Institutes and an Einstein Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is an Honorary Professor at several institutions, including the CAS and National Tsinghua University. He received an honorary doctor (honoris causa) of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in 2008.

    He was formerly the H. C. Carver Professor of Statistics and Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, 1993-2003 and the GM/NSERC Chair in Quality and Productivity at the University of Waterloo in 1988-1993. In his 1997 inaugural lecture for the Carver Chair, he coined the term data science and advocated that statistics be renamed data science and statistician to data scientist. Before Waterloo, he taught in the Statistics Department at the University of Wisconsin from 1977-1988. He got his BS in Mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1971 and Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley (1973-1976).

    His work is widely cited in professional journals as well as in magazines, including a feature article about his work in Canadian Business and a special issue of Newsweek on quality. He has served as editor or associate editor for several major statistical journals like Annals of Statistics, Journal of American Statistical Association, Technometrics, and Statistica Sinica. Professor Wu has published more than 185 research articles in peer review journals. He has supervised 50 Ph.D.'s, out of which more than 25 are teaching in major research departments or institutions in statistics, engineering, or business in US/Canada/Asia/Europe. Among them, there are 21 Fellows of ASA, IMS, ASQ, IAQ and IIE, three editors of Technometrics, and one editor of JQT. He co-authors with Mike Hamada the book "Experiments: Planning, Analysis, and Optimization" (Wiley, 2nd Ed, 2009, 716 pages) and with R. Mukerjee the book "A Modern Theory of Factorial Designs" (Springer, 2006).

    jeff.wu@isye.gatech.edu

    404.894.2301

    Office Location:
    ISyE Main Building, Room 233

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Advanced Manufacturing
    • Bioengineering
    • Biotechnology
    • Energy

    IRI Connections:

    Suman Das

    Suman Das

    Suman Das

    Morris M. Bryan, Jr. Chair and Professor, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
    Director, Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory

    suman.das@me.gatech.edu

    404.385.6027

    Office Location:
    MARC 255

    Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory

  • ME Profile Page
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Additive manufacturing
    • Biomaterials
    • Conventional Energy
    • Materials and Nanotechnology
    Additional Research:

    3D printing; Additive/Advanced Manufacturing; Biomaterials; Composites; Emerging Technologies; Nanocomposites; Nanomanufacturing; Manufacturing, Mechanics of Materials, Bioengineering, and Micro and Nano Engineering. Advanced manufacturing and materials processing of metallic, polymeric, ceramic, and composite materials for applications in life sciences, propulsion, and energy. Professor Das directs the Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory and Research Group at Georgia Tech. His research interests encompass a broad variety of interdisciplinary topics under the overall framework of advanced design, prototyping, direct digital manufacturing, and materials processing particularly to address emerging research issues in life sciences, propulsion, and energy. His ultIMaTe objectives are to investigate the science and design of innovative processing techniques for advanced materials and to invent new manufacturing methods for fabricating devices with unprecedented functionality that can yield dramatic improvements in performance, properties and costs.


    IRI Connections:

    Sonia Chernova

    Sonia Chernova

    Sonia Chernova

    Associate Professor; School of Interactive Computing
    Director; Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) Lab

    I am an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. I received my Ph.D. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and held positions as a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Media Lab and as Assistant Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute prior to joining Georgia Tech. I direct the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) lab, where we work on developing robots that are able to effectively operate in human environments. My research interests span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adjustable autonomy, human computation and cloud robotics. Please visit the RAIL lab website for a description of our latest projects.

    chernova@cc.gatech.edu

    404.385.4753

    Personal Page

  • RAIL Lab
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
    • Collaborative Robotics
    • Shaping the Human-Technology Frontier
    Additional Research:

    Robotics; Artificial Intelligence; Semantic Reasoning; Adjustable Autonomy; Human Computation and Cloud Robotics.


    IRI Connections:

    Victor Breedveld

    Victor Breedveld

    Victor Breedveld

    Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies
    Professor and Frank Dennis Faculty Fellow

    victor.breedveld@chbe.gatech.edu

    404.894.5134

    Office Location:
    Ford Environmental Science & Technology Building, Room 1222

    ChBE Profile

  • Website
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Biobased Materials
    • Bioengineering
    • Biomaterials
    • Biorefining
    • Biotechnology
    • Energy
    Additional Research:
    Biofuels; Papermaking, Coatings & Barriers; Films & Coatings; Biomaterials; Structure and Reheology of Complex fluids; Rheology of Bioengineering Materials

    IRI Connections:

    Bert Bras

    Bert Bras

    Bert Bras

    Associate Chair for Administration
    Brook Byers Professor
    Professor of Mechanical Engineering

    Dr. Bert Bras has been a Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology since September 1992. From 2001 to 2004, he served as the Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Sustainable Technology and Development. 

    In 2014, he was named a Brook Byers Professor of Sustainability. He was named the Associate Chair for Administration for the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2016 and briefly served as Interim School Chair in 2018. 

    Dr. Bras’ 25-year career as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology equips him with considerable expertise in sustainable design and manufacturing that has taken him through many areas of industry, from automotive to alternative energy.

    He holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Twente (Netherlands) and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Houston. Prior to completing his Ph.D., he worked at the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN).

    bert.bras@me.gatech.edu

    404.894.9667

    Office Location:
    MRDC, Room 3408

    Website

    University, College, and School/Department
    Research Focus Areas:
    • Additive manufacturing
    • Advanced Manufacturing
    • Aerospace
    • Automotive
    • Energy
    • Use & Conservation
    Additional Research:
    Electric Vehicles; Computer-Aided Engineering and Design and Manufacturing; Sustainable design; Design for recycling; Robust design

    IRI Connections:

    Emily Sanders

    Emily Sanders

    Emily Sanders

    Assistant Professor

    Dr. Emily D. Sanders is an Assistant Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. She obtained her Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2021, where she developed new topology optimization methods for design of tension-only cable nets, elastostatic cloaking devices, and multiscale structures and components. Dr. Sanders hold a bachelor’s degree from Bucknell University and a master’s degree from Stanford University.

    emily.sanders@me.gatech.edu

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Additive manufacturing
    • Advanced Manufacturing
    • Algorithms & Optimizations
    • Architecture & Design

    IRI Connections:

    Christopher J. Saldaña

    Christopher J. Saldaña

    Christopher Saldaña

    Ring Family Professor
    Associate Professor

    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.

    christopher.saldana@me.gatech.edu

    404-385-3735

    Office Location:
    GTMI, Room 259

    Website

  • George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
    • Materials & Manufacturing
    Additional Research:

    Additive/Advanced Manufacturing; Composites; Bio-Inspired Materials; Computer-Aided Engineering; Advanced Characterization


    IRI Connections: