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).

Craig Forest is a Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech where he also holds program faculty positions in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering. He conducts research on miniaturized, high-throughput robotic instrumentation to advance neuroscience and genetic science, working at the intersection of bioMEMS, precision machine design, optics, and microfabrication. Prior to Georgia Tech, he was a research fellow in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He obtained a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in June 2007, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2003, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2001. He is cofounder/organizer of one of the largest undergraduate invention competitions in the US—The InVenture Prize, and founder/organizer of one of the largest student-run makerspaces in the US—The Invention Studio. He was a recently a Fellow in residence at the Allen Insitutte for Brain Science in Seattle WA; he was awarded the Georgia Tech Institute for BioEngineering and BioSciences Junior Faculty Award (2010) and was named Engineer of the Year in Education for the state of Georgia (2013). He is one of the inaugural recipients of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Grants, a national effort to invent the next generation of neuroscience and neuroengineering tools. In 2007, he was a finalist on the ABC reality TV show "American Inventor.”

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.

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.

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).

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.

Nick Sahinidis is the Butler Family Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. His current research activities are at the interface between computer science and operations research, with applications in various engineering and scientific areas, including: global optimization of mixed-integer nonlinear programs: theory, algorithms, and software; informatics problems in chemistry and biology; process and energy systems engineering. Sahinidis has served on the editorial boards of many leading journals and in various positions within AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers). He has also served on numerous positions within INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), including Chair of the INFORMS Optimization Society. He received an NSF CAREER award, the INFORMS Computing Society Prize, the MOS Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize, the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award, the Constantin Carathéodory Prize, and the National Award and Gold Medal from the Hellenic Operational Research Society. Sahinidis is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of AIChE and INFORMS.

An environmental psychologist and professor of architecture, Craig Zimring directs the SimTigrate Design Lab. He and his colleagues and students focus on how innovative, research-informed design can improve health and healthcare, and how research can be incorporated into classroom teaching, both to improve design and help students develop skills for practice. He has conducted over $7M in research with and for Mayo Clinic, Emory Healthcare, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Military Health System, HKS Architects, HDR Architects, and many others, including safety-net clinics and international providers of healthcare. He has published over 100 scholarly and professional publications and received 11 awards for his research. He has given numerous keynote and plenary addresses to organizations and meetings such as Australian Healthcare Week, Institute for Patient and Family-Centered Care, and Chinese Hospital Association. His Ph.D. and master's graduates serve in teaching and leadership positions in universities and practice.

He currently serves on the board of the Center for Health Design and has served on the boards of the Environmental Design Research Association, the National Academies’ Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, the Joint Commission’s Roundtable on the Hospital of the Future and other organizations. In addition to his work on healthcare, Zimring served as a senior scientist in developing the 2010 New York City Active Design Guidelines and was a founding member of the Center for Active Design.