Leanne West is Chief Engineer of Pediatric Technologies at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Pediatric Innovation Catalyst at the Global Center for Medical Innovation where she leads innovation in pediatric medical devices. In her 25+ years working at Georgia Tech, she has led multimillion dollar programs and teams of researchers to develop products for government and industry partners. She also started her own company, Intelligent Access, to take her invention of a wireless personal captioning system to market. She serves as the technical liaison between Georgia Tech and pediatric hospitals around the world, with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Shriners Hospitals being the main partners. West works closely with clinicians to understand and identify problems that need a solution to allow them to take better care of their patients. She is an invited Judge for many medical device pitch competitions and serves on several Boards in the healthcare and technology arenas. 

West is the President of the International Children’s Advisory Network (iCAN). Since 2014, iCAN fosters greater global understanding about the importance of the pediatric patient and caregiver voice in healthcare, clinical trials, and research. iCAN gives its members the opportunities to share their stories and experiences in front of organizations like the FDA, AAP, and CDC, and conferences. iCAN is an official partner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) as an official member organization of the Patient and Caregiver Connection Partner program and the Total Product Life Cycle Advisory Program. West is also a patient advocate for one of her two rare diseases, serving on the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research Patient Advisory Council and Speaker’s Bureau. 

She has served as the twice-elected Chair of the Georgia Tech Executive Board (2007, 2008) and was the GT Chair of the State Charitable Campaign (2017). She was recognized by Georgia Trend magazine as one of Georgia’s “40 Under 40” in 2004; she was selected for Leadership Georgia in 2008; she was a member of the team awarded the international Optical Society 2012 Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award; she received Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Achievement in Research Enterprise Enhancement Award in 2014, and she was Women in Technology’s Woman of the year in 2014. In 2017, she was appointed to the board of the Georgia Technology Authority by the late Speaker of the House, David Ralston.

Dr. Stephen Balakirsky is the Chief Scientist for the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and the Director of Technical Initiatives at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at GT.

Dr. Balakirsky’s research interests include robotic architectures, planning, bio-automation, robotic standards, and autonomous systems testing. His work in knowledge driven robotics couples real-time sensors and knowledge repositories to allow for flexibility and agility in robotic systems ranging from assembly and manufacturing systems to surveillance and logistics systems. The framework promotes software reuse and the ability to detect and correct for execution errors.

Previously, Dr. Balakirsky worked as a project manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and was a senior research engineer at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). At ARL, Dr. Balakirsky performed mobile robotics research in several areas, including command and control, mapping, human-computer interfaces, target tracking, vision processing and tele-operated control.

Ratan is an Assistant Professor of Cognition and Brain Science in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech, and the Director of the Murty Lab (murtylab.com). He obtained his PhD from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Kanwisher and DiCarlo labs at MIT before moving to Georgia Tech. Research in the Murty Lab aims to uncover the neural codes and algorithms that enable us to see. The central theme of the lab's work is to integrate biological vision with artificial models of vision. The lab combines the benefits of closed-loop experimental testing (using 3T/7T human functional-MRI) with cutting-edge computational methods (like deep neural networks, generative algorithms, and AI interpretability) toward a new computationally precise understanding of human vision. This research also guides the development of neurally mechanistic biologically constrained models aimed to uncover a better understanding of the neurobiological changes that underlie perceptual abnormalities such as agnosias.

Mijin Kim is an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech. Her research program is focused on the development and implementation of novel nanosensor technology to improve cancer research and diagnosis. The Kim Lab combines nanoscale engineering, fluorescence spectroscopy, machine learning approaches, and biochemical tools (1) to understand the exciton photophysics in low-dimensional nanomaterials, (2) to develop diagnostic/nano-omics sensor technology for early disease detection, and (3) to investigate biological processes with focusing problems in lysosome biology and autophagy. For her scientific innovation, Kim has received multiple recognitions, including being named as one of the STAT Wunderkinds and the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 List.

Peter Kasson is an international leader in the study of biological membrane structure, dynamics, and fusion, with particular application to how viruses gain entry to cells. His group performs both high-level experimental and computational work – a powerful combination that is critical to advancing our understanding of this important problem. His publications describe inventive approaches to the measurement of viral fusion rates and characterization of fusion mechanisms, and to the modeling of large-scale biomolecular and lipid assemblies. He has applied these insights to the prediction of pandemic outbreaks and drug resistance, with particular attention to Zika, SARS-CoV-2, and influenza pathogens in recent years. See https://kassonlab.org/ for more information.

Saurabh Sinha received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2002, and after post-doctoral work at the Rockefeller University with Eric Siggia, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2005, where he held the positions of Founder Professor in Computer Science and Director of Computational Genomics in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology until 2022. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 2022, as Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Engineering, with joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering. Sinha’s research is in the area of bioinformatics, with a focus on regulatory genomics and systems biology. Sinha is an NSF CAREER award recipient and has been funded by NIH, NSF and USDA. He co-directed an NIH BD2K Center of Excellence and was a thrust lead in the NSF AI Institute at UIUC. He led the educational program of the Mayo Clinic-University of Illinois Alliance, and co-led data science education for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Sinha has served as Program co-Chair of the annual RECOMB Regulatory and Systems Genomics conference and served on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Computational Biology (2018-2021). He was a recipient of the University Scholar award of the University of Illinois, and selected as a Fellow of the AIMBE in 2018.

Vida Jamali earned her Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Rice University under the guidance of Professor Matteo Pasquali and her B.S. in chemical engineering from Sharif University of Technology. Jamali was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Paul Alivisato's lab at UC Berkeley and Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute before joining Georgia Tech. The Jamali Research Group uses experimental, theoretical, and computational tools such as liquid phase transmission electron microscopy, rheology, statistical and colloidal thermodynamics, and machine learning to study the underlying physical principles that govern the dynamics, statistics, mechanics, and self-organization of nanostructured soft materials, in and out of thermal equilibrium, from both fundamental and technological aspects.

Hannah Choi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. Her research focuses on mathematical approaches to neuroscience, with primary interests in linking structures, dynamics, and computation in data-driven brain networks at multiple scales. Before coming to Georgia Tech, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington and also a visiting scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and spent one semester at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley as a Patrick J McGovern Research Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University and her BA in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Garrett Stanley is the McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and is the Co-Director of the Georgia Tech Neural Engineering Center. He has formal training, both at undergraduate and doctorate levels, in engineering (specifically trained in Control Theory through all of his graduate work), and has worked extensively in the field of neuroscience, specifically in sensory processing in the brain, and more specifically in vision and somatosensation (touch). 

From 1999 to 2007, he was an Associate Professor in the Division of Engineering & Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he was the leader of the Harvard Biocontrols Laboratory. Professor Stanley is now a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech/Emory University (2008-2013 Associate Professor, 2014-present Full Professor), and leads several programmatic efforts at the interface between basic neuroscience and neurotechnology (Co-Direct the GT Neural Engineering Center, Direct Computational Neuroscience training program, Director of Graduate Studies, etc.). In terms of research, he is the leader of the Neural Coding group in the Laboratory for Neuroengineering. 

The research of his group has been funded by the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, DARPA, and several private foundations. Prof. Stanley’s group routinely publishes our research in the top Neuroscience journals, along with more technical work in engineering journals. He is considered a leader in the field nationally and internationally.

Peng Qiu is an Associate Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory University School of Medicine. 

Dr. Qiu is a member of the Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. 

His research interests are in the areas of bioinformatics and computational biology with a focus on statistical signal processing, machine learning, control systems and optimization. 

As it relates to cancer, he is interested in single-cell analysis, and multi-omics pan-cancer data integration. He is collaborating with Winship investigator Adam Marcus on the analysis of single-cell RNAseq data of leader/follower cells in experiments that study the behavior of collective invasion in cancer.