Dr. Grijalva joined the Georgia Institute of Technology in the summer of 2009 as Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is the Director of the Advanced Computational Electricity Systems (ACES) Laboratory, where he conducts research on real-time power system control, informatics, and economics, and renewable energy integration in power. From 2012-2015, Dr. Grijalva served as the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) Associate Director for Electricity Systems, responsible for coordinating large efforts on electricity research and policy at Georgia Tech. Dr. Grijalva received the Electrical Engineer degree from EPN-Ecuador in 1994, the M.S. Certificate in Information Systems from ESPE-Ecuador in 1997, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He was a post-doctoral fellow in Power and Energy Systems at the University of Illinois from 2003 to 2004. From 1995 to 1997, he was with the Ecuadorian National Center for Energy Control (CENACE) as engineer and manager of the Real-Time EMS Software Department. From 2002 to 2009, he was with PowerWorld Corporation as a senior software architect and developer of innovative real-time and optimization applications used today by utilities, control centers, and universities in more than 60 countries. Dr. Grijalva is a leading researcher on ultra-reliable architectures for critical energy infrastructures. He has pioneered work on de-centralized and autonomous power system control, renewable energy integration in power, and unified network models and applications. He is currently the principal investigator of various future electricity grid research projects for the US Department of Energy, ARPA-E, EPRI, PSERC as well as other Government organizations, research consortia, and industrial sponsors. Research interests: Power system and smart grid computation De-centralized and autonomous power control architectures Ultra-reliable electricity internetworks Seamless integration of large-scale renewable energy Electricity markets design and power system economics

Pinar Keskinocak is the William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She is also co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. Previously, she served as the College of Engineering ADVANCE Professor and as interim associate dean for faculty development and scholarship. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University, and her M.S. and B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University. 

Dr. Keskinocak's research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling (including Covid-19, malaria, Guinea worm, pandemic flu), evaluating intervention strategies, and resource allocation; catch-up scheduling for vaccinations; hospital operations management; disaster preparedness and response (e.g., prepositioning inventory); debris management; centralized and decentralized price and lead time decisions. She has worked on projects with companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and healthcare providers, including American Red Cross, CARE, Carter Center, CDC, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University, and Intel Corporation. 

She is an INFORMS Fellow and currently serves as the president of INFORMS. Previously she served as the Secretary of INFORMS, a department editor for Operations Research (Policy Modeling and Public Sector area), associate editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and INFORMS Vice President of Membership and Professional Recognition. She is the co-founder and past-president of INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service, and Needs, and the president of the INFORMS Health Applications Society.

Valerie Thomas is the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. 

Dr. Thomas's research interests are energy and materials efficiency, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Current research projects include low carbon transportation fuels, carbon capture, building construction, and electricity system development. Dr. Thomas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Physical Society. She has been an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow, a Member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, and a Member of the USDA/DOE Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee. 

She has worked at Princeton University in the Princeton Environmental Institute and in the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

Dr. Thomas received a B. A. in physics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

Steven W. McLaughlin is the provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

McLaughlin first joined Georgia Tech as a member of the faculty in 1996. From 2017-2020, he served as the dean and Southern Company Chair of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, the largest engineering college in the country. Prior roles include the Steve Chaddick School Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2012-2017, and the vice provost for International Initiatives and Steven A. Denning Chair in Global Engagement from 2007-2012.

In 2014 he co-founded CREATE-X, a campus-wide effort to instill entrepreneurial confidence in students and help them launch companies. The program has successfully launched 225 student-led companies and engaged more than 4,000 students in the principles and practice of evidence-based entrepreneurship.

In 2011 he was awarded the honor Chevalier dans l`Ordre Nationale de Merite, (Knight of the French National Order of Merit), the second highest civilian award given by Republic of France. He was the first Georgia Tech recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) where he was cited by President Clinton "for leadership in the development of high-capacity, nonbinary optical recording formats." He is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

His research interests are in the general area of communications and information theory. His research group has published in the areas of forward error correction and equalization in wireless communications, magnetic/optical data storage, data security, and privacy. He has advised more than 50 students and postdocs. His group has published more than 250 papers in journals and conferences and holds 36 U.S. patents.

He received the B.S.E.E. degree from Northwestern University, the M.S.E. degree from Princeton University, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan.

Shkina Halbert joined IDEaS in 2016 to provide Administrative support. In 2019, she was promoted to IDEaS Program & Operations Manager. She has over eleven years of experience in the administrative field. She previously work at a successful immigration law firm that assisted the top partners of the company. She primarily handles planning and coordinating workshops/conferences, department HR duties, department operations, travel and various other tasks to support the team. She holds a Masters in Business Administration and Bachelor of Arts in history.

Dr. Lewis-Strickland is a program planning and implementation professional with over 8 years of experience directing programs that build leadership, professional, and skills capacity for students, alumni, and community members. Currently, she is the Program Coordinator for the South Big Data Hub in the Institute for Data Engineering and Sciences. In addition, she manages the operations of initiatives that support broadening participation in data science through community consortium building. She earned her Doctorate of Education in Organizational Leadership, emphasizing Higher Education Leadership from Grand Canyon University. Her dissertation empowered black women to share their leadership resilience experiences to inspire and support aspiring black women leaders. In addition, Dr. Lewis-Strickland is a member of numerous professional organizations such as the International Leadership Association and the Network for Change and Continuous Innovation.

Charmain M. Alston is the senior grants administrator for IDEaS. She joined the team in 2017 with more than 26 years of experience in the federal government, and 18 years of experience with proposal and financial administration at the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate. Charmain has a BBS with a concentration in Acquisition and Contract Management.

Sriram Chockalingam is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS). He develops high performance computing algorithms and implementations for IDEaS research efforts and collaborations. Dr. Chockalingam's research interests focus on development of sequential and parallel algorithms for network reverse engineering in systems biology, Bayesian network structure learning and approximate sequence matching with applications in Bioinformatics. He has over a decade of experience in developing software in both industry and academia targeted towards solving data science problems.

Enlu Zhou is a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She received the B.S. degree with highest honors in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, China, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2009. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2013, she was an assistant professor in the Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2009-2013. She is a recipient of the Best Theoretical Paper award at the Winter Simulation Conference, AFOSR Young Investigator award, NSF CAREER award, and INFORMS Outstanding Simulation Publication Award. She has served as an associate editor for Journal of Simulation, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and Operations Research. She is currently the Vice President and President-Elect of the INFORMS Simulation Society.

Mayya Zhilova is an associate professor in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech and an affiliated member of the Machine Learning Center. She received her Ph.D. in statistics from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2015. 

Her primary research interests lie in the areas of mathematical statistics, statistical learning theory, and uncertainty quantification, particularly in statistical inference for complex high-dimensional data, performance of resampling procedures for various classes of problems, functional estimation, and inference for misspecified models.