Omar Asensio

Omar Asensio

Omar Asensio

Associate Professor

Dr. Omar I. Asensio is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the intersection of big data and public policy, with applications to energy systems and consumer behavior, smart cities, and machine learning in transportation and electric mobility. He directs the Data Science and Policy Lab at Georgia Tech, where he collaborates with the private sector and city governments on data innovations in policy analysis and research evaluation. He is a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS), the Machine Learning Center, and the Strategic Energy Institute. Dr. Asensio’s research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, and PNAS. His work uses statistical and computational tools to advance our understanding of how large-scale civic data and experiments can be used to increase participation in civic processes, while addressing resource conservation and environmental sustainability. Dr. Asensio’s research also has been featured in policy advisory communications by the European Commission, NSF Public Affairs, the World Bank, and national governments — including the U.K., and the IndiaAI initiative.

Dr. Asensio is a member of the New Voices 2021-2023 cohort of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) 40-for-40 fellowship, and the ONE-NBS Research Impact on Practice award by the Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) Division of the Academy of Management. Dr. Asensio serves as Associate Editor of Data and Policy journal published by Cambridge University Press. He holds a doctorate in environmental science and engineering from UCLA with field specialties in economics. He is a faculty participant in the Research University Alliance (RUA) Research Exchange and is engaged in multiple activities to increase the representation of women and under-represented students and professionals in STEM fields. 

asensio@pubpolicy.gatech.edu

Website

  • Data Science and Policy Lab
  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Energy Infrastructure
    • Energy Utilization and Conservation
    • Policy & Economics
    Additional Research:
    Cyber/ Information Technology; Strategic Planning; Building Technologies; Electric Vehicles; Policy/Economics; Public Policy; Energy Efficiency and Conservation

    IRI Connections:

    Thomas Conte

    Thomas Conte

    Thomas Conte

    Professor

    Tom Conte holds a joint appointment in the Schools of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the founding director of the Center for Research into Novel Computing Hierarchies (CRNCH). His research is in the areas of computer architecture and compiler optimization, with emphasis on manycore architectures, microprocessor architectures, back-end compiler code generation, architectural performance evaluation and embedded computer system architectures.

    conte@gatech.edu

    (404) 385-7657

    Office Location:
    Klaus 2334

    Website

  • CRNCH Lab Page
  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Algorithms & Optimizations
    • High Performance Computing
    Additional Research:
    Computer Architecture; Compiler Optimization

    IRI Connections:

    Edmond Chow

     Edmond Chow

    Edmond Chow

    Professor, School of Computational Science and Engineering

    Edmond Chow is a Professor in the School of Computational Science in the College of Computing. He previously held positions at D. E. Shaw Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research is in developing and applying numerical methods and high-performance computing to solve large-scale scientific computing problems and seeks to enable scientists and engineers to solve larger problems more efficiently using physical simulation. Specific interests include numerical linear algebra (preconditioning, multilevel methods, sparse matrix computations) and parallel methods for quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, and Brownian/Stokesian dynamics.  Chow earned an Honors B.A.Sc. in systems design engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1993, and a Ph.D. in computer science with a minor in aerospace engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1997. Chow was awarded the 2009 ACM Gordon Bell prize and the 2002 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

    echow@cc.gatech.edu

    404.894.3086

    Office Location:
    CODA S1311

    CoC Profile Page

    Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Delivery & Storage
    • High Performance Computing
    • Policy & Economics
    Additional Research:
    High performance computing, materials, data Sciences, cyber/ information technology, quantum information sciences

    IRI Connections:

    Alexander Alexeev

    Alexander Alexeev

    Alexander Alexeev

    Professor

    Dr. Alexeev came to Georgia Tech at the beginning of 2008 as an assistant professor. His research background is in the area of fluid mechanics. He uses computer simulations to solve engineering problems in complex fluids, multiphase flows, fluid-structure interactions, and soft materials. As a part of his graduate research at Technion, he investigated resonance oscillations in gases and probed how periodic shock waves excited at resonance can enhance agglomeration of small airborne particles, a process which is important in air pollution control technology. He also investigated wave propagation in vibrated granular materials and its effect on fluidization of inelastic granules. During postdoctoral studies at TU Darmstadt, he examined how microstructures on heated walls can be harnessed to control thermocapillary flows in thin liquid films and to enhance heat transport in the fluid. That could be beneficial in many practical applications, especially in microgravity. At the University of Pittsburgh, he studied the motion of micrometer-sized, compliant particles on patterned substrates to develop efficient means of controlling movement of such particles in microfluidic devices. Such substrates are needed to facilitate various biological assays and tissue engineering studies dealing with individual cells.

    alexander.alexeev@me.gatech.edu

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Energy Infrastructure

    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:

    Nancey Green Leigh

    Nancey Green Leigh

    Nancey Green Leigh

    Professor; School of City & Regional Planning
    Associate Dean for Research; College of Design

    Nancey Green Leigh is a Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and adviser for the economic development planning, working with masters and doctoral students. Maintaining an active research program, Leigh is currently leading a project entitled "Workers, Firms and Industries in Robotic Regions," funded by the National Science Foundation's Robotics Initiative. She previously led a large scale research effort by three universities focused on sustainable industrial systems for urban regions. Both of these efforts as well as other funded research (brownfields, urban land and manufacturing, resilient infrastructure) contribute to Leigh's long term focus on advancing sustainable development for local and regional economies. As Associate Dean for Research, Leigh is focused on strengthening the research impact of the College of Design. She develops and administers competitive initiatives to support individual and collaborative research by college faculty and affiliated researchers. She oversees the college's seven major research units. She also is engaged in building research connections within Georgia Tech between the College of Design, other colleges and Interdisciplinary Research Institutes, as well as to external funders and collaborators in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Leigh has published more than 60 articles and four books, Routledge Handbook of International Planning Education (2019 with S.P. French, S. Guhathakurta, and B. Stiftel), Planning Local Economic Development, 6th edition (2017 with E.J. Blakely) adopted for courses in a wide array of universities; Economic Revitalization: Cases and Strategies for City and Suburb (2002 with J. Fitzgerald); and Stemming Middle Class Decline: The Challenge to Economic Development Planning (1994). She was co-editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research from 2012 to 2016, and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2008.

    ngleigh@design.gatech.edu

    404.894.9839

    Office Location:
    Architecture-East Building, 209

    Website

    Google Scholar

    University, College, and School/Department
    Research Focus Areas:
    • Collaborative Robotics
    • Policy & Economics
    • Use & Conservation
    Additional Research:
    economic development; robots & AI impact on workers; firms & regions; City and Regional Planning; System Design & Optimization; Design Sciences

    IRI Connections:

    Pascal Van Hentenryck

    Pascal Van Hentenryck

    Pascal Van Hentenryck

    A. Russell Chandler III Chair
    Professor
    Director, AI Hub
    Director, AI Institute for Advances in Optimization

    Pascal Van Hentenryck is an A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to this appointment, he was a professor of Computer Science at Brown University for about 20 years, he led the optimization research group (about 70 people) at National ICT Australia (NICTA) (until its merger with CSIRO), and was the Seth Bonder Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Van Hentenryck is also an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University.

    Van Hentenryck is a Fellow of AAAI (the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science). He has been awarded two honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Louvain and the university of Nantes, the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer Award, the Philip J. Bray Award for teaching excellence in the physical sciences at Brown University, the ACP Award for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming, the ICS INFORMS Prize for Research Excellence at the Intersection of Computer Science and Operations Research, and an NSF National Young Investigator Award. He received a Test of Time Award (20 years) from the Association of Logic Programming and numerous best paper awards, including at IJCAI and AAAI. Van Hentenryck has given plenary/semi-plenary talks at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (twice), the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, the SIAM Optimization Conference, the Annual INFORMS Conference, NIPS, and many other conferences. Van Hentenryck is program co-chair of the AAAI’19 conference, a premier conference in Artificial Intelligence.

    Van Hentenryck’s research focuses in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Operations Research. His current focus is to develop methodologies, algorithms, and systems for addressing challenging problems in mobility, energy systems, resilience, and privacy. In the past, his research focused on optimization and the design and implementation of innovative optimization systems, including the CHIP programming system (a Cosytec product), the foundation of all modern constraint programming systems and the optimization programming language OPL (now an IBM Product). Van Hentenryck has also worked on computational biology, numerical analysis, and programming languages, publishing in premier journals in these areas.

    Van Hentenryck runs the Seth Bonder summer Camp in Computational and Data Science for middle- and high-school students every summer. 

    pascal.vanhentenryck@isye.gatech.edu

    (404) 385-5538

    Profile Page

  • Website
  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
    • Energy Utilization and Conservation
    Additional Research:
    Electric Vehicles

    IRI Connections:

    Dimitri Mavris

    Dimitri Mavris

    Dimitri Mavris

    Regents' Professor
    Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis
    Director, Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory

    Dimitri Mavris is a Regents’ Professor, Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis, and an S.P. Langley Distinguished Professor. He also serves as the director of the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) and executive director of the Professional Master’s in Applied Systems Engineering (PMASE). Dr. Mavris received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His primary areas of research interest include: advanced design methods, aircraft conceptual and preliminary design, air-breathing propulsion design, multi-disciplinary analysis, design and optimization, system of systems, and non-deterministic design theory. Dr. Mavris has actively pursued closer ties between the academic and industrial communities in order to foster research opportunities and tailor the aerospace engineering curriculum towards meeting the future needs of the US aerospace industry. He has also co-authored with his students in excess of 1,000 publications. During his tenure at Georgia Tech, Dr. Mavris has chaired and served in several Technical and Program Committees for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and served on the AIAA Board of Directors and Institute Development Committee. He is the President of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS). He is the Georgia Tech technical point of contact for the FAA Center of Excellence for Alternative Jet Fuels & Environment (ASCENT), the Georgia Tech site director for the FAA Partnership to Enhance General Aviation Safety, Accessibility, and Sustainability (PEGASAS), and the principal investigator for the Airbus/Georgia Tech Center for MBSE-enabled Overall Aircraft Design and the Siemens Center of Excellence for Simulation and Digital Twin.

    dimitri.mavris@aerospace.gatech.edu

    (404) 894-1557

    Website

  • http://www.ae.gatech.edu/community/staff/bio/mavris-d
  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Algorithms & Optimizations
    • Delivery & Storage
    • Policy & Economics
    • Use & Conservation
    Additional Research:
    System Design & Optimization

    IRI Connections:

    Wenke Lee

    Wenke Lee

    Wenke Lee

    Executive Director, Institute for Information Security and Privacy
    Co-Executive Director, SEI
    Professor

    Wenke Lee, Ph.D., is executive director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) and responsible for continuing Georgia Tech's international leadership in cybersecurity research and education. Additionally, he is the John P. Imlay, Jr. Professor of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he has taught since 2001. Previously, he served as director of the IISP's predecessor -- the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) research lab -- from 2012 to 2015. Lee is one of the most prolific and influential security researchers in the world. He has published several dozen, oft-cited research papers at top academic conferences, including the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, USENIX Security, IEEE Security & Privacy ("Oakland"), and the Network & Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. His research expertise includes systems and network security, botnet detection and attribution, malware analysis, virtual machine monitoring, mobile systems security, and detection and mitigation of information manipulation on the Internet. Lee regularly leads large research projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and private industry. Significant discoveries from his research group have been transferred to industry, and in 2006, doing so enabled Lee to co-found Damballa, Inc., which focused on detection and mitigation of advanced persistent threats. Lee’s awards and honors include the “Internet Defense Prize” awarded by Facebook and USENIX in 2015, an “Outstanding Community Service Award” from the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in 2013, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship in 2005, an NSF Career Award in 2002, as well as best paper awards in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Passionate about quality education, Lee serves on the advisory boards of the Faculty of Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the board of trustees at Pace Academy in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1999.

    wenke@cc.gatech.edu

    404.385.2879

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Delivery & Storage
    • Machine Learning
    • Network and Security
    • Policy & Economics
    • Vulnerability Analysis
    Additional Research:
    Data Security & Privacy; Encryption; Internet Infrastructure & Operating Systems; Machine Learning; Cyber Technology

    IRI Connections:

    Raheem Beyah

    Raheem Beyah

    Raheem Beyah

    Dean, College of Engineering
    Motorola Foundation Professor

    Raheem Beyah, Ph.D., is associate chair for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation, and the Motorola Foundation Professor in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research is at the intersection of the networking and security fields. He leads the Georgia Tech Communications Assurance and Performance Group (CAP), which develops algorithms that enable a more secure network infrastructure with computer systems that are more accountable and less vulnerable to attacks. Through experimentation, simulation, and theoretical analysis, CAP provides solutions to current network security problems and to long-range challenges as current networks and threats evolve. Dr. Beyah has served as guest editor and associate editor of several journals in the areas of network security, wireless networks, and network traffic characterization and performance. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2009 and was selected for DARPA's Computer Science Study Panel in 2010. He is a member of NSBE, ASEE, and is a senior member of IEEE and ACM. Beyah is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University in 1998. He received his Master's and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1999 and 2003, respectively. Prior to returning to Georgia Tech, Dr. Beyah was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State University, a research faculty member with the Georgia Tech Communications Systems Center (CSC), and a consultant in Andersen Consulting's (now Accenture) Network Solutions Group.

    rbeyah@ece.gatech.edu

    404.894.2531

    Office Location:
    KACB 2308

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Cyber Technology
    • Network and Security Vulnerability Analysis
    • Cyber-Physical Systems
    Additional Research:
    Mobile & Wireless Communications; Network Science

    IRI Connections: