Paul Diederich is a systems support engineer responsible for the day-to-day IT operations supporting our users. He also helps create IT solutions and played a key role in creating the Protected Health Data Infrastructure at IPaT. Paul graduated from Kennesaw State University with a bachelor's degree in Information Security Assurance. Prior to Georgia Tech, Paul did freelance IT providing technical support to individuals and companies including medical offices. He also worked at Mesa Community College as a media technician while he lived in Arizona.

Arthi Rao is a research scientist at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development at Georgia Tech. She has had a consistent focus on Health and Place research throughout her career. She has an interdisciplinary educational and professional background in Urban Planning, Epidemiology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from Georgia Tech. Her research interests focus on social determinants of health, healthcare access, healthy communities, and spatial methods. She uses methods including spatial clustering, data mining/classification techniques and hierarchical modeling in her research. She has integrated these methods to create decision-support tools for academic and industrial applications.

She regularly collaborates with researchers at The Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech, and the American Planning Association as a subject matter expert on healthy communities’ research and geospatial methods. She has published in journals on the topics of Health Impact Assessment (HIA), sustainability, walkability analysis, regional planning, and therapeutic landscapes. She also teaches courses titled “Public Health and the Built Environment” and “Public Health Analytics” at Georgia Tech.

Specialization Area: Health and Environment

Lisa Marks is a designer and educator teaching studio courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Georgia Tech. Her current research focuses on methods of combining endangered and traditional handcraft with algorithmic modeling in order to produce new modes of production. She has a Master of Industrial Design from Parsons School of Design and worked in New York for clients including Google, Nike, and Swarovski. 

Tim began working as the GVU Center’s research technologist in 2018. In conjunction with IPaT, he developed, designed, and launched the Craft Lab in 2022 and is serving as the director of the Prototyping, Craft, and Usability labs. Tim provides strategic oversight of the tools and technologies present in these “innovation labs” and seeks opportunities to grow and shape the spaces to match the ever-changing research landscape. These spaces are an essential component of the research within IPaT and the broader Georgia Tech community. Tim views the spaces not only as a set of technologies like 3D printers, laser cutters, embroidery machines, etc., but also as a catalyst to bring together community members and explore new frontiers of research.

Tim has also spent much of his time at Georgia Tech working in research computing, including his roles as a Research Technologist in College of Computing’s Technology Services Organization (TSO) and as a part of IPaT’s Research Operations team. He served as interim Associate Director for Research in TSO in 2023. His focus in these areas is in DevOps and business automation with aims to match IT capabilities and capacities with the needs of end-users.

Tim holds a master of science in human-computer interaction and a graduate certificate in Management of Technology from Georgia Tech. His thesis project focused on the introductory experience to academic makerspaces and digital tools that support new users. In this work, Tim prototyped a new digital training aid for makerspaces to allow more seamless introduction for new users while satisfying training requirements.

She is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and a practicing designer, researcher, and educator who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. As an avid photographer and illustrator, her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects National Photography Competition and she has contributed graphics to several exhibitions and publications. As an educator, she was recognized as one of two recipients of the 2017-2018 American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS)/ Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) New Faculty Teaching Award and a 2021 AIAS Educator Honor Award. 

Her research and practice experiences span design/build, early intervention design education, transatlantic studies, and historic site documentation and visualization. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in fall 2021 for the project "From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South," supporting research and development of the Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States seminar at Georgia Tech. 

Expanding experiences abroad to enrich both teaching and research agendas , she was the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians’ H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellow. Between June 2016 and May 2017, she traveled to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Cuba, and Japan to research the impact of tourism on cultural heritage sites; research blog posts can be found here. 

Currently, she is working with Auburn University Associate Professor Liu and an interdisciplinary team from the McWhorter School of Building Science, the Department of History, and the Media Production Group on “Walking in the Footsteps of History”, an experimental survey and modeling project to digitally reconstruct the area south of the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 'Bloody Sunday' events of March 7, 1965. This project is working to record and represent the built environment through the use of 3D LiDAR scans, UAV photogrammetry, and digital modeling. The team was awarded a $50,000 grant 2019 National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant Program to compile a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Willkens serves as a Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology initiative lead for research activities related to just, resilient, and informed communities.

Mathieu Dahan is an Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research interests are in combinatorial optimization, game theory, and predictive analytics, with applications to service operations management and disaster logistics. His primary focus is on developing strategies for improving the resilience of large-scale infrastructures — particularly, transportation and natural gas networks — in the face of correlated failures such as security attacks and natural disasters. Current projects include: (i) Strategic design of network inspection systems; and (ii) Analytics-based response operations under uncertainty.

Dr. Dahan received a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computational Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.Eng. and B.Eng. from the École Centrale Paris, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Paris-Sud University. He is the recipient of the MIT Robert Thurber Fellowship, the MIT Robert Guenassia Award, the Honorable Mention for the J-WAFS Fellowships, and the Best Poster Award at the Princeton Day of Optimization.

During the summer of 2016, he worked as a research scientist intern at Amazon.com (Seattle) in the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies team. Using Machine-Learning techniques, he worked on predicting the fulfillment cost and developing a prototype to grant a fast and accurate access to future shipping cost estimates.

Faith Sumpter (she/her/hers) joins the IPaT team as the program and operations manager. Faith joins the team from Georgia Tech’s Institute Diversity department where she provided support for several programs including Employee Resource Groups, Inclusive Leaders Academy, and Transformative Narratives. Prior to that position, she worked within student activities, orientation, and leadership programs at UNC Asheville, Chattahoochee Technical College, and Agnes Scott College. Faith received a bachelor of arts in Spanish from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and a master of arts in higher education and student affairs from the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. Outside of work, she is an active member of her community and serves as the member-at-large for diversity and inclusion for the Wesleyan College Alumnae Association Board of Managers.

Marcia Chandler has been with Georgia Tech for more than 15 years, with assignments in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Tennenbaum Institute before joining IPaT. Her responsibilities include purchasing and p-card administration, travel and expense processing, student hiring and HR actions, and asset management. She also assists researchers with Georgia Tech’s rigorous research faculty promotions process and coordinates IPaT Research faculty promotions peer review committee activities. Finally, she compiles and edits the IPaT Weekly Highlights. A native of Florida, Marcia holds a master’s degree in public administration from Kennesaw State University, a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Florida A&M University, and she is a 20+-year member of the Grammy award-winning Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus.

I am an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Before joining Georgia Tech, I spent two wonderful years at Virginia Tech as a faculty member. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Visual Computing Group at Harvard University, and received my Ph.D. from Human-Centred Computing Department, Monash University, Australia.

My research encompasses a wide range of topics within the fields of Visualization (VIS), VR/AR, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I actively contribute to these communities and regularly publish my work in leading venues such as IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, IEEE TVCG, EuroVis, and IEEE VR. I am honored to have received three best paper honorable mention awards, notably from IEEE VIS in 2016 and 2022, as well as ACM CHI in 2021. I also serve as a program committee member for several prestigious conferences in my fields, including IEEE VIS 2022/23/24, ACM CHI 2023/24, and IEEE VR 2022/23/24.

Celeste Mason is a research scientist II at the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). After completing her Masters of Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech (and previously, a Bachelor’s in Materials Science and Engineering), she worked as a researcher/developer at a wearable computing startup and universities in Northern Germany. Research projects included design and development of technologies for intelligent assistance in physical training for older adults, with an emphasis on realistic intelligent virtual agents and dynamic user feedback; creation of a multi-modal dataset for action recognition and semantic/hierarchical structure discovery, with the goal of enhancing cognitive robotic planning algorithms; user interfaces, wearable, and tangible systems for the “Workflow Editor” graphical procedural customization system for order-picking and other industrial processes (now part of Teamviewer); and the collaborative research projects “Multimodal Algebra Lernen (MAL)”, a tangible mathematics educational system; and “Be-griefen”, an experimentation XR educational system for physics and electronics instruction.
 

Some of the projects Celeste has worked on at Georgia Tech include PopSign (an American Sign Language vocabulary learning mobile game - the initial prototype was the basis of her Masters project), along with the Passive Haptic Learning and Rehabilitation project (PHL/PHR Gloves help to teach the "muscle memory" of how to play piano melodies without the learner's active attention and may aid those recovering from stroke injury and other conditions improve sensation/dexterity in their affected hands), the FIDO project (tangible and wearable systems for working dogs), and the CHAT project (wearable computers used by dolphin researcher). Prior Materials Science research projects focused on design, fabrication, and characterization of piezo-electric nanogenerators, bio-inspired nanomaterials and optically transparent, electrically conductive nanoparticle/polymer composites. Her current research focuses include educational games, tools, and outreach (especially in the STEM space); assistive technologies for health, education and industry; environmental sensor systems for community-driven sustainability; and wearable (AR/XR) and implantable technologies for health, productivity, and quality-of-life/well-being. Celeste continues to pursue technology transfer efforts for these projects (PHL Gloves and PopSign in particular) with the goal of building up and refining these research prototypes toward viable products that can significantly improve and enrich users’ daily lives.

Research Interests:

• Educational and behavior-change technologies, serious games
• Wearables/XR, multimodal interaction
• Assistive technologies
• Sustainability in computing