May Dongmei Wang, Ph.D., is The Wallace H Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow, professor of BME, ECE and CSE, Director of Biomedical Big Data Initiative, and Georgia Distinguished Cancer Scholar. She is also Petit Institute Faculty Fellow, Kavli Fellow, Fellow of AIMBE, Fellow of IEEE, and Fellow of IAMBE. She received BEng from Tsinghua University China and MS/PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT). Dr. Wang’s research and teaching are in Biomedical Big Data and AI-Driven Biomedical Health Informatics and Intelligent Reality (IR) for predictive, personalized, and precision health. She has published over 270 referred journal and conference proceeding articles (13,500+ GS-Citations) and delivered over 280 invited and keynote lectures. Dr. Wang’s research has been supported by NIH, NSF, CDC, GRA, GCC, VA, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Enduring Heart Foundation, Wallace Coulter Foundation, Carol Ann and David Flanagan Foundation, Shriner’s Hospitals, Microsoft Research, HP, UCB, and Amazon.

Dr. Wang chairs IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) BHI-Technical Community and ACM Special Interest Group in Bioinformatics (SIGBio), and is the Senior Editor of IEEE Journal of Biomedical & Health Informatics (IF=7.02), and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on BME, and IEEE Review of BME. She was IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer and PNAS (Proceeding of National Academy of Sciences) Emerging Area Editor. During the past decade, Dr. Wang has been a standing panelist for NIH Study Sections, NSF Smart and Connect Health, and Brain Canada, and has co-chaired and helped organize more than 10 conferences by IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biologics  Gordon Research Conferences, ACM Special Interest Groups in Bioinformatics, and IEEE Future Directions.

Dr. Wang received GIT Outstanding Faculty Mentor for Undergrad Research Award and Emory University MilliPub Award for a high-impact paper cited over 1,000 times. She was selected into 2022 Georgia Tech LeadingWomen Program and 2021 Georgia Tech Provost Emerging Leaders Program. Previously, she was Carol Ann and David Flanagan Distinguished Faculty Fellow, GIT Biomedical Informatics Program Co-Director in ACTSI, and Bioinformatics and Biocomputing Core Director in NIH/NCI-Sponsored U54 Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence.

Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the Digital Media Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he directs the Public Design Workshop: a design research studio that explores socially engaged design and civic media. 

DiSalvo is also co-director of the Digital Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Center and its Digital Civics initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, and he leads the Serve-Learn-Sustain Fellows program, which brings together faculty, staff, students, and community partners to explore pressing social research themes (the 2016-2017 themes are Smart Cities and Food, Energy, Water, Systems). He has a courtesy appointment in the School of Interactive Computing and is an affiliate of the GVU Center and the Center for Urban Innovation.  DiSalvo also coordinates the Digital Media track of the interdisciplinary M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction. 

DiSalvo’s scholarship draws together theories and methods from design research and design studies, the social sciences, and the humanities, to analyze the social and political qualities of design, and to prototype experimental systems and services. Current research domains include civics, smart cities, the Internet of Things, food systems, and environmental monitoring. Across these domains, DiSalvo is interested in how practices of participatory and public design work to articulate issues and provide resources for new forms of collective action.  

Areas of Expertise:

• Civic Media
• Design
• Design Studies
• Digital Civics
• Food Systems
• Public And Civic IoT
• Smart Cities

Rebecca "Beki" Grinter is a Professor of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing & (by courtesy) the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on improving the experience of computing by understanding the human experience in the building and using of technologies. Her work contributes to the fields of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and computer supported cooperative work. She has also worked in the areas of robotics, networking, security, and software engineering. She has published over 80 scholarly articles, served as Papers Chair (2006) & Best Papers Chair (2010) for the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the premier conference for human-computer interaction. In 2013 she was elected to the CHI Academy. In 2010 she was recognized as a Distinguished Alumna of the University of California, Irvine. Before joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, she was a Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox PARC and a Member of Technical Staff in the Software Production Research Department of Bell Laboratories. She was also a visiting scholar at Rank Xerox EuroPARC. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Information and Computer Science both from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Leeds. Affiliations GVU Center

Leigh McCook, principal research associate at Georgia Tech, also serves as deputy director for IPaT, director of STEM programs for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and previously served as division chief for fifteen years in GTRI’s socio-technical systems division in the Information and Communications Lab. She has been with Georgia Tech for more than 30 years.

As deputy director in IPaT, McCook works to build new research partnerships across campus as well as develop government, industry, and international programs. While she continues to conduct research, McCook's focus has centered on growing IPaT’s research portfolio of state government and industry projects, particularly in education, humanitarian systems, health and smart cities.

McCook’s GTRI activities include directing research and outreach programs for regional and national centers and managing a variety of research and STEM programs funded by federal, state, and local agencies.

Her career expertise includes technology transfer, research translation, outreach, planning, and program management, specifically in areas related to emergency preparedness and response, homeland security, community resiliency, and education. She has managed researchers working a variety of programs in health, learning technology, planning, technology assessment, and integration, policy analysis and research, technology transfer, education, training, public safety, humanitarian, and emergency response.

McCook served as program manager for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA) Homeland Security/Emergency Response programs at the Georgia Tech Research Institute since 2000. Twenty years of program support to GEMA has resulted in over $53M work of funded project work at GTRI.

McCook’s experience also includes having served as associate director for technology transfer and outreach for EPA’s Hazardous Substance Research Centers (South & Southwest). In this capacity she led technology transfer, research translation, and outreach activities for the five-university consortium.

McCook has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on projects for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Georgia Department and Family and Child Services, the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, the Atlanta Urban Area Security Initiative, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Southeast Regional Research Initiative.

Nicoleta Serban is the Peterson Professor of Pediatric Research in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Serban's most recent research focuses on model-based data mining for functional data, spatio-temporal data with applications to industrial economics with a focus on service distribution and nonparametric statistical methods motivated by recent applications from proteomics and genomics. 

She received her B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Theoretical Statistics and Stochastic Processes from the University of Bucharest. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Serban's research interests on Health Analytics span various dimensions including large-scale data representation with a focus on processing patient-level health information into data features dictated by various considerations, such as data-generation process and data sparsity; machine learning and statistical modeling to acquire knowledge from a compilation of health-related datasets with a focus on geographic and temporal variations; and integration of statistical estIMaTes into informed decision making in healthcare delivery and into managing the complexity of the healthcare system.

Neha Kumar is an Associate Professor jointly appointed at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction and global sustainable development, with a focus on global health and community informatics. Her work contributes feminist perspectives to the design and integration of emerging technologies across marginalized contexts in the Global South. 

Her research has been recognized by multiple ACM Best Paper and Honorable Mention awards. Neha received the College of Computing's Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty Award (2017) and the Lockheed Excellence in Teaching Award (2019). She currently serves as the President of ACM SIGCHI. She earned her Ph.D. in Information Management Systems from UC Berkeley, Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Education from Stanford University, and Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Applied Math from UC Berkeley.

Debra Lam is the Founding Director of the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, a statewide public-private partnership committed to investing in innovative solutions for shared economic prosperity. She continues to lead smart communities and urban innovation work at Georgia Tech. Prior to this, she served as Pittsburgh’s inaugural Chief of Innovation & Performance where she oversaw all technology, sustainability, performance, and innovation functions of city government. Before that, she was a management consultant at a global engineering and design firm, Arup. She has received various awards, including being named one of the top 100 most influential people in digital government by Apolitcal.

She has worked and lived in the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A graduate of Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley, Debra serves on the board of the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta and was most recently appointed by the U.S Department of Commerce to the Internet of Things Advisory Board.

Jeff Evans is a researcher with the Information Communication Laboratory (ICL) at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), where researchers work to solve complex problems in computer science, information technology, communications, networking and sociotechnical systems. Customers have included those in the Department of Defense (DoD), emergency response and health care systems spaces. Evans’ research has focused primarily on modes of communications in emerging technologies, particularly wireless systems, and he is involved as a project director for several advanced network and multimedia communications programs. One of his main research foci involves ensuring applications’ performance as they migrate across different networks for legacy systems and emerging, high-bandwidth access technologies. His early work developed into the Network Applications Integration Lab (NAIL) research testbed, which led to his working with campus and other labs across GTRI. After running some of ICL’s research programs in both the DoD and commercial spaces, he was asked to help launch up the first multi-disciplinary unit, the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) at Georgia Tech in order to integrate theoretical research, basic research and to conduct applied science about the emerging technologies that directly impact people: health care, education, humanitarian systems and media. He has helped build numerous international and industry partnerships, as well as multidisciplinary “living lab” test beds. Evans helped co-found GTRI’s Foundations for the Future (F3) program, which helps to bring Georgia Tech’s expertise into the state’s K-12 classrooms. ICL also has nationally recognized initiatives that includes the FalconView™ Program, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) information exchange standards; communications research and antenna networks, both for troops and for evaluating IED countermeasures; emergency management technologies; and are developing a comprehensive approach to the Internet of Things.

Dr. Matthew Gombolay is the Anne and Alan Taetle Assistant Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 2011, a S.M. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2013, and a Ph.D. in Autonomous Systems from MIT in 2017. Gombolay's research interests span robotics, AI/ML, human-robot interaction, and operations research. Between defending his dissertation and joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Gombolay served as a technical staff member at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory transitioning his research for the U.S. Navy, earning him an R&D 100 Award for his development of "Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling" (COVAS). His publication record includes a best paper award from American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, and he was selected as a DARPA Riser in 2018. Dr. Gombolay's research has been highlighted in media outlets such as CNN, PBS, NBC, CBS, Harvard Business Review, Gizmodo, and national public radio