Russ Clark is the director of sustainability and a senior research scientist in Georgia Tech's Institute for People and Technology, who engages hundreds of students each semester in mobile development, networking, and the Internet of Things. He is the CEAR Hub lead principal investigator. He emphasizes innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry involvement in student projects and application development. He was formerly the co-director of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center (GT-RNOC), which supported research efforts across campus, and principal leader of the Convergence Innovation Competition, which pairs students and industry sponsors on novel projects. He has played a leadership role in the NSF GENI project, leading both the GT campus trials efforts as well as the GENI@SoX regional deployment and the Software-Defined Exchange (SDX). Russ is active in the startup community, including roles with the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps program and as a principle with Empire Technologies during its acquisition by Concord Communications.

Walter Rich is a research communications program manager in Georgia Tech's Institute Communications supporting the Institute for People and Technology and Georgia Tech research communications.

Hyde is an associate professor in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a quantitative scholar whose main research areas are stratification and inequality, urban sociology, work and occupations, climate and disaster resilience, and immigration. He is currently conducting research on the effects of race/ethnicity and immigration status on homeownership, social and demographic change in Clarkston, GA (known as the most diverse square mile in America), and Principal Investigator for the Youth Advocacy for Resilience to Disasters Program research project funded by the National Science Foundation's Civic Innovation Challenge. He has also been principal investigator for a National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) grant. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut and has published research articles in journals like Social Science Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Social Currents, Environmental Sociology, Social Indicators Research, City & Community, and Sociological Perspectives. Hyde serves as a Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology initiative lead for research activities related to responsible and ethical technologies.

Cynthia Moore is assistant director for business operations at the Institute for People and Technology. She has over a decade of experience at Georgia Tech, previously serving as director of Institute Diversity's OMED: Educational Services. She provided oversight and leadership of programs and initiatives that address the academic transition, retention, and academic success of underrepresented students in STEM. Moore also oversaw various initiatives at OMED, including the Tower Awards, an annual celebration of student diversity and academic success. She began her Georgia Tech career in Business Services where she was responsible for administrative and financial management.

Quinn Drake has worked in the University System for over ten years. She joins our team from Emory University. Before Emory, Quinn worked at Georgia State University as a Grants and contracts officer. Her experience includes post-award management,  state accounts, residual accounts, indirect accounts, and foundation accounts. Her many roles in the financial arena have led her to the position of Financial Manager II.

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.

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.

Maribeth Gandy Coleman is a Regent's Researcher and Director of Research for the Institute of People and Technology at Georgia Tech. She received a B.S. in Computer Engineering as well as a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. In her 20+ as a research faculty member her work has been focused on the intersection of technology for mobile/wearable computing, augmented reality, human computer interaction, assistive technology, and gaming. She is a computer scientist focused on developing novel and scientifically validated systems at the “human technology frontier” designed for purposes such as training, rehabilitation, and cognitive training, utilizing cutting-edge technology such as augmented and virtual reality. For example, she lead an initiative (funded by National Science Foundation, Dept of Education, and ACT Inc.) to research the design of games for cognitive training and assessment for older adults, persons with disabilities, and K-12 students. She also previously led a project funded by Georgia Tech’s Health Systems Institute to develop home-based computer games for stroke rehabilitation. In her AR research, she is interested in advancing AR as a new medium by focusing on authoring, evaluation, and deployment. She was the lead architect on a large open source software project called the Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART), which had thousands of users and was used to create a variety of large-scale AR systems. She was also co-PI on an NSF grant focused on the development of presence metrics for measuring engagement in AR environments using qualitative and quantitative data. She has also applied AR technologies to a STEM education project for teens, explored how AR interfaces can enhance user abilities during maintenance and repair tasks, and is currently studying the use AR and mobile technologies to make Internet of Things environments more approachable and useful to communities. In her Director role she is responsible for organizational leadership & strategic planning, fundraising, convening & managing diverse teams, industry/academic partnerships, and translational work including commercialization of intellectual property.

Michael L. Best is Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and Professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab.
 

Research Fields:
* Information and Communications Technologies for Development
* International Diffusion and Innovation in IT

Geographic Focuses:
* Africa (Sub-Saharan)
* Asia (East)
* Asia (South)
* Latin America and Caribbean

Issues:
* Inequality and Social Justice
* International Development
* Digital and Mixed Media
* Digital Communication
* Human/Machine Interaction
* Internet Studies