Dr. Aidun joined the Woodruff School as a Professor in 2003 after completion of a two-year period as program director at the National Science Foundation. He began at Tech in 1988 as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology. Prior, he was a research Scientist at Battelle Research Laboratories, Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and Senior Research Consultant at the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Center at Cornell. 

Dr. Aidun's research is at the intersection between fundamentals of the physics of complex fluids/thermal transport and applications to engineering and biotransport. He has a diverse research portfolio in fluid mechanics, bioengineering, renewable bioproducts and decarbonization of industrial processes. 

A major focus has been to understand the physics of blood cell transport and interaction with glycoproteins (e.g., vWF) with applications to cardiovascular diseases.

Andreas (Andy) S. Bommarius is a professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as well of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA.  He received his diploma in Chemistry in 1984 at the Technical University of Munich, Germany and his Chemical Engineering B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1982 and 1989 at MIT, Cambridge, MA.

From 1990-2000, he led the Laboratory of Enzyme Catalysis at Degussa (now Evonik) in Wolfgang, Germany, where his work ranged from immobilizing homogenous catalysts in membrane reactors to large-scale cofactor-regenerated redox reactions to pharma intermediates.

At Georgia Tech since 2000, his research interests cover green chemistry and biomolecular engineering, specifically biocatalyst development and protein stability studies.  His lab applies data-driven protein engineering to improve protein properties on catalysts ranging from ene and nitro reductases to cellobiohydrolases.  Bommarius has guided the repositioning of the curriculum towards Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering by developing new courses in Process Design, Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering, as well as Drug Design, Development, and Delivery (D4), an interdisciplinary course with Mark Prausnitz.

Andy Bommarius in 2008 became a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.  Since 2010, he is Director of the NSF-I/UCR Center for Pharmaceutical Development (CPD), a Center focusing on process development, drug substance and product stability, and novel analytical methods for the characterization of drug substances and excipients.

Saad Bhamla studies biomechanics across species to engineer knowledge and tools that inspire curiosity.

Saad Bhamla is an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at Georgia Tech. A self-proclaimed "tinkerer," his lab is a trove of discoveries and inventions that span biology, physics and engineering. His current projects include studying the hydrodynamics of insect urine, worm blob locomotion and ultra-low-cost devices for global health. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Economist, CNN, Wired, NPR, the Wall Street Journal and more.

Saad is a prolific inventor and his most notable inventions includes a 20-cent paper centrifuge, a 23-cent electroporator, and the 96-cent hearing aid. Saad's work is recognised by numerous awards including a NIH R35 Outstanding Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, CTL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and INDEX: Design to Improve Life Award. Saad is also a National Geographic Explorer and a TED speaker. Newsweek recognized Saad as 1 of 10 Innovators disrupting healthcare.

Saad is a co-founder of Piezo Therapeutics.

Outside of the lab, Saad loves to go hiking with his partner and two dogs (Ollie and Bella).

Dr. Medford is interested in leveraging materials informatics, statistics, and machine learning to maximize the practical impact of fundamental atomic-scale simulations in the field of surface science and catalysis. His research areas include heterogeneous catalysis, oxide surface chemistry, density functional theory, kinetic models, uncertainty quantification, and Bayesian optimization and inference.

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.

Kamran Paynabar is the Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Iran in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from The University of Michigan in 2012. He also holds an M.A. in Statistics from The University of Michigan. His research interests comprise both applied and methodological aspects of machine-learning and statistical modeling integrated with engineering principles. He is a recipient of the INFORMS Data Mining Best Student Paper Award, the Best Application Paper Award from IIE Transactions, the Best QSR refereed paper from INFORMS, and the Best Paper Award from POMS. He has been recognized with the Georgia Tech campus level 2014 CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award and the Provost Teaching and Learning Fellowship. He served as the chair of QSR of INFORMS, and the president of QCRE of IISE.

George Lan is an A. Russell Chandler III Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.  His research and teaching interests lie in theory, algorithms and applications of stochastic optimization and nonlinear programming.  Most of his current research concerns the design of efficient algorithms for solving challenging optimization problems, especially those arising from data analytics, machine learning, and reinforcement learning. He is actively pursuing the applications of these methodologies in healthcare and sustainability areas. Dr. Lan serves as the associate editor for Computational Optimization and Applications (2014 – present), Mathematical Programming (2016 – present) and SIAM Journal on Optimization (2016  – present). Dr. Lan is an associate director for the center of machine learning at Georgia Tech.