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.

Lily Cheung got her research start as a sophomore at Rutgers University, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2008. She then earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 2013. Under the supervision of Stanislav Shvartsman, she characterized gene regulatory networks controlling the development of the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, using a combination of molecular biology, genetics, and reaction-diffusion modeling.

During her postdoctoral training with Wolf Frommer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, she designed biomolecular sensors to quantify sugar transport in plants. Her current interests include the use of high-throughput quantitative techniques and mathematical modeling to advance our understanding of how metabolic and gene regulatory networks interact to control plant growth.

Lily is the recipient of a NSF NPGI Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology, a NSF CAREER Award, and a Human Frontier Science Program Early Career Award.

Satish Kumar is currently an Associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. He joined Georgia Tech in 2009 as an Assistant Professor. Prior, he worked at IBM Corporation where he was responsible for the thermal management of electronic devices. Kumar received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette in 2007. He received his M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge in 2003 and B.Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in 2001. His research interests are in electro-thermal transport in carbon nanotube, graphene, and 2D materials based electronic devices, AlGaN/GaN transistors, thermal management, and thermo-electric coolers. He is author or co-author of over 70 journal or conference publications. His contributions to his research field have been recognized by Purdue Research Foundation Fellowship in 2005, 1969 Teaching Fellow from Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning Center at Georgia Tech, 2012 Summer Faculty Fellow from Air Force Research Lab, 2014 Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award, and 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award.

Dr. Akanksha Menon is an Assistant Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to this, she was a Rosenfeld Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she performed research on hybrid membrane-thermal desalination processes using solar energy, and she also contributed to the development of thermal energy storage materials. Dr. Menon completed her Ph.D. at Georgia Tech, where she focused on developing semiconducting polymers and new device architectures for thermoelectric energy harvesting. She holds a bachelor's degree from Texas A&M University at Qatar, as well as a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Her research group at Georgia Tech is working on technologies for the water-energy nexus.

Lauren Garten joined the School of Materials Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in Fall 2021. Her group focuses on developing new materials for energy and electronic applications, particularly at the nexus between ferroelectricity, ferromagnetism, electronics, and photovoltaics. 

Lauren received her B.S. in ceramic engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology. She then went on to earn a Ph.D. in material science from the Pennsylvania State University for her work on ferroelectric, piezoelectric, and dielectric synthesis and characterization with Prof. Susan Trolier-McKinstry. She then became a post-doc at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory working on metastable materials for energy applications. After a very short stint as a material scientist at Sandia National Laboratory, she won the NRC Research Associateship from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Math which was hosted at the U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL). She then received the Jerome and Isabella Karle Distinguished Scholar Fellowship from NRL to work on lead-free multiferroic materials and devices.

Scott Sinquefield completed his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1998 at Oregon State University. He spent three years working with the Multi-Fuel Combustion Group at the Combustion Research Facility at Sandia National Labs (Livermore); where he performed the experimental portion of his thesis research. He joined the Chemical Recovery group at IPST in 1998 and was lead.engineer in the construction and operation of the Pressurize Entrained Flow Reactor facility. He now leads the research program on black liquor gasification. He has extensive experience in the design and construction of pilot research reactors and control systems. He also has expertise in boiler fire-side fouling and thermodynamic modeling of aqueous electrolyte systems.