Dr. Chen has an extensive research interests in environmental science and engineering. More specifically, he is a leading researcher in the environmental applications of nanomaterials and their potential fate, transport, transformation, bioaccumulation and toxicity in the environment. His interests in environmental nanomaterials dated back in his graduate research in 1992. He has also been active on algae based bio-renewable energy and sustainable urban development. Dr. Chen has been principle and co-principal investigators for 28 research projects (by June 2010) funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, Boeing and other organizations. The total funds are $7 million. He has also served as a review member or panel review member in the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy evaluation committee. He has also been invited to serve as an abroad review expert for the China Changjiang Scholars Program (which is to awarded to the top researchers in China). He has published more than 40 papers and two book chapters in this field.

Dr. Chen received his Ph.D in Nankai University, China. He joined the Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering in May 2009. Till then, he was an Associate Professor Research at the Arizona State University.

Christos Athanasiou is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech's Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, leading the Daedalus Lab. The lab's mission is to advance science and technology in biological and man-made systems for tackling grand social and environmental challenges with a major focus on energy storage, environmental remediation, and sustainable space exploration. Christos holds a Ph.D. in Photonics from EPFL. Initially, he carried out postdoctoral research at Brown University's School of Engineering, and later jointly at Brown University and MIT Media Lab.

Dr. Realff’s broad research interests are in the areas of process design, simulation, and scheduling. His current research is focused on the design and operation of processes that minimize waste production by recovery of useful products from waste streams, and the design of processes based on biomass inputs. In particular, he is interested in carbon capture processes both from flue gas and dilute capture from air as well as the analysis and design of processes that use biomass.

Matthew McDowell joined Georgia Tech in the fall of 2015 as an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. McDowell received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

McDowell’s research group focuses on understanding how materials for energy and electronic devices change and transform during operation, and how these transformations impact properties. The group uses in situ experimental techniques to probe materials transformations under realistic conditions. The fundamental scientific advances made by the group guide the engineering of materials for breakthrough new devices. Current projects in the group are focused on i) electrode materials for alkali ion batteries, ii) materials for solid-state batteries, iii) interfaces in chalcogenide materials for electronics and catalysis, and iv) new methods for creating nanostructured metals.

Tequila A. L. Harris is a Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and is the director of the Polymer Thin Film Processing Laboratory (tharris@gatech.edu). Her research focuses on investigating the fundamental science associated with manufacture of polymer thin films from fluids (e.g., solutions, dispersions, slurries, etc.) as they are coated onto permeable or impermeable surfaces to make components or devices. She explores the connectivity between thin film functionality, based on their manufacture or structure, and their life expectancy, to elucidate mechanisms by which performance or durability can be predicted. In addition to conducting computational analysis, developing analytical models and running experiments, Harris also develops new manufacturing technologies to fabricate thin films, in wide area or discrete patterns. Target applications are well-suited for a variety of industries including food, energy, electronic, and environmental systems to name a few. In conjunction with her research activities, she is committed to the education, mentoring, and advisement of students towards scholarly achievements. She has published over fifty peer-reviewed articles. Harris has several awards including the National Science Foundation's young investigator CAREER Award and the Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty Award.

Suhas S. Jain is an Assistant Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received his bachelor’s from NIT-Karnataka (India) in 2014, M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2018 and 2022, respectively, all in mechanical engineering. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Turbulence Research, Stanford University (2022-2023), a researcher at the Institute of Fluid Dynamics, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany (2014-2015), and a project assistant at the Indian Institute of Science (2015-2016).

His research interests include computational modeling of fluid flows (multiphase flows; turbulent flows; compressible flows; and fluid-structure interaction) with a current focus on modeling atomization, sprays, and phase change for propulsion applications; ice accretion and aerodynamics for sustainable energy and aerospace design; and air-sea interaction modeling for understanding climate change; and modeling of fluid-solid and solid-solid systems for biomedical and high-speed applications. Through the integration of numerical modeling, high-performance computing, and data-driven approaches, Suhas and his group aim to address key challenges in these areas.

Joseph K. Scott is an associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his BS from Wayne State Univ. and his MS and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all in chemical engineering. His honors include the 2012 Best Paper Award from the Journal of Global Optimization, the 2016 W. David Smith, Jr. Award from the Computing and Systems Technology Div. of AIChE, the 2014–2016 Automatica Paper Prize from the International Federation of Automatic Control, and the 2016 Air Force Young Investigator Research Program Award. His research interests include process modeling and simulation, dynamic systems, process control, and optimization theory and algorithms.

Jake D. Soper is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prof. Soper’s research program is a hybrid of organometallic and inorganic coordination chemistry, at the forefront of an emerging area that uses redox-active ligand complexes for redox control in bond activation and functionalization reactions. His research focuses on the development of new homogeneous catalysts for selective transformations of small molecules, with particular emphasis on multielectron reactions relevant to organic synthesis and energy conversion and storage. Recent research accomplishments include the rational design of Earth-abundant metal catalysts to functionally mimic palladium in coupling catalysis cycles and the demonstration of redox-active ligand-meditated radical control in catalytic dioxygen activation and oxygen atom transfer reactions. This research has appeared in top peer-reviewed chemistry journals, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Inorganic Chemistry. Prof. Soper has also been an invited contributor to special issues of the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry on Cooperative & Redox Non-Innocent Ligands in Directing Organometallic Chemistry and an Inorganic Chemistry Forum on Redox-Active Ligands, consisting of “papers from leading scientists on a multidisciplinary topic of growing interest. His recent development of redox-active ligand-mediated cobalt cross coupling catalysis was hailed as a “breakthrough in the field” in a 2011 Highlights feature in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. 

Prof. Soper earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from Western Washington University in 1998 and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Washington in 2003. His graduate research was performed under the direction of Prof. James M. Mayer. He was subsequently an NIH Ruth L. Kirchstein Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratories of Prof. Daniel G. Nocera at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2009 his independent research was honored with an NSF CAREER award and a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA). During his tenure at Georgia Tech, he has been invited to speak at 30 universities and 12 conferences, including four Gordon Research Conferences. He was the corresponding organizer of a symposium on modern redox-active ligand chemistry that was presented at the International Chemical Congress of Pacific Basin Societies, Pacifichem 2010. He created and directs the Georgia Tech–Westlake HS Energy Challenge Program, for which he received the 2010 Georgia Tech Faculty Award for Academic Outreach.