Cyrus Aidun

Cyrus Aidun

Cyrus Aidun

Professor

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.

cyrus.aidun@me.gatech.edu

404-894-6645

Office Location:
Love Building, Room 320

Website

  • Related Site
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Biobased Materials
    • Biochemicals
    • Biorefining
    • Biotechnology
    • Conventional Energy
    • Molecular, Cellular and Tissue Biomechanics
    • Pulp Paper Packaging & Tissue
    • Sustainable Manufacturing
    Additional Research:
    Computational analysis of cellular blood flow in the cardiovascular system with applications to platelet margination, thrombus formation, and platelet activation in artificial heart valves. Thermal Systems. Chemical Recovery; Papermaking.

    IRI Connections:

    Suresh Menon

    Suresh Menon

    Suresh Menon

    Professor

    Professor Menon joined Flow Industries, Kent, Washington, as a research scientist, and in 1988, became a senior scientist and program manager for the computational fluid dynamics group in Quest Integrated, Inc. (formerly called Flow Research, Inc.). At Quest, Menon led research teams in various research projects such as the active control of combustion instability in ramjet engines, supersonic mixing studies, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft fluid dynamics, and hypersonic reentry problems. In 1992, he joined Georgia Institute of Technology as an associate professor and became a professor in 1997. He is currently the Hightower Professor of Engineering in Georgia Tech. Professor Menon is a world renowned expert in large-eddy simulation of turbulent reacting and non-reacting flows and has developed unique simulation capabilities to study pollutant formation, ozone depletion in high-altitude aircraft jet plumes and combustion in gas turbine and ramjet engines. He has been (and is currently) a principal investigator for a wide range of research projects funded by NASA, Department of Energy, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Office of Naval Research, Defense Threat Reduction Agency. His work has been (and is also) supported by many industries including General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, Solar Turbines, Boeing, Safran (France), Hyundai (S. Korea), JAXA (Japan), IHI (Japan) and Rocketdyne-Aerojet. He has published and/or presented over 395 papers. Professor Menon is a Fellow of AAAS, Associate Fellow of AIAA, and a member of the American Physical Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Combustion Institute and the Sigma Xi. He is a peer reviewer for numerous archival journals, NASA, NSF, DoD and DOE research proposals.

    suresh.menon@aerospace.gatech.edu

    (404) 894-9126

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Energy Generation, Storage, and Distribution
    Additional Research:
    Combustion

    IRI Connections:

    Jian Luo

    Jian Luo

    Jian Luo

    Professor
    BBISS Lead: Coastal Urban Flooding

    Dr. Jian Luo completed his undergraduate and M.S. studies at Tsinghua University, Beijing, where he received a B.Sc.(Eng.) and a M.S. degree in Environmental Engineering in 1998 and 2000, respectively. He completed his Ph.D. in 2006 in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, California. The research Dr. Luo is conducting involves field, theoretical, and computational investigations of flow and reactive transport in subsurface; development and application of geostatistical methods for the spatial and temporal analysis of hydrogeologic and biochemistry data; development of computational algorithms and programs to simulate subsurface flow and reactive transport, and to assess the associated uncertainty; inverse modeling to estimate flow and transport parameters under uncertainty; and use of such computational methods and models to assess subsurface contamination, and to aid the optimal design of groundwater remediation operations.

    jian.luo@ce.gatech.edu

    (404) 385-6390

    Departmental Bio

  • BBISS Initiative Lead Project - Coastal Urban Flooding in a Changing Climate
  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Energy Generation, Storage, and Distribution
    Additional Research:
    Geosystems; Water

    IRI Connections:

    Devesh Ranjan

    Devesh Ranjan

    Devesh Ranjan

    Chair, Mechanical Engineering

    Devesh Ranjan was named the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and took over the role on January 1, 2022. He previously served as the Associate Chair for Research, and Ring Family Chair in the Woodruff School. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and serves as a co-director of the $100M Department of Defense-funded University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH). At Georgia Tech, Ranjan has held several leadership positions including chairing ME’s Fluid Mechanics Research Area Group (2017 - 2018), serving as ME’s Associate Chair for Research (2019-present), and as co-chair of the “Hypersonics as a System” task-force, and serving as Interim Vice-President for Interdisciplinary Research (Feb 2021-June 2021). 

    Ranjan joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2014. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a director’s research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2008) and Morris E. Foster Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at Texas A&M University (2009-2014). He earned a bachelor's degree from the NIT-Trichy (India) in 2003, and master's and Ph.D. degrees from the UW-Madison in 2005 and 2007 respectively, all in mechanical engineering. 

    Ranjan’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary area of power conversion, complex fluid flows involving shock and hydrodynamic instabilities, and the turbulent mixing of materials in extreme conditions, such as supersonic and hypersonic flows. Ranjan is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and has received numerous awards for his scientific contributions, including the DOE-Early Career Award (first GT recipient), the NSF CAREER Award, and the US AFOSR Young Investigator award. He was also named the J. Erskine Love Jr. Faculty Fellow in 2015. He was invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2016 US Frontiers in Engineering Symposium. For his educational efforts and mentorship activity, he has received CATERPILLAR Teaching Excellence Award from College of Engineering at Texas A&M, as well as 2013 TAMU ASME Professor Mentorship Award from TAMU student chapter of the ASME. At Georgia Tech, Ranjan served as a Provost’s Teaching and Learning Fellow (PTLF) from 2018-2020, and was named 2021 Governor’s Teaching Fellow. He was also named Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Fellow for 2020-21. 

    Ranjan is currently part of a 10-member Technical Screening Committee of the NAE’s COVID-19 Call for Engineering Action taskforce, an initiative to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Shock Waves and was a former Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering.

    devesh.ranjan@me.gatech.edu

    (404) 385-2922

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Energy Generation, Storage, and Distribution
    • Nuclear
    • Thermal Systems
    Additional Research:
    Nuclear; Thermal Systems

    IRI Connections:

    Andrew Medford

    Andrew Medford

    Andrew Medford

    Assistant Professor

    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.

    andrew.medford@chbe.gatech.edu

    (404) 385-5531

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Biobased Materials
    • Biochemicals
    • Biorefining
    • Biotechnology
    • Fuels & Chemical Processing
    • Hydrogen Production
    • Hydrogen Utilization
    • Materials & Manufacturing
    • Pulp Paper Packaging & Tissue
    • Sustainable Manufacturing
    Additional Research:
    Catalysis, Biochemicals, Biorefining, Chemistry, Sugars, Molecular Simulations, Computational Biology

    IRI Connections:

    Valerie Thomas

    Valerie Thomas

    Valerie Thomas

    Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems
    Professor
    RBI Initiative Lead: Sustainability Analysis

    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.

    valerie.thomas@isye.gatech.edu

    (404) 894-0390

    ISyE Profile

  • Website
  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Biobased Materials
    • Biochemicals
    • Biorefining
    • Biotechnology
    • Gigatechnology
    • Hydrogen Storage & Transport
    • Hydrogen Utilization
    • Pulp Paper Packaging & Tissue
    • Renewable Energy
    • Social & Environmental Impacts
    • Sustainable Engineering
    • Sustainable Manufacturing
    • Use & Conservation
    Additional Research:

    Hydrogen Transport/Storage; Biofuels; ClIMaTe/Environment; Electric Vehicles; System Design & Optimization; Energy and Materials Efficiency; Sustainability; Industrial Ecology; Technology Assessment; Science and Technology Policy


    IRI Connections:

    Meisha Shofner

    Meisha Shofner

    Meisha Shofner

    Professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering

    Meisha L. Shofner is a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, joining the faculty following post-doctoral training at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. in Materials Science from Rice University. Prior to beginning graduate school, she was employed as a design engineer at FMC in the Subsea Engineering Division, working at two plant locations (Houston, Texas and the Republic of Singapore), and she is a registered Professional Engineer in Georgia.

    Shofner’s research area is processing-structure-property relationships of polymers and composites. Specifically, she designs processing strategies to attain hierarchical structures in these materials to improve properties and has discovered scalable processing methods to produce auxetic structures and tensegrity-inspired structures. Additionally, she works with bioderived materials to produce composites with reduced environmental impact.  

    meisha.shofner@mse.gatech.edu

    404.385.7216

    Office Location:
    MRDC 4409

    Shofner Lab

  • MSE Profile Page
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Advanced Composites
    • Materials & Manufacturing
    • Materials and Nanotechnology
    • Renewable Energy
    Additional Research:

    Biomolecular-Solids; Biomaterials; Composites; Polymers; Nanomaterials; Biofuels; Structure-property relationships in polymer nanocomposite materials; producing structural hierarchy in these materials for structural and functional applications.


    IRI Connections:

    Wenke Lee

    Wenke Lee

    Wenke Lee

    Executive Director, Institute for Information Security and Privacy
    Co-Executive Director, SEI
    Professor

    Wenke Lee, Ph.D., is executive director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) and responsible for continuing Georgia Tech's international leadership in cybersecurity research and education. Additionally, he is the John P. Imlay, Jr. Professor of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he has taught since 2001. Previously, he served as director of the IISP's predecessor -- the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) research lab -- from 2012 to 2015. Lee is one of the most prolific and influential security researchers in the world. He has published several dozen, oft-cited research papers at top academic conferences, including the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, USENIX Security, IEEE Security & Privacy ("Oakland"), and the Network & Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. His research expertise includes systems and network security, botnet detection and attribution, malware analysis, virtual machine monitoring, mobile systems security, and detection and mitigation of information manipulation on the Internet. Lee regularly leads large research projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and private industry. Significant discoveries from his research group have been transferred to industry, and in 2006, doing so enabled Lee to co-found Damballa, Inc., which focused on detection and mitigation of advanced persistent threats. Lee’s awards and honors include the “Internet Defense Prize” awarded by Facebook and USENIX in 2015, an “Outstanding Community Service Award” from the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in 2013, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship in 2005, an NSF Career Award in 2002, as well as best paper awards in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Passionate about quality education, Lee serves on the advisory boards of the Faculty of Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the board of trustees at Pace Academy in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1999.

    wenke@cc.gatech.edu

    404.385.2879

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Delivery & Storage
    • Machine Learning
    • Network and Security
    • Policy & Economics
    • Vulnerability Analysis
    Additional Research:

    Data Security & Privacy; Encryption; Internet Infrastructure & Operating Systems; Machine Learning; Cyber Technology


    IRI Connections:

    Debra Lam

    Debra Lam

    Debra Lam

    Founding Director, Partnership for Inclusive Innovation
    Principal Researcher

    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.

    debra.lam@gatech.edu

    (404) 894-4728

    Website

    University, College, and School/Department
    Research Focus Areas:
    • Delivery & Storage
    • Use & Conservation
    Additional Research:
    System Design & Optimization

    IRI Connections:

    Rachel Kuske

    Rachel Kuske

    Rachel Kuske

    Chair
    Professor

    Rachel Ann Kuske is an American-Canadian applied mathematician and Professor and Chair of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

    Kuske received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1992. Her dissertation, Asymptotic Analysis of Random Wave Equations, was supervised by Bernard J. Matkowsky. From 1997 to 2002, she was assistant professor and then associate professor at the University of Minnesota. 

    She is an expert on stochastic and nonlinear dynamics, mathematical modeling, asymptotic methods, and industrial mathematics. She served on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), and as of 2021 she serves on ICERM's board of trustees.

    rachel@math.gatech.edu

    (404) 894-9238

    Website

    University, College, and School/Department

    IRI Connections: