Baratunde A. Cola is a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his degrees from Vanderbilt University and Purdue University, all in mechanical engineering, and was a starting fullback on the Vanderbilt football team as an undergrad. Cola has received a number of prestigious early career research awards including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE) in 2012 from President Obama for his work in nanotechnology, energy, and outreach to high school art and science teachers and students; the AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science in 2013; and the 2015 Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In addition to research and teaching, Cola is the founder and CEO of Carbice Corporation, which sells a leading thermal management solution for the global electronics industry.

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. 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.

Chen received his Ph.D in Nankai University, China. He joined the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in May 2009.

Wenshan Cai joined the faculty of the Georgia Institute of Technology in January 2012 as an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials at Stanford University. His scientific research is in the area of nanophotonic materials and devices, in which he has made a major impact on the evolving field of plasmonics and metamaterials. Cai has published more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and the total citations of his recent papers have reached approxIMaTely 10,000 within the past 10 years. He authored the book, Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications, which is used as a textbook or a major reference at many universities around the world. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2000 and 2002, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2008, all in electrical/electronic engineering. Cai is the recipient of several national and international distinctions, including the OSA/SPIE Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award (2014), the CooperVision Science & Technology Award (2016), and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2017).

Marilyn Brown is a Regents' and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. She joined Georgia Tech in 2006 after a distinguished career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she led several national climate change mitigation studies and became a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. 

Her research focuses on the design and impact of policies aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, with an emphasis on the electric utility industry, the integration of energy efficiency, demand response, and solar resources, and ways of improving resiliency to disruptions. Her books include Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Green Savings: How Policies and Markets Drive Energy Efficiency (Praeger, 2015), and Climate Change and Global Energy Security (MIT Press, 2011). She has authored more than 250 publications. Her work has had significant visibility in the policy arena as evidenced by her numerous briefings and testimonies before state legislative bodies and Committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Dr. Brown co-founded the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and chaired its Board of Directors for several years. She has served on the Boards of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Alliance to Save Energy, and was a commissioner with the Bipartisan Policy Center. She has served on eight National Academies committees and is an Editor of Energy Policy and an Editorial Board member of Energy Efficiency and Energy Research and Social Science. She served two terms (2010-2017) as a Presidential appointee and regulator on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider. From 2014-2018 she served on DOE’s Electricity Advisory Committee, where she led the Smart Grid Subcommittee.

Abdel-Khalik joined the Georgia Tech faculty as the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor in 1987. He was appointed to his current position as the Southern Nuclear Distinguished Professor in 1993. He served as Associate Director of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering between 1990 and 1992 and as the Georgia Tech Secretary of the Faculty between 2002 and 2006. He served as a member of the USNRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) between 2006 and 2012, including two years as Chairman (2009-2011).  Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, Abdel-Khalik served as a faculty member in the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Department (1976-1987) and as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Engineering (1973-1975) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Abdel-Khalik also served as a Senior Engineer at Babcock and Wilcox Nuclear Power Generation Division (1975); as a Guest Research Scientist at the Nuclear Research Center in Karlsruhe, Germany (1979); and as an Invited Professor at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (1982).

Abdel-Khalik currently serves as a member of the External Advisory Boards for the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University and the Mechanical Engineering Department of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He also serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for Badr University in Cairo, Egypt.

Dr. Alexeev came to Georgia Tech at the beginning of 2008 as an assistant professor. His research background is in the area of fluid mechanics. He uses computer simulations to solve engineering problems in complex fluids, multiphase flows, fluid-structure interactions, and soft materials. As a part of his graduate research at Technion, he investigated resonance oscillations in gases and probed how periodic shock waves excited at resonance can enhance agglomeration of small airborne particles, a process which is important in air pollution control technology. He also investigated wave propagation in vibrated granular materials and its effect on fluidization of inelastic granules. During postdoctoral studies at TU Darmstadt, he examined how microstructures on heated walls can be harnessed to control thermocapillary flows in thin liquid films and to enhance heat transport in the fluid. That could be beneficial in many practical applications, especially in microgravity. At the University of Pittsburgh, he studied the motion of micrometer-sized, compliant particles on patterned substrates to develop efficient means of controlling movement of such particles in microfluidic devices. Such substrates are needed to facilitate various biological assays and tissue engineering studies dealing with individual cells.

Michael Filler is a professor and the Traylor Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Cornell University and Stanford University, respectively, prior to completing postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology. Filler has been recognized for his research and teaching with the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award, CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and AVS Dorothy M. and Earl S. Hoffman Award. Filler also heads Nanovation, a forum to address the big questions, big challenges, and big opportunities of nanotechnology.

Fedorov's background is in thermal/fluid sciences, chemical reaction engineering as well as in applied mathematics. His laboratory works at the intersection between mechanical and chemical engineering and solid state physics and analytical chemistry with the focus on portable/ distributed power generation with synergetic CO₂ capture; thermal management of high power dissipation devices and electronics cooling; special surfaces and nanostructured interfaces for catalysis, heat and moisture management; and development of novel bioanalytical instrumentation and chemical sensors. Fedorov joined Georgia Tech in 2000 as an assistant professor after finishing his postdoctoral work at Purdue University.

Erturk began at Georgia Tech in May 2011 as an Assistant Professor, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2016 and became a full Professor in 2019. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked as a Research Scientist in the Center for Intelligent Material Systems and Structures at Virginia Tech (2009-2011). His postdoctoral research interests included theory and experiments of smart structures for applications ranging from aeroelastic energy harvesting to bio-inspired actuation. His Ph.D. dissertation (2009) was centered on experimentally validated electromechanical modeling of piezoelectric energy harvesters using analytical and approxIMaTe analytical techniques. Prior to his Ph.D. studies in Engineering Mechanics at Virginia Tech, Erturk completed his M.S. degree (2006) in Mechanical Engineering at METU with a thesis on analytical and semi-analytical modeling of spindle-tool dynamics in machining centers for predicting chatter stability and identifying interface dynamics between the assembly components.

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.