Dragomir Davidovic's research focuses on the exploration of physical properties that emerge in objects when their size approaches nanometer-scale. The objects of study are metallic or insulating particles, molecules, atomic-scale diameter wires, and droplets of one phase surrounded by another phase. Recent advances in lithography enable attachment of these objects to larger scale conducting electrodes, making it possible to explore their physical properties by electronic transport. The properties of nanoscale objects can be fundamentally different from those in bulk. As an example, whereas in bulk metals, the energy spectrum of conduction electrons is continuous, in metallic nanoparticles the spectrum is discrete. As a result, metallic nanoparticles are more like atoms than bulk metals, and nanoparticles are commonly referred to as artificial atoms.

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.

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).

Dr. Bert Bras has been a Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology since September 1992. From 2001 to 2004, he served as the Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Sustainable Technology and Development. 

In 2014, he was named a Brook Byers Professor of Sustainability. He was named the Associate Chair for Administration for the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2016 and briefly served as Interim School Chair in 2018. 

Dr. Bras’ 25-year career as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology equips him with considerable expertise in sustainable design and manufacturing that has taken him through many areas of industry, from automotive to alternative energy.

He holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Twente (Netherlands) and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Houston. Prior to completing his Ph.D., he worked at the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN).

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.

Vida Jamali earned her Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Rice University under the guidance of Professor Matteo Pasquali and her B.S. in chemical engineering from Sharif University of Technology. Jamali was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Paul Alivisato's lab at UC Berkeley and Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute before joining Georgia Tech. The Jamali Research Group uses experimental, theoretical, and computational tools such as liquid phase transmission electron microscopy, rheology, statistical and colloidal thermodynamics, and machine learning to study the underlying physical principles that govern the dynamics, statistics, mechanics, and self-organization of nanostructured soft materials, in and out of thermal equilibrium, from both fundamental and technological aspects.

Ching-Hua Huang, Ph.D., is the Turnipseed Family Chair and Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Huang received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Huang’s expertise includes environmental chemistry, advanced water/wastewater treatment technology, contaminants of emerging concern, sustainable water reuse, waste remediation and resource recovery. Huang has supervised many research projects sponsored by various agencies, and has published more than 170 peer-reviewed journal papers, book chapters and conference proceeding papers. She is the Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society's Environmental Science & Technology Water and the Editorial Advisory Board member of Environmental Science & Technology. 

Professor C. P. Wong is the Charles Smithgall Institute Endowed Chair and Regents’ Professor. After his doctoral study, he was awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with Nobel Laureate Professor Henry Taube at Stanford University. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was with AT&T Bell Laboratories for many years and became an AT&T Bell Laboratories Fellow in 1992. 

His research interests lie in the fields of polymeric materials, electronic packaging and interconnect, interfacial adhesions, nano-functional material syntheses and characterizations. nano-composites such as well-aligned carbon nanotubes, grahenes, lead-free alloys, flip chip underfill, ultra high k capacitor composites and novel lotus effect coating materials. 

He received many awards, among those, the AT&T Bell Labs Fellow Award in 1992, the IEEE CPMT Society Outstanding Sustained Technical Contributions Award in 1995, the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Faculty Best Research Paper Award in 1999, Best MS, PhD and undergraduate Thesis Awards in 2002 and 2004, respectively, the University Press (London) Award of Excellence, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000, the IEEE EAB Education Award in 2001, the IEEE CPMT Society Exceptional Technical Contributions Award in 2002, the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award in 2004, Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Advisor Award in 2005, the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Field Award in 2006, the Sigma Xi’s Monie Ferst Award in 2007, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME)’s TEEM Award in 2008, the 2009 IEEE -CPMT David Feldman Outstanding Contribution Award and the 2009 Penn State University Distinguished Alumni Award. The 2012 International Dresden Barkhausen Award (Germany). 

He holds over 65 U.S. patents, numerous international patents, has published over 1000 technical papers, 12 books and a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the USA since 2000.

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.

Sheng Dai, Ph.D., P.E., earned his degrees from Tongji University and Georgia Tech. He worked as an ORISE postdoc at the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, and returned to Georgia Tech as a faculty member in 2015. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ocean Science and Engineering. and holds a courtesy appointment at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Dai's group addresses emerging energy and environment challenges through studying subsurface geomechanics, geomaterials characterization, energy geotechnics, bio-inspired geotechnics, flow in porous media, and granular dynamics. His research has been funded by federal funding agencies (DOE, NSF, NASA, DOT), national labs (INL, NETL), and industry (AECOM, GTI, Leidos).  Dr. Dai has been recognized for his research and teaching, including being a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the ORISE Fellowship, the Bill Schutz Junior Faculty Teaching Award, and the Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows at Georgia Tech.

He is an associated editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth and Advances in Geo-Energy Research, an editorial advisor of Geomechanics for Energy and Environment, and serves on the Pressure Core Advisory Board for U.S. Geological Survey, the GOM2 Marine Test Technical Advisory Committee for UT/DOE, the National Gas Hydrate Program for NETL, and the Task Force Leader of TC308 Energy Geotechnics of ISSMGE.