Elizabeth Qian joined the Daniel Guggenheim School in November 2022. She holds a joint appointment at Georgia Tech as Assistant Professor in the Schools of Aerospace Engineering and Computational Science and Engineering. Her interdisciplinary research develops new computational methods to enable engineering design and decision-making for complex systems. Her specialties are in developing efficient surrogate models through model reduction and scientific machine learning, and in developing multifidelity approaches to accelerate expensive computations in uncertainty quantification, optimization, and control. 

Elizabeth previously held a postdoctoral appointment as von Karman Instructor at Caltech in the Department of Computing + Mathematical Sciences. She has been the recipient of many awards, including a Caltech-wide award for teaching bestowed by the undergraduate student body, the 2020 SIAM Student Paper Prize, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She is also an alumna of the U.S. Fulbright student program. She earned her PhD, SM, and SB degrees from the MIT Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics.

Dr. Casey Wichman is an applied microeconomist working on issues at the intersection of environmental and public economics. His research focuses on how people interact with the natural and built environment, and what that behavior reveals about the value of environmental amenities. His research spans water and energy demand, valuation of environmental resources and infrastructure, urban transportation, public goods provision, demand for outdoor recreation, and climate change. Methodologically, he relies on the application of program evaluation techniques, often using large micro-data sets, to estimate causal effects of environmental policies on economic behavior. 

Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Wichman served as the Research Director of the Energy and Environment Lab at the University of Chicago and as a Fellow at Resources for the Future, an environmental economics think-tank in Washington, DC. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2015, and his doctoral work earned outstanding doctoral dissertation awards from both the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and the Association of Agricultural and Applied Economists.

Maryam Saeedifard received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran, in 1998 and 2002, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2008, all in electrical engineering.

From 2007 to 2008, she was with ABB Corporate Research Center, Dattwil-Baden, Switzerland, working in the power electronic systems group. She joined Purdue University in January 2010, where she served as an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since January 2014, she has been on the ECE faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Her main research focus has been in the area of Power Electronics and Applications of Power Electronics in Power Systems and Transportation Systems. She has served on the technical program committees of the IEEE Power Electronics Society, IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC), and IEEE Industrial Electronics Conference (IECON). She is an editor for IEEE Trans. on Sustainable Energy, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, and IEEE Trans. on Power Electronics.

Michael’s love of design at all scales is evident in his teaching, research and practice. 

He is a registered architect, director of the Modern Cities Europe Program, and creative director at Gamble + Gamble Architects in Atlanta. From 2015 to 2022, he directed the Master of Architecture program in the School of Architecture.  His design-driven research operates at a variety of scales, from house to city, with emphasis on innovation, alternative energy, and building technology pursued within the context of a larger concern for the creation of healthy, well-conceived environments. He has received numerous awards for excellence in design and scholarship. www.gg-architects.com 

Michael was the first point of contact for the $30 million Living Building gift, a.k.a. Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design (KBISD), and actively participated in pre-planning and fund acquisition, design competition and team formation, all the way through building execution, implementation and certification.  He also led a series of interdisciplinary design studios that paralleled the effort, and chaired the Academic and Research Council connected to the project.  He is co-author of the novel organizational structure of the living building workgroups, now tested, and currently  serves as chair of the KBISD advisory council and leads the Living Building Pilot Project Program, comprised of faculty, researchers and students from across campus, now in round three of funding. 

Michael’s research has received grants from The Alcoa Foundation, The Kendeda Foundation, Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, the National Endowments of the Arts, and received First Prize for Research in an international competition sponsored by the Environmental Design and Research Association. Gamble has published essays on the design of the public realm in Harvard Design Magazine with W. Jude Leblanc. 

Peralta-Yahya has been part of Georgia Tech since 2012. Her diverse research group composed of chemists, biologists, and chemical engineers works in the area of engineering biology, drawing from principles of biochemistry and engineering to build systems for chemical detection and production. Specifically, her group focuses on the development of G protein-coupled receptors for biotechnology and biomedical applications, and the engineering of biological systems for the production of fuels and functionalized plant natural products. Early on, her work was recognized with several awards including a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a DuPont Young Professor Award, a Kavli Fellowship by the US Academy of Science, and an NIH MIRA award. Her group’s key accomplishments are 1) the standardization of GPCR-based sensors in yeast to reduce the cost and accelerate the pace of drug discovery for these receptors, which are the target of over 30% of FDA approved drugs, and 2) the development of advanced biofuels, including pinene, which, when dimerized, has sufficient energy content to power rockets and missiles.  Today, her group is funded to work on these and other cutting edge areas – including how to power a rocket returning from Mars and how to make synthetic cells learn without evolution – by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

Leigh McCook, principal research associate at Georgia Tech, also serves as deputy director for IPaT, director of STEM programs for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and previously served as division chief for fifteen years in GTRI’s socio-technical systems division in the Information and Communications Lab. She has been with Georgia Tech for more than 30 years.

As deputy director in IPaT, McCook works to build new research partnerships across campus as well as develop government, industry, and international programs. While she continues to conduct research, McCook's focus has centered on growing IPaT’s research portfolio of state government and industry projects, particularly in education, humanitarian systems, health and smart cities.

McCook’s GTRI activities include directing research and outreach programs for regional and national centers and managing a variety of research and STEM programs funded by federal, state, and local agencies.

Her career expertise includes technology transfer, research translation, outreach, planning, and program management, specifically in areas related to emergency preparedness and response, homeland security, community resiliency, and education. She has managed researchers working a variety of programs in health, learning technology, planning, technology assessment, and integration, policy analysis and research, technology transfer, education, training, public safety, humanitarian, and emergency response.

McCook served as program manager for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA) Homeland Security/Emergency Response programs at the Georgia Tech Research Institute since 2000. Twenty years of program support to GEMA has resulted in over $53M work of funded project work at GTRI.

McCook’s experience also includes having served as associate director for technology transfer and outreach for EPA’s Hazardous Substance Research Centers (South & Southwest). In this capacity she led technology transfer, research translation, and outreach activities for the five-university consortium.

McCook has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on projects for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Georgia Department and Family and Child Services, the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, the Atlanta Urban Area Security Initiative, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Southeast Regional Research Initiative.

I'm an Associate Professor of Biogeochemistry in the School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

My research explores the ways in which Earth's biosphere and planetary boundary conditions act to reshape ocean/atmosphere chemistry and climate, how these interactions have evolved over time, and how they might be engineered moving forward. The work I do is inherently interdisciplinary, and utilizes an ensemble of tools including computer models of ocean, sediment, and soil biogeochemistry, stable isotope and trace element tracers, and analysis of modern natural systems.

Dr. Annalisa Bracco is a professor at Georgia Tech with extensive background in computational fluid dynamics and physical oceanography. Her research interests include coastal ocean circulation, with focus on meso- and submesoscale processes, ocean predictability and inverse dynamics, impacts of physical forcing on ecosystems, and climate model validation. Her group has been involved in field collections during the Deepwater Horizon spill (July/Aug. 2010) and was back in the Gulf in the summer of 2011.

Tom Fuller is Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Georgia Tech. Dr. Fuller received a BS from the University of Utah in Chemical Engineering in 1982. Dr. Fuller then served for five years in the U.S. Navy working as a Nuclear Engineer. In 1992 he obtained a Ph.D. from UC, Berkeley also in Chemical Engineering. 

Subsequently, Dr. Fuller developed advanced lithium batteries while working as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He then moved to United Technologies. He was responsible for technology development, design, assembly, and test of cell stacks for UTC Fuel Cells. 

His research group at Georgia Tech is focused on durability challenges for electrochemical systems. For the last eight years Dr. Fuller has been a Technical Editor for the Journal of the Electrochemical Society. In 2009 Dr. Fuller was named a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society.