Benoit Montreuil is the Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He also serves as Director of the Physical Internet Center and Executive Director of the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute. 

Dr. Montreuil is leading the International Physical Internet Initiative, engaging academic, industry and government leaders worldwide into research and innovation projects on smart, hyperconnected and sustainable logistics, supply chains, transportation, businesses and regions. 

His main research interests generically lie in developing concepts, methodologies and technologies for creating, optimizing, transforming and enabling businesses, supply chains and value creation networks to thrive in a fast evolving hyperconnected world. 

He stands at the crossroads of industrial and systems engineering; operations research; computer sciences; operations, logistics, supply chain, strategic management; and sustainability science. His research builds mostly on a synthesis of optimization modeling and mathematical programming, discrete & agent-based simulation modeling, systems science & design theory. 

Dr. Montreuil is a world-renowned scientist who has introduced in collaboration with students and colleagues an imposing set of paradigm-challenging leading edge contributions through nearly four decades of research, shared through 250 scientific publications, 250 scientific communications and numerous keynote speeches at international scientific and professional conferences. He has extensive advisory, entrepreneurial and collaborative research experience with industry and government. 

Through his career, he has received numerous awards, recently including DC Velocity’s Rainmaker of the Year and The Physical Internet Pioneer Award for his outstanding and inspiring vision. 

From 2000 to 2014, Dr. Montreuil has held the Canada Research Chair in Business Engineering. He is a founding member of the CIRRELT Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation. He is also past president of the College-Industry Council on Material Handling Education and its Liaison to the Board of Governors of MHI, the North American industry association of material handling, logistics and supply chain solutions and technology providers. 

Dr. Montreuil graduated in 1978 from the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR). He earned a master’s and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1980 and 1982 respectively. After serving on the industrial engineering faculty of UQTR and Purdue University, from 1988 to 2014, he was a Professor of operations and decisions systems in the faculty of Business Administration at Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada.

Ben Emerson completed his Ph. D. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in August, 2013. Since then, Ben has worked as a Research Engineer at the Ben T. Zinn Combustion Lab at Georgia Tech. Ben’s research portfolio includes projects on combustion instabilities, alternative fuels, and combustion system R&D with a core focus and motivation of cleaner combustion. Ben’s research primarily consists of three core competencies, which are experimental combustion system development, combustor diagnostics, and combustion theory and modeling. Ben’s combustion system development work spans a wide variety of applications, from small lab-scale burners to combustor rigs that test full-scale gas turbine combustor hardware. His combustor diagnostics work encompasses the state of the art optical diagnostic techniques for reacting flow field measurements and imaging, and aims to implement those techniques in both laboratory-scale and large-scale rig tests. Finally, Ben’s combustion theory and modeling work is geared towards analysis of experimental datasets, development of reduced-order engineering tools, and the development of a suite of hydrodynamic stability analysis tools. Together, these core competencies form the pillars of Ben’s research, which facilitates the design of cleaner-burning combustion systems.

Dr. Chance retired from Global Thermostat at the end of 2022, where he served as a Senior Science Advisor. He continues at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he serves as an Adjunct Professor. Dr. Chance began his career with Honeywell Corporation, holding a number of research positions including Research Manager for Electronic Materials.

In 1986, he joined Exxon as the Director of their Polymers and Fluids Laboratory, later serving as Division Manager for their Paramins Technology division, and as Distinguished Scientific Advisor in ExxonMobil’s Corporate Strategic Research Laboratories. Dr. Chance retired from ExxonMobil in 2006 and joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as a faculty member with a joint appointment in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, continuing also as Distinguished Scientific Advisor Emeritus at ExxonMobil from 2006-2009. 

He joined Algenol Biofuels (2009-2019) as Executive Vice President for Engineering. Dr. Chance's scientific interests are focused on CO² capture and utilization, including Direct Air Capture, as a mitigation strategy for climate change. 

Dr. Chance has organized several international scientific meetings and served on numerous university and industrial advisory boards. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, edited two books, and authored over 30 patents. He was elected Fellow in The American Physical Society in 1988 and was the 2018 recipient of the Lawrence B. Evans Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, an institute level award for career achievement.

Professor Citrin earned a B.A. from Williams College (1985) and a M.S. (1987) and a Ph.D. (1991) from the University of Illinois, all in physics, where his dissertation was on the optical properties of semiconductor quantum wires. Subsequently, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany (1992-1993) and Center Fellow at the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan (1993-1995). Dr. Citrin was an assistant professor of physics and materials science at Washington State University (1995 to 2001).

Professor Citrin joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2001 where his work focuses on terahertz technology and nanotechnology. He is a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and of a Friedrich Bessel Award from the Alexander Von Humboldt Stiftung. In addition, he is Project Coordinator on Nonlinear Optics and Dynamics at Georgia Tech-CNRS UMI 2958 located at Georgia Tech-Lorraine. Professor Citrin’s research in terahertz imaging is featured in the Georgia Tech press release, ”Imaging Technique Unlocks the Secrets of 17th Century Artists"; a list of some media placements from the press release may be found at http://photonics.georgiatech-metz.fr/node/33.

Research interests: 

• Terahertz nondestructive testing of materials
• Terahertz characterization of art and cultural heritage
• Chaos and nonlinear dynamics in external-cavity semiconductor lasers
• Nanophotonics
• High-speed electronic, photonic, and optoelectronic devices
• Nonlinear optical properties of semiconductor materials and devices

Bojan Petrovic joined Georgia Tech in 2007 as a Professor. Prior to that he acquired industrial experience as a Fellow Scientist in Westinghouse Science and Technology where his primary responsibility was as the project Deputy Director on the development of the advanced, modular IRIS reactor.

Dr. Petrovic's current research focuses on advanced reactor design, nuclear fuel cycle and waste management, and related modeling and simulation methods.

Over the past ten years, he has been involved in the development of the IRIS Reactor, within an international team of 19 organizations from ten countries. IRIS is an advanced medium power (335 MWe) integral-type PWR, based on proven light-water technology, but incorporating many innovative solutions that improve its operation, safety, security, and economics. Advanced reactors have the potential to offer full benefit in synergy with advanced fuel cycles. Recently, the focus of this research is shifting to judicious selection of fuel cycle, reprocessing, and partition and transmutation options, which  may significantly reduce the radiotoxicity of spent nuclear fuel and enable its safe and economical ultimate disposal.

Novel reactor designs and advanced fuel cycles pose new challenges and require improved, more accurate methods of modeling and simulations. Dr. Petrovic's interest is in developing approaches for using Monte Carlo and hybrid deterministic-Monte Carlo methods (for eigenvalue as well as shielding applications) in a way that will be practical and relevant for analysis of complex nuclear systems.

Dr. Petrovic has a strong interest in interdisciplinary areas, and his research projects have included collaboration related to industrial and medical applications of nuclear technology. His recent research in computational medical physics focuses on proton therapy. His research has been sponsored by the Department of Energy, industry and utilities.

Alan Erera is a Manhattan Associates/Dabbiere Chair and the Associate Chair for Research in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also the faculty director for the M.S. in Supply Chain Engineering program, Co-Director for Global Transportation in the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute, and Co-Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Panama Logistics Innovation & Research Center.

His research focuses on transportation and logistics systems planning and control, with an emphasis on planning under uncertainty and real-time operational control.  His recent work has addressed dynamic vehicle routing systems for same-day distribution; resilient logistics network design for food supply chains; service network design, linehaul equipment management, and driver scheduling for consolidation freight carriers; robust container fleet management for global shipping companies; and robust and flexible vehicle routing system planning and control for distribution companies. He has written extensively in these subject areas, and has delivered over 100 technical presentations and invited lectures. His research program has been supported by federal agencies (DHS, USDOT, NSF) and major U.S. freight carriers and manufacturing firms.

He received his B.S. Eng. from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Dan Kotlyar is an Assistant Professor in the Nuclear and Radiological Engineering, G.W.W. School of Mechanical Engineering. He received his B.Sc. in Engineering in 2008, MSc in Nuclear Engineering in 2010, and PhD in Nuclear Engineering in 2013 from Ben-Gurion University, Israel. In 2014, he joined the University of Cambridge as a Research Associate in the Engineering Design Center. In 2014, he was elected as a Research Fellow at Jesus College. He is the recipient of the NRC Faculty Development Fellowship. Dr. Kotlyar’s research interests include development of numerical methods and algorithms for coupled Monte Carlo, fuel depletion and thermal hydraulic codes. In particular, he specializes in applying these methods to the analysis of advanced reactor systems. Dr. Kotlyar’s research also focuses on optimizing the performance of various fuel cycles in terms of fuel utilization, proliferation, and cost. Dr. Kotlyar profoundly believes in education through research and thus integrates practical reactor system design into his lectures.

Dr. Garimella began at Tech in August 2003 as an Associate Professor and Director of the Sustainable Thermal Systems Laboratory. Prior, he was an Associate Professor at Iowa State University, an Assistant and Associate Professor at Western Michigan University, a Research Scientist at Battelle Memorial Institute, and a Senior Engineer at General Motors.