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.

Dr. Beril Toktay is Regents' Professor and the Brady Family Chairholder in the Scheller College of Business. She serves as Executive Director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. A globally recognized leader in sustainable operations management, Dr. Toktay has dedicated her career to bridging academic excellence with real-world impact in sustainability research and education.

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2005, Dr. Toktay has established herself as an influential leader in sustainability scholarship and cross-institute initiatives. She founded the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business and co-created the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS). Under her leadership as Executive Faculty Co-Director, the SLS team expanded sustainability-focused academic community engagement across Georgia Tech until its 2024 institutionalization as the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education within BBISS. Most recently, she co-chaired Georgia Tech's Sustainability Next Strategic Plan Implementation Team, under which Georgia Tech recommitted to growing BBISS, elevated and restructured the Office of Sustainability, and launched the Sustain-X startup accelerator, educational innovation and transdisciplinary research seed grant programs, the Climate Action Plan, and the Sustainability Education Curriculum Committee.

A Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society, Dr. Toktay is internationally recognized for her research in sustainable operations management spanning circular economy models and climate mitigation strategies. Her circular economy research includes developing improved Extended Producer Responsibility cost allocation mechanisms recommended for adoption by the UK government. Her climate mitigation work features in a multi-university project that identified Georgia's top twenty decarbonization solutions, catalyzing the creation of the 70-member Drawdown Georgia Business Compact facilitated by the Ray C. Anderson Center.

Dr. Toktay serves on the boards of the New York Climate Exchange, Georgia Cleantech Innovation Hub, and Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. Her former professional service includes VP for Marketing, Communications and Advocacy at INFORMS, Department Co-Editor for "Health, Environment, and Society" at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Area Editor for "Environment, Energy, and Sustainability" at Operations Research. She served as the Scheller College of Business ADVANCE Professor from 2012-2020.

Dr. Toktay’s research has earned recognition including being named among the World's Top Business and Management Scientists (Research.com, 2024),the  M&SOM Best Paper Award (2021), the M&SOM Responsible Research Award (2019), and the Management Science Best Paper in Operations Management Award (2015).

Her commitment to developing the next generation of sustainability leaders earned her Georgia Tech's Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award (2018) and recognition as a E3 Impact Award Finalist (2019) by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce for Serve-Learn-Sustain's impact on Atlanta communities. She co-developed the Carbon Reduction Challenge, an interdisciplinary program that engages undergraduate students in climate intrapreneurship and which earned top ten finalist recognition from Reimagine Education among 1,184 projects from 39 countries.

Dr. Toktay holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT, an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, and B.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering and Mathematics from Bogazici University.

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.

Dr. Brigitte Stepanov is a war researcher and Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies. She is the founder and director of the Energy Today Lab, an interdisciplinary research hub that reflects creatively and analytically on the energy - broadly defined from labor to thermodynamics - of our contemporary world. Her research interests focus on 20th- and 21st-century French, North African, and Sub-Saharan African literary and visual culture. Trained as a scholar of French and Francophone Studies and as a mathematician, she holds degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada and a PhD from Brown University. At Brown, she was a Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and awarded an Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence.

Before coming to Georgia Tech, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of French and Arabic at Grinnell College, where she organized the Theories of Decolonization working group with the support of a grant from Grinnell’s Center for the Humanities. She has been a Silas Palmer Fellow at the Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford University, a Lecturer at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 in France, and a selected participant of the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar “The Search for Humanity after Atrocity.” Additionally, she has trained in conflict mediation, having most recently taken part in the Peacebuilding Institute hosted by the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at EMU.

Her current book project, Cruelty, War, Fiction: Redefining the In-Human, explores excessive forms of violence in warfare and their representation in fiction and visual media from Algeria, Rwanda, and France. She argues that the concept of cruelty is fundamental to any discussion of political instability, war, and crimes against humanity. More broadly, this project examines the relationship between the evolution of warfare over the last eighty years and shifting conceptions of the human in the face of “universal” manifestations of violence. This work is closely tied to her second research project, which examines literary, artistic, and cultural responses to radioactive fallout and its ensuing ecological crisis following France’s nuclear arsenal testing in Algeria and the South Pacific. Dr. Stepanov’s scholarship has appeared in Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, The French Review, Voix plurielles, and in the volume Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East (Routledge, 2021). Dr. Stepanov is also the translator of works by Peter Szendy and Laura Odello and has worked with the Derrida Seminar Translation Project.

Finally, she is a photographer, focusing on archiving memory and the geometry of ecological forms. Both facets of her work are preoccupied with minute documentation – be it to collect visual reminders of patches of lichen or the detailed brickwork of a monument. Among other venues, her work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and AS220 in Providence. Her recent exhibit, “Why I’ll Always Dream of Poland,” supported by a grant from the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown, features photographs she took while conducting research on Holocaust remembrance in Israel, Germany, France, Ukraine, Poland, Canada, and the US. Shedding light on public mourning and memorialization, the project also reflects on personal loss and family histories and attempts to bridge the gap between private experiences and public sites of inhuman violence.

Kate Pride Brown is an environmental and political sociologist whose research focuses on a range of issues, including environmental activism in Russia and conservation policy in the United States. She received her doctorate from Vanderbilt University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment. Her book, Saving the Sacred Sea: The Power of Civil Society in an Age of Authoritarianism and Globalization (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines the conflict between local and transnational environmentalists, multinational corporations, and the Russian government over the future of Lake Baikal, the largest, deepest and oldest freshwater lake on Earth. While she continues to study environmental issues in Russia, especially around Lake Baikal, Dr. Brown has also published research on water and energy politics and policy in the United States. She is currently studying the "nuclear renaissance" in the southeastern United States. Among other honors, she has received a Fulbright Fellowship, a Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State, and funding from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her research has appeared in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Energy Research and Social Science, Environmental Politics, Environmental Sociology, Ethnography, Memory Studies, Nature and Culture, Research in Political Sociology, Social Movement Studies, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, Water Policy and WIREs Water.

In the Kaiser group, we work to improve the understanding of the emissions and atmospheric processes that influence air quality and climate. Our research focuses largely on volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are reactive organic species that are precursors to ozone and aerosol. Our work is grounded in insights from field, and aimed at understanding atmospheric composition at broad spatial and temporal scales.

Daniel Matisoff teaches and conducts research in the areas of public policy, energy policy, and corporate sustainability. His research focuses on the effectiveness and efficiency of comparative approaches to addressing environmental problems and the adoption and diffusion of energy technologies and policies. He currently is a fellow with the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainability, and is affiliated with the Strategic Energy Institute and Center for Urban Innovation. He has participated in over $4 million of sponsored research through the National Science Foundation, the European Union Center for Excellence, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Georgia Department of Transportation, and the National Electric Energy Testing Research and Applications Center. His recent research has resulted in publications in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Environmental and Resource Economics, Energy Economics, Environmental Science and Technology, Energy Policy, and Business Strategy and the Environment, among other outlets. His current research interests include: evaluating the effectiveness of voluntary eco-labeling programs; the effectiveness of incentives for solar electricity; the adoption of smart grid technologies and policies; and the impact of large scale solar adoption on consumer rates and bills.

Dr. Jennifer Hirsch is an applied cultural anthropologist recognized internationally for fostering university and community engagement in sustainability and climate action. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, she is the inaugural Director of the Center for Sustainable Communities Research & Education (SCoRE), creating a culture of collaboration in which students, faculty, and staff engage in long-term relationships with community, government, and industry partners to build sustainable communities.

Dr. Hirsch’s research and teaching interests focus on: 1) equity in the sustainable built environment; 2) grassroots sustainability innovation; and 3) community leadership in energy equity.

Dr. Hirsch is also a co-founder and lead coordinator of RCE Greater Atlanta – a Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development - officially acknowledged in 2017 by the United Nations University. She is also Adjunct Associate Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning. She serves on the faculty of The Asset-Based Community Development Institute hosted by DePaul University and on the Board of Directors of AASHE (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education).

Before coming to Georgia Tech, Dr. Hirsch worked in Chicago as Associate Director of Study Abroad at Northwestern University; as Urban Anthropology Director at The Field Museum of Natural History; and as an independent consultant with clients such as the City of Cleveland, Enterprise Community Partners, the U.S. Green Building Council, The Institute of Cultural Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Joliet Junior College. Dr. Hirsch received a Bachelor’s degree in American Culture from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena is an Assistant Professor and the Goizueta Junior Faculty Rotating Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA.

His group focuses on understanding and control of crystallographic structure and effects on electronic dynamics at the nanoscale of low-cost semiconductors for optoelectronic applications. Juan-Pablo’s group works on advanced deposition techniques, with emphasis on low-cost and high throughput, as well as advanced characterization methods that include synchrotron-based mapping and imaging approaches with nanoscale resolution.

His research program at Georgia Tech has attracted funding from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, which funds cutting-edge research on new materials for solar energy conversion.

His work has been cited over 28,000 times (h-index of 59) making him a top cited researcher as recognized by the Web of Science Group, Highly Cited Researchers-cross-field (2019, 2021) and Chemistry (2020), and Nature Index, Leading early career researcher in materials science (2019).