Milton Mueller is an internationally prominent scholar specializing in the political economy of information and communication. The author of seven books and scores of journal articles, his work informs not only public policy but also science and technology studies, law, economics, communications, and international studies. His books Networks and States: The global politics of Internet governance (MIT Press, 2010) and Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2002) are acclaimed scholarly accounts of the global governance regime emerging around the Internet. Mueller’s research employs the theoretical tools of institutional economics, STS and political economy, as well as historical, qualitative and quantitative methods. Mueller’s prominence in scholarship is matched by his prominence in policy practice. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Internet Governance Project (IGP), a policy analysis center for global Internet governance. Since its founding in 2004, IGP has played a prominent role in shaping global Internet policies and institutions such as ICANN and the Internet Governance Forum. He has participated in proceedings and policy development activities of ICANN, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and regulatory proceedings in the European Commission, China, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He has served as an expert witness in prominent legal cases related to domain names and telecommunication policy. He was recently elected to the advisory committee of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and appointed in 2014 to the IANA Stewardship Coordination Group. Mueller has also been a practical institution-builder in the scholarly world, where he led the creation of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), an international association of scholars.

Wenke Lee, Ph.D., is executive director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) and responsible for continuing Georgia Tech's international leadership in cybersecurity research and education. Additionally, he is the John P. Imlay, Jr. Professor of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he has taught since 2001. Previously, he served as director of the IISP's predecessor -- the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) research lab -- from 2012 to 2015. Lee is one of the most prolific and influential security researchers in the world. He has published several dozen, oft-cited research papers at top academic conferences, including the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, USENIX Security, IEEE Security & Privacy ("Oakland"), and the Network & Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. His research expertise includes systems and network security, botnet detection and attribution, malware analysis, virtual machine monitoring, mobile systems security, and detection and mitigation of information manipulation on the Internet. Lee regularly leads large research projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and private industry. Significant discoveries from his research group have been transferred to industry, and in 2006, doing so enabled Lee to co-found Damballa, Inc., which focused on detection and mitigation of advanced persistent threats. Lee’s awards and honors include the “Internet Defense Prize” awarded by Facebook and USENIX in 2015, an “Outstanding Community Service Award” from the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in 2013, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship in 2005, an NSF Career Award in 2002, as well as best paper awards in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Passionate about quality education, Lee serves on the advisory boards of the Faculty of Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the board of trustees at Pace Academy in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1999.

Debra Lam is the Founding Director of the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, a statewide public-private partnership committed to investing in innovative solutions for shared economic prosperity. She continues to lead smart communities and urban innovation work at Georgia Tech. Prior to this, she served as Pittsburgh’s inaugural Chief of Innovation & Performance where she oversaw all technology, sustainability, performance, and innovation functions of city government. Before that, she was a management consultant at a global engineering and design firm, Arup. She has received various awards, including being named one of the top 100 most influential people in digital government by Apolitcal.

She has worked and lived in the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A graduate of Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley, Debra serves on the board of the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta and was most recently appointed by the U.S Department of Commerce to the Internet of Things Advisory Board.

Rachel Ann Kuske is an American-Canadian applied mathematician and Professor and Chair of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Kuske received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1992. Her dissertation, Asymptotic Analysis of Random Wave Equations, was supervised by Bernard J. Matkowsky. From 1997 to 2002, she was assistant professor and then associate professor at the University of Minnesota. 

She is an expert on stochastic and nonlinear dynamics, mathematical modeling, asymptotic methods, and industrial mathematics. She served on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), and as of 2021 she serves on ICERM's board of trustees.

Anju Toor is a researcher in nanomaterials for energy systems. She was a Bakar Innovation Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked on printed on-chip integrated micro batteries. She earned an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at University of California, Berkeley.

Her research focuses on advanced energy materials, printed electronics, energy storage systems, and nanoparticle self-assembly. She has led research on flexible and stretchable batteries for next-generation Augmented/Virtual Reality applications at Meta Reality Labs. She was named EECS Rising Star and selected for The Rising Stars Women in Engineering Workshop in Asia.

As an expert in self-assembly and energy materials, she has published over 20 research publications in the most reputed platforms in the field.

Chuanyi Ji received the B.S. (Honors) from Electronics Department Tsinghua University in 1983, the M.S. from Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania in 1986, and the Ph.D. from Electrical Engineering California Institute of Technology in 1992. She joined the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1991. She spent a sabbatical year at Bell-Labs Lucent in 1999, and was a visiting faculty at MIT in the fall of 2000. She is an Associate Professor at School of ECE Georgia Institute of Technology, which she joined in 2001. 

Research

• Large-scale data analytics, modeling and learning algorithms in a networked setting
• Both real-world application and methodology development, to quantify resilience, decision making and equity for energy networks and communities
• Work reported as among the pioneering research that learns from heterogeneous data on  operational energy grid, severe weather, and communities (join us)

Distinctions & Awards

• One of the favorite papers published in Nature Energy in the past five years, selected by the editors at Nature Energy, 2021
• Early Career Award, RPI 2000
• NSF Career Award, 1995
• Ming Li Scholarship, Caltech 1989
• Honor graduate, Tsinghua University, 1983

Bjarne Kreitz is an incoming Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Kreitz received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from Clausthal University of Technology (Germany). He obtained his Dr.-Ing. in Chemical Engineering from Clausthal University of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Turek, working on the microkinetic investigation of the transient methanation with experiments and multiscale modeling. 

Kreitz conducted postdoctoral work at Brown University with Prof. Franklin Goldsmith with a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Before joining Brown, he worked briefly as a postdoc at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) in the group of Prof. Olaf Deutschmann.

Qi Tang comes to Georgia Tech from Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was a staff scientist in the Applied Mathematics and Plasma Physics Group. Before joining LANL in 2018, he was an Eliza Ricketts Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Tang completed his Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 2015. His research interests include: computational plasma physics, fusion simulations, scalable numerical algorithms, multi-physics and multi-scale problems, and scientific machine learning.

Beckett Y. Zhou is an Assistant Professor at the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research team focuses on developing efficient aerodynamic and aeroacoustics simulation and optimization frameworks, supported by multi-fidelity methodologies and data-driven methods. 

Zhou received his master's degree from MIT in 2012 and his Ph.D. from the RWTH Aachen University in 2018 with a thesis entitled ‘Numerical Optimization for Airframe Noise Reduction. He subsequently performed post-doctoral research with NASA Langley Research Center (hosted by the National Institute of Aerospace) on the topic of adjoint-based broadband noise reduction via stochastic noise generation. He was a Lecturer in Aeroacoustics at the University of Bristol between March 2021 and October 2024, leading the computational aeroacoustics research in the Department of Aerospace Engineering.