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.

Sen Na is an Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining ISyE, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics and the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at University of California, Berkeley, working with Michael W. Mahoney. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Chicago in 2021, under the supervision of Mihai Anitescu and Mladen Kolar. Before attending University of Chicago, he received his B.S. in mathematics from Nanjing University in 2016. 

Na is broadly interested in the mathematical foundations of data science, with topics including high-dimensional statistics, graphical models, semiparametric models, optimal control, and large-scale and stochastic nonlinear optimization. He is also interested in the broad applications of machine learning methods in biology, neuroscience, and engineering. 

Na has received multiple awards, including the prestigious William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship from UChicago and the 2023 MAPR Meritorious Service Award from the Mathematical Optimization Society.

Julia Yang, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. Her research has enabled fundamental understanding of battery materials by advancing computational approaches to resolve transport in disordered electrodes and explain reactivity in organic electrolytes. She is a co-author on more than 14 publications and four patents, a recipient of the Harvard University Center for the Environment Fellowship (2022-2024), and a NextProf Nexus alum (2023). She is deeply committed to educating the next generation of diverse minds by prioritizing equity, inclusivity, and belonging, starting from within the classroom and beyond. 

Prof. Yang received her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering, with an additional major in Physics, from Carnegie Mellon University and her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from U.C. Berkeley as an NDSEG Fellow under the guidance of Prof. Gerbrand Ceder. During her graduate studies, she was an AI Resident with X, the Moonshot Factory. She led postdoctoral work at Harvard University as an Environmental Fellow working with Prof. Boris Kozinsky and collaborating with Prof. Ah-Hyung Alissa Park. 

Neu's research involves the understanding and prediction of the fatigue behavior of materials and closely related topics, typically when the material must resist degradation and failure in harsh environments. Specifically, he has published in areas involving thermomechanical fatigue, fretting fatigue, creep and environmental effects, viscoplastic deformation and damage development, and related constitutive and finite-element modeling with a particular emphasis on the role of the materials microstructure on the physical deformation and degradation processes. He has investigated a broad range of structural materials including steels, titanium alloys, nickel-base superalloys, metal matrix composites, molybdenum alloys, high entropy alloys, medical device materials, and solder alloys used in electronic packaging. His research has widespread applications in aerospace, surface transportation, power generation, machinery components, medical devices, and electronic packaging. His work involves the prediction of the long-term reliability of components operating in extreme environments such as the hot section of a gas turbine system for propulsion or energy generation. His research is funded by some of these industries as well as government funding agencies.