Paige Clayton is an Assistant Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech. She is also affiliated with the CREATE Economic Development Research Center at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. Dr. Clayton joined Georgia Tech in 2020 after completing her Ph.D. in Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a concentration on entrepreneurship and innovation, regional economic development, and science and technology policy. At the University of North Carolina, Dr. Clayton received the Nancy W. Stegman Fellowship and the Dissertation Completion Fellowship. During her PhD, she held visiting positions at SKEMA Business School (Sophia Antipolis, France) and at UCLA’s Department of Geography. 

Dr. Clayton’s research focuses on regional patterns of economic development and how entrepreneurship and innovation influence local economies. Key themes include entrepreneurial support organizations, social network analysis, entrepreneurial ecosystems, university technology transfer, research & development, and institutions, and the connections between these factors which help support local entrepreneurship and innovation. Her research has been published in Research Policy, Industrial & Corporate Change, Academy of Management Perspectives, the Journal of Technology Transfer, Industrial Labor & Relations Review, International Regional Science Review, and the Oxford Handbook on Entrepreneurship and Collaboration, among others. 

Paige is an alumna of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and a native Atlantan.

Dr. Abdel-Khalik joined the Georgia Tech faculty as the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor in 1987.  He was appointed to his current position as the Southern Nuclear Distinguished Professor in 1993.  He served as Associate Director of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering between 1990 and 1992 and as the Georgia Tech Secretary of the Faculty between 2002 and 2006.  He served as a member of the USNRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) between 2006 and 2012, including two years as Chairman (2009-2011).  Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, Dr. Abdel-Khalik served as a faculty member in the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Department (1976-1987) and as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Engineering (1973-1975) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Dr. Abdel-Khalik also served as a Senior Engineer at Babcock and Wilcox Nuclear Power Generation Division (1975); as a Guest Research Scientist at the Nuclear Research Center in Karlsruhe, Germany (1979); and as an Invited Professor at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (1982).

Dr. Abdel-Khalik currently serves as a member of the External Advisory Boards for the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University and the Mechanical Engineering Department of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  He also serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for Badr University in Cairo, Egypt.

Claire Berger is Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research - Néel Institute working at the Georgia Institute of Technology in W. A. de Heer’s group. She obtained the PhD in Physics from the University of Grenoble, France, with a dissertation on the electronic properties of AlMn quasicrystals. She then moved to a postdoc position at the Centre d’Etudes Atomiques, where she produced and studied amorphous films, and was hired as a researcher at the CNRS ‘s Laboratory for Study of Electronic Properties of Solids (LEPES), in Grenoble. She focused the first part of her carrier on electronic properties of quasicrystalline materials grown and characterized at LEPES. She contributed to the experimental evidence for a metal-insulator transition in these metal- based compounds. 

At Georgia Tech, her current scientific interests are primarily nanoscience and electronic property of graphene-based systems. She co-authored the first article demonstrating the two dimensional properties of graphene and proposing graphene for electronics, and together with Walt de Heer and Phil First she co-authored the first patent for graphene electronics (2003). 

She is co-author of more than 200 publications in international journals, has a citation index of 10,880 and an H index of 41.

Dr. Yu Ding is the Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2023, he was the Mike and Sugar Barnes Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University. While at Texas A&M, he also served as Associate Department Head for Graduate Affairs of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering between 2012 and 2016 and Associate Director for Research Engagement of Texas A&M Institute of Data Science between 2020 and 2023. He received his B.S. in Precision Engineering from the University of Science and technology of China in 1993, a M.S. in Precision Engineering from Tsinghua University in 1996, a second M.S. in Mechanical from Penn State in 1998, and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2001.

Dr. Ding is the author of the CRC Press book, Data Science for Wind Energy, and a co-author of the Springer Nature book, Data Science for Nano Image Analysis. Dr. Ding received the 2019 IISE Technical Innovation Award and 2022 INFORMS Impact Prize for his data science innovations impacting wind energy applications. Dr. Ding is a Fellow of IISE (2015) and ASME (2016). He has served as editor or associate editor for several major engineering data science journals, and is currently serving as the 14th Editor in Chief of IISE Transactions, for the term of 2021-2024.