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.

Anjali Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and Director of the Nunn School Program in Global Development. Her research focuses on the political economy of development, and employs quantitative analyses of data derived from India and other developing country contexts. Her specific substantive interests include the politics of service provision, democratic institutions and the link between climate change and local level politics. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Anjali was a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She obtained her Ph.D. from New York University in 2010.