Lisa Yaszek is Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, where she explores science fiction as a global language crossing centuries, continents, and cultures. Recent examples of her award-winning books include Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (2016); Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (2021); and The Future is Female! Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women series (2018-present). Yaszek’s ideas about how we represent space and space exploration in popular culture have been featured in venues including Time Magazine, The Washington Post, and Space.com, and she has been an expert commentator for CBS Sunday Morning, the BBC4, Turner Classic Movies, and the AMC miniseries James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction. Additionally, Yaszek is a past president of the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) and a founding member of the Eugie Award for Short Speculative Fiction. In 2024, she received the SFRA Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to the study of science, technology, and science fiction across media.

Mariel Borowitz is an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Space Policy and International Relations, and head of the Nunn School Program on International Affairs, Science, and Technology. Her research deals with international space policy issues. She has published on issues of space sustainability, space security, and development and exploration of the Moon. Her work has also covered developments in the Earth observation and remote sensing sector. Her book, Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data, published by MIT Press, examines trends in the development of data sharing policies governing Earth observing satellites, as well as interactions with the growing commercial remote sensing sector. Her work has been published in Science, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Space Policy, Astropolitics, and New Space. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Borowitz is also currently detailed to the U.S. Office of Space Commerce in a half-time capacity as the director of International Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Engagement. In this role, she focuses on the development and implementation of an approach to international coordination on space situational awareness and space traffic coordination. She also works directly with the team developing the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), which will provide space safety services to spacecraft operators around the world. Borowitz previously completed a detail as a policy analyst for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. from 2016 to 2018. In 2022, she testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics in a hearing titled, "Space Situational Awareness: Guiding the Transition to a Civil Capability."

Borowitz earned a Ph.D. in public policy at the University of Maryland and a Masters degree in international science and technology policy from the George Washington University. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jonathan Goldman is the director of Quadrant-i (Q-i) in the Office of Commercialization. Quadrant-i supports faculty, researchers, and students in translating research into startups. Under Goldman's leadership, Quadrant-i will offer a comprehensive suite of programs, resources, and services to enhance the commercialization journey for Georgia Tech’s innovations. His leadership will focus on fostering a collaborative environment that encourages innovation and accelerates the transition from idea to impact.

A seasoned entrepreneur and commercialization expert, Goldman transitioned to Quadrant-i after a significant tenure with VentureLab, another key commercialization unit at Georgia Tech. During his initial years at VentureLab from 2002 to 2007, Goldman assisted in developing more than 10 companies that collectively attracted $300 million in funding. He was instrumental in forming the solar firm Suniva, later serving as its director of business development. After returning to VentureLab, he continued to foster entrepreneurial success among Georgia Tech researchers. Now at Quadrant-i, he is committed to advancing the Institute’s mission by transforming groundbreaking research into commercially successful enterprises. 

Stephen E. Ralph is a Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received the BEE degree in Electrical Engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1980. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1988 for his work on highly nonequilibrium carrier transport in semiconductor devices. He is currently the director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center, a cross-disciplinary electronics and photonics research center focused on the synergistic development of high-speed electronic components and signal processing to enable revolutionary system performance. He is also the founder and director of the new Terabit Optical Networking Consortium, an industry led communications and information technology consortium. Prior to Georgia Tech he held a postdoctoral position at AT&T Bell Laboratories and was a visiting scientist with the Optical Sciences Laboratory at the IBM T. J. Watson research center. He has widely published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and holds more than 10 patents in the fields of optical communications, optical devices and signal processing. His current research focuses on high-speed optical communications systems including modulation formats, coherent receivers, microwave photonics, integrated photonics and signal processing. Ralph is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electronic Devices. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA).

Education
B.S., Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004; B.S., Aerospace Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004; M.A., Chemistry, Brown University, 2006; Ph.D., Chemistry, University of California Berkeley, 2010

Research
Dr. Stockton joined the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in January 2015. Her research plans include (1) instrument development for in situ organic analysis in the search for extraterrestrial life, (2) microfluidic approaches to experimentally evaluating hypotheses on the origin of biomolecules and the emergence of life, and (3) terrestrial applications of these technologies for environmental analysis and point-of-care diagnostics.

Christopher E. Carr is an engineer/scientist with training in aero/astro, electrical engineering, medical physics, and molecular biology. At Georgia Tech he is an Assistant Professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering with a secondary appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He is a member of the Space Systems Design Lab (SSDL) and runs the Planetary eXploration Lab (PXL). He serves as the Principal Investigator (PI) or Science PI for several life detection instrument and/or astrobiology/space biology projects, and is broadly interested in searching for and expanding the presence of life beyond Earth while enabling a sustainable human future. He previously served as a Research Scientist at MIT in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a Research Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Molecular Biology. He serves as a Scott M. Johnson Fellow in the U.S. Japan Leadership Program.

Nian Liu began as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in January 2017. He received his B.S. in 2009 from Fudan University (China), and Ph.D. in 2014 from Stanford University, where he worked with Prof. Yi Cui on the structure design for Si anodes for high-energy Li-ion batteries. In 2014-2016, he worked with Prof. Steven Chu at Stanford University as a postdoc, where he developed in situ optical microscopy to probe beam-sensitive battery reactions. Dr. Liu 's lab at Georgia Tech is broadly interested in the combination of nanomaterials, electrochemistry, and light microscopy for understanding and addressing the global energy challenges. Dr. Liu is the recipient of the Electrochemical Society (ECS) Daniel Cubicciotti Award (2014) and American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award (2015).

FRANK ROSENZWEIG is a professor of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the director of the University of Montana Institute on Ecosystems. Rosenzweig’s research is aimed at illuminating the evolution of complex traits that augment biodiversity and drive major transitions in the history of life. His lab seeks to understand how changes in genome architecture alter global patterns of gene expression, whether such changes explain the physiology and behavior of novel genotypes, and the extent to which adaptation is shaped by trade-offs and constraints. Rosenzweig was a lead author of the 2015 NASA Astrobiology Strategy Document and member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute Executive Committee. He currently serves as co-Lead of the NASA Research Coordination Network, LIFE: From Early Cells to Multicellularity, as a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences and as Principal Investigator of the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research award ENGINE OF INNOVATION: How compartmentalization drives evolution of novelty and efficiency across scales. Rosenzweig received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Tennessee, and his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Grover’s research activities in process systems engineering focus on understanding macromolecular organization and the emergence of biological function. Discrete atoms and molecules interact to form macromolecules and even larger mesoscale assemblies, ultimately yielding macroscopic structures and properties. A quantitative relationship between the nanoscale discrete interactions and the macroscale properties is required to design, optimize, and control such systems; yet in many applications, predictive models do not exist or are computationally intractable.

The Grover group is dedicated to the development of tractable and practical approaches for the engineering of macroscale behavior via explicit consideration of molecular and atomic scale interactions. We focus on applications involving the kinetics of self-assembly, specifically those in which methods from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics do not provide closed form solutions. General approaches employed include stochastic modeling, model reduction, machine learning, experimental design, robust parameter design, and estimation.