Thomas González Roberts is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the Director of Georgia Tech’s Engineering Space Policy Laboratory. Using tools from observational astronomy and computational astrodynamics, Roberts studies the behavior of Earth-orbiting satellites to understand how space actors—from superpowers to start-ups—engage with outer space governance. His research interests include international coordination, sustainability, and security in space. Roberts’ work has been supported by the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation, and earned recognition with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Prize for Open Data, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy’s Prize for Innovation in Global Security, and a placement on Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 in Science list. He holds a PhD and SM in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, an SM in technology and policy from MIT, and a BA in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University.

A 2019 inductee to the National Academy of Engineering, Ahuja has more than 35 years of research and development experience in aircraft noise research, acoustics facilities design, flow control, state-of-the-art instrumentation, and advanced signal processing. During his employment of 13 years at Lockheed Georgia Company in various capacities, including the head of the Aeroacoustics Research and acting manager of the Advanced Flight Sciences Department, he was the principal investigator and/or the program manager on several successfully completed projects funded by Lockheed, the U. S. Air Force and NASA. He joined the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology as a Senior Faculty Research Leader in March 1989. He recently served in the capacity of the director of Georgia Tech Ireland. Ahuja is a former associate editor of the AIAA Journal and also a former Chairman of the AIAA Aeroacoustics Technical Committee. Ahuja has authored or co-authored over 180 technical articles or reports on a range of topics including acoustic shielding, fan noise, active flow control, flow/acoustic interactions, jet noise, cavity noise, automobile noise, sonic boom research, psychoacoustics, high-temperature fiber optics strain gauges, acoustic transducers, active noise control, tilt rotor noise, source separation, acoustic fatigue, duct acoustics, computational aeroacoustics, innovative flow visualization techniques, tornado signatures, rapid charging of batteries and others. The international media, including CNN and Beyond 2000, has covered his work.

Amirali Aghazadeh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and also program faculty of Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, and Bioengineering Ph.D. programs. He has affiliations with the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEAS) and Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences. Before joining Georgia Tech, Aghazaeh was a postdoc at Stanford and UC Berkeley and completed his Ph.D. at Rice University. His research focuses on developing machine learning and deep learning solutions for protein and small molecular design and engineering.
 

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. 

A primary goal of Professor First's research is to develop an understanding of solid-state systems at atomic length scales. The main experimental tools in this pursuit are scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and related techniques such as ballistic electron emission microscopy (BEEM). These methods rely on the quantum-mechanical tunnel effect to obtain atomically-resolved maps of the electronic structure of surfaces, clusters, and buried layers.

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).