Blair Brettmann received her B.S. in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. She received her Master’s in chemical engineering practice from MIT in 2009 following internships at GlaxoSmithKline (Upper Merion, PA) and Mawana Sugar Works (Mawana, India). Blair received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT in 2012 working with the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing under Professor Bernhardt Trout. Her research focused on solid-state characterization and application of pharmaceutical formulations prepared by electrospinning. Following her Ph.D., Brettmann worked as a research engineer for Saint-Gobain Ceramics and Plastics for two years. While at Saint-Gobain she worked on polymer-based wet coatings and dispersions for various applications, including window films, glass fiber mats and architectural fabrics. Later, Brettmann served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago with Professor Matthew Tirrell. Currently, Brettmann is an assistant professor with joint appointments in chemical and biomolecular engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Zhong Lin (ZL) Wang received his Ph.D in physics from Arizona State University in 1987, and he is a now the Hightower Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, Regents' Professor, College of Engineering Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Nanostructure Characterization, at Georgia Tech. He served as a Visiting Lecturer in SUNY (1987-1988), Stony Brook, as a research fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (England) (1988-1989), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1989-1993) and at National Institute of Standards and Technology (1993-1995) before joining Georgia Tech in 1995. Wang is the Hightower Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, Regents' Professor, Engineering Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Nanostructure Characterization, at Georgia Tech. Wang has made original and innovative contributions to the synthesis, discovery, characterization and understanding of fundamental physical properties of oxide nanobelts and nanowires, as well as applications of nanowires in energy sciences, electronics, optoelectronics and biological science. He is the leader figure in ZnO nanostructure research. His discovery and breakthroughs in developing nanogenerators establish the principle and technological road map for harvesting mechanical energy from environment and biological systems for powering a personal electronics. His research on self-powered nanosystems has inspired the worldwide effort in academia and industry for studying energy for micro-nano-systems, which is now a distinct disciplinary in energy research and future sensor networks. He coined and pioneered the field of piezotronics and piezo-phototronics by introducing piezoelectric potential gated charge transport process in fabricating new electronic and optoelectronic devices. This historical breakthrough by redesign Semiconductors transistor has important applications in smart MEMS/NEMS, nanorobotics, human-electronics interface and sensors. Wang also invented and pioneered the in-situ technique for measuring the mechanical and electrical properties of a single nanotube/nanowire inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM).

Martin Maldovan is an associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He was also a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at MIT.  Maldovan’s group is developing novel heat and mass transport processes as an enabling technology for energy converter materials and devices, micro and nanoelectronics, chemical and biological separations, and catalysis. His group focuses on designing, predicting, and controlling heat and mass transfer in rationally engineered systems with length scales ranging from macro to nano, to advance new paradigms for energy saving materials and devices.  

 Xing Xie is the Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a post-doctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. (2006) and M.S. (2008) degrees in Environmental Science & Engineering from Tsinghua University, and a second M.S. degree (2012) in Materials Science & Engineering and a Ph.D. degree (2014) in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. His research focuses on the applications of innovative materials for sustainable and reliable water and energy. He has worked on many projects related to water treatment and reuse, microbial detection and quantification, energy and resource recovery, energy storage, etc. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles with more than 6,000 citations

Russell Gentry is professor of architecture and civil engineering (by courtesy) and a licensed structural engineer. He teaches graduate courses in building structures, computationally-driven fabrication and construction, and building integration. He is affiliated with the design computing faculty in the School of Architecture and the structural engineering and mechanics of materials faculty in the School of Civil Engineering. 

Gentry is the chair of ASTM D30.10, Composites for Civil Structures and an expert on the development of test methods for composite materials. He is a fellow of the International Institute for Fiber Composites (IIFC). He is the Georgia Tech principal investigator on the NSF-sponsored international initiative to develop alternative uses for decommissioned composite wind turbine blades. 

Gentry is the acting director of the Digital Building Laboratory (DBL), an applied research lab in the College of Design, focusing on computational design, building information modeling, and information technology in the AEC industry. He serves as the associate dean for faculty in the College of Design.

Ajeet Rohatgi received the B.S. (E.E.) degree from Indian Institute of Technology in 1971, the M.S. (Materials Engineering) from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1973, and the Ph.D. in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Lehigh University in 1977. He joined the Westinghouse Research and Development Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1977 and became a Westinghouse Fellow while working on the science and technology of photovoltaic and microelectronic devices. Rohatgi joined the ECE faculty at Georgia Tech in 1985 and started a program on photovoltaics, which has become one of the best in the country. He has become an internationally recognized leader in photovoltaics. He is the founding director of the first university-based DOE Center of Excellence in Photovoltaic Research and Education. He is the author of more than 300 publications and holds 10 U.S. patents. Rohatgi has received numerous awards and distinctions from professional societies and Georgia Tech. He is the founder and CTO for Suniva.

Gleb Yushin is a Professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and a Co-Founder of several companies, including Sila Nanotechnologies, Inc.. For his contributions to materials science, Yushin has received numerous awards and recognitions, including Kavli Fellow Award, R&D 100 Award (Y-Carbon's application), Honda Initiation Grant Award, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, and several distinctions from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), such as Nano 50 Award. Dr. Yushin has co-authored over 30 patents and patent applications, over 100 invited presentations and seminars and over 100 publications on nanostructured Electronic Materials related applications, including papers in Science, Nature Materials and other leading journals. His current research is focused on advancing energy storage materials and devices for electronics, transportation and grid applications.

Walter Alexander “Walt” de Heer is a Dutch physicist and nanoscience researcher known for discoveries in the electronic shell structure of metal clusters, magnetism in transition metal clusters, field emission and ballistic conduction in carbon nanotubes, and graphene-based electronics.

De Heer earned a doctoral degree in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 under the supervision of Walter D. Knight. He worked at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland from 1987 to 1997, and is currently a Regents' Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He directs the Epitaxial Graphene Laboratory in the School of Physics and leads the Epitaxial Graphene Interdisciplinary Research Group at the Georgia Tech Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.