Florian Schäfer is an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he received his Ph.D. in applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, working with Houman Owhadi. Before that, he received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics at the University of Bonn. His research interests lie at the interface of numerical computation, statistical inference, and competitive games.
Fanijo’s research centres around sustainable and smart-resilient buildings/civil infrastructure with a particular interest in decarbonizing infrastructure using novel low-carbon construction materials and alternative energy sources. Buildings contribute to more than one-third (39%) of the global energy-related CO2 emissions and 35% of global energy consumption, mainly from manufacturing, building materials and transportation. As such, advanced research on developing innovative construction materials is urgently required to address the carbon emissions from materials and construction processes of buildings' life cycle. His research approach includes examining the fresh properties and rheology, early-age cracking, microstructure evaluation, mechanical and durability performance, and life cycle assessment of building systems (particularly cementitious composites) made with these sustainable construction materials.
He has also conducted research across different disciplines, including cementitious and concrete composites; corrosion monitoring and mitigation; concrete durability; green concrete technology using recycled and by-product materials; 3D printing of cementitious materials; highway pavement; geopolymers; fibre-reinforced concrete; advanced sensing technologies and automation; and non-destructive structural monitoring and evaluation.
Fanijo received his B.S. in Building Construction with first-class honours from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. In 2019, He earned an M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Idaho. Subsequently, he got his PhD in Civil Engineering (with a simultaneous Master’s degree – MEng in Material Science and Engineering) from Virginia Tech in 2022. He has worked on numerous funded research projects and published in various peer-reviewed journals and proceedings. Fanijo has also received numerous national and international awards for his excellence in research, with his recent NSBE Golden Torch Award recognized as the graduate student of the year 2022.
At Georgia Tech, he is passionate about teaching construction materials and methods and their critical role in the design and construction of buildings. Fanijo developed and currently teaching the Construction Materials and Methods Course so that Building Construction students can have in-depth knowledge of building materials and systems, their properties, and their intrinsic relationship to structural systems and environmental performance. He also develops and teaches courses on Green Construction Technology, Concrete Durability and Sustainable Construction Materials and Techniques.
Fanijo is a Professional Engineer (P.E.) and LEED Green Associate with more than five years of working experience in the construction sector.
Richard Barke is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy. He received his BS in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a minor in geophysics, launching an interest in the many intersections between science and public policy. He obtained his MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Rochester. He taught at the University of Houston before returning to Georgia Tech where he chaired the creation of the Ivan Allen College and the School of Public Policy and has served as school chair and as Associate Dean of IAC. He was a consultant to the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government on reforming the congressional science budget process and the processes by which Congress receives scientific and technology advice and was a visiting scholar on similar matters at the University of Ghent, Belgium. His consulting and sponsored research has included companies subject to federal and state regulations; the Houston Area Research Center; the US Departments of Commerce, Energy, and the Army; the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; and seven National Science Foundation grants.
His research interests focus on the regulation of risk, the roles of politics within science, and of science within politics. He has presented his work at more than one hundred scholarly panels and conferences. In addition to a dozen book chapters Dr. Barke has published in Risk Analysis; Minerva; Social Science Quarterly; Policy Studies Journal; Science, Technology, and Human Values; and Public Choice and is the author of Science, Technology, and Public Policy (CQ Press) and co-author of Governing the American Republic (St. Martin's). Among his awards are Georgia Tech's Outstanding Service Award, the IAC Faculty Legacy Award, ANAK Faculty of the Year, and the Georgia Tech Student Government Association Faculty of the Year Award (twice). He teaches courses on political processes, intergenerational policy, ethics and risk, and regulatory policy, and has team-taught courses with faculty from all six colleges at Georgia Tech. His current work is on long-term policy-making.
Erin L. Ratcliff is a Full Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds a joint appointment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Prof. Ratliff is also the Associate Director of Scientific Continuity for Director of the currently funded Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) entitled “Center for Soft PhotoElectroChemical Systems (SPECS)”, a center which she directed at her prior appointment at University of Arizona.
Her group “Laboratory for Interface Science for Printable Electronic Materials” uses a combination of applications and devices with electrochemistry, spectroscopies, microscopies, and synchrotron-based techniques to understand fundamental structure-property relationships of next-generation materials for energy conversion and storage and biosensing. Materials of interest include metal halide perovskites, π-conjugated materials, colloidal quantum dots, and metal oxides. Current research is focused on mechanisms of electron transfer and transport across interfaces, including semiconductor/electrolyte interfaces and durability of printable electronic materials.
Her research program has been funded by the Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences, the Solar Energy Technology Office, Office of Naval Research, National Science Foundation, and the Nano Bio Materials Consortium.
Dr. Ghalichechian joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in August 2021. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus, from 2017 to 2021. During this period, he established the RF Microsystems Laboratory with research in the area of millimeter-wave antennas and arrays.
Dr. Ghalichechian received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, Iran in 2001. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland-College Park in 2005 and 2007, respectively, with research focused on electrostatic micromotors. From 2007 to 2012, he was with the Research Department of FormFactor, Inc. (Livermore, California) as a Senior Principal Engineer. During this period, he helped design and develop microsprings for advanced probe cards used in testing memory and SoC devices. Dr. Ghalichechian joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the ElectroScience Laboratory at OSU as a Research Scientist in 2012. From 2016 to 2017, he held a Research Assistant Professor position at OSU.
Prof. Ghalichechian is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters (AWPL). He is a recipient of the 2018 College of Engineering Lumley Research Award at OSU, 2019 NSF CAREER Award, 2019 US Air Force Faculty Summer Fellowship Award, and 2020 ECE Excellence in Teaching Award at OSU.
Millimeter-wave (30-300 GHz) antennas and arrays5G/6G antenna systemsReconfigurable antennas and componentsOn-chip antennas and arraysReflectarrays and phased arraysExploiting non-linear properties of phase-change materials for RF sensors
Jason Azoulay is an organic, organometallic and polymer chemist and internationally recognized leader in developing emerging semiconductor materials and devices. He has made significant contributions to the fields of polymer chemistry and materials science,bridging fundamental chemistry with real-world applications. His work focuses on the design, synthesis and characterization of advanced functional materials across numerous technology platforms, with an emphasis on organic semiconductors and conjugated polymers.
Azoulay co-directs the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics, and his lab adds great strength to Georgia Tech’s leadership in soft-matter and hybrid optoelectronics. His work also complements numerous efforts at Georgia Tech that develop and apply advanced functional materials.
I have a broad range of interests in soft condensed matter physics and adjacent fields like statistical physics, physics of living systems and hard condensed matter. My particular focus is on the relationship between the geometric structure of a system and its mechanical response. Both biological and engineered systems often have some structure, such as networks of struts, particles jammed together or patterns of creases in thin sheets, that grant them flexibility and strength with a minimum of weight. These structures can lead to subtle and surprising mechanical response:
Condensed matter physics, statistical physics, physics of living systems, and hard condensed matter.
Suman Datta is the Joseph M Pettit Chair of Advanced Computing and Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar and Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received his B.Tech degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. His research group focuses on semiconductor devices that enable new compute models such as in-memory compute, brain-inspired compute, cryogenic compute, resilient compute etc.
From 2015 to 2022, Datta was the Stinson Endowed Chair Professor of Nanotechnology in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame, where he was the Director of a multi-university microelectronics research center, ASCENT, funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Datta also served as the Director of a six-university research center for Extremely Energy Efficient Collective Electronics (EXCEL), funded by the SRC and National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore an alternate computing hardware that leverages continuous-time dynamics of emerging devices to execute optimization, learning, and inference tasks.
From 2007 to 2015, he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, where his group pioneered advances in compound semiconductor-based quantum-well field effect transistors and tunneling field effect transistors.
From 1999 to 2007, he was in the Advanced Transistor Group at Intel Corporation, where he led device R&D effort for several generations of high-performance logic transistors such as high-k/metal gate, Tri-gate and strained channel CMOS transistors. He has published over 425 journal and refereed conference papers and holds more than 187 issued patents related to semiconductor devices. In 2013, Datta was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to high-performance advanced silicon and compound semiconductor transistor technologies. In 2016, he was named Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in recognition of his inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society.
High-performance heterogenous compute with advanced CMOSBrain-inspired collective state computing with advanced CMOS and beyond-CMOS semiconductorsEmerging semiconductors like ferroelectric field effect transistors, insulator-to-metal phase transition oxides, high mobility semiconducting oxides for near and in-memory compute and storageSemiconductors for cryogenic computing and harsh environment computing
The Raman Group has two main thrusts. The team utilizes sophisticated tools to cool atoms to temperatures less than one millionth of a degree above absolute zero. Using these tools, they explore topics ranging from superfluidity in Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) to quantum antiferromagnetism in a spinor condensate. In another effort the team partners with engineers to build cutting edge atomic quantum sensors on-chip that can one day be mass-produced.
Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates