Muhannad S. Bakir is the Dan Fielder Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He and his research group have received more than thirty paper and presentation awards including six from the IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC), four from the IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference (IITC), and one from the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC). Bakir’s group was awarded 2014 and 2017 Best Papers of the IEEE Transactions on Components Packaging and Manufacturing Technology (TCPMT). He is the recipient of the 2013 Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Award, 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2011 IEEE CPMT Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and was an Invited Participant in the 2012 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. Bakir is the co-recipient of the 2018 IEEE Electronics Packaging Society (EPS) Exceptional Technical Achievement Award "for contributions to 2.5D and 3D IC heterogeneous integration, with focus on interconnect technologies." He is also the co-recipient of the 2018 McKnight Foundation Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards. In 2020, Bakir was the recipient of the Georgia Tech Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award.  
 
Bakir serves on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology (TCPMT) and IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (TED). Dr. Bakir serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE EPS. 

Shimeng Yu is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received the B.S. degree in microelectronics from Peking University in 2009, and the M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2011 and 2013, respectively. From 2013 to 2018, he was an assistant professor at Arizona State University.

Yu’s research interests are semiconductor devices and integrated circuits for energy-efficient computing systems. His expertise is on the emerging non-volatile memories (e.g., RRAM, ferroelectrics) for applications such as AI hardware, in-memory computing, 3D integration, etc.

Among Yu’s honors, he was a recipient of NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award in 2016, IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Early Career Award in 2017, ACM Special Interests Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2018, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Young Faculty Award in 2019, ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2020, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) Distinguished Lecturer for 2021-2022, and IEEE EDS Distinguished Lecturer for 2022-2023, etc.

Yu is active in professional services. He served or is serving technical program committee for IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits, ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), ACM/IEEE Design, Automation & Test in Europe (DATE), ACM/IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided-Design (ICCAD), etc.  He is an editor of IEEE Electron Device Letters and a senior member of the IEEE.

Suresh Sitaraman is a Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and leads the Flexible Hybrid Electronics Initiative at Georgia Tech and directs the Computer-Aided Simulation of Packaging Reliability (CASPaR) Lab at Georgia Tech. He is a Thrust Leader/Faculty Member, Reliability/Mechanical Design Research, 3D Systems Packaging Research Center; a Faculty Member, Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute; a Faculty Member, Interconnect and Packaging Center, an SRC Center of Excellence, Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology; a Faculty Member, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Nanotechnlogy Research Center, Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology; a Faculty Member, Institute of Materials. Dr. Suresh Sitaraman's research is exploring new approaches to develop next-generation microsystems. In particular, his research focuses on the design, fabrication, characterization, modeling and reliability of micro-scale and nano-scale structures intended for microsystems used in applications such as aerospace, automotive, computing, telecommunicating, medical, etc. Sitaraman's research is developing physics-based computational models to design flexible as well as rigid microsystems and predict their warped geometry and reliability. His virtual manufacturing tools are able to simulate sequential fabrication and assembly process mechanics to be able to enhance the overall yield, even before prototypes are built. Sitaraman's work is developing free-standing, compliant interconnect technologies that can mechanically decouple the chip from the substrate without compromising the overall electrical functionality. This work is producing single-path and multi-path interconnect technologies as well as nanowire and carbon nanotube interconnects for electrical and thermal applications, and such interconnect technologies can be employed in flexible as well as 3D microelectronic systems. Sitaraman's research is also developing innovative material characterization techniques such as the stressed super layer technique as well as magnetic actuation test that can be used to study monotonic and fatigue crack propagation in nano- and micro-scale thin film interfaces. In addition, Sitaraman has developed fundamental modeling methodologies combined with leading-edge experimentation techniques to study delamination in the dielectric material and copper interface used in back-end-of-the-line (BEOL) stacks and through-silicon vias as well as epoxy/copper and epoxy/glass interfaces as in microelectronic packaging and photovoltaic module applications. Examining the long-term operational as well as accelerated thermal cycling reliability of solder interconnects, his work has direct implications in implantable medical devices, photovoltaic modules, computers and smart devices as well as rugged automobile and aerospace applications. Through the above-mentioned fundamental and applied research and development pursuits, Sitaraman's work aims to address some of the grand challenges associated with clean energy, health care, personal mobility, security, clean environment, food and water, and sustainable infrastructure

Itamar Kolvin received his B.Sc. (2007) in Physics and Mathematics and his M.Sc. (2009) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2017, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics under Prof. Jay Fineberg in the Hebrew University. He was a HFSP cross-disciplinary postdoctoral fellow in the Physics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara with Pro. Zvonimir Dogic. His research interests are in the fundamentals of soft matter out-of-equilibrium: assembly, deformation, flow and fracture. Current efforts make use of model systems that are assembled of protein machineries to investigate active and adaptive material mechanics. 

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.

Scott Danielsen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018 and his B.S.E. in chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. He then spent five years as a postdoctoral associate at Duke University and as a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine from 2019-2023. 

Prof. Danielsen’s group uses a combination of theoretical, computational, and experimental methods to reveal structure–property–processing relationships of soft materials. Their current primary research interests are the structure and dynamics of nonideal structured fluids, particularly polymer gels and biological fluids, with a focus on designing new materials and processing conditions for functional materials.

Sabetta Matsumoto received her B.A., M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Sciences and in the Applied Mathematics group and Harvard University. She is a professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She uses differential geometry, knot theory, and geometric topology to understand the geometry of materials and their mechanical properties. She is passionate about using textiles, 3D printing, and virtual reality to teach geometry and topology to the public.

Vida Jamali earned her Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Rice University under the guidance of Professor Matteo Pasquali and her B.S. in chemical engineering from Sharif University of Technology. Jamali was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Paul Alivisato's lab at UC Berkeley and Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute before joining Georgia Tech. The Jamali Research Group uses experimental, theoretical, and computational tools such as liquid phase transmission electron microscopy, rheology, statistical and colloidal thermodynamics, and machine learning to study the underlying physical principles that govern the dynamics, statistics, mechanics, and self-organization of nanostructured soft materials, in and out of thermal equilibrium, from both fundamental and technological aspects.

My lab, Biohybrid System Laboratory, is interested in elucidating how biological systems coordinate the hierarchical structures and functions of their individual components, in order to produce emergent physical behaviors, and how disrupting this coordination potentiates disease. We seek to design, build, and test a hierarchy of biohybrid systems capable of reproducing the targeted behaviors. Our primary interest is coordinated activation and contraction of tissue- and organ-level cardiac and skeletal muscle systems. To pursue this goal, we focus on the development of biohybrid fabrication methods and measurement systems through the combined application of genetic tools, induced pluripotent stem cells, tissue engineering, microfabrication, electronics, optics, and feedback control. The resulting findings and technical developments will be translated into various applications such as (1) stem cell-based functional assays for personalized disease diagnosis and treatment and (2) new types of biohybrid actuators for creating biological autonomous systems.