Abdel-Khalik joined the Georgia Tech faculty as the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor in 1987. He was appointed to his current position as the Southern Nuclear Distinguished Professor in 1993. He served as Associate Director of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering between 1990 and 1992 and as the Georgia Tech Secretary of the Faculty between 2002 and 2006. He served as a member of the USNRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) between 2006 and 2012, including two years as Chairman (2009-2011).  Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, Abdel-Khalik served as a faculty member in the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Department (1976-1987) and as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Engineering (1973-1975) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Abdel-Khalik also served as a Senior Engineer at Babcock and Wilcox Nuclear Power Generation Division (1975); as a Guest Research Scientist at the Nuclear Research Center in Karlsruhe, Germany (1979); and as an Invited Professor at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (1982).

Abdel-Khalik currently serves as a member of the External Advisory Boards for the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University and the Mechanical Engineering Department of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He also serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for Badr University in Cairo, Egypt.

Simon Zhang is a research scientist in the Institute for People and Technology. Zhang graduated with a degree in Industrial Design at Georgia Tech in 2024. As a frontend engineer and UX designer, Zhang currently supports AI-CARING (AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups) and GT Research Connect, a career platform to connect research faculty with funding. They focus on building interfaces gounded in people's needs and crafting robust modern web applications. Outside of work, their interests lie in color systems, typography, and Asian American studies.

At first glance, Kristina Chatfield wasn’t a typical sustainability hire at Georgia Tech.

She was a business management consultant for a law firm who had also helped a national survey data firm with their data crunching. Higher ed was “like a different planet,” she recalls.

Chatfield realized early on that she could apply her management and operations background to any field. “You can’t run any successful organization unless you have operational efficiency and program and project management.” Without them, she says, “Things don’t work properly.”

But equally important was her commitment to learning about academia and sustainability, areas that were not in her wheelhouse a decade ago. With support from Jennifer Hirsch, senior director of SCoRE (and formerly of SLS), Chatfield embraced both with gusto.

“I’ve learned to approach sustainability from a holistic standpoint,” Chatfield explains, noting that sustainability isn’t just about the environment or systems — it’s primarily about the people.

“If you have a passion for community engagement and sustainability, there’s a lot of commonality you can find with people from all different persuasions. As human beings, we mostly care about the same things.”

“Kris is a master at setting up and managing complex operational and financial systems, and she is passionate about sustainability, communities, and Georgia Tech. This combination, together with her decade of management experience in SLS and SCoRE, makes her perfect for her new leadership role,” says BBISS Executive Director Beril Toktay.

Chatfield says a key highlight of her work in sustainability has been connecting community organizations and nonprofit partners with the Institute through the SCoRE summer internship program. Georgia Tech students are partnered with community organizations throughout Atlanta. Now in its eighth year, the program allows students “to learn about the social aspects of sustainability, innovation, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the context of actual work that’s being done in the Atlanta area,” Chatfield says. “Partners benefit tremendously because the program expands their capacity by having these amazing Georgia Tech students working for them.”

Chatfield says the internship program often serves as the first interaction partners have with Georgia Tech. “It opens the door to a much broader and deeper relationship.”

In her free time, Kris enjoys her family life with five adult children, and soon she will welcome her third grandchild. “Being a grandparent is the best thing ever,” she says.

She also enjoys playing pickleball with her husband and traveling. With one of her sons about to be stationed in Germany with the Army, she hopes to combine her passions of travel and family time.

Karthik Menon is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Woodruff School and the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Menon graduated with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2021, where his doctoral work focused on the flow physics of fluid-structure interactions and vortex-dominated flows. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Pediatrics and the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. At Stanford, he worked on computational methods for accurate patient-specific cardio­vascular blood flow simulations and uncertainty quantification. Menon’s broad research interests include fluid mechanics, computational modeling, and data-driven methods. His research aims to advance interdisciplinary technology in a wide range of healthcare, engineering and energy applications. Fluid dynamics is central to some of the biggest challenges and opportunities in these domains – such as personalized treatments for cardiovascular disease, extracting renewable energy from flowing water and wind, and developing bio-mimetic flying and swimming robots. Menon’s work tackles these challenges by uncovering new physics and combining high-performance computing with data-enabled techniques.

Dr. Pamidighantam is associate director of the ARTISAN center under the Institute for Data Engineering and Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Pamidighantam had been a senior research scientist at Indiana University, Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center and NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign supporting computational chemistry and science gateways development in support of molecular sciences faculty.

Nick Housley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech and a Member of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. He earned a BS in Kinesiology from The University of Georgia, a DPT from Georgia State University where he focused on clinical neuroplasticity, a Ph.D. in Applied Physiology from Georgia Institute of Technology and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Neurobiology.

Nick started his independent career on the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology in 2025. The Housley Lab studies how the nervous system, cancer, and its treatment interact in mammalian systems through two overarching themes. First, they perform foundational studies on the role the nervous system plays in the initiation and progression of cancer. Second, they perform multi-scale preclinical studies to define the determinants of neurologic consequences of cancer treatment. In parallel, Housley lead clinical efforts to translate basic science findings to clinical practice.

The Housley lab also develops nanostructures for multimodal applications in solid tumor cancers including drug delivery and cancer detection. A major area of focus involves the use of their nanohydrogel platform to precisely delivery therapeutic payloads to primary and metastatic cancer sites and translate their technology from the laboratory into human clinical studies. My colleagues and I also investigate the interactions of nanostructures and biological environments that enable solid tumor targeting.

Sridhar Narasimhan is Professor of IT Management and Co-Director -Business Analytics Center (BAC), Scheller College of Business. The BAC partners with its Executive Council companies in the analytics space and supports Scheller’s BSBA, MBA, and MS Analytics programs. Professor Narasimhan has developed and taught the MBA IT Practicum course. Since 2016, he has been teaching Business Analytics to undergraduate and MBA students at Scheller. 

Professor Narasimhan is the founder and first Area Coordinator of the nationally ranked Information Technology Management area. In fall 2010, he was the Acting Dean and led the College in its successful AACSB Maintenance of Accreditation effort. He was Senior Associate Dean from 2007 through 2015.

We are currently witnessing the birth of a new branch of astrophysics: high-energy astrophysics. With neutrinos we can study the high-energy Universe and peer into environments from where electromagnetic radiation can't escape. The IceCube neutrino observatory is a detector in operation at the geographic south pole. IceCube discovered, in 2013, an extragalactic flux of astrophysical neutrinos. Even though IceCube has identified two neutrino candidate sources: TXS 0506+056 (in 2018) and NGC 1068 (in 2022), the class of objects responsible for the astrophysical flux have not been unequivocally identified. Both these galaxies have Active Nuclei in which a supermassive black hole is being fed material via an accretion disk. Interestingly they are very different looking objects. TXS 0506+056 was seen with two flares of neutrinos and NGC 1068 is steady. TXS 0506+056 is seen mostly in ~50-200 TeV neutrinos, whereas NGC 1068 is seen in 1.5 to 15 TeV neutrinos. NGC 1068 is in our "neighboorhood" but TXS 0506+056 is very far away. 

The Taboada group uses IceCube data to search for astrophysical neutrino sources. Ignacio Taboada is the current spokesperson of the IceCube collaboration.

Ben Wang is Professor Emeritus in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. In addition, Dr. Wang previously served as the Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute. 

Dr. Wang's primary research interest is in applying emerging technologies to improve manufacturing competitiveness. He specializes in process development for affordable composite materials. Dr. Wang is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the growing field of nanomaterials science. His main area of research involves a material known as "buckypaper", which has shown promise in a variety of applications, including the development of aerospace structures, improvements in energy and power efficiency, enhancements in thermal management of engineering systems, and construction of the next-generation of computer displays.

Dr. Wang served on the National Materials and Manufacturing Board (NMMB). NMMB is the principal forum at the U.S. National Academies for issues related to innovative materials and advanced manufacturing, and has oversight responsibility for National Research Council activities in these technology areas. Dr. Wang is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering.

Because of his contributions to advanced manufacturing and materials, Dr. Wang was invited to deliver a presentation to the U.S. National Research Council Review Panel in support of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2005. In 2012, he was invited to give testimony before the National Academies Committee on Manufacturing Extension Partnership. In 2012 he was invited to participate in the Roundtable on Strengthening U.S. Advanced Manufacturing in Clean Energy in the White House.

In addition to authoring or co-authoring more than 240 refereed journal papers, he is a co-author of three books: Computer-Aided Manufacturing (Prentice-Hall, 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, and 3rd Edition), Computer-Aided Process Planning (Elsevier Science Publishers), and Computer Aided Manufacturing PC Application Software (Delmar Publishers).

Dr. Wang earned his bachelor's in industrial engineering from Tunghai University in Taiwan, and his master's in industrial engineering and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University.