Whether we’re driving a car, cooking dinner, performing a psychology experiment, or even watching television, we’re performing goal-directed behavior. We must keep track of our current goal (e.g., to cook dinner), so that we do not execute responses inappropriate for the present situation (e.g., sitting down to watch television). Yet, we must also flexibly adapt our goals to changing situations. For example, we must override our “cooking” goal with an “answering” one when we hear the doorbell ring. My research focuses on the mental processes required to carry out these and other types of goal-directed behavior.

A complicated set of mental processes are involved in behaviors like these. In addition to maintaining and updating our goals, we must attend to relevant stimuli, store relevant information in memory, and select and execute appropriate responses. What is the nature of these processes? How do they interact? What are their limitations? How do they change with training? And what are the neural mechanisms underlying them? These are the types of questions I investigate using a variety of experimental techniques: including behavioral testing, functional neuroimaging, and magnetic stimulation.

Susan Lozier is a physical oceanographer and the dean of the Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Sciences. Previously, she was the Ronie-Richelle Garcia-Johnson Professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Her research focuses on large-scale ocean circulation, the ocean's role in climate variability, and the transfer of heat and fresh water from one part of the ocean to another.

Lozier received her Bachelor of Science degree from Purdue University in 1979, and her Master of Science (1984) and Doctor of Philosophy (1989) degrees from the University of Washington.

Lozier was a post-doctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution before joining the faculty at Duke University. She is a principal investigator for the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP), responsible for coordinating its international and national projects. She was the first woman to graduate from the University of Washington's physical oceanography doctoral program, and is active in the community mentoring program, MPOWIR (Mentoring Physical Oceanography Women to Increase Retention). In 2020 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lozier was the featured speaker for the 16th Annual Roger Revelle Annual Commemorative Lecture, sponsored by the National Academies and held at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 2015, presenting her lecture on Overturning Assumptions: Past, Present, and Future Concerns about the Ocean's Circulation. She started a two-year term as president of the American Geophysical Union in 2021.

Debra Lam is the Founding Director of the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, a statewide public-private partnership committed to investing in innovative solutions for shared economic prosperity. She continues to lead smart communities and urban innovation work at Georgia Tech. Prior to this, she served as Pittsburgh’s inaugural Chief of Innovation & Performance where she oversaw all technology, sustainability, performance, and innovation functions of city government. Before that, she was a management consultant at a global engineering and design firm, Arup. She has received various awards, including being named one of the top 100 most influential people in digital government by Apolitcal.

She has worked and lived in the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A graduate of Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley, Debra serves on the board of the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta and was most recently appointed by the U.S Department of Commerce to the Internet of Things Advisory Board.

Dr. Diana Hicks is a Professor in the School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in metrics for science and technology policy. She was the first author on the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics published in Nature, which has been translated into 24 languages and won the 2016 Ziman award of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) for collaborative promotion of public interaction with science and technology. Her work has informed policymakers in the U.S., Europe and Japan. She has advised the OECD, Flanders, the Czech Republic, and Sweden on national research evaluation systems. She chaired the School of Public Policy for 10 years and currently co-chairs the international Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy and has been an editor of Research Evaluation. Prof. Hicks has also taught at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; SPRU, University of Sussex, and worked at NISTEP in Tokyo. She earned her D.Phil and M.Sc. from SPRU, University of Sussex. In 2018 she was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “distinguished contributions to the evaluation of national and international research and development enterprises, and for outstanding leadership in science and technology policy education.”

Conan Cao is a member of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science.

Greeshma Agasthya (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Nuclear & Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Program at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She leads the Computational Medical Physics Laboratory, and her research interests are: (1) developing multiscale digital twins for personalized radiation dosimetry for imaging, therapy, and theranostics, (2) modeling and simulations to assess novel radiation protocols from cancer diagnosis to cancer treatment, and (3) developing AI frameworks to model patient trajectories for early intervention and treatment in oncology.

Previously, she was a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the Advanced Computing for Health Sciences section. Agasthya received her doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University and completed her postdoctoral training at Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute. She has experience in medical imaging research, modeling and simulation for radiation dosimetry, and AI and Machine learning for healthcare. Agasthya has developed and used multi-scale modeling and simulations of the human body for virtual clinical trials, radiation dosimetry, and optimization of medical imaging systems for cancer applications. She has worked on artificial intelligence (AI) for cancer surveillance, predicting disease outcomes, and clinical decision support. She has collaborated with experts in medical physics, radiology, cardiology, computer engineering, and statistics to tackle interdisciplinary challenges in medical physics and biomedical engineering. She has worked on imaging modalities including neutron imaging, x-ray radiography, computed tomography (CT), and tomosynthesis systems for cancer applications.

Alexander Vlahos is an Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Alexander received his B.S. in Biochemistry from McMaster University and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor Michael Sefton. His Ph.D. work focused on developing an injectable bioartificial pancreas that could be delivered underneath the skin. He then transitioned to mammalian synthetic biology, where he conducted his postdoctoral work as an HFSP long-term fellow at Stanford University with Professor Xiaojing Gao.

His research integrates principles from synthetic biology, protein engineering, and tissue engineering to develop synthetic protein circuits for mammalian cellular engineering. The Vlahos lab synergizes synthetic biology and tissue engineering to create programmable gene and cell therapies for biomedical applications in regenerative medicine, cancer, and autoimmune disease. His lab has three main research themes, including 1) generating protein sensors to sense changes in internal cell states or the external microenvironment, 2) programming engineered cells to model cell-to-cell communication and elucidate the dynamics and expression of key signals that govern fibrosis and immune rejection, and 3) applying synthetic protein circuits to modulate the immune system and improve cell transplantation.

Anthony Harding is an environmental economist with research interests at the intersection of innovative technologies and climate policy. He uses economic theory and applied econometrics to analyze the extent of socioeconomic risks from climate change, how policy and technologies can moderate these risks, and what impacts, intended or otherwise, policies may have. Before returning to Georgia Tech, Harding was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the School of Economics and a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.