Aaron Drysdale, a Master of Computer Science graduate from Georgia Tech, is the Chief Technologist at the Cloud Hub. He manages the proposal process for research grants, organizes industry training sessions, and provides direct technical support to research teams utilizing cloud resources. Aaron's role also involves collaborating with Microsoft’s technical teams to resolve complex issues, ensuring seamless and efficient research progress. His expertise and proactive approach are vital to the success of the Cloud Hub's mission to advance innovative research.

Dr. Hyesoon Kim received her Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include high-performance energy-efficient computer architectures, programmer-compiler-architecture interaction, low-power high-performance embedded processors, and compiler and hardware support for dynamic optimizations, virtual machines, and binary instrumentation.

Professor John Wise uses numerical simulations to study the formation and evolution of galaxies and their black holes. He is one of the lead developers of the community-driven, open-source astrophysics code Enzo and has vast experience running state-of-the-art simulations on the world’s largest supercomputers. He received his B.S. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001. He then studied at Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2007. He went on to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center just outside of Washington, DC as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow. Then in 2009, he was awarded the prestigious Hubble Fellowship which he took to Princeton University before arriving at Georgia Tech in 2011, coming back home after ten years roaming the nation.

Munmun De Choudhury is currently an associate professor at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech. Munmun’s research interests are in computational social science, with a focus on reasoning about personal and societal well-being from social digital footprints.

As Director of Activities for three of Tech's Interdisciplinary Research Institutes: the Strategic Energy Institute, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, and the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, I'll help bring together researchers from different disciplines to address topics of strategic importance. Each interdisciplinary research group mobilizes faculty to address the needs of external stakeholders (federal, state, and local entities, corporations, foundations, and communities) by fostering an Institute-wide innovation ecosystem around a specific focus.

A principal research scientist, Christine Conwell is the interim executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) since September 2024 and has served as the director of planning and operations since 2020. She oversees strategic and annual planning within SEI and partners with campus researchers and units to create and execute strategic programs and events. Most recently, she led the development of a new five-year action plan and launched a signature initiative to build energy-focused research partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions.  

Before her role at SEI, Conwell was managing director of the $40 million NSF-NASA Center for Chemical Evolution (CCE) in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where she oversaw daily operations, fostered collaborations between 12 universities and other partners, and developed outreach and educational programs. Annually, she worked with more than 80 faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and students and advised on key opportunities to maximize the center's impact. She served as a key leader within CCE’s management team and, in 2020, she was awarded Georgia Tech’s prestigious Outstanding Achievement in the Research Enterprise Award for her leadership.

Conwell holds a B.S. in molecular biology and chemistry from Westminster College in Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Georgia Tech. She has authored several peer-reviewed manuscripts, book chapters, and grants on her research in DNA biophysics and non-viral gene delivery, and was a postdoctoral recipient of the NIH Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award. During her time at Georgia Tech, Conwell has served as a member of the Research Faculty Senate and the Faculty Executive Board, and she was selected as a member of the fifth Leading Women at Georgia Tech cohort.

Dr. Annalisa Bracco is a professor at Georgia Tech with extensive background in computational fluid dynamics and physical oceanography. Her research interests include coastal ocean circulation, with focus on meso- and submesoscale processes, ocean predictability and inverse dynamics, impacts of physical forcing on ecosystems, and climate model validation. Her group has been involved in field collections during the Deepwater Horizon spill (July/Aug. 2010) and was back in the Gulf in the summer of 2011.

Dr. Nicole Kennard is a Research Scientist II within BBISS and serves as the Assistant Director for Community-Engaged Research. She supports faculty across the university in building meaningful and co-creative research partnerships with local communities to address pressing sustainability and societal challenges. She works closely with the Center for Sustainable Communities Research & Education (SCoRE) to provide trainings for GT researchers to work with communities in research partnerships.

Kennard also leads her own community-engaged research in sustainable food systems. Her work focuses on building resilient, community-focused food systems and uplifting local agriculture, agroecology, and food sovereignty as solutions to the complex, intertwined challenges of food insecurity, climate change, and land degradation. She uses a combination of quantitative methods (lifecycle assessment, mapping, soil health and ecosystem service assessments) and qualitative methods (in-depth interviews) to support this systems-level research. She is currently working with local partners to build a food systems map for the City of Atlanta.

Kennard holds a PhD in Chemistry and Biosciences from the University of Sheffield (Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures); an MSc in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security from Newcastle University (U.S. Fulbright Scholar); and a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.