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.

Susan Ryan is a member of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.