Dr. Boukouvala is originally from Piraeus, which is the port of Athens in Greece. As the daughter of an airforce pilot, she travelled a lot with her family. Her first international move was actually to the USA, where she spent one year in Montgomery, Alabama. She later on lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Crete, Greece, before returning to Athens to get her B.S Degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University in Athens. In 2008, she moved back to the US to obtain a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Rutgers University in NJ. She then worked as a Postdoctoral Associate in both Princeton University and Texas A&M University. In August 2016, Dr. Boukouvala returned to the South East US, as an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. 

Her research interest in Process Systems Engineering (PSE) started during her PhD years, where she worked under the supervision of Dr. Marianthi Ierapetritou, on modeling and optimization of continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing. Her background on optimization and data-driven modeling was enhanced during her years as a postdoc with the late Christodoulos A. Floudas. Dr. Boukouvala is a proud 4th generation member of the academic family tree of the father of PSE, Roger Sargent.

Bjarne Kreitz is an incoming Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Kreitz received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from Clausthal University of Technology (Germany). He obtained his Dr.-Ing. in Chemical Engineering from Clausthal University of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Turek, working on the microkinetic investigation of the transient methanation with experiments and multiscale modeling. 

Kreitz conducted postdoctoral work at Brown University with Prof. Franklin Goldsmith with a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Before joining Brown, he worked briefly as a postdoc at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) in the group of Prof. Olaf Deutschmann.

Julia Yang, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. Her research has enabled fundamental understanding of battery materials by advancing computational approaches to resolve transport in disordered electrodes and explain reactivity in organic electrolytes. She is a co-author on more than 14 publications and four patents, a recipient of the Harvard University Center for the Environment Fellowship (2022-2024), and a NextProf Nexus alum (2023). She is deeply committed to educating the next generation of diverse minds by prioritizing equity, inclusivity, and belonging, starting from within the classroom and beyond. 

Prof. Yang received her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering, with an additional major in Physics, from Carnegie Mellon University and her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from U.C. Berkeley as an NDSEG Fellow under the guidance of Prof. Gerbrand Ceder. During her graduate studies, she was an AI Resident with X, the Moonshot Factory. She led postdoctoral work at Harvard University as an Environmental Fellow working with Prof. Boris Kozinsky and collaborating with Prof. Ah-Hyung Alissa Park. 

Saumya Jain is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences. He received a B.Tech and an M.Tech in Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Arizona. He conducted postdoctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow in the lab of Dr. Larry Zipursky. His research focuses on the regulation of gene expression in developing nervous systems across space and time.

Animal brains consist of a vast number of neurons (~100 billion in humans, ~100 million in mice), and thousands of neuron-types. These neurons generated at different times and locations in the developing brain come together in precise ways to form specific connections (~100 trillion connections in the human brain). Even subtle defects in wiring are associated with conditions such as autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy. How does biology ensure the assembly of such a complex structure? A key piece of this puzzle is ensuring that the right set of genes are expressed at the right time and in the right place. The Jain lab is trying to address the following questions: 1) How are the timing and cell-type specificity of gene expression controlled in developing neurons to ensure proper circuit formation? 2) How are these mechanisms perturbed in neurodevelopmental disorders? To address these questions, the lab applies single-cell genomics, genetics and molecular biology approaches in the developing mouse and fruit fly visual systems.

Alan Ritter is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research interests include natural language processing, information extraction, and machine learning. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon.  His research aims to solve challenging technical problems that can help machines learn to read vast quantities of text with minimal supervision.  His work has been featured in the press including WIRED, TNW and VentureBeat.  Alan is the recipient of an NSF CAREER, an Amazon Research Award, a Sony Faculty Innovation Award, and several paper awards presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Dr. Vijay Ganesh is a professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2023, Vijay was a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada from 2012 to 2023 and a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2012. Vijay completed his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2007. Vijay's primary area of research is the theory and practice of SAT/SMT solvers, and their application in AI, software engineering, security, mathematics, and physics. In this context he has led the development of many SAT/SMT solvers, most notably, STP, Z3str4, AlphaZ3, MapleSAT, and MathCheck. He has also proved several decidability and complexity results in the context of first-order theories. More recently he has started working on topics at the intersection of learning and reasoning, especially the use of machine learning for efficient solvers, and the use of solvers aimed at making AI more trustworthy, secure, and robust. For his research, Vijay has won over 30 awards, honors, and medals to-date, including an ACM Impact Paper Award at ISSTA 2019, ACM Test of Time Award at CCS 2016, and a Ten-Year Most Influential Paper citation at DATE 2008.

Dr. Rahnev received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University in 2012. After completing a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, he joined Georgia Tech in 2015 where he is currently Blanchard Early Career professor. His research focuses on perceptual decision making – the process of internally representing the available sensory information and making decisions on it. Dr. Rahnev uses a wide variety of methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), psychophysics, computational modeling, and deep neural networks (DNNs). Dr. Rahnev’s work appears in high-impact journals such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Nature Human Behavior. He has received over $3.5M in funding, including PI grants from NIH, NSF, and the Office of Naval Research.

Anna (Anya) Ivanova is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology. She got her Ph.D. from MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Science and carried out her postdoctoral training at MIT Quest for Intelligence. In her research, Anya is examining the language-thought relationship in humans and in large language models using a synergistic combination of human brain imaging, behavioral studies, and computational modeling.

I am an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Before joining Georgia Tech, I spent two wonderful years at Virginia Tech as a faculty member. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Visual Computing Group at Harvard University, and received my Ph.D. from Human-Centred Computing Department, Monash University, Australia.

My research encompasses a wide range of topics within the fields of Visualization (VIS), VR/AR, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I actively contribute to these communities and regularly publish my work in leading venues such as IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, IEEE TVCG, EuroVis, and IEEE VR. I am honored to have received three best paper honorable mention awards, notably from IEEE VIS in 2016 and 2022, as well as ACM CHI in 2021. I also serve as a program committee member for several prestigious conferences in my fields, including IEEE VIS 2022/23/24, ACM CHI 2023/24, and IEEE VR 2022/23/24.

Molei Tao received B.S. in Math & Physics in 2006 from Tsinghua Univ. (Beijing) and Ph.D. in Control & Dynamical Systems with a minor in Physics in 2011 from Caltech (advisor: Houman Owhadi, co-advisor: Jerry Marsden). Afterwards, he worked as a postdoc in Computing & Mathematical Sciences at Caltech from 2011 to 2012, and then as a Courant Instructor at NYU from 2012 to 2014. From 2014 on, he has been an assistant, and then associate professor in School of Math at Georgia Tech. He is a recipient of W.P. Carey Ph.D. Prize in Applied Mathematics (2011), American Control Conference Best Student Paper Finalist (2013), NSF CAREER Award (2019), AISTATS best paper award (2020), IEEE EFTF-IFCS Best Student Paper Finalist (2021), Cullen-Peck Scholar Award (2022), GT-Emory AI.Humanity Award (2023), a Plenary Speaker at Georgia Scientific Computing Symposium (2024), a Keynote Speaker at (2024) International Conference on Scientific Computing and Machine Learning, SONY Faculty Innovation Award (2024), Best Poster Award at 2024 international conference “Recent Advances and Future Directions for Sampling” held at Yale, and Richard Duke Fellowship (2025).