Nian Liu began as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in January 2017. He received his B.S. in 2009 from Fudan University (China), and Ph.D. in 2014 from Stanford University, where he worked with Prof. Yi Cui on the structure design for Si anodes for high-energy Li-ion batteries. In 2014-2016, he worked with Prof. Steven Chu at Stanford University as a postdoc, where he developed in situ optical microscopy to probe beam-sensitive battery reactions. Dr. Liu 's lab at Georgia Tech is broadly interested in the combination of nanomaterials, electrochemistry, and light microscopy for understanding and addressing the global energy challenges. Dr. Liu is the recipient of the Electrochemical Society (ECS) Daniel Cubicciotti Award (2014) and American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award (2015).

The Glass research group studies the microbes that made Earth habitable, and, more specifically, the microbial mechanisms underpinning cryptic transformations of methane and nitrous oxide in oxygen-free ecosystems. Why focus on the microbial world? The Earth has been constantly inhabited for four billion years. For three-quarters of that time, life was solely microbial. Ancient microbes produced the gases that warmed the planet to clement temperatures when the sun was faint, and that invented the molecular machines that drive biogeochemical cycles. The co-evolution of Earth and life is woven into the fabric of our research group, which examines the interplay between microbes and the greenhouses gases that control planetary temperature. Our research informs the microbial metabolisms that (i) made the early Earth habitable for life, (ii) make the deep subsurface habitable for life, (iii) serve as biosignatures for life on exoplanets, and (iv) play crucial roles in regulating atmospheric fluxes of greenhouse gases on our warming planet.

Martin Maldovan is an associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He was also a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at MIT.  Maldovan’s group is developing novel heat and mass transport processes as an enabling technology for energy converter materials and devices, micro and nanoelectronics, chemical and biological separations, and catalysis. His group focuses on designing, predicting, and controlling heat and mass transfer in rationally engineered systems with length scales ranging from macro to nano, to advance new paradigms for energy saving materials and devices.