Ashok Goel is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. At Georgia Tech, he is also the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Human-Centered Computing, a Co-Director of the Center for Biologically Inspired Design, and a Fellow of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. For more than thirty years, Ashok has conducted research into artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-centered computing, with a focus on computational design, modeling and creativity. His recent work has explored design thinking, analogical thinking and systems thinking in biological inspired design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiRDQ4hr9i8), and his research is now developing virtual research assistants for modeling biological systems. Ashok teaches a popular course on knowledge-based AI as part of Georgia Tech's program on Online Masters of Science in Computer Science. He has pioneered the development of virtual teaching assistants, such as Jill Watson, for answering questions in online discussion forums (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbCguICyfTA). Chronicle of Higher Education recently called virtual assistants exemplified by Jill Watson as one of the most transformative educational technologies in the digital era. Ashok is the Editor-in-Chief of AAAI's AI Magazine.

Charlotte S. Alexander is Professor of Law and Ethics at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. Her scholarship focuses on the efficiency, transparency, and openness of the court system, with a particular interest in civil litigation. She uses empirical and computational methods to process large quantities of legal data and uncover patterns in case filing, progress, and resolution. She has an additional research interest in employment law and litigation.

Alexander received her B.A. from Columbia University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was elected president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. After law school, she clerked for Judge Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and then served as a Skadden Fellow and senior staff attorney at Georgia Legal Services’ Farmworker Rights Division.

Alexander’s work is published or forthcoming in a wide variety of peer reviewed and law journals, including Science, the N.Y.U. Law Review, Texas Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, American Business Law Journal, Industrial Relations, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. She has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Labor, and private foundations. In 2023, she worked as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar with the Justice Innovation Lab of the National Judicial Training College in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on projects involving court delays and access to justice.

Dr. Stephen Harmon serves as associate dean of research at Georgia Tech Professional Education (GTPE), executive director for the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U), and as professor at the Georgia Tech College of Design. At GTPE and C21U, he leads the invention, prototyping, and validation efforts associated with educational innovation and with managing facilities available to all Georgia Tech researchers and faculty members.

His previous position was professor and chair of the Learning Technologies Division in the College of Education and Human Development at Georgia State University.

After majoring in English literature at Furman University, Dr. Harmon moved to Upper Egypt to teach fourth-grade English for two years. While traveling through the Middle East and Africa, he realized the tremendous need, and scarce resources, for education and training in developing countries. He returned to the U.S. and earned a masters and doctorate in instructional technology, with a cognate in global policy studies, from the University of Georgia.

Dr. Harmon’s research centers on educational uses of emerging technologies and has, for the last few years, focused on eLearning, particularly with respect to synchronous, online learning environments. He is a past president of the Association of Educational Communications and Technology, an international professional association of thousands of educators and others whose activities are directed toward improving instruction through technology. 

Dr. Harmon also conducts research on educational technology in developing countries. He has worked in several Middle Eastern and African countries, including as a consultant for USAID’s Education for Development and Democracy Initiative in Botswana.

Dr. Harmon has over 120 professional publications and presentations and was the 2011 recipient of Georgia State University’s Innovative Instruction Award. He was the spring 2016 commencement speaker at Georgia Southern University.

Robert Wright is a GTRI Senior Research Scientist in the Assured Software and Information Division within the CIPHER laboratory. He has been with GTRI since 2021 and leads research efforts in trustworthy autonomous systems. Wright started his career as a civilian research scientist for the Air Force Research Laboratory where he developed technologies and programs for autonomous command and control systems (2003-2016). In 2014, Wright received his Ph.D. in computer science from Binghamton University for his work in developing RL algorithms that learn efficiently from experience Prior to GTRI (2016-2021), Wright was a principal scientist for Assured Information Security where he was a PI for a number of DARPA and Air Force Research Laboratory efforts researching RL and AI techniques. His work has been published in many top venues and was awarded “Best Paper” at the 2013 European Conference on ML. 

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).

Aaron D. Levine is Associate Dean for Research and Outreach in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. He also holds an appointment as a Guest Researcher in the Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a member of the leadership team for the NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), leading ethics and policy research for the center. He seved as Co-Director for CMaT's Engineering Workforce Development activities from 2017 to 2022. His research focuses on the intersection between public policy and bioethics. Much of his work has examined the development of stem cell science, particularly research using human embryonic stem cells, and the translation of novel cell therapies. He also writes extensively on the oversight of contentious areas of medicine, such as assisted reproductive technology. In 2012, he received a NSF CAREER award to examine the impact of ethical controversy on graduate science education and the development of scientific careers.  He serves as Vice-Chair for Bioethics on the International Society for Cell & Genel Therapy’s Committee on the Ethics of Cell and Gene Therapy and recently completed a three-year term as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He is also a long-time member of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Aaron has a long-standing interest in science communication and is the author of Cloning: A Beginner's Guide (Oneworld Publications, 2007), an accessible introduction to the science of cloning and embryonic stem cells and the ethical and policy controversies this science inspires. He was an AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellow for 2019-2020. You can follow Aaron on twitter at @aarondlevine.

He completed his Ph.D. in Public Affairs at Princeton University, where his dissertation research examined the impact of public policy on the development of human embryonic stem cell science.  He also holds an M. Phil. from the University of Cambridge, where, as a Churchill Scholar, he studied computational biology at the Sanger Centre and developed algorithms to help analyze the human genome sequence, and a B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Research in the Sherrill group focuses on the development of ab initio electronic structure theory and its application to problems of broad chemical interest, including the influence of non-covalent interactions in drug binding, biomolecular structure, organic crystals, and organocatalytic transition states. We seek to apply the most accurate quantum models possible for a given problem, and we specialize in generating high-quality datasets for testing new methods or machine-learning purposes. We have developed highly efficient algorithms and software to perform symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT) computations of intermolecular interactions, and we have used this software to analyze the nature of non-covalent pi-interactions in terms of electrostatics, London dispersion forces, induction/polarization, and short range exchange-repulsion. 

Larry P. Heck is a Professor with a joint appointment in the Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the Rhesa S. Farmer Distinguished Chair of Advanced Computing Concepts and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. His received the BSEE from Texas Tech University (1986), and MSEE and PhD EE from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1989,1991). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech and received the Distinguished Engineer Award from the Texas Tech University. He was a Senior Research Engineer with SRI (1992-98), VP of R&D at Nuance (1998-2005), VP of Search and Advertising Sciences at Yahoo! (2005-2009), Chief Scientist of the Microsoft Speech products and Distinguished Engineer in Microsoft Research (2009-2014), Principal Scientist with Google Research (2014-2017), CEO of Viv Labs and SVP at Samsung (2017-2021).

Hang Lu received her B.S. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and her M.S.C.E.P and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the College of Engineering and C. J. "Pete" Silas Chair, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Lu's research interests involve the interface of engineering and biology and her lab, the Lu Fluidics Group, is conducting research at these interface levels. The Lu Fluidics Group engineers BioMEMS (Bio Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) and microfluidic devices to address questions in neuroscience, cell biology, and biotechnology that are difficult to answer using conventional techniques.

Faces of Research - Profile Article

Dr. Tsiotras holds the David & Andrew Lewis Endowed Chair in the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also associate director at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. His current research interests include nonlinear and optimal control and their connections with AI, planning, and decision-making, emphasizing autonomous ground, aerial, and space vehicles applications. He has published more than 350 journal and conference articles in these areas. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Dr. Tsiotras was an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia. He has also held visiting appointments with the MIT, JPL, INRIA, Rocquencourt, the Laboratoire de Automatique de Grenoble, and the Ecole des Mines de Paris (Mines ParisTech). Dr. Tsiotras is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the IEEE Technical Excellence Award in Aerospace Controls, the Outstanding Aerospace Engineer Award from Purdue, the Sigma Xi President and Visitor's Award for Excellence in Research, as well as numerous other fellowships and scholarships. He is currently the chief editor of the Frontiers in Robotics & AI, in the area of space robotics, and an associate editor for the Dynamic Games and Applications journal. In the past, he has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and the Journal of Dynamical and Control Systems. He is a Fellow of the AIAA, IEEE, and AAS.