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.

Saad Bhamla studies biomechanics across species to engineer knowledge and tools that inspire curiosity.

Saad Bhamla is an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at Georgia Tech. A self-proclaimed "tinkerer," his lab is a trove of discoveries and inventions that span biology, physics and engineering. His current projects include studying the hydrodynamics of insect urine, worm blob locomotion and ultra-low-cost devices for global health. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Economist, CNN, Wired, NPR, the Wall Street Journal and more.

Saad is a prolific inventor and his most notable inventions includes a 20-cent paper centrifuge, a 23-cent electroporator, and the 96-cent hearing aid. Saad's work is recognised by numerous awards including a NIH R35 Outstanding Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, CTL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and INDEX: Design to Improve Life Award. Saad is also a National Geographic Explorer and a TED speaker. Newsweek recognized Saad as 1 of 10 Innovators disrupting healthcare.

Saad is a co-founder of Piezo Therapeutics.

Outside of the lab, Saad loves to go hiking with his partner and two dogs (Ollie and Bella).

Dr. Aidun joined the Woodruff School as a Professor in 2003 after completion of a two-year period as program director at the National Science Foundation. He began at Tech in 1988 as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology. Prior, he was a research Scientist at Battelle Research Laboratories, Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and Senior Research Consultant at the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Center at Cornell. 

Dr. Aidun's research is at the intersection between fundamentals of the physics of complex fluids/thermal transport and applications to engineering and biotransport. He has a diverse research portfolio in fluid mechanics, bioengineering, renewable bioproducts and decarbonization of industrial processes. 

A major focus has been to understand the physics of blood cell transport and interaction with glycoproteins (e.g., vWF) with applications to cardiovascular diseases.

Blair Brettmann received her B.S. in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. She received her Master’s in chemical engineering practice from MIT in 2009 following internships at GlaxoSmithKline (Upper Merion, PA) and Mawana Sugar Works (Mawana, India). Blair received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT in 2012 working with the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing under Professor Bernhardt Trout. Her research focused on solid-state characterization and application of pharmaceutical formulations prepared by electrospinning. Following her Ph.D., Brettmann worked as a research engineer for Saint-Gobain Ceramics and Plastics for two years. While at Saint-Gobain she worked on polymer-based wet coatings and dispersions for various applications, including window films, glass fiber mats and architectural fabrics. Later, Brettmann served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago with Professor Matthew Tirrell. Currently, Brettmann is an assistant professor with joint appointments in chemical and biomolecular engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Edward Botchwey received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993 and both M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in materials science engineering and bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and 2002 respectively. He was recruited to the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2012 from his previous position at the University of Virginia. His current position is associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Botchwey is former Ph.D. fellow of the National GEM Consortium, a former postdoctoral fellow of the UNCF-Merk Science Initiative, and a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers from the National Institutes of Health. 

Botchwey’s research focuses on the delivery of naturally occurring small molecules and synthetic derivatives for applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. He is particularly interested in how transient control of immune response using bioactive lipids can be exploited to control trafficking of stem cells, enhance tissue vascularization, and resolve inflammation. Botchwey serves on the Board of Directors of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and serves as the secretary to the Biomedical Engineering Decade committee.

Botchwey, his wife Nisha Botchwey (also a GT faculty member) and three children reside in east Atlanta in the Lake Claire neighborhood. Botchwey is also an avid cyclist and enjoys reading YA fantasy, behavioral neuroscience and Christian theology books in his personal time.

Andreas (Andy) S. Bommarius is a professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as well of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA.  He received his diploma in Chemistry in 1984 at the Technical University of Munich, Germany and his Chemical Engineering B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1982 and 1989 at MIT, Cambridge, MA.

From 1990-2000, he led the Laboratory of Enzyme Catalysis at Degussa (now Evonik) in Wolfgang, Germany, where his work ranged from immobilizing homogenous catalysts in membrane reactors to large-scale cofactor-regenerated redox reactions to pharma intermediates.

At Georgia Tech since 2000, his research interests cover green chemistry and biomolecular engineering, specifically biocatalyst development and protein stability studies.  His lab applies data-driven protein engineering to improve protein properties on catalysts ranging from ene and nitro reductases to cellobiohydrolases.  Bommarius has guided the repositioning of the curriculum towards Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering by developing new courses in Process Design, Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering, as well as Drug Design, Development, and Delivery (D4), an interdisciplinary course with Mark Prausnitz.

Andy Bommarius in 2008 became a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.  Since 2010, he is Director of the NSF-I/UCR Center for Pharmaceutical Development (CPD), a Center focusing on process development, drug substance and product stability, and novel analytical methods for the characterization of drug substances and excipients.

The Curtis lab is primarily focused on the physics of cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions, in particular within the context of glycobiology and immunobiology. Our newest projects focus on questions of collective and single cell migration in vitro and in vivo; immunophage therapy "an immunoengineering approach - that uses combined defense of immune cells plus viruses (phage) to overcome bacterial infections"; and the study of the molecular biophysics and biomaterials applications of the incredible enzyme, hyaluronan synthase. A few common scientific themes emerge frequently in our projects: biophysics at interfaces, the use of quantitative modeling, collective interactions of cells and/or molecules, cell mechanics, cell motility and adhesion, and in many cases, the role of bulky sugars in facilitating cell integration and rearrangements in tissues.

Julie Champion is the William R. McLain Endowed Term Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned her B.S.E. in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. She was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Champion is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and has received awards including American Chemical Society Women Chemists Committee Rising Star, NSF BRIGE Award, Georgia Tech Women in Engineering Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, Georgia Tech BioEngineering Program Outstanding Advisor Award. Professor Champion’s current research focuses on design and self-assembly of functional nanomaterials made from engineered proteins for applications in immunology, cancer, and biocatalysis.

Marilyn Brown is a Regents' and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. She joined Georgia Tech in 2006 after a distinguished career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she led several national climate change mitigation studies and became a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. 

Her research focuses on the design and impact of policies aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, with an emphasis on the electric utility industry, the integration of energy efficiency, demand response, and solar resources, and ways of improving resiliency to disruptions. Her books include Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Green Savings: How Policies and Markets Drive Energy Efficiency (Praeger, 2015), and Climate Change and Global Energy Security (MIT Press, 2011). She has authored more than 250 publications. Her work has had significant visibility in the policy arena as evidenced by her numerous briefings and testimonies before state legislative bodies and Committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Dr. Brown co-founded the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and chaired its Board of Directors for several years. She has served on the Boards of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Alliance to Save Energy, and was a commissioner with the Bipartisan Policy Center. She has served on eight National Academies committees and is an Editor of Energy Policy and an Editorial Board member of Energy Efficiency and Energy Research and Social Science. She served two terms (2010-2017) as a Presidential appointee and regulator on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider. From 2014-2018 she served on DOE’s Electricity Advisory Committee, where she led the Smart Grid Subcommittee.