Leanne West is Chief Engineer of Pediatric Technologies at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Pediatric Innovation Catalyst at the Global Center for Medical Innovation where she leads innovation in pediatric medical devices. In her 25+ years working at Georgia Tech, she has led multimillion dollar programs and teams of researchers to develop products for government and industry partners. She also started her own company, Intelligent Access, to take her invention of a wireless personal captioning system to market. She serves as the technical liaison between Georgia Tech and pediatric hospitals around the world, with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Shriners Hospitals being the main partners. West works closely with clinicians to understand and identify problems that need a solution to allow them to take better care of their patients. She is an invited Judge for many medical device pitch competitions and serves on several Boards in the healthcare and technology arenas. 

West is the President of the International Children’s Advisory Network (iCAN). Since 2014, iCAN fosters greater global understanding about the importance of the pediatric patient and caregiver voice in healthcare, clinical trials, and research. iCAN gives its members the opportunities to share their stories and experiences in front of organizations like the FDA, AAP, and CDC, and conferences. iCAN is an official partner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) as an official member organization of the Patient and Caregiver Connection Partner program and the Total Product Life Cycle Advisory Program. West is also a patient advocate for one of her two rare diseases, serving on the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research Patient Advisory Council and Speaker’s Bureau. 

She has served as the twice-elected Chair of the Georgia Tech Executive Board (2007, 2008) and was the GT Chair of the State Charitable Campaign (2017). She was recognized by Georgia Trend magazine as one of Georgia’s “40 Under 40” in 2004; she was selected for Leadership Georgia in 2008; she was a member of the team awarded the international Optical Society 2012 Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award; she received Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Achievement in Research Enterprise Enhancement Award in 2014, and she was Women in Technology’s Woman of the year in 2014. In 2017, she was appointed to the board of the Georgia Technology Authority by the late Speaker of the House, David Ralston.

Matt works with Georgia Tech researchers and students, along with industry partners in the creation of innovative mobile and converged applications and services. He is also the Associate Director, and co-founder, of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center, a unique research center supporting industry and student engagement through research and operational projects; and the wireless services manager for Georgia Tech in the Office of Information Technology. Matt is a principal in the annual Convergence Innovation Competition, now in its ninth year, which provides industry sponsors an opportunity to engage students in wide ranging categories which they define and judge. Matt is also responsible for The GT Journey project which includes GT mobile, an HTML5 based portal for mobile, desktop, and kiosks; and GT DevHub where any member of the campus community can access campus IT services and contribute content, meta-data, and the applications themselves.

Munmun De Choudhury is currently an associate professor at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech. Munmun’s research interests are in computational social science, with a focus on reasoning about personal and societal well-being from social digital footprints.

Dr. Janet Murray is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, as well as Director of the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (http://dilac.iac.gatech.edu). She received her PhD in English from Harvard. Her primary research interests are interactive design, interactive narrative, and the history and development of representational media. Her widely known book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether we can expect this new medium to support a new expressive art form, comparable to the Shakespearean theater or the Victorian novel in its ability to move and enlighten us. She is mostly optimistic about this possibility. Her textbook, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011) unites the myriad traditional disciplines in which interactive designers are now trained into a single coherent digitally focused design vocabulary. Her Prototyping eNarrative group (PENlab) creates prototypes of emerging narrative structures including interactive television, story-games, and virtual/augmented reality (http://penlab.gatech.edu). She is an emerita member of the Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute and the Board of the Peabody Awards, an Inaugural Fellow of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance, and a frequent keynote speaker for conferences at the intersection of games and narrative.