Ryan Lively was born in 1984. He spent approximately 16 years in Gainesville, FL and attended almost every home football game at The Swamp. He enrolled at Georgia Tech in 2002 as an eager Chemical Engineering student and has been a Yellow Jacket at heart ever since. During his studies at Georgia Tech, Ryan worked on research projects as diverse as ab initio quantum mechanical methods to estimate molecular binding energies, fresh Georgia peach preservation, composite spinneret design, dual-layer hollow fiber membrane spinning, and sorbent-loaded fiber spinning.

Bernard Kippelen was born and raised in Alsace, France. He studied at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg where he received a Maitrise in Solid-State Physics in 1985, and a Ph.D. in Nonlinear Optics in 1990. From 1990 to 1997 he was Charge de Recherches at the CNRS, France. In 1994, he joined the faculty of the Optical Sciences Center at the University of Arizona. There, he developed a research and teaching program on polymer optics and plastic electronics. In August 2003, Dr.

Kalaitzidou joined Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in the G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in November of 2007. She also holds an adjunct appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. She obtained her Ph.D. in manufacturing and characterization of polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) from Michigan State University and worked as a post-doctoral researcher on mechanics of soft materials in the Polymer Science and Engineering Department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was promoted to professor in 2019 and was also named a Rae S. and Frank H.

Dennis Hess’s research interests are in thin film science and technology, surface and interface modification and characterization, microelectronics processing and electronic materials. His group focuses on the establishment of fundamental structure-property relationships and their connection to chemical process sequences used in the fabrication of novel films, electronic materials, devices, and nanostructures.

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. 

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.