Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the Digital Media Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he directs the Public Design Workshop: a design research studio that explores socially engaged design and civic media. 

DiSalvo is also co-director of the Digital Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Center and its Digital Civics initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, and he leads the Serve-Learn-Sustain Fellows program, which brings together faculty, staff, students, and community partners to explore pressing social research themes (the 2016-2017 themes are Smart Cities and Food, Energy, Water, Systems). He has a courtesy appointment in the School of Interactive Computing and is an affiliate of the GVU Center and the Center for Urban Innovation.  DiSalvo also coordinates the Digital Media track of the interdisciplinary M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction. 

DiSalvo’s scholarship draws together theories and methods from design research and design studies, the social sciences, and the humanities, to analyze the social and political qualities of design, and to prototype experimental systems and services. Current research domains include civics, smart cities, the Internet of Things, food systems, and environmental monitoring. Across these domains, DiSalvo is interested in how practices of participatory and public design work to articulate issues and provide resources for new forms of collective action.  

Areas of Expertise:

• Civic Media
• Design
• Design Studies
• Digital Civics
• Food Systems
• Public And Civic IoT
• Smart Cities

Pinar Keskinocak is the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She is also co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. Previously, she served as the College of Engineering ADVANCE Professor and as interim associate dean for faculty development and scholarship. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University, and her M.S. and B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University.

Keskinocak's research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling (including Covid-19, malaria, Guinea worm, pandemic flu), evaluating intervention strategies, and resource allocation; catch-up scheduling for vaccinations; hospital operations management; disaster preparedness and response (e.g., prepositioning inventory); debris management; centralized and decentralized price and lead time decisions. She has worked on projects with companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and healthcare providers, including American Red Cross, CARE, Carter Center, CDC, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University, and Intel Corporation.

She is an INFORMS Fellow and currently serves as the president of INFORMS. Previously she served as the Secretary of INFORMS, a department editor for Operations Research (Policy Modeling and Public Sector area), associate editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and INFORMS Vice President of Membership and Professional Recognition. She is the co-founder and past-president of INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service, and Needs, and the president of the INFORMS Health Applications Society.

Turgay Ayer is the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Ayer also serves as the research director for healthcare analytics and business intelligence in the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech and holds a courtesy appointment at Emory Medical School.

His research focuses on healthcare analytics and socially responsible business analytics with a particular emphasis on practice-focused research. His research papers have been published in top tier management, engineering, and medical journals, and covered by popular media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, U.S. News, and NPR.

Ayer has received over $2.5 million grant funding and several awards for his work, including an NSF CAREER Award (2015), first place in MSOM Responsible Research in Operations Management (2019), first place in the MSOM Best Practice-Based Research Competition (2017), INFORMS Franz Edelman Laureate Award (2017), and Society for Medical Decision Making Lee Lusted Award (2009).

Ayer serves an associate editor for Operations Research, Management Science, and MSOM, and is a past president of the INFORMS Health Application Society. He received a B.S. in industrial engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Josiah Hester works broadly in computer engineering, with a special focus on wearable devices, edge computing, and cyber-physical systems. His Ph.D. work focused on energy harvesting and battery-free devices that failed intermittentently. He now focuses on sustainable approaches to computing, via designing health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for conservation. 
   
His work in health is focused on increasing accessibility and lowering the burden of getting preventive and acute healthcare. In both situations, he designs low-burden, high-fidelity wearable devices that monitor aspects of physiology and behavior, and use machine learning techniques to suggest or deliver adaptive and in-situ interventions ranging from pharmacological to behavioral. 
   
His work is supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, and DARPA. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022. He was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant Ten, won the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Most Promising Scientist/Engineer Award, and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2021. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC, Popular Science, Communications of the ACM, and the Guinness Book of World Records, among many others.

An environmental psychologist and professor of architecture, Craig Zimring directs the SimTigrate Design Lab. He and his colleagues and students focus on how innovative, research-informed design can improve health and healthcare, and how research can be incorporated into classroom teaching, both to improve design and help students develop skills for practice. He has conducted over $7M in research with and for Mayo Clinic, Emory Healthcare, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Military Health System, HKS Architects, HDR Architects, and many others, including safety-net clinics and international providers of healthcare. He has published over 100 scholarly and professional publications and received 11 awards for his research. He has given numerous keynote and plenary addresses to organizations and meetings such as Australian Healthcare Week, Institute for Patient and Family-Centered Care, and Chinese Hospital Association. His Ph.D. and master's graduates serve in teaching and leadership positions in universities and practice.

He currently serves on the board of the Center for Health Design and has served on the boards of the Environmental Design Research Association, the National Academies’ Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, the Joint Commission’s Roundtable on the Hospital of the Future and other organizations. In addition to his work on healthcare, Zimring served as a senior scientist in developing the 2010 New York City Active Design Guidelines and was a founding member of the Center for Active Design.

Paul M.A. Baker, Ph.D., is the Senior Director, Research and Strategic Innovation at the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP), and Chief Operating Officer, Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies (CDAIT). He is also a Principal Research Scientist with the School of Public Policy. Previously he was the Associate Director of the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U). Aside from exploring the diffusion innovation and policy in IoT, recent research projects include innovation driven workforce development, mapping the role of intermediaries in innovation networks, usability of voting technologies, implementation of accessible technologies. His work in policy studies include barriers to the adoption of wireless technologies by people with disabilities, teleworking and people with disabilities; social media innovation, online collaboration and virtual communities. He is also involved in international policy research and collaborative policy networks, especially as it relates to issues of technology and usability policy, workforce development and innovation diffusion. 

Baker holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University, a Master’s degree in Theological Studies from Emory University, M.P. in Urban Planning from the University of Virginia, and an M.A. in International Commerce and Policy from George Mason University. He has served on a variety of national boards and panels, and as a grant proposal reviewer for U.S. Department of Education, the Academy of Finland, the Israel Science Foundation, and the NTIA, US Department of Commerce. He serves also on editorial boards and as a reviewer for 15 journals. His co-edited (with Jarice Hanson and Jeremy Hunsinger) volume, “The Unconnected: Social Justice, Participation, and Engagement in the Information Society” was published in 2013.

Arthi Rao is a research scientist at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development at Georgia Tech. She has had a consistent focus on Health and Place research throughout her career. She has an interdisciplinary educational and professional background in Urban Planning, Epidemiology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from Georgia Tech. Her research interests focus on social determinants of health, healthcare access, healthy communities, and spatial methods. She uses methods including spatial clustering, data mining/classification techniques and hierarchical modeling in her research. She has integrated these methods to create decision-support tools for academic and industrial applications.

She regularly collaborates with researchers at The Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech, and the American Planning Association as a subject matter expert on healthy communities’ research and geospatial methods. She has published in journals on the topics of Health Impact Assessment (HIA), sustainability, walkability analysis, regional planning, and therapeutic landscapes. She also teaches courses titled “Public Health and the Built Environment” and “Public Health Analytics” at Georgia Tech.

Specialization Area: Health and Environment