Meredith is the Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Renewable Bioproducts Institute, and the James Harris Faculty Fellow in ChBE.

Meredith's group researches the surfaces and interfaces of advanced materials. Their work aims to apply fundamentals of polymer, surface and colloid science to find new ways to engineer materials useful to society and industry. In particular, projects emphasize the utilization of renewable components and sustainable processing to achieve circular manufacturing and use of plastics, composites, foams and coatings, among others. Many of these materials are critical for food security, energy efficiency, and are closely connected to greenhouse gas reduction.

Dr. Medford is interested in leveraging materials informatics, statistics, and machine learning to maximize the practical impact of fundamental atomic-scale simulations in the field of surface science and catalysis. His research areas include heterogeneous catalysis, oxide surface chemistry, density functional theory, kinetic models, uncertainty quantification, and Bayesian optimization and inference.

Jamshad Mahmood has over 23 years of experience in corrosion testing and manufacturing of recovery boilers and pressure vessels. He is a Mechanical/Research Engineer with expertise in the design, manufacturing of industrial equipments and conducting lab corrosion testing e.g., slow strain rate corrosion testing, electrochemical corrosion testing, high-temperature aqueous corrosion testing and molten salts corrosion testing. In addition to laboratory experimentation, Jamshad conducted several field studies evaluating in-situ corrosion of pulp mill equipments e.g., digesters, paper machines, storage tanks and recovery boiler tubes. He manages the corrosion laboratories and chemical inventories for the corrosion group. Prior to joining the Institute of Paper Science and Technology in 1997, he worked as Manager Production for 8 years with Descon Engineering Works – one of the large boiler manufactures.

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Professor of the Practice                       
School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
College of Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Associate Director, Pulp, Paper, Packaging and Tissue, Renewable Bioproducts Institute, an Interdisciplinary Research Institute at GT

Director, GT Pulp and Paper Engineering Undergraduate Certificate Program and Foundation
 

Brief Biography:  
Luettgen has 25 plus years of industry experience, with Scott Paper and Kimberly-Clark Corp., where he most recently served as head of North American Innovation the Kimberly-Clark Professional business sector. He has held positions in product development and innovation as well as in capital project management and manufacturing facility leadership.

For several years, Luettgen has served on the Georgia Tech Renewable Bioproducts Institute Industry Board of Advisors, and as the Chairman of the Board of the Technical Association of the Pulp & Paper Industry (TAPPI).  He earned his bachelor's degree in Paper Engineering at Western Michigan University (’85), his master’s degree at the Institute of Paper Chemistry, Appleton, WI (’87), and his Ph.D. in Surface Chemistry at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology - now the Renewable Bioproducts Institute at Georgia Tech (’91).

He rejoined Georgia Tech in November 2014 as a Professor of the Practice in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Associate Director of Pulp, Paper, Tissue and Packaging at RBI. He also serves as the Director of the undergraduate Pulp and Paper Certificate Program and its Foundation.

Areas of research interest include:  Recycling; renewable cellulosic feedstocks; replacing fossil-based products with bio-based materials; commercialization of nanocellulosic materials in consumer and packaging products; Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0; tissue/towel manufacturing and converting; and manufacturing leadership / operational excellence.

Mark D. Losego is an associate professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. The Losego research lab focuses on materials processing to develop novel organic-inorganic hybrid materials and interfaces for microelectronics, sustainable energy devices, national security technologies, and advanced textiles. The Losego Lab combines a unique set of solution and vapor phase processing methods to convert organic polymers into organic-inorganic hybrid materials, including developing the science to scale these processes for manufacturing.  Prof. Losego’s work is primarily experimental, and researchers in his lab gain expertise in the vapor phase processing of materials (atomic layer deposition, physical vapor deposition, vapor phase infiltration, etc.), the design and construction of vacuum equipment, interfacial and surface science, and materials and surface characterization. Depending on the project, Losego Lab researchers explore a variety of properties ranging from electrical to electrochemical to optical to thermal to sorptive to catalytic and more.

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. Ryan introduced a rapid temperature swing adsorption (RTSA) approach for post-combustion CO2 capture, which was successfully demonstrated by adapting knowledge developed in membrane science to design unique nanoscale composite adsorbent/heat exchangers. After his Ph.D. (awarded in 2010), he spent almost 3 years as a post-doctoral research engineer at Algenol Biofuels, where he published 25 papers and filed two U.S. patent applications. His work at Algenol focused on developing energy-efficient liquid and vapor separation systems for downstream biofuel purification. 

He is now the Thomas C. DeLoach Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His current research seeks to revolutionize fluid separation processes critical to the global energy and carbon infrastructure. He has a specific focus on membrane- and adsorbent-based science and technology to address some of the most difficult chemical separations. His group’s research activities range from fundamental material science and discovery to translational engineering applications focusing on making and testing separation devices. 

Ryan has received a variety of awards for his research efforts including the 2020 Allan P. Colburn Award from AIChE, and the 2022 Curtis W. McGraw Award from ASEE. He is currently an Editor for the Journal of Membrane Science and is the Secretary of the North American Membrane Society. He is the Director of the Center for Understanding & Controlling Accelerated and Gradual Evolution of Materials for Energy (UNCAGE-ME), an Energy Frontier Research Center of the US Department of Energy. He has over 160 publications in the field of separations including articles in Science, Nature and other impactful venues.

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. Kippelen joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology where his research ranges from the investigation of fundamental physical processes (nonlinear optical activity, charge transport, light harvesting and emission), to the design, fabrication and testing of light-weight flexible optoelectronic devices and circuits based on nanostructured organic materials. He currently serves as director of the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics, and as co-president of the Lafayette Institute, a major optoelectronics commercialization initiative that is based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine in Metz, France. He currently holds 25 patents and has co-authored over 270 refereed publications and 14 book chapters. His publications have received over 20,000 citations and his h-index is 73 (Google Scholar). He served as chair and co-chair of numerous international conferences on organic optoelectronic materials and devices and as deputy editor of Energy Express. He was the founding editor of Energy Express.