Bojan Petrovic joined Georgia Tech in 2007 as a Professor. Prior to that he acquired industrial experience as a Fellow Scientist in Westinghouse Science and Technology where his primary responsibility was as the project Deputy Director on the development of the advanced, modular IRIS reactor.

Dr. Petrovic's current research focuses on advanced reactor design, nuclear fuel cycle and waste management, and related modeling and simulation methods.

Over the past ten years, he has been involved in the development of the IRIS Reactor, within an international team of 19 organizations from ten countries. IRIS is an advanced medium power (335 MWe) integral-type PWR, based on proven light-water technology, but incorporating many innovative solutions that improve its operation, safety, security, and economics. Advanced reactors have the potential to offer full benefit in synergy with advanced fuel cycles. Recently, the focus of this research is shifting to judicious selection of fuel cycle, reprocessing, and partition and transmutation options, which  may significantly reduce the radiotoxicity of spent nuclear fuel and enable its safe and economical ultimate disposal.

Novel reactor designs and advanced fuel cycles pose new challenges and require improved, more accurate methods of modeling and simulations. Dr. Petrovic's interest is in developing approaches for using Monte Carlo and hybrid deterministic-Monte Carlo methods (for eigenvalue as well as shielding applications) in a way that will be practical and relevant for analysis of complex nuclear systems.

Dr. Petrovic has a strong interest in interdisciplinary areas, and his research projects have included collaboration related to industrial and medical applications of nuclear technology. His recent research in computational medical physics focuses on proton therapy. His research has been sponsored by the Department of Energy, industry and utilities.

The Strategic Energy Institute is excited to welcome Scott McWhorter as a 2023 Distinguished External Fellow. Scott will co-lead the concept development, visioning, partnership, and preliminary capture activities for Georgia Tech on the Department of Commerce Tech Hubs (“Hubs”) and expand Georgia Tech’s hydrogen activities and stature.

Scott is not new to the Georgia Tech campus and has previously worked with Dan Campbell of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) on developing trace organic optical sensors based on evanescent waveguides. More recently, Scott worked with David Sholl (professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech through 2021), to develop the RAPID (Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment) Institute and then through his work with Southeast Hydrogen Energy Alliance (SHEA), started working with Comas Haynes of GTRI on hydrogen, where they brought together the ecosystem that was responsible for at least three hydrogen hub efforts in the South East.

Scott's work related to energy in his own words: 
My career has always related to energy even when I didn’t notice it. I started out in DNA microchips where we tried to understand the various aspects of fluidics (mass transport, thermal, and surface science) that influenced efficient separations. Using the tools from those efforts I transitioned into optical sensor development to monitor trace gases from the gas-solid catalyst interface in a fuel cell electrode to an unknown-unknown contaminant that might cause a failure mode in a weapons system. Over the past decade, my work in energy has focused namely on building partnerships in industrial manufacturing consortia (ManufacturingUSA Institutes) where I helped form both CESMII and RAPID and then focusing on developing technologies to solve the hydrogen storage and delivery challenges through either more efficient, energy dense solid-state storage or using electro magnetics to efficiently provide heat to catalysts to decompose a hydrogen carrier or plastic.

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.

Matthew McDowell joined Georgia Tech in the fall of 2015 as an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. McDowell received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

McDowell’s research group focuses on understanding how materials for energy and electronic devices change and transform during operation, and how these transformations impact properties. The group uses in situ experimental techniques to probe materials transformations under realistic conditions. The fundamental scientific advances made by the group guide the engineering of materials for breakthrough new devices. Current projects in the group are focused on i) electrode materials for alkali ion batteries, ii) materials for solid-state batteries, iii) interfaces in chalcogenide materials for electronics and catalysis, and iv) new methods for creating nanostructured metals.

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.