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.

Michael Helms is a versatile professional with a backgrounds in cognitive science, design theory, technology consulting, computer programming and financial services. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013, and recently completed NSF's entrepreneurial I-CORPS program as an entrepreneurial lead. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he worked as a technology consultant building business cases for the development of large data infrastructure projects. In conjunction with with the Center for Biologically Inspired Design he provides design consulting services focused on product innovation by leveraging insight gleaned from 3.8 billion years of evolution. Most recently, Helms began research with the Center for Education (CEISMC), working on modeling school interventions as complex social systems.

Shatakshee Dhongde is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Economics at Georgia Tech. She obtained her PhD. from the University of California, Riverside. She is also a research affiliate with the Institute of Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research has focused on the economics of poverty. Poverty is a multidimensional concept and is often not captured by income levels. Her papers measure poverty in its many forms and have been published in leading economics journals. In particular, her research on measuring multidimensional poverty in the United States has been highlighted in the national media, including NPR. She was awarded the Nancy and Richard Ruggles Prize for young researchers by the International Association of Review of Income and Wealth (IARIW). She serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice.

The research in Chen Group is cross-disciplinary, bridging mechanical engineering, chemistry, and materials science, focusing on electrochemical energy storage related materials and devices, as well as functional and structural metals/alloys. The technical expertise of the group include development and application of advance in situ characterization methods for energy storage devices, computation-aided materials design and novel synthesis methods for nanostructured materials.