Zhu's research focuses on the modeling and simulation of mechanical behavior of materials at the nano- to macroscale. Some of the scientific questions he is working to answer include understanding how materials fail due to the combined mechanical and chemical effects, what are the atomistic mechanisms governing the brittle to ductile transition in crystals, why the introduction of nano-sized twins can significantly increase the rate sensitivity of nano-crystals, and how domain structures affect the reliability of ferroelectric ceramics and thin films. To address these problems, which involve multiple length and time scales, he has used a variety of modeling techniques, such as molecular dynamics simulation, reaction pathway sampling, and the inter-atomic potential finite-element method. The goal of his research is to make materials modeling predictive enough to help design new materials with improved performance and reliability.

Gleb Yushin is a Professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and a Co-Founder of several companies, including Sila Nanotechnologies, Inc.. For his contributions to materials science, Yushin has received numerous awards and recognitions, including Kavli Fellow Award, R&D 100 Award (Y-Carbon's application), Honda Initiation Grant Award, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, and several distinctions from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), such as Nano 50 Award. Dr. Yushin has co-authored over 30 patents and patent applications, over 100 invited presentations and seminars and over 100 publications on nanostructured Electronic Materials related applications, including papers in Science, Nature Materials and other leading journals. His current research is focused on advancing energy storage materials and devices for electronics, transportation and grid applications.

Ben Wang is Professor Emeritus in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. In addition, Dr. Wang previously served as the Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute. 

Dr. Wang's primary research interest is in applying emerging technologies to improve manufacturing competitiveness. He specializes in process development for affordable composite materials. Dr. Wang is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the growing field of nanomaterials science. His main area of research involves a material known as "buckypaper", which has shown promise in a variety of applications, including the development of aerospace structures, improvements in energy and power efficiency, enhancements in thermal management of engineering systems, and construction of the next-generation of computer displays.

Dr. Wang served on the National Materials and Manufacturing Board (NMMB). NMMB is the principal forum at the U.S. National Academies for issues related to innovative materials and advanced manufacturing, and has oversight responsibility for National Research Council activities in these technology areas. Dr. Wang is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering.

Because of his contributions to advanced manufacturing and materials, Dr. Wang was invited to deliver a presentation to the U.S. National Research Council Review Panel in support of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2005. In 2012, he was invited to give testimony before the National Academies Committee on Manufacturing Extension Partnership. In 2012 he was invited to participate in the Roundtable on Strengthening U.S. Advanced Manufacturing in Clean Energy in the White House.

In addition to authoring or co-authoring more than 240 refereed journal papers, he is a co-author of three books: Computer-Aided Manufacturing (Prentice-Hall, 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, and 3rd Edition), Computer-Aided Process Planning (Elsevier Science Publishers), and Computer Aided Manufacturing PC Application Software (Delmar Publishers).

Dr. Wang earned his bachelor's in industrial engineering from Tunghai University in Taiwan, and his master's in industrial engineering and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University.

Julie Swann is the department head and A. Doug Allison Distinguished Professor of the Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She is an affiliate faculty in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at both NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining NC State, Swann was the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There she co-founded and co-directed the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), one of the first interdisciplinary research centers on the Georgia Tech campus. Starting with her work with CHHS, Swann has conducted research, outreach and education to improve how health and humanitarian systems operate worldwide.

Aarn Stebner works at the intersection of manufacturing, machine learning, materials, and mechanics. He joined the Georgia Tech faculty as an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering in 2020.

Previously, he was the Rowlinson Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the Colorado School of Mines (2013 – 2020), a postdoctoral scholar at the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (2012 – 2013), a Lecturer in the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University (2009 – 2012), a Research Scientist at Telezygology Inc. establishing manufacturing and “internet of things” technologies for shape memory alloy-secured latching devices (2008-2009), a Research Fellow at the NASA Glenn Research Center developing smart materials technologies for morphing aircraft structures (2006 – 2008), and a Mechanical Engineer at the Electric Device Corporation in Canfield, OH developing manufacturing and automation technologies for the circuit breaker industry (1995 – 2000).

Joel Sokol is the Harold E. Smalley Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also Director of the interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics degree (on-campus and online).

His primary research interests are in sports analytics and applied operations research. He has worked with teams or leagues in all three of the major American sports. Dr. Sokol's LRMC method for predictive modeling of the NCAA basketball tournament is an industry leader, and his non-sports research has won the EURO Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize and been a finalist for the Cozzarelli Prize.

Dr. Sokol has also won recognition for his teaching and curriculum development from IIE and the NAE, held the Fouts Family Associate Professorship for a three-year term, and is the recipient of Georgia Tech's highest awards for teaching. He served two terms as INFORMS Vice President of Education, and is a past Chair and founding officer of the INFORMS section on sports operations research.

Dr. Sokol's Ph.D. in operations research is from MIT, and his bachelor's degrees in mathematics, computer science, and applied sciences in engineering are from Rutgers University.

Dr. Christopher Saldaña began working at Georgia Tech in 2014. Prior, Dr. Saldaña previously held the Harold and Inge Marcus Career Professorship at the Pennsylvania State University and worked as a research engineer at M4 Sciences Corporation. Dr. Saldaña has also previously held visiting affiliations/positions with the US Air Force Research Laboratory, the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India), Technische Universität Dortmund (Dortmund, Germany), Autodesk, and Sandia National Laboratories. He has received several awards, including an NSF CAREER award, the Robert J. Hocken SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer award and an R&D100 Technology Award. He serves as an Associate Editor for IISE Transactions (Design and Manufacturing) and serves on the Editorial Boards of Manufacturing Letters, Computer Aided Design and Applications, and the ASTM Journal of Smart and Sustainable Manufacturing.

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.

Regents' Professor and Carter N. Paden, Jr. Distinguished Chair in Metals Processing, Dave McDowell joined Georgia Tech in 1983 and holds a dual appointment in the GWW School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. He served as Director of the Mechanical Properties Research Laboratory from 1992-2012. In 2012 he was named Founding Director of the Institute for Materials (IMaT), one of Georgia Tech's Interdisciplinary Research Institutes charged with fostering an innovation ecosystem for research and education. He has served as Executive Director of IMaT since 2013. McDowell's research focuses on nonlinear constitutive models for engineering materials, including cellular metallic materials, nonlinear and time dependent fracture mechanics, finite strain inelasticity and defect field mechanics, distributed damage evolution, constitutive relations and microstructure-sensitive computational approaches to deformation and damage of heterogeneous alloys, combined computational and experimental strategies for modeling high cycle fatigue in advanced engineering alloys, atomistic simulations of dislocation nucleation and mediation at grain boundaries, multiscale computational mechanics of materials ranging from atomistics to continuum, and systems-based computational materials design. A Fellow of SES, ASM International, ASME and AAM, McDowell is the recipient of the 1997 ASME Materials Division Nadai Award for career achievement and the 2008 Khan International Medal for lifelong contributions to the field of metal plasticity. McDowell currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and is co-Editor of the International Journal of Fatigue.