Dr. Lewis-Strickland is a program planning and implementation professional with over 8 years of experience directing programs that build leadership, professional, and skills capacity for students, alumni, and community members. Currently, she is the Program Coordinator for the South Big Data Hub in the Institute for Data Engineering and Sciences. In addition, she manages the operations of initiatives that support broadening participation in data science through community consortium building. She earned her Doctorate of Education in Organizational Leadership, emphasizing Higher Education Leadership from Grand Canyon University. Her dissertation empowered black women to share their leadership resilience experiences to inspire and support aspiring black women leaders. In addition, Dr. Lewis-Strickland is a member of numerous professional organizations such as the International Leadership Association and the Network for Change and Continuous Innovation.

Chris Le Dantec is currently a Professor of the Practice and Director of Digital Civic Initiatives in the Khoury College of Computer Science and the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. 

He is also an Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, jointly appointed in the School of Interactive Computing and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. He teaches in the Human-Centered Computing, HCI, and Digital Media programs.

Debra Lam is the Founding Director of the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, a statewide public-private partnership committed to investing in innovative solutions for shared economic prosperity. She continues to lead smart communities and urban innovation work at Georgia Tech. Prior to this, she served as Pittsburgh’s inaugural Chief of Innovation & Performance where she oversaw all technology, sustainability, performance, and innovation functions of city government. Before that, she was a management consultant at a global engineering and design firm, Arup. She has received various awards, including being named one of the top 100 most influential people in digital government by Apolitcal.

She has worked and lived in the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A graduate of Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley, Debra serves on the board of the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta and was most recently appointed by the U.S Department of Commerce to the Internet of Things Advisory Board.

Michael Thoreau Lacey is an American mathematician. Lacey received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987, under the direction of Walter Philipp. His thesis was in the area of probability in Banach spaces, and solved a problem related to the law of the iterated logarithm for empirical characteristic functions. In the intervening years, his work has touched on the areas of probability, ergodic theory, and harmonic analysis. 

His first postdoctoral positions were at the Louisiana State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at UNC, Lacey and Walter Philipp gave their proof of the almost sure central limit theorem. 

He held a position at Indiana University from 1989 to 1996. While there, he received a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and during the tenure of this fellowship he began a study of the bilinear Hilbert transform. This transform was at the time the subject of a conjecture by Alberto Calderón that Lacey and Christoph Thiele solved in 1996, for which they were awarded the Salem Prize. Since 1996, he has been a Professor of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2004, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for joint work with Xiaochun Li. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Prof. Srijan Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. His research develops data science solutions to address the high-stakes challenges on the web and in the society. He has pioneered the development of user models and network science tools to enhance the well-being and safety of people. Applications of his research widely span e-commerce, social media, finance, health, web, and cybersecurity. His methods to predict malicious users and false information have been widely adopted in practice (being used in production at Flipkart and Wikipedia) and taught at graduate level courses worldwide. He has received several awards including the ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award runner-up 2018, Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Award 2018, and best paper awards from WWW and ICDM. His research has been the subject of a documentary and covered in popular press, including CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and New York Magazine. He completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University, received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park, and B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Dr. Hyesoon Kim received her Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include high-performance energy-efficient computer architectures, programmer-compiler-architecture interaction, low-power high-performance embedded processors, and compiler and hardware support for dynamic optimizations, virtual machines, and binary instrumentation.

Dr. Nicole Kennard is a Research Scientist II within BBISS and serves as the Assistant Director for Community-Engaged Research. She supports faculty across the university in building meaningful and co-creative research partnerships with local communities to address pressing sustainability and societal challenges. She works closely with the Center for Sustainable Communities Research & Education (SCoRE) to provide trainings for GT researchers to work with communities in research partnerships.

Kennard also leads her own community-engaged research in sustainable food systems. Her work focuses on building resilient, community-focused food systems and uplifting local agriculture, agroecology, and food sovereignty as solutions to the complex, intertwined challenges of food insecurity, climate change, and land degradation. She uses a combination of quantitative methods (lifecycle assessment, mapping, soil health and ecosystem service assessments) and qualitative methods (in-depth interviews) to support this systems-level research. She is currently working with local partners to build a food systems map for the City of Atlanta.

Kennard holds a PhD in Chemistry and Biosciences from the University of Sheffield (Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures); an MSc in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security from Newcastle University (U.S. Fulbright Scholar); and a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.