Dr. Duarte is excited to join the Department of Psychology at U.T. Austin starting in Fall, 2021 after 13 years as a professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Duarte received her Ph.D. in Neurobiology from U.C. Berkeley in 2004 and conducted her postdoctoral work in cognitive neuroscience at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK. Dr. Duarte is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses multiple, complementary neuroscience methods including electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and neuropsychological methods (i.e. neurological patients), to understand the neural mechanisms of age-related changes in episodic memory, which is memory for personally experienced events. The major aim of her research program is to understand the neural changes that underlie age-related decline in episodic memory, why some people age better, from a neural and cognitive perspective, than others, and to develop and implement effective interventions to alleviate this decline. She has longstanding and active interdisciplinary collaborations with neurologists, neuropsychologists, and sleep disorder clinicians, and with mechanical engineers, to investigate experimental manipulations that may ameliorate episodic memory impairments in people with Alzheimer’s disease pathology, and to explore sleep-related biomarkers of Alzheimer’s pathology. She has a particular interest in the cognitive neuroscience of aging in racial/ethnic minorities and the psychosocial factors like race-related stress, depression, and acculturation that influence memory and underlying brain function in diverse populations. Her lab's work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Science Daily, and Ozy. 

Paul Diederich is a systems support engineer responsible for the day-to-day IT operations supporting our users. He also helps create IT solutions and played a key role in creating the Protected Health Data Infrastructure at IPaT. Paul graduated from Kennesaw State University with a bachelor's degree in Information Security Assurance. Prior to Georgia Tech, Paul did freelance IT providing technical support to individuals and companies including medical offices. He also worked at Mesa Community College as a media technician while he lived in Arizona.

Santanu S. Dey is A. Russell Chandler III Professor and associate chair of graduate studies in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Dey holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. 

Dr. Dey's research interests are in the area of non convex optimization, and in particular mixed integer linear and nonlinear programming. His research is partly motivated by applications of non convex optimization arising in areas such as electrical power engineering, process engineering, civil engineering, logistics, and statistics. Dr. Dey has served as the vice chair for Integer Programming for INFORMS Optimization Society (2011-2013) and has served on the program committees of Mixed Integer Programming Workshop 2013 and Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization 2017, 2020. He currently serves on the editorial board of Computational Optimization and Applications, MOS-SIAM book series on Optimization, is an associate editor for Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming A, and SIAM Journal on Optimization. He has been as associate editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing and an area editor for Mathematical Programming C.

Eric joined PACE in 2021, and currently leads the Research Computing Facilitation team, after having worked as a Cyberinfrastructure Architect and RCF. Before joining PACE, Eric could be found at Indiana University as a systems engineer with the XSEDE Campus Bridging team, providing HPC-oriented consultations to institutions across the US. He also worked closely with the Cyberinfrastructure Research Center at IU, providing support for several different science gateway projects. Prior to that, his research in condensed matter physics at Florida State University involved computational studies of the optical properties of strongly correlated materials.

Ahmet Coskun is a Bernie-Marcus Early-Career Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Coskun is a systems biotechnologist and bioengineer, working at the nexus of multiplexed cell imaging and quantitative tissue biology. He directs an interdisciplinary research team at the Single Cell Biotechnology and Spatial Omics Laboratory, an interdisciplinary program strategically positioned for multiparameter imaging one cell at a time by spatial context and function. Coskun holds five issued patents and is also the co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award 2024, NIH R35 MIRA Award 2023, Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award 2025, CMBE Young Innovator Award 2024, BMES-CMBE Rising Star Award 2023, American Lung Association Innovation Award 2022, Burroughs Welcome Fund CASI Award 2016, and Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 CIOS Award, among other research and teaching awards. Previously, Coskun was an instructor at Stanford University. He received his postdoctoral training from the California Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research has been supported by federal and private grants, including the National Institutes of Health (NIGMS, NIA, NIAID, NCI, NIDCR, OD, and ORIP), Wellcome LEAP, Burroughs Wellcome Fund (CASI), NSF CMaT, American Cancer Society IRG, Multi-cellular engineered living systems (M-CELS), and Regenerative Medicine Center. In addition, he leads outreach programs to engage K-12 students and undergraduate students through BioCrowd Studio, an innovative crowd-sourcing program bringing together interactive virtual media, distributed biokits, and collaborative spatial discovery.

Didier Contis is the Executive Director of Academic Technology, Innovation, Research Computing for the Office of Information Technology. In his role, Didier provides long-range vision, strategic directions, and support for the research and academic technologies of the Institute by partnering with research and academic entities, and leading and executing the aspects of IT strategy that enable the Institute to achieve its research, teaching and learning, and innovation goals.

He previously served as the Interim Chief Information Security Officer (2021) and led the initial Institute response to the 2021 campus-wide external endpoint audit using the centralized coordination with distributed execution organizational approach. He also served as Interim Associate VP for Data Strategy and Analytics and was a member of the Data Security Task Force appointment (2020), charged with improving campus policies and practices concerning the use and sharing of sensitive data.

Since Fall 2021, he has been co-teaching a Vertically Integrated Project class focused on using data as an asset and is interested in applying knowledge graphs for data analytics. In partnership with the University of Michigan and the New School, Didier advocates for the safe and responsible use of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies in higher education. He has co-taught an Educause Learning Lab on XR Security, Privacy, Safety, and Ethics Considerations in Higher Education.

As the Director of Technology Services for CoE from 2007 to 2022, he established several partnerships with the Georgia Tech central IT organization and other academic units to develop new campus-wide services supporting the educational and research ecosystem, with a strong focus on protecting research data, empowering users, and providing equitable access. Some of these initiatives included the launch of the first large-scale GPU-enabled virtual computer lab to provide students access to scientific and engineering applications irrespective of time, place, and device constraints, and a multi-academic unit partnership to create a federated and distributed private academic cloud, supporting research and instruction.

Didier began his career at Georgia Tech in 1999 as a Research Engineer in the School of Electrical and Computing Engineering, focused on Cyber Security, HPC, Unix, and Networking, as well as contributing to research projects on hardware platforms for Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention. In addition, he partnered with faculty to get a grant from Cisco Systems and create the first hands-on network security laboratory. He also was the IT Manager for the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2004 to 2007. Didier holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Diplôme d'Ingénieur (Bachelor) from the École des Mines de Nantes in France.