Craig Tovey is a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He also co-directs CBID, the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design. 

Dr. Tovey's principal research and teaching activities are in operations research and its interdisciplinary applications to social and natural systems, with emphasis on sustainability, the environment, and energy. His current research concerns inverse optimization for electric grid management, classical and biomimetic algorithms for robots and webhosting, the behavior of animal groups, sustainability measurement, and political polarization.  

Dr. Tovey received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the 1989 Jacob Wolfowitz Prize for research in heuristics. He was granted a Senior Research Associateship from the National Research Council in 1990, was named an Institute Fellow at Georgia Tech in 1994, and received the Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award in 2011. In 2016, Dr. Tovey was recognized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce with the Test of Time Award for his work as co-author of the paper “How Hard Is It to Control an Election?” He was a 2016 Golden Goose Award recipient for his role on an interdisciplinary team that studied honey bee foraging behavior which led to the development of the Honey Bee Algorithm to allocate shared webservers to internet traffic. 

Dr. Tovey received an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1977 and both an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1981. 

Dr. John Lawrence Tone is professor of history in the School of History and Sociology.  In the past he has served as interim dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, chair of the School of Economics and of the School of History and Sociology, and associate dean of undergraduate studies in the Ivan Allen College. He specializes in Spanish and Cuban military history and the history of disease and medicine. He has written several articles and books, including The Fatal Knot: The Guerrilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon in Spain (1995), La guerrilla española (1999), and War and Genocide in Cuba (2006). The Fatal Knot was a selection of the History Book Club and received the Literary Prize of the International Napoleonic Society in 1999.  He was inducted as a Fellow of the International Napoleonic Society in that same year. War and Genocide in Cuba received the Society for Military History Prize for the Best Book on a Non-US Subject in 2008. His current research is on the history of yellow fever. He has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. He teaches courses on European History, The French Revolution and Napoleon, Intellectual History, Modern Spain, Modern Cuba, and The History of Disease and Medicine.

Mikkel A. Thomas has worked for the Institute for Matter and Systems since 2008. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1997, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1999 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Optoelectronics in 2008, all from the Georgia institute of Technology. Prior to his employment at Georgia Tech, Thomas worked at OptiComp Corporation located in Zephyr Cove, Nevada. His research at the company revolved around the development of VCSEL based, integrated optical communication systems for use in satellites and other aerospace applications. Since arriving at Georgia Tech, in the IMS, Thomas has provided cleanroom processing support to the academic faculty and their graduate students. He also provided processing support and fabrication services for entities not directly affiliated with the institute. Additionally, he was the lab instructor for ChBE 4050. In 2022, Thomas was named the Associate Director for Education and Outreach in IMS. In this role, Thomas is responsible for all the outreach efforts of the IRI covering K-Grey. He also organizes all the education coordinators in the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) as part of his role in the NNCI coordinating office located at Georgia Tech.

We are currently witnessing the birth of a new branch of astrophysics: high-energy astrophysics. With neutrinos we can study the high-energy Universe and peer into environments from where electromagnetic radiation can't escape. The IceCube neutrino observatory is a detector in operation at the geographic south pole. IceCube discovered, in 2013, an extragalactic flux of astrophysical neutrinos. Even though IceCube has identified two neutrino candidate sources: TXS 0506+056 (in 2018) and NGC 1068 (in 2022), the class of objects responsible for the astrophysical flux have not been unequivocally identified. Both these galaxies have Active Nuclei in which a supermassive black hole is being fed material via an accretion disk. Interestingly they are very different looking objects. TXS 0506+056 was seen with two flares of neutrinos and NGC 1068 is steady. TXS 0506+056 is seen mostly in ~50-200 TeV neutrinos, whereas NGC 1068 is seen in 1.5 to 15 TeV neutrinos. NGC 1068 is in our "neighboorhood" but TXS 0506+056 is very far away. 

The Taboada group uses IceCube data to search for astrophysical neutrino sources. Ignacio Taboada is the current spokesperson of the IceCube collaboration.

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.