Dr. Sofía Pérez-Guzmán serves as an Assistant Professor within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She also holds a courtesy appointment at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to this, she worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment.

Dr. Pérez-Guzmán's primary interest lies in addressing wicked problems within supply chain and transportation domains. These challenges often encompass disruptions, human behavior, multiple stakeholders, and equity and sustainability objectives. Her ongoing research focuses on disaster response logistics, food systems logistics, and urban freight transportation, with an overarching aim of enhancing the social performance of supply chains. Her research methodologies include optimization, simulation, data analytics, econometrics, empirical approaches, as well as behavioral and economic theories.

Education

• Ph.D. Transportation Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 2022
• M.S. Economics Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 2022
• M.S. Transportation Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 2020
• B.S. Industrial Engineering Universidad del Valle (Colombia) 2017
   

Distinctions & Awards

•    Trailblazer in Engineering Fellow from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 2022.
•    Civil and Environmental Engineering Rising Star from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA, 2021.
•    Second place at the National Institute of Justice Challenge of the US Department of Justice, category Year 3, Female Parolees, Small Groups, 2021.
•    First place at the Supply Chain Data Analytics Competition hosted by the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago, 2021.
•    NY State Legacy Leadership Award from the Women’s Transportation Seminar, 2018.
•    Prest & Gio scholarship from Procter & Gamble. Bogota, Colombia, 2015.

Dr. Huang obtained her Ph.D in Geological Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1999. She then worked as a senior engineer in Schlumberger Oilfield Services in Sugar Land, TX from 2000 to 2006 before she joined the faculty in Georgia Tech in 2007. Dr. Huang is a recipient of the NSF CAREER in 2011.

Dr. Edvard Bruun joined the faculty in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in August 2024. He completed his Ph.D. (2024) in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University. Dr. Bruun is also a licensed professional engineer in Canada and worked as a structural engineer at Arup before pursuing his Ph.D.

Dr. Bruun’s research centers on robotic automation for the assembly and disassembly of large-scale building components. He develops computational methods to design geometrically complex yet material-efficient structures that demand robotic fabrication for their construction. By harnessing the spatial precision and multifunctionality of cooperative multi-robot systems, Dr. Bruun coordinates multiple industrial robotic arms to execute intricate tasks. These include providing temporary structural support and facilitating the addition, removal, or repurposing of building components in collaboration with human operators.

Dr. Graham joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in January 2023. She completed a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgia Tech, and completed her MS and PhD in Environmental Engineering and Science at Stanford University. Prior to that, she received her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan in Chemical Engineering.

Dr. Graham’s research interests focus on the fate and transport of pathogens and antimicrobial resistance genes in the built and natural environments. Her previous research projects have focused on wastewater-based epidemiology, quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA), and the removal of pathogens in green stormwater infrastructure. Her lab aims to use molecular biology, microbiology, and modeling tools to address issues of water, climate, and health domestically and internationally.

Professor Yavari joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in January 2005. He received his B.S. in Civil Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1997. He continued his studies at The George Washington University where he obtained an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2000. He then moved to Pasadena, CA and obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (Applied Mechanics option with minor in Mathematics) from the California Institute of Technology in 2005. Professor Yavari is a Fellow of the Society of Engineering Science and a member of the American Academy of Mechanics.

Professor Yavari's interests are in developing systematic theories of discrete mechanics for crystalline solids with defects. Defects play a crucial role in determining the properties of materials. The development of atomistic methods including density functional theory, bond-order potentials and embedded atom potentials has enabled a detailed study of such defects. However, much of the work is numerical and often with ad hoc boundary/far-field conditions. Specifically, a systematic method for studying these discrete yet non-local problems is lacking. Design in small scales requires solving inverse problems and this is not possible with purely numerical techniques. From a mechanics point of view, defective crystals are modeled as discrete boundary-value problems. The challenging issues are extending the existing techniques from solid state physics for non-periodic systems, new developments in the theory of vector-valued partial difference equations, existence and uniqueness of solutions of discrete boundary-value problems and their symmetries, etc. The other efforts in this direction are understanding the geometric structure of discrete mechanics and its link with similar attempts in the physics and computational mechanics literatures and investigating the rigorous continuum limits of defective crystals

 Xing Xie is the Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a post-doctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. (2006) and M.S. (2008) degrees in Environmental Science & Engineering from Tsinghua University, and a second M.S. degree (2012) in Materials Science & Engineering and a Ph.D. degree (2014) in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. His research focuses on the applications of innovative materials for sustainable and reliable water and energy. He has worked on many projects related to water treatment and reuse, microbial detection and quantification, energy and resource recovery, energy storage, etc. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles with more than 6,000 citations

Don White is a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). He has been a member of the CEE faculty at Georgia Tech since 1997. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, White served on the faculty at the Purdue University School of Civil Engineering from 1987 to 1996. He received his doctorate in Structural Engineering from Cornell University in 1988, and is an alumnus of North Carolina State University. Prior to graduate study, White worked as a structural engineer in Raleigh, NC.

White’s research covers a broad area of design and behavior of steel and composite steel-concrete structures as well as computational mechanics, methods of nonlinear analysis and applications to design. White is a member of the AISC Technical Committees 4, Member Design, and 10, Loads, Analysis and Stability, the AISI Bridge Design Advisory Group, the AISC Specification Committee, and several AASHTO/NSBA Steel Bridge Collaboration Task Groups. He is past Chair of the SSRC Task Group 29, Second-Order Inelastic Analysis of Frames and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the SSRC.

White has served as a major contributor to the steel design and structural analysis sections of the AASHTO LRFD Bridge Design Specifications and the ANSI/AISC Specification for Structural Steel Build­ings during the past 20 years. He was a lead author on the 1997 ASCE publication Effective Length and Notional Load Approaches for Assessing Frame Stability: Implications for American Steel Design, which was a precursor of the development of the AISC Direct analysis Method of design, referred to as the DM. Furthermore, White was a major participant ad hoc task group efforts leading to the development of the DM, which is the preferred method of stability design in the AISC Specification for Design of Steel Building Structures. Subsequent to these developments, the Metal Building Manufacturers Association (MBMA) provided White the opportunity to extend a number of these developments to updated procedures for design of frames using web-tapered members, which is captured within the AISC/MBMA Design Guide 25. White received the 2005 Special Achievement Award and the 2009 T.R. Higgins lectureship award from AISC for his research on design criteria for steel and composite steel-concrete members in bridge and building construction. He received the 2006 Shortridge Hardesty Award from ASCE for his research on advanced frame stability concepts and practical design formulations. For efforts leading to the comprehensive update to the 2005 AASHTO LRFD provisions for steel I- and box-girder bridge design, and unification of AASHTO LRFD provisions for straight and curved girder bridge design, White received the 2007 Richard S. Fountain Bridge Task Force Award and, with M. Grubb and W. Wright, the 2006 Richardson Medal from the Engineers’ Society of Western Pennsylvania.

White has conducted research on a wide range of topics relating to stability analysis and design and construction engineering of steel bridge structures. This includes work on construction simulation of curved and skewed steel bridges, investigation of the behavior of thin-web girders, and stability of components and structural systems during construction and in their final constructed condition. He was one of several researchers privileged to be involved closely with curved steel bridge experimental testing at the FHWA Turner Fairbank Highway Research Center from 1997 through 2005. White was P.I. and lead author of the NCHRP Report 725, Guidelines for Analytical Methods and Construction Engineering of Curved and Skewed Steel Girder Bridges. This work contributed additional substantive advances to the state-of-the-art in the engineering of curved and skewed steel girder bridge structures. White is currently P.I. on a multi-year FHWA-sponsored effort with the goal of modernizing the AASHTO LRFD provisions pertaining to all types of noncomposite box-section members including truss members, edge girders in cable-stayed spans, arch ribs, arch ties, and tower legs.

Yang Wang joined Georgia Tech faculty in 2007. With a B.E. and an M.S. degree in civil engineering awarded by Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, he received a Ph.D. in civil engineering at Stanford University in 2007, as well as an M.S. in electrical engineering. Wang’s research interests include structural health monitoring and damage detection, decentralized structural control, wireless and mobile sensors, and structural dynamics. He received an NSF Early Faculty Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2012 and a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) in 2013. Wang is the author and coauthor of over 100 journal and conference papers, and currently serves as an associate editor for the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) Journal of Bridge Engineering.