Subhro Guhathakurta is the Harry West Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning. He joined Georgia Tech in 2011 as the director of the Center for Geographic Information Systems, which was renamed the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization (CSPAV), and then the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics (CURA), under his leadership. He was named chair of the School of City & Regional Planning in 2018 and completed his term in 2021.

Professor Guhathakurta was previously associate director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University (ASU) and among the founding faculty members of ASU’s School of Sustainability. He was instrumental in developing the Urban Modeling and Simulation Lab in ASU’s College of Design. He is an author of 6 books and monographs and over 75 scientific papers. His editorial contributions include books such as "Integrated Urban and Environmental Models: A Survey of Current Applications and Research" (Springer-Verlag, 2003), "Visualizing Sustainable Planning" (Springer 2009), and “The Routledge Handbook of International Planning Education” (Routledge 2019). He was a Co-Editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research (2012-2016) and is serving on editorial boards of several leading planning journals including the Journal of American Planning Association (JAPA). Prof. Guhathakurta is a recipient of the Mercator Professorship by DFG (German National Science Foundation) to conduct research in visualizing unstructured data at the Technische Universität, Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has held visiting appointments at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at the University College London; the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore; the Center for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures at the University of Queensland in Brisbane; and served as a high-end expert for the Institute of Environmental Sustainability at Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

Specialization Area: 

Geographic Information Science and Technology

Teaching Interest:

Professor Guhathakurta's recent teaching roles have primarily focused on the Ph.D. program, where he routinely teaches the course on “urban and regional theory” (CP8300). This class discusses the foundational theoretical propositions of urban growth and development through the lens of emerging urban issues and policy. He has also taught "Introduction to Urban Analytics," “Environmental GIS,” and “Introduction to Land use” in various years.

Research Interest:

As director of a research center (CURA), Prof Guhathakurta's research has involved leading multidisciplinary teams of academics, students, and practitioners to pursue externally funded research in the domains of spatial analytics, planning, and policy. These projects range in size and complexity from small ($50,000 and less) to large, multi-year ($1 million +), sponsored by various local, state, and federal agencies. These projects typically involve both discovery and fundamental contributions to the literature and application development (mostly software tools and data) that are used by stakeholders and other researchers.

List of Recent Scholarly Work:

1. Lieu S. J., Koo, BW, Huang, UJ, and Guhathakurta, S. (2026) Automated Detection and Classification of Bike Lanes Using Multimodal Imagery. Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment 41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsase.2025.101817. 
2. Liu, K., Guhathakurta, S., Han, C., Hittinger, E., Phoung, S., & Williams, E. (2025). The Impact of Online Shopping on Retail Building Space and Energy Demand in the U.S. Energies, 18(23), 6178. https://doi.org/10.3390/en18236178.
3. Han, C., Lieu, S. J., Hwang, U., & Guhathakurta, S. (2025). Do streetscapes still matter for customer ratings of eating and drinking establishments in car-dependent cities? Journal of Urban Design, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2025.2541953.
4. Han, C., Guhathakurta, S., Hittinger, E., Liu, K., Phoung, S., & Williams, E. (2025). Empirical assessment of the relationship between teleworking frequency and residential energy use in the US: multilevel modeling and time use comparisons. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ade3fa.  
5. Lieu S. J., Guhathakurta S. (2025). Exploring pedestrian route choice preferences by demographic groups: Analysis of street attributes in Chicago. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice. 195:104437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2025.104437. 
6. Lieu, S. J., & Guhathakurta, S. (2025). A novel approach for estimating sidewalk width from street view images and computer vision. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 23998083251369602.

My lab is focused on understanding how proteins and other biological systems function at a molecular level. To probe these systems, we carry out molecular dynamics simulations, modeling biological behavior one atom at a time. The simulations serve as a "computational microscope" that permits glimpses into a cell's inner workings through the application of advanced software and high-powered supercomputers. We are particularly interested in how bacteria utilize unique pathways to synthesize proteins and insert them into both the inner and outer membranes, how they import nutrients across two membranes, and how their cell walls provide shape and mechanical strength.

Chris Gu is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the quantitative study of the behaviors of individuals and organizations under various types of information constraints and economic structures, with the goal of improving their well-being. His current work focuses on understanding how consumers search for products under partially revealed information, how consumers adopt sustainable technologies under the influence of government policies, how companies decide about internal technology adoption and upgrade, and how social network connections influence individual crowdsourcing behaviors. He is an AMS Mary Kay Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Competition Finalist, and his research has received the ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Grover’s research activities in process systems engineering focus on understanding macromolecular organization and the emergence of biological function. Discrete atoms and molecules interact to form macromolecules and even larger mesoscale assemblies, ultimately yielding macroscopic structures and properties. A quantitative relationship between the nanoscale discrete interactions and the macroscale properties is required to design, optimize, and control such systems; yet in many applications, predictive models do not exist or are computationally intractable.

The Grover group is dedicated to the development of tractable and practical approaches for the engineering of macroscale behavior via explicit consideration of molecular and atomic scale interactions. We focus on applications involving the kinetics of self-assembly, specifically those in which methods from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics do not provide closed form solutions. General approaches employed include stochastic modeling, model reduction, machine learning, experimental design, robust parameter design, and estimation.

Dr. Grijalva joined the Georgia Institute of Technology in the summer of 2009 as Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is the Director of the Advanced Computational Electricity Systems (ACES) Laboratory, where he conducts research on real-time power system control, informatics, and economics, and renewable energy integration in power. From 2012-2015, Dr. Grijalva served as the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) Associate Director for Electricity Systems, responsible for coordinating large efforts on electricity research and policy at Georgia Tech. Dr. Grijalva received the Electrical Engineer degree from EPN-Ecuador in 1994, the M.S. Certificate in Information Systems from ESPE-Ecuador in 1997, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He was a post-doctoral fellow in Power and Energy Systems at the University of Illinois from 2003 to 2004. From 1995 to 1997, he was with the Ecuadorian National Center for Energy Control (CENACE) as engineer and manager of the Real-Time EMS Software Department. From 2002 to 2009, he was with PowerWorld Corporation as a senior software architect and developer of innovative real-time and optimization applications used today by utilities, control centers, and universities in more than 60 countries. Dr. Grijalva is a leading researcher on ultra-reliable architectures for critical energy infrastructures. He has pioneered work on de-centralized and autonomous power system control, renewable energy integration in power, and unified network models and applications. He is currently the principal investigator of various future electricity grid research projects for the US Department of Energy, ARPA-E, EPRI, PSERC as well as other Government organizations, research consortia, and industrial sponsors. Research interests: Power system and smart grid computation De-centralized and autonomous power control architectures Ultra-reliable electricity internetworks Seamless integration of large-scale renewable energy Electricity markets design and power system economics

Nancey Green Leigh is a Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and adviser for the economic development planning, working with masters and doctoral students. Maintaining an active research program, Leigh is currently leading a project entitled "Workers, Firms and Industries in Robotic Regions," funded by the National Science Foundation's Robotics Initiative. She previously led a large scale research effort by three universities focused on sustainable industrial systems for urban regions. Both of these efforts as well as other funded research (brownfields, urban land and manufacturing, resilient infrastructure) contribute to Leigh's long term focus on advancing sustainable development for local and regional economies. As Associate Dean for Research, Leigh is focused on strengthening the research impact of the College of Design. She develops and administers competitive initiatives to support individual and collaborative research by college faculty and affiliated researchers. She oversees the college's seven major research units. She also is engaged in building research connections within Georgia Tech between the College of Design, other colleges and Interdisciplinary Research Institutes, as well as to external funders and collaborators in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Leigh has published more than 60 articles and four books, Routledge Handbook of International Planning Education (2019 with S.P. French, S. Guhathakurta, and B. Stiftel), Planning Local Economic Development, 6th edition (2017 with E.J. Blakely) adopted for courses in a wide array of universities; Economic Revitalization: Cases and Strategies for City and Suburb (2002 with J. Fitzgerald); and Stemming Middle Class Decline: The Challenge to Economic Development Planning (1994). She was co-editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research from 2012 to 2016, and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2008.

David Goldsman is the Director of Master's Recruiting and Admissions and Coca-Cola Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering at Cornell University. He also holds degrees from Syracuse University in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer and Information Sciences. He has been a Visiting Professor or Scientist at Cornell University, Syracuse University, The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, AT&T Bell Laboratories, NEC USA, The Middle East Technical University, Northwestern University, The University of Oklahoma, Sabancı University, Boğaziçi University, Özyeğin University, Monterrey Tech, and The University of the Andes. 

Dave's research interests include simulation output analysis, statistical ranking and selection methods, and medical and humanitarian applications of operations research. He has published extensively, and has over 75 publications in such bellwether journals as Management Science, Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, IIE Transactions, and Sequential Analysis. He has also co-authored about 20 book chapters as well as the texts Design and Analysis of Experiments for Statistical Selection, Screening and Multiple Comparisons, with Bob Bechhofer and Tom Santner, and Probability and Statistics in Engineering (4th edition), with Bill Hines, Doug Montgomery, and Connie Borror. 

Dave is an Associate Editor for Sequential Analysis and the Journal of Simulation. He was previously the Simulation Department Editor for IIE Transactions and an Associate Editor for Operations Research Letters. He was also the Associate Editor for the Proceedings of the 1992 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), the Program Chair for the 1995 WSC, and the IIE Board Representative to the WSC (2001–2009). Further, he has served in various elected positions for the INFORMS Simulation Society, including President. He was the Chair of the INFORMS Public Awareness Committee from 2002–2008, and has engaged in substantial outreach to high school and community college students and teachers for over 25 years. 

Dave and Christos Alexopoulos won the INFORMS Simulation Society's 2007 Outstanding Simulation Publication Award for their paper “To Batch or not to Batch?” which appeared in ACM TOMACS in 2004. In addition, Dave, Christos, Claudia Antonini, and Jim Wilson won the IIE Transactions 2010 Best Paper Prize in Operations Engineering and Analysis for their 2009 paper “Area Variance Estimators for Simulation Using Folded Standardized Time Series.” Dave received the INFORMS Simulation Society's Distinguished Service Award in 2002. He also received a Fulbright fellowship in 2006 to lecture at Boğaziçi and Sabancı Universities in Istanbul, Turkey. Dave is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers. 

Dave is an active consultant, having undertaken various projects in the healthcare, airline, automotive, fast food, hotel, and banking industries, among others.

Ashok Goel is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. At Georgia Tech, he is also the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Human-Centered Computing, a Co-Director of the Center for Biologically Inspired Design, and a Fellow of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. For more than thirty years, Ashok has conducted research into artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-centered computing, with a focus on computational design, modeling and creativity. His recent work has explored design thinking, analogical thinking and systems thinking in biological inspired design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiRDQ4hr9i8), and his research is now developing virtual research assistants for modeling biological systems. Ashok teaches a popular course on knowledge-based AI as part of Georgia Tech's program on Online Masters of Science in Computer Science. He has pioneered the development of virtual teaching assistants, such as Jill Watson, for answering questions in online discussion forums (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbCguICyfTA). Chronicle of Higher Education recently called virtual assistants exemplified by Jill Watson as one of the most transformative educational technologies in the digital era. Ashok is the Editor-in-Chief of AAAI's AI Magazine.

Eric Gilbert is the John Derby Evans Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He also has a courtesy appointment in CSE. Before coming to Michigan, he was on the faculty at Georgia Tech. At Michigan, he runs the comp.social lab, and is affiliated with SMRL, CSMR, MISC, and ESC. Dr. Gilbert is a sociotechnologist, with a research focus on building and studying social media systems. His work has been supported by grants from the SSRC, Rockefeller Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, Samsung, Yahoo!, Google, ARL, DARPA, and NSF.

Dr. Gilbert's work has been recognized with multiple best paper awards, as well as covered by outlets including Wired, NPR, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, the Georgia Tech Young Faculty Award, the CSCW Service Award, and the UIUC CS Distinguished Alumni Award. He previously served as a Program Chair and the Steering Committee Chair for ICWSM, and as a General Chair for CSCW; he currently serves as an Editor for CSCW. Prof. Gilbert is an alum of Teach For America (Chicago '02), and holds a BS in Math & CS and a PhD in CS—both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Greg Gibson is Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Integrative Genomics at Georgia Tech. He received his BSc majoring in Genetics from the University of Sydney (Australia) and PhD in Developmental Genetics from the University of Basel. After transitioning to quantitative genetic research as a Helen Hay Whitney post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, he initiated a program of genomic research as a David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellow at the University of Michigan. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in Fall of 2009, after ten years at North Carolina State University where he developed tools for quantitative gene expression profiling and genetic dissection of development in the fruitfly Drosophila. He is now collaborating with the Center for Health Discovery and Well Being on integrative genomic analyses of the cohort. Dr Gibson is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and serves as Section Editor for Natural Variation for PLoS Genetics. He has authored a prominent text-book, a "Primer of Genome Science" as well as a popular book about genetics and human health, "It Takes a Genome".