Valerie Thomas is the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. 

Dr. Thomas's research interests are energy and materials efficiency, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Current research projects include low carbon transportation fuels, carbon capture, building construction, and electricity system development. Dr. Thomas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Physical Society. She has been an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow, a Member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, and a Member of the USDA/DOE Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee. 

She has worked at Princeton University in the Princeton Environmental Institute and in the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

Dr. Thomas received a B. A. in physics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

Peter Swire, J.D., is Associate Director of Policy for the Institute for Information Security & Privacy. Swire has been a privacy and cyberlaw scholar, government leader, and practitioner since the rise of the Internet in the 1990's. In 2013, he became the Nancy J. and Lawrence P. Huang Professor of Law and Ethics at the Georgia institute of Technology. Swire teaches in the Scheller College of Business, with appointments by courtesy with the College of Computing and School of Public Policy. He is senior counsel with the law firm of Alston & Bird LLP. Swire served as one of five members of President Obama's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology. Prior to that, he was co-chair of the global Do Not Track process for the World Wide Web Consortium. He is a senior fellow with the Future of Privacy Forum, and a policy fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology. Under President Clinton, Swire was the chief counselor for privacy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget -- the only person to date to have U.S. government-wide responsibility for privacy policy. In that role, his activities included being White House coordinator for the HIPAA medical privacy rule, chairing a White House task force on how to update wiretap laws for the Internet age, and helping negotiate the U.S.-E.U. Safe Harbor agreement for trans-border data flows.Under President Obama, he was special assistant to the President for economic policy. Swire is author of five books and numerous scholarly papers. He has testified often before the Congress, and been quoted regularly in the press. He has served on privacy and security advisory boards for companies including Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, as well as a number of start-ups. Swire graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and the Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

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.

Phanish Suryanarayana joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in August 2011. He received his B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in 2005. He obtained his M.S. in Aeronautics from California Institute of Technology in 2006. Subsequently, he received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics from California Institute of Technology in 2011 for his thesis titled "Coarse-graining Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory". His research interests are in the areas of multiscale modeling, ab-initio calculations, density functional theory, continuum mechanics and smart materials. Overall, he is interested in developing efficient numerical methods for solving problems arising in a variety of fields. On a personal level, Dr. Suryanarayana is a sports enthusiast. He plays badminton, cricket, waterpolo, and ultimate frisbee. He also is an avid gamer (PC) and enjoys playing bridge and other board game

Aarn Stebner works at the intersection of manufacturing, machine learning, materials, and mechanics. He joined the Georgia Tech faculty as an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering in 2020.

Previously, he was the Rowlinson Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the Colorado School of Mines (2013 – 2020), a postdoctoral scholar at the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (2012 – 2013), a Lecturer in the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University (2009 – 2012), a Research Scientist at Telezygology Inc. establishing manufacturing and “internet of things” technologies for shape memory alloy-secured latching devices (2008-2009), a Research Fellow at the NASA Glenn Research Center developing smart materials technologies for morphing aircraft structures (2006 – 2008), and a Mechanical Engineer at the Electric Device Corporation in Canfield, OH developing manufacturing and automation technologies for the circuit breaker industry (1995 – 2000).

John received the B.S. degree in Mathematics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (1983) and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (1985 and 1989). He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1989, and he is presently a Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing (IC) in the College of Computing. From 2021-2022, he served as the Interim School Chair of IC as well. John is additionally an Adjunct Faculty member of the School of Computing Instruction at GT, as he regularly teaches one of the large CS intro courses. In 2013, John was named an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. 

John's primary research areas are data and information visualization, approaching each from a human-computer interaction perspective. In 2013, he served as General Chair of the IEEE VIS conference, the flagship academic conference for his research area, when it was held in Atlanta. John received the 2012 IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award, and he was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy in 2016 and the IEEE VIS Academy in 2019. John was named an IEEE Fellow in 2014 and an ACM Fellow in 2022. On the instructional side, John has twice received the College of Computing's annual gus baird Teaching Award. 

John is Director of the Information Interfaces Research Group whose mission is to help people take advantage of information to enrich their lives. As the amount of data available to people and organizations has skyrocketed over the past 10-20 years, largely fueled by the growth of the internet, insufficient methods for people to benefit from this flood of data have been developed. A central focus of many of the group's projects is the creation of information visualization and visual analytics tools to help people explore, analyze, understand, and communicate data sets. In particular, they are creating visual analytics systems to help people with "sense-making" activities on data sets such as large document collections. The group also has developed many techniques and systems for providing people with peripheral awareness of useful information. John's passion about research in, and the value of, data visualization is illustrated in his EuroVis 2014 Conference Capstone invited lecture. He describes his more recent research on designing flexible and natural interfaces for human-data interaction in this 2022 CSIG-VIS lecture.

Dr. Abigale Stangl is a design researcher specializing in the development of systems that promote inclusive design practices and enhance the accessibility of products and information. With expertise in human-centered design, human-computer interaction, accessibility, and sensory AI, her interdisciplinary research encompasses universal design principles and prioritizes disability-first innovation. Abigale's current research goals focus on expanding tactile media availability through in-depth investigations of tactile design practices, interaction techniques, and the optimization of multimodal and multisensory systems. She actively collaborates with individuals with disabilities, ensuring their perspectives and needs drive innovation. Abigale also cultivates students' abilities as allies and co-designers, fostering an inclusive design community that embraces diverse perspectives.

Garrett Stanley is the McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and is the Co-Director of the Georgia Tech Neural Engineering Center. He has formal training, both at undergraduate and doctorate levels, in engineering (specifically trained in Control Theory through all of his graduate work), and has worked extensively in the field of neuroscience, specifically in sensory processing in the brain, and more specifically in vision and somatosensation (touch). 

From 1999 to 2007, he was an Associate Professor in the Division of Engineering & Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he was the leader of the Harvard Biocontrols Laboratory. Professor Stanley is now a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech/Emory University (2008-2013 Associate Professor, 2014-present Full Professor), and leads several programmatic efforts at the interface between basic neuroscience and neurotechnology (Co-Direct the GT Neural Engineering Center, Direct Computational Neuroscience training program, Director of Graduate Studies, etc.). In terms of research, he is the leader of the Neural Coding group in the Laboratory for Neuroengineering. 

The research of his group has been funded by the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, DARPA, and several private foundations. Prof. Stanley’s group routinely publishes our research in the top Neuroscience journals, along with more technical work in engineering journals. He is considered a leader in the field nationally and internationally.

Joel Sokol is the Harold E. Smalley Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also Director of the interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics degree (on-campus and online).

His primary research interests are in sports analytics and applied operations research. He has worked with teams or leagues in all three of the major American sports. Dr. Sokol's LRMC method for predictive modeling of the NCAA basketball tournament is an industry leader, and his non-sports research has won the EURO Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize and been a finalist for the Cozzarelli Prize.

Dr. Sokol has also won recognition for his teaching and curriculum development from IIE and the NAE, held the Fouts Family Associate Professorship for a three-year term, and is the recipient of Georgia Tech's highest awards for teaching. He served two terms as INFORMS Vice President of Education, and is a past Chair and founding officer of the INFORMS section on sports operations research.

Dr. Sokol's Ph.D. in operations research is from MIT, and his bachelor's degrees in mathematics, computer science, and applied sciences in engineering are from Rutgers University.