Sholl’s research focuses on materials whose macroscopic dynamic and thermodynamic properties are strongly influenced by their atomic-scale structure. Much of this research involves applying computational techniques such as molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo simulations and quantum chemistry methods to materials of interest. Although the group's work is centered on computational methods, it involves extensive collaboration with experimental groups and industrial partners.

My current research involves the modeling of certain types of human activity that exhibit regular spatio- and/or temporal patterns. As a case study, we have generally focused on various types of criminal behavior, since there are clear patterns in this activity and we have access to relatively large amounts of data. A large portion of this work aims to model the formation and dynamics of crime "hotspots" - spatio-temporal regions of increased criminal activity. Working with data provided by the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments, we have developed methods of measuring the repeat and near-repeat criminal events that are the hallmarks of hotspot formation. We have also constructed a family of discrete models that allow for such patterns to develop from natural criminal behavior, and have derived continuum approximations of these discrete models. Some output from one of many simulations (right) illustrates this finding, with "hot" areas in red and "cold" areas in purple. 

In addition to the work on crime hotspots, this overarching project has also included: more accurate predictions of when and where crimes will occur, based on self-exciting point process models borrowed from seismology; the study of gang territoriality, modeled via diffusive Lotka-Volterra equations; gang retaliatory violence, and how the police may be able to solve such crimes using constrained optimization; the evolution of gang rivalry networks in the presence of retaliation and third-party effects; game theoretic models for the levels of both crime and cooperation with the authorities in society; and new methods for finding the "anchor points" of criminals given the locations of crimes they committed, based on models inspired by animal foraging.

Alexander Shapiro is the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. 

Dr. Shapiro’s research interests are focused on stochastic programming, risk analysis, simulation based optimization, and multivariate statistical analysis.   In 2013 he was awarded Khachiyan Prize of INFORMS for lifetime achievements in optimization, and in 2018 he was a recipient of the Dantzig Prize awarded by the Mathematical Optimization Society and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2020 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2021 he was a recipient of John von Neumann Theory Prize awarded by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). 

Dr. Shapiro served  on editorial board of a number of professional journals. He was an area editor (optimization) of the Operations Research Journal and the editor-in-chief of the Mathematical Programming, Series A, Journal. 

Nicoleta Serban is the Peterson Professor of Pediatric Research in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Serban's most recent research focuses on model-based data mining for functional data, spatio-temporal data with applications to industrial economics with a focus on service distribution and nonparametric statistical methods motivated by recent applications from proteomics and genomics. 

She received her B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Theoretical Statistics and Stochastic Processes from the University of Bucharest. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Serban's research interests on Health Analytics span various dimensions including large-scale data representation with a focus on processing patient-level health information into data features dictated by various considerations, such as data-generation process and data sparsity; machine learning and statistical modeling to acquire knowledge from a compilation of health-related datasets with a focus on geographic and temporal variations; and integration of statistical estIMaTes into informed decision making in healthcare delivery and into managing the complexity of the healthcare system.

Vivek Sarkar is Chair of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, where he is also the Stephen Fleming Chair for Telecommunications in the College of Computing. He conducts research in multiple aspects of parallel computing software including programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, and debuggers for parallel, heterogeneous and high-performance computer systems. Prof. Sarkar currently leads the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory at Georgia Tech, and is co-director of the Center for Research into Novel Computing Hierarchies (CRNCH). He is also the instructor for a 3-course online specialization on Parallel, Concurrent, and Distributed Programming hosted on Coursera. 

Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2017, Prof. Sarkar was the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering at Rice University, where he created the Habanero Lab, served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science during 2013–2016, and created a sophomore-level undergraduate course on Fundamentals of Parallel Programming. Before joining Rice in 2007, Sarkar was Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at IBM Research. His research projects at IBM included the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, the ASTI optimizer used in IBM’s XL Fortran product compilers, and the PTRAN automatic parallelization system. Sarkar became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, and was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2008. He has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009, and on CRA’s Board of Directors since 2015.

Agata Rozga is a psychologist with expertise and 13 years of experience forging a new interdisciplinary research area at the intersection of computing and psychology called computational behavioral science. The research vision is to transform the measurement, analysis, and understanding of health-related behaviors by leveraging advances in sensing, wearable and mobile technologies, and computational analysis methods. The ultimate goal is to develop tools that can lead to better detection, monitoring, and treatment of a variety of chronic health conditions.

One key area Dr. Rozga’s research has focused on is understanding early trajectories and predictors of social communication in children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In her most recent work, she is applying novel computational methods to longitudinal measures of communication behavior to understand different pathways to language in autism, including failure to acquire spoken language by age 5. Dr. Rozga’s research has recently expanded to include a focus on Mild Cognitive Impairment, with an eye toward developing novel AI-based systems to help monitor cognitive and functional decline in everyday activities, to deliver appropriate in-situ supports, and to support care networks.

Dr. Rozga serves as the Director of Translational Research for the Georgia Tech-led NSF National AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), and as the Programs and Research Director for the Technology Core of the Cognitive Empowerment Program at the Emory Brain-Health Center. She was previously the Head of Product for Diligent Robotics, https://www.diligentrobots.com/.

Dr. Justin Romberg is the Schlumberger Professor and the Associate Chair for Research in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Associate Director for the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Romberg received the B.S.E.E. (1997), M.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees from Rice University in Houston, Texas. From Fall 2003 until Fall 2006, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He spent the Summer of 2000 as a researcher at Xerox PARC, the Fall of 2003 as a visitor at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions in Paris, and the Fall of 2004 as a Fellow at UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. In the Fall of 2006, he joined the Georgia Tech ECE faculty. In 2008 he received an ONR Young Investigator Award, in 2009 he received a PECASE award and a Packard Fellowship, and in 2010 he was named a Rice University Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus. He is currently on the editorial board for the SIAM Journal on the Mathematics of Data Science, and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

His research interests lie on the intersection of signal processing, machine learning, optimization, and applied probability.

Christine P. Ries is Professor in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech. She received a Ph.D. in International Business Economics from The University of Chicago (1977) and came to Georgia Tech as Professor and Chair (1997-99) of the School of Economics.  She has previously held faculty positions at The Harvard Business School, The Fuqua School of Business at Duke, the Peter F. Drucker Graduate Management Center at Claremont, and at Stanford University. At Claremont she was Senior Associate at the Center for Politics and Economics.  She is now a Senior Fellow at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Adjunct Scholar at Foundation for Education in Economics, Board of Policy Advisors Heartland Institute, Faculty Associate at Georgia Tech’s Program in Science Technology and Innovation Policy, faculty member of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities and a member of the Philadelphia Society and the selective Policy@Tech Campus Partners.  Finally, she is member of the Georgia Tech Faculty Council on Big Data and Engineering and the Data Dominators Affinity Group.

Dr. Ries studies and teaches principles of free market economics and their application in corporate decision making and the creation of economic value for companies, states and countries. She is a specialist in international financial economics, corporate financial management, and organizational economics and governance.  In this context, her work has extended into issues of Big Data as it affects corporate and industrial transformation and public policy and analysis.  Her work ties together foreign exchange risk management, corporate decision-making, strategy and corporate value. This work has extended into value-based analytics in a global economy. She has addressed corporate political risk in assessing how corporate strategies predict and respond to shifts in government trade, commercial and capital controls policies. Her articles include publications in The Journal of International Business Studies, The Harvard Business Review, Euromoney, and The Financial Analysts’ Journal, among others. She is the author of over 20 widely used case studies that have been published by the Harvard Business School and reprinted elsewhere. She has served as consultant and advisor to many U.S. and foreign corporations, financial institutions, universities, and governments.  These include IBM, Citicorp, Morgan Guarantee Trust, Chase Manhattan Bank, Barclays Bank, Lucky Goldstar Corp., and others. 

For governments of states and foreign countries, especially in emerging market countries, she advises and consults on tax, regulation and capital control policies and their impacts on relative competitiveness success in attracting investment and business. Her books address the strategies and policies of international corporations, the politics and economics of emerging markets and the interface between corporate strategy and government policy. She has served on the Executive and Editorial Boards of The Academy of International Business and on the editorial boards and as referee of several major professional and academic journals.

She has experience on corporate boards of advisors and her experience on not-for-profit boards is extensive. She recently served as Trustee and Chair of Education Committee for The Atlanta International School and as Treasurer for The Care and Counseling Center of Georgia. Dr. Ries has delivered speeches and public lectures around the globe and is the recipient of several teaching awards.  In additional to teaching courses in international finance, corporate financial policy and strategy, corporate/government interface, and markets and organizations she has created innovative courses including The Global Economy, Network Economics and Economic and Financial Modeling, and a capstone course for GT economics majors. The later required students to assess the internal economies of companies and their impact on the economy of the State of Georgia. 

After being appointed to the Special Council for Tax Reform and Fairness for Georgians in 2010, Dr. Ries focused her expertise on the problem of tax structure and economic growth in Georgia. On the Council, she organized and promoted private sector teams from mining, manufacturing and agricultural industries to streamline and rationalize Georgia’s tax code describing sales tax exemptions for business. This code modernization was enacted into law in 2012 and dramatically increased code transparency and reduced the cost of compliance for businesses in Georgia. She has created a tax calculator game to facilitate much greater public understanding of tax policy dynamics and improve the quality of public discussion by providing accurate measures of the impact of various tax reform alternatives.

Active involvement in the economic health and competitive attractiveness of Georgia has led her to extend her long-standing interest and activities in children and K-12 education. She is an active proponent of a state charter school strategy that supports Georgia’s economic growth and facilitates the creation of an education-rich environment in the state.  She is currently member GCA’s Academic Oversight and Finance Committees of the board of the Georgia Cyber Academy, a state-wide K-12 virtual school system with nearly 14,000 students.  It is the largest public school in Georgia and the third largest K-12 Cyber Academy the U.S. She was recently a member of the board of the Georgia Charter Educational Foundation contributing to the governance and educational committees. Previously, she served as a Trustee of the Atlanta International School where she chaired the Education Committee and served on the Headmaster Evaluation and Support Committee and the Finance Committee. Within the university system she has longed worked on the use of computers and information technology in education, strategic planning, financial planning, endowment investment, academic standards and the integration into the curriculum of an international perspective. In the last year, she converted her class, The Global Economy, to a hybrid format mixing face-to-face and online learning and is engaged in offering increasing numbers of on-line courses. She is also an active speaker and conference contributor on the subject of on-line and hybrid learning.

Dr. Ries is a frequent speaker on radio and television on topics of economic and tax reform, education reform, government budgeting and spending, global economic issues, Big Data, Analytics and corporate investment and Georgia economic development.