Ratan is an Assistant Professor of Cognition and Brain Science in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech, and the Director of the Murty Lab (murtylab.com). He obtained his PhD from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Kanwisher and DiCarlo labs at MIT before moving to Georgia Tech. Research in the Murty Lab aims to uncover the neural codes and algorithms that enable us to see. The central theme of the lab's work is to integrate biological vision with artificial models of vision. The lab combines the benefits of closed-loop experimental testing (using 3T/7T human functional-MRI) with cutting-edge computational methods (like deep neural networks, generative algorithms, and AI interpretability) toward a new computationally precise understanding of human vision. This research also guides the development of neurally mechanistic biologically constrained models aimed to uncover a better understanding of the neurobiological changes that underlie perceptual abnormalities such as agnosias.

Ratan obtained his PhD in Neuroscience from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (India) with Prof. SP Arun and completed his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Profs. Nancy Kanwisher and James J DiCarlo.​ He leads the Murty Vision, Cognition, and Computation Lab at Georgia Tech.

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Ratan's research goal is to understand the neural codes and algorithms that support human vision.

Dr. Janet Murray is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, as well as Director of the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (http://dilac.iac.gatech.edu). She received her PhD in English from Harvard. Her primary research interests are interactive design, interactive narrative, and the history and development of representational media. Her widely known book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether we can expect this new medium to support a new expressive art form, comparable to the Shakespearean theater or the Victorian novel in its ability to move and enlighten us. She is mostly optimistic about this possibility. Her textbook, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011) unites the myriad traditional disciplines in which interactive designers are now trained into a single coherent digitally focused design vocabulary. Her Prototyping eNarrative group (PENlab) creates prototypes of emerging narrative structures including interactive television, story-games, and virtual/augmented reality (http://penlab.gatech.edu). She is an emerita member of the Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute and the Board of the Peabody Awards, an Inaugural Fellow of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance, and a frequent keynote speaker for conferences at the intersection of games and narrative.

Milton Mueller is an internationally prominent scholar specializing in the political economy of information and communication. The author of seven books and scores of journal articles, his work informs not only public policy but also science and technology studies, law, economics, communications, and international studies. His books Networks and States: The global politics of Internet governance (MIT Press, 2010) and Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2002) are acclaimed scholarly accounts of the global governance regime emerging around the Internet. Mueller’s research employs the theoretical tools of institutional economics, STS and political economy, as well as historical, qualitative and quantitative methods. Mueller’s prominence in scholarship is matched by his prominence in policy practice. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Internet Governance Project (IGP), a policy analysis center for global Internet governance. Since its founding in 2004, IGP has played a prominent role in shaping global Internet policies and institutions such as ICANN and the Internet Governance Forum. He has participated in proceedings and policy development activities of ICANN, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and regulatory proceedings in the European Commission, China, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He has served as an expert witness in prominent legal cases related to domain names and telecommunication policy. He was recently elected to the advisory committee of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and appointed in 2014 to the IANA Stewardship Coordination Group. Mueller has also been a practical institution-builder in the scholarly world, where he led the creation of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), an international association of scholars.

Martin Mourigal received the B.S in Materials from Ecole des Mines de Nancy in 2004. He later received his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from Ecole Polytechnique Federale (EPFL) located in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2007 and 2011, respectively. He was also a postdoctoral research fellow in John Hopkins University from 2011 until 2014. He joined Georgia Tech in 2015 and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Physics. Mourigal's lab focuses on the study of collective electronic and magnetic phenomena in quantum materials. His research exploits the unique strengths of neutron and X-ray scattering to probe the organization and the dynamics of matter at the nanoscale.In addition to his own lab research, Mourigal is the co-director of the Georgia Tech Quantum Alliance, a university wide program that will work towards solving problems in optimization, cryptography, and artificial intelligence. Mourigal was awarded the Cullen Peck Faculty Scholar Award from Georgia Tech in 2019. He was also awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for excellence as a young educator and researcher in 2018.

Dr. Cassie S. Mitchell is a research engineer, elite athlete, and mentor. She is a current member of the USA Paralympic team and research faculty in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. At age 18 Cassie was afflicted with Devics Neuromyelitis Optica, leaving her as a quadriplegic and with visual impairments. Her faith and philosophy on life has helped her to overcome the resulting challenges. She graduated with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Oklahoma State University and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from GT/Emory. She enjoys mentoring high school and college students as well as new spinal cord injury patients at Shepherd Center Brain and Spinal Cord Rehabilitiation Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia.

Professor Menon joined Flow Industries, Kent, Washington, as a research scientist, and in 1988, became a senior scientist and program manager for the computational fluid dynamics group in Quest Integrated, Inc. (formerly called Flow Research, Inc.). At Quest, Menon led research teams in various research projects such as the active control of combustion instability in ramjet engines, supersonic mixing studies, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft fluid dynamics, and hypersonic reentry problems. In 1992, he joined Georgia Institute of Technology as an associate professor and became a professor in 1997. He is currently the Hightower Professor of Engineering in Georgia Tech. Professor Menon is a world renowned expert in large-eddy simulation of turbulent reacting and non-reacting flows and has developed unique simulation capabilities to study pollutant formation, ozone depletion in high-altitude aircraft jet plumes and combustion in gas turbine and ramjet engines. He has been (and is currently) a principal investigator for a wide range of research projects funded by NASA, Department of Energy, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Office of Naval Research, Defense Threat Reduction Agency. His work has been (and is also) supported by many industries including General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, Solar Turbines, Boeing, Safran (France), Hyundai (S. Korea), JAXA (Japan), IHI (Japan) and Rocketdyne-Aerojet. He has published and/or presented over 395 papers. Professor Menon is a Fellow of AAAS, Associate Fellow of AIAA, and a member of the American Physical Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Combustion Institute and the Sigma Xi. He is a peer reviewer for numerous archival journals, NASA, NSF, DoD and DOE research proposals.

Dr. Medford is interested in leveraging materials informatics, statistics, and machine learning to maximize the practical impact of fundamental atomic-scale simulations in the field of surface science and catalysis. His research areas include heterogeneous catalysis, oxide surface chemistry, density functional theory, kinetic models, uncertainty quantification, and Bayesian optimization and inference.

Steven W. McLaughlin is the provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

McLaughlin first joined Georgia Tech as a member of the faculty in 1996. From 2017-2020, he served as the dean and Southern Company Chair of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, the largest engineering college in the country. Prior roles include the Steve Chaddick School Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2012-2017, and the vice provost for International Initiatives and Steven A. Denning Chair in Global Engagement from 2007-2012.

In 2014 he co-founded CREATE-X, a campus-wide effort to instill entrepreneurial confidence in students and help them launch companies. The program has successfully launched 225 student-led companies and engaged more than 4,000 students in the principles and practice of evidence-based entrepreneurship.

In 2011 he was awarded the honor Chevalier dans l`Ordre Nationale de Merite, (Knight of the French National Order of Merit), the second highest civilian award given by Republic of France. He was the first Georgia Tech recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) where he was cited by President Clinton "for leadership in the development of high-capacity, nonbinary optical recording formats." He is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

His research interests are in the general area of communications and information theory. His research group has published in the areas of forward error correction and equalization in wireless communications, magnetic/optical data storage, data security, and privacy. He has advised more than 50 students and postdocs. His group has published more than 250 papers in journals and conferences and holds 36 U.S. patents.

He received the B.S.E.E. degree from Northwestern University, the M.S.E. degree from Princeton University, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan.

The research in our group bridges the gap between applied electronic structure theory and first-principles molecular simulation to enable predictive computational discovery of new materials and new chemistry. This research relies heavily on sophisticated high-performance and high-throughput computing paradigms, employing modern graphics processing unit (GPU) based computing. A primary focus is electrochemistry and electrochemical energy storage applications, and we seek to develop a fundamental understanding of how redox chemistry and other chemical and physical processes are modulated by strong electric fields. We are interested in chemical reaction mechanisms within highly ionic and heterogeneous environments, and are developing multi-scale modeling approaches to study chemical reactivity in the condensed phase. This method development includes novel QM/MM approaches and machine-learning reactive force fields, which are combined with enhanced sampling molecular dynamics/Monte Carlo techniques. Please see our research group website for more details!