Kait Morano

Kait Morano
kmorano@gatech.edu

Kait Morano is a Research Scientist II at the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). Her interests include urban planning, climate change, and spatial analysis, and her work focuses on designing innovative, equitable strategies to build community resilience. At IPaT, she serves as the Resilience Planning Director of the Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub.

Kait holds a bachelor’s in Geography from Virginia Tech and a master’s of City and Regional Planning from Georgia Tech, where she specialized in Geographic Information Systems. Prior to joining IPaT, Kait worked in local government on the Georgia coast, at the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization at Georgia Tech, and as an ORISE Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Research Scientist II
IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology > Research Faculty
People and Technology

Nathan Moon

Nathan Moon
nathan.moon@gatech.edu
Associate Director for Research
Phone
404-894-8845
Additional Research

STEM education; Disability Employment; workplace accommodations policy; Accessible Information and Communications Technologies

IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology
University, College, and School/Department
Georgia Institute of Technology > Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

Tracy Mitzner

Tracy Mitzner
tracy.mitzner@design.gatech.edu
Research Scientist I
Phone
404-385-0011
Additional Research
Technology; Older Adults
IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology
University, College, and School/Department
Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Sciences

Helena Mitchell

Helena Mitchell
helena@gatech.edu
Principal Investigator
Phone
404-385-4640
Additional Research

Broadband and Wireless Communications; Educational Technologies; Regulatory and Legislative Policy; Emergency/Public Safety Communications; Universal Service to Vulnerable; Rural; Inner City Populations

IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology
University, College, and School/Department
Georgia Institute of Technology > Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

Karen Milchus

Karen Milchus
karen.milchus@design.gatech.edu
Senior Research Engineer
Phone
(404) 894-0393
Additional Research
Technology for people with disabilities.
IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology

Keith McGreggor

Keith McGreggor
keith.mcgreggor@gatech.edu
VentureLab Director
Additional Research

Artificial Intelligence; Cognitive Systems; Visual Representations

IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology
Commercialization
University, College, and School/Department
Georgia Institute of Technology

Leigh McCook

Leigh McCook
Leigh.McCook@gtri.gatech.edu

Leigh McCook, principal research associate at Georgia Tech, also serves as deputy director for IPaT, director of STEM programs for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and previously served as division chief for fifteen years in GTRI’s socio-technical systems division in the Information and Communications Lab. She has been with Georgia Tech for more than 30 years.

As deputy director in IPaT, McCook works to build new research partnerships across campus as well as develop government, industry, and international programs. While she continues to conduct research, McCook's focus has centered on growing IPaT’s research portfolio of state government and industry projects, particularly in education, humanitarian systems, health and smart cities.

McCook’s GTRI activities include directing research and outreach programs for regional and national centers and managing a variety of research and STEM programs funded by federal, state, and local agencies.

Her career expertise includes technology transfer, research translation, outreach, planning, and program management, specifically in areas related to emergency preparedness and response, homeland security, community resiliency, and education. She has managed researchers working a variety of programs in health, learning technology, planning, technology assessment, and integration, policy analysis and research, technology transfer, education, training, public safety, humanitarian, and emergency response.

McCook served as program manager for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA) Homeland Security/Emergency Response programs at the Georgia Tech Research Institute since 2000. Twenty years of program support to GEMA has resulted in over $53M work of funded project work at GTRI.

McCook’s experience also includes having served as associate director for technology transfer and outreach for EPA’s Hazardous Substance Research Centers (South & Southwest). In this capacity she led technology transfer, research translation, and outreach activities for the five-university consortium.

McCook has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on projects for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Georgia Department and Family and Child Services, the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, the Atlanta Urban Area Security Initiative, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Southeast Regional Research Initiative.

Division Chief, Information and Communications Laboratory, GTRI
Deputy Director, Institute for People and Technology (IPaT)
Phone
404-407-7898
Additional Research

Education; Humanitarian Systems

IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology > Leadership
Energy > Faculty Council
Energy > Research Community
People and Technology
Energy
GTRI
Geogia Tech Research Institute

Celeste Mason

Celeste Mason
celeste.m@gatech.edu

Celeste Mason is a research scientist II at the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). After completing her Masters of Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech (and previously, a Bachelor’s in Materials Science and Engineering), she worked as a researcher/developer at a wearable computing startup and universities in Northern Germany. Research projects included design and development of technologies for intelligent assistance in physical training for older adults, with an emphasis on realistic intelligent virtual agents and dynamic user feedback; creation of a multi-modal dataset for action recognition and semantic/hierarchical structure discovery, with the goal of enhancing cognitive robotic planning algorithms; user interfaces, wearable, and tangible systems for the “Workflow Editor” graphical procedural customization system for order-picking and other industrial processes (now part of Teamviewer); and the collaborative research projects “Multimodal Algebra Lernen (MAL)”, a tangible mathematics educational system; and “Be-griefen”, an experimentation XR educational system for physics and electronics instruction.
 

Some of the projects Celeste has worked on at Georgia Tech include PopSign (an American Sign Language vocabulary learning mobile game - the initial prototype was the basis of her Masters project), along with the Passive Haptic Learning and Rehabilitation project (PHL/PHR Gloves help to teach the "muscle memory" of how to play piano melodies without the learner's active attention and may aid those recovering from stroke injury and other conditions improve sensation/dexterity in their affected hands), the FIDO project (tangible and wearable systems for working dogs), and the CHAT project (wearable computers used by dolphin researcher). Prior Materials Science research projects focused on design, fabrication, and characterization of piezo-electric nanogenerators, bio-inspired nanomaterials and optically transparent, electrically conductive nanoparticle/polymer composites. Her current research focuses include educational games, tools, and outreach (especially in the STEM space); assistive technologies for health, education and industry; environmental sensor systems for community-driven sustainability; and wearable (AR/XR) and implantable technologies for health, productivity, and quality-of-life/well-being. Celeste continues to pursue technology transfer efforts for these projects (PHL Gloves and PopSign in particular) with the goal of building up and refining these research prototypes toward viable products that can significantly improve and enrich users’ daily lives.

Research Interests:

  • Educational and behavior-change technologies, serious games
  • Wearables/XR, multimodal interaction
  • Assistive technologies
  • Sustainability in computing

 

Research Scientist II
IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology > Research Faculty
People and Technology

Lisa Marks

Lisa Marks
lisa.marks@design.gatech.edu

Lisa Marks is a designer and educator teaching studio courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Georgia Tech. Her current research focuses on methods of combining endangered and traditional handcraft with algorithmic modeling in order to produce new modes of production. She has a Master of Industrial Design from Parsons School of Design and worked in New York for clients including Google, Nike, and Swarovski. Marks serves as a Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology initiative lead for research activities related to arts, expression, and creative technologies.

Assistant Professor
IRI and Role
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
People and Technology > Leadership
People and Technology
University, College, and School/Department
Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Design > School of Industrial Design

Brian Magerko

Brian Magerko
magerko@gatech.edu
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Digital Media
Additional Research
Interactive Narrative; Serious Game Design Development; Cognitive Architechtures; Intelligent Agents; Human-Computer Interaction; Educational Media; Improvisation; Cognitive Science
IRI and Role
Data Engineering and Science > Faculty
People and Technology > Affiliated Faculty
Data Engineering and Science
People and Technology
University, College, and School/Department
Georgia Institute of Technology > Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts