Dr. Garimella began at Tech in August 2003 as an Associate Professor and Director of the Sustainable Thermal Systems Laboratory. Prior, he was an Associate Professor at Iowa State University, an Assistant and Associate Professor at Western Michigan University, a Research Scientist at Battelle Memorial Institute, and a Senior Engineer at General Motors.

Michael’s love of design at all scales is evident in his teaching, research and practice. 

He is a registered architect, director of the Modern Cities Europe Program, and creative director at Gamble + Gamble Architects in Atlanta. From 2015 to 2022, he directed the Master of Architecture program in the School of Architecture.  His design-driven research operates at a variety of scales, from house to city, with emphasis on innovation, alternative energy, and building technology pursued within the context of a larger concern for the creation of healthy, well-conceived environments. He has received numerous awards for excellence in design and scholarship. www.gg-architects.com 

Michael was the first point of contact for the $30 million Living Building gift, a.k.a. Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design (KBISD), and actively participated in pre-planning and fund acquisition, design competition and team formation, all the way through building execution, implementation and certification.  He also led a series of interdisciplinary design studios that paralleled the effort, and chaired the Academic and Research Council connected to the project.  He is co-author of the novel organizational structure of the living building workgroups, now tested, and currently  serves as chair of the KBISD advisory council and leads the Living Building Pilot Project Program, comprised of faculty, researchers and students from across campus, now in round three of funding. 

Michael’s research has received grants from The Alcoa Foundation, The Kendeda Foundation, Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, the National Endowments of the Arts, and received First Prize for Research in an international competition sponsored by the Environmental Design and Research Association. Gamble has published essays on the design of the public realm in Harvard Design Magazine with W. Jude Leblanc. 

Victor Fung is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering. Prior to this position, he was a Wigner Fellow and a member of the Nanomaterials Theory Insitute in the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A physical chemist by training, Fung now works at the intersection of scientific artificial intelligence, computing, and materials science/chemistry.

Tom Fuller is Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Georgia Tech. Dr. Fuller received a BS from the University of Utah in Chemical Engineering in 1982. Dr. Fuller then served for five years in the U.S. Navy working as a Nuclear Engineer. In 1992 he obtained a Ph.D. from UC, Berkeley also in Chemical Engineering. 

Subsequently, Dr. Fuller developed advanced lithium batteries while working as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He then moved to United Technologies. He was responsible for technology development, design, assembly, and test of cell stacks for UTC Fuel Cells. 

His research group at Georgia Tech is focused on durability challenges for electrochemical systems. For the last eight years Dr. Fuller has been a Technical Editor for the Journal of the Electrochemical Society. In 2009 Dr. Fuller was named a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society.

James David Frost is the Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor of civil engineering. He received B.A.I and B.A. degrees in civil engineering and mathematics, respectively, from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland in 1980 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in civil engineering in 1986 and 1989 from Purdue University. Prior to serving as a member of the faculty at Purdue University and Georgia Tech, he worked in industry in Ireland and Canada on a range of natural resource related projects ranging from tailings impoundments to artificial sand islands in the Arctic for oil exploration. At Georgia Tech, where he has been for almost 20 years, he has served as head of the Geosystems Engineering Group and as founding director of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program and subsequently the Georgia Tech Savannah campus.

Biography

Dr. Hermann Fritz is a professor of civil engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). He is an expert on coastal hazards, such as tsunamis, hurricane storm surge and storm waves, landslides and submarine volcanic eruptions. Dr. Fritz has led or participated in more than a dozen post-disaster reconnaissance campaigns encompassing tsunami, hurricane, landslide, and earthquake events. Tsunami Surveys: 2004 Indian Ocean (Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Somalia, Madagascar, Oman, Yemen, Comoros), 2006 Java, 2007 Solomon Islands and Peru, 2009 Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga, 2010 Solomon Islands, Haiti, Chile, and Mentawai Islands, 2011 Japan, 2012 El Salvador, 2013 Solomon Islands, 2014 and 2015 Chile, 2017 Greenland, 2018 Sulawesi and Krakatau. Hurricane Surveys: 2005 Hurricane Katrina, 2007 Tropical Cyclone Gonu (Oman), 2008 Tropical Cyclone Nargis (Myanmar), 2013 Typhoon Haiyan (Philippines), 2015 Tropical Cyclone Pam (Vanuatu), 2017 Hurricane Nate. Dr. Fritz's research centers on fluid dynamic aspects of natural hazards as well as their mitigation and coastal protection. Dr. Fritz obtained his Doctorate degree (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) in 2002 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Switzerland).

Research

Dr. Fritz has developed a strong research effort covering experimental (both field and laboratory) and computational methods in fluid dynamics, hydraulics and geophysics. His research focuses on coastal hazards such as tsunamis, hurricanes, landslides, and volcanoes. Dr. Fritz’s work encompasses non-linear and breaking water waves; subaerial and submarine mass flows such as landslides, avalanches, island collapses, and submarine volcanic eruptions; floods, river engineering and morphologic processes; hydraulic and coastal structures such as seawalls, breakwaters, levees and dams along with their failure and breaching mechanisms; hydropower, wave, tidal and ocean current energy. His research is significantly enhancing the hazard prevention, mitigation and protection of coastal and mountainous areas on a truly global scale.

Education

Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (Dr. sc. techn. ETH)

ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) 2002

M.S. in Civil Engineering (Dipl.-Ing. ETH)

ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) 1997

Teaching

Professor Fritz’ teaching focuses on civil and environmental engineering at undergraduate and graduate levels, emphasizing dynamics, fluid mechanics, hydraulic engineering, coastal hazards, coastal structures, and experimental methods. His instruction integrates fundamental principles with practical applications to prepare students for research and professional practice. Professor Fritz is committed to fostering student engagement through hands-on learning and critical thinking in courses related to hydraulic and coastal engineering.

Distinctions & Awards

• Plinius Medal, Natural Hazards Division, European Geosciences Union (EGU), 2014
• CIOS Honor Roll
• Excellence in Research Award, CEE, Georgia Tech, 2005
• Research Excellence Award, Georgia Tech Savannah, 2005

Michael Filler is a professor and the Traylor Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Cornell University and Stanford University, respectively, prior to completing postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology. Filler has been recognized for his research and teaching with the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award, CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and AVS Dorothy M. and Earl S. Hoffman Award. Filler also heads Nanovation, a forum to address the big questions, big challenges, and big opportunities of nanotechnology.

Fedorov's background is in thermal/fluid sciences, chemical reaction engineering as well as in applied mathematics. His laboratory works at the intersection between mechanical and chemical engineering and solid state physics and analytical chemistry with the focus on portable/ distributed power generation with synergetic CO₂ capture; thermal management of high power dissipation devices and electronics cooling; special surfaces and nanostructured interfaces for catalysis, heat and moisture management; and development of novel bioanalytical instrumentation and chemical sensors. Fedorov joined Georgia Tech in 2000 as an assistant professor after finishing his postdoctoral work at Purdue University.

Erturk began at Georgia Tech in May 2011 as an Assistant Professor, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2016 and became a full Professor in 2019. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked as a Research Scientist in the Center for Intelligent Material Systems and Structures at Virginia Tech (2009-2011). His postdoctoral research interests included theory and experiments of smart structures for applications ranging from aeroelastic energy harvesting to bio-inspired actuation. His Ph.D. dissertation (2009) was centered on experimentally validated electromechanical modeling of piezoelectric energy harvesters using analytical and approxIMaTe analytical techniques. Prior to his Ph.D. studies in Engineering Mechanics at Virginia Tech, Erturk completed his M.S. degree (2006) in Mechanical Engineering at METU with a thesis on analytical and semi-analytical modeling of spindle-tool dynamics in machining centers for predicting chatter stability and identifying interface dynamics between the assembly components.