Ryan Lively was born in 1984. He spent approximately 16 years in Gainesville, FL and attended almost every home football game at The Swamp. He enrolled at Georgia Tech in 2002 as an eager Chemical Engineering student and has been a Yellow Jacket at heart ever since. During his studies at Georgia Tech, Ryan worked on research projects as diverse as ab initio quantum mechanical methods to estimate molecular binding energies, fresh Georgia peach preservation, composite spinneret design, dual-layer hollow fiber membrane spinning, and sorbent-loaded fiber spinning. Ryan introduced a rapid temperature swing adsorption (RTSA) approach for post-combustion CO2 capture, which was successfully demonstrated by adapting knowledge developed in membrane science to design unique nanoscale composite adsorbent/heat exchangers. After his Ph.D. (awarded in 2010), he spent almost 3 years as a post-doctoral research engineer at Algenol Biofuels, where he published 25 papers and filed two U.S. patent applications. His work at Algenol focused on developing energy-efficient liquid and vapor separation systems for downstream biofuel purification. 

He is now the Thomas C. DeLoach Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His current research seeks to revolutionize fluid separation processes critical to the global energy and carbon infrastructure. He has a specific focus on membrane- and adsorbent-based science and technology to address some of the most difficult chemical separations. His group’s research activities range from fundamental material science and discovery to translational engineering applications focusing on making and testing separation devices. 

Ryan has received a variety of awards for his research efforts including the 2020 Allan P. Colburn Award from AIChE, and the 2022 Curtis W. McGraw Award from ASEE. He is currently an Editor for the Journal of Membrane Science and is the Secretary of the North American Membrane Society. He is the Director of the Center for Understanding & Controlling Accelerated and Gradual Evolution of Materials for Energy (UNCAGE-ME), an Energy Frontier Research Center of the US Department of Energy. He has over 160 publications in the field of separations including articles in Science, Nature and other impactful venues.

Zhiqun Lin is currently Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on nanostructured functional materials (NanoFM). An extensive list of materials currently under investigation in his group includes polymer-based nanocomposites, block copolymers, polymer blends, conjugated polymers, quantum dots (rods, tetrapods, wires), magnetic nanocrystals, metallic nanocrystals, semiconductor metal oxide nanocrystals, ferroelectric nanocrystals, multiferroic nanocrystals, upconversion nanocrystals, thermoelectric nancrystals, core/shell nanoparticles (nanorods), hollow nanocrystals, Janus nanocrystals, nanopores, nanotubes, hierarchically structured and assembled materials, and semiconductor organic-inorganic nanohybrids.

The goal of his research is to understand the fundamentals of these nanostructured materials. His group intends to create these nanostructures in a precisely controllable manner and to exploit the structure-property relationships in the development of multifunctional materials for potential use in energy conversion (e.g., solar cells, photocatalysis, and hydrogen generation) and storage (e.g., batteries), electronics, optics, optoelectronics, magnetic materials and devices, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

Tim Lieuwen is the executive vice president for research (EVPR) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In this role, he oversees the Institute’s $1.37 billion portfolio of research, economic development, and sponsored activities. This includes leadership of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the Enterprise Innovation Institute, nine interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs), and related research administrative support units.

In his 25-plus years at Georgia Tech, Lieuwen earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering (1996 and 1999, respectively) and has held multiple leadership positions. He has been the executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) since 2012 and began serving as the interim chair of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering in 2023.

Lieuwen has received numerous honors and recognition for his work in clean energy systems and policy, national security, and regional economic development. Additionally, he has been awarded the titles of Regents’ Professor and the David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair in AE. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Aaron D. Levine is Associate Dean for Research and Outreach in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. He also holds an appointment as a Guest Researcher in the Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a member of the leadership team for the NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), leading ethics and policy research for the center. He seved as Co-Director for CMaT's Engineering Workforce Development activities from 2017 to 2022. His research focuses on the intersection between public policy and bioethics. Much of his work has examined the development of stem cell science, particularly research using human embryonic stem cells, and the translation of novel cell therapies. He also writes extensively on the oversight of contentious areas of medicine, such as assisted reproductive technology. In 2012, he received a NSF CAREER award to examine the impact of ethical controversy on graduate science education and the development of scientific careers.  He serves as Vice-Chair for Bioethics on the International Society for Cell & Genel Therapy’s Committee on the Ethics of Cell and Gene Therapy and recently completed a three-year term as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He is also a long-time member of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Aaron has a long-standing interest in science communication and is the author of Cloning: A Beginner's Guide (Oneworld Publications, 2007), an accessible introduction to the science of cloning and embryonic stem cells and the ethical and policy controversies this science inspires. He was an AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellow for 2019-2020. You can follow Aaron on twitter at @aarondlevine.

He completed his Ph.D. in Public Affairs at Princeton University, where his dissertation research examined the impact of public policy on the development of human embryonic stem cell science.  He also holds an M. Phil. from the University of Cambridge, where, as a Churchill Scholar, he studied computational biology at the Sanger Centre and developed algorithms to help analyze the human genome sequence, and a B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Wenke Lee, Ph.D., is executive director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) and responsible for continuing Georgia Tech's international leadership in cybersecurity research and education. Additionally, he is the John P. Imlay, Jr. Professor of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he has taught since 2001. Previously, he served as director of the IISP's predecessor -- the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) research lab -- from 2012 to 2015. Lee is one of the most prolific and influential security researchers in the world. He has published several dozen, oft-cited research papers at top academic conferences, including the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, USENIX Security, IEEE Security & Privacy ("Oakland"), and the Network & Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. His research expertise includes systems and network security, botnet detection and attribution, malware analysis, virtual machine monitoring, mobile systems security, and detection and mitigation of information manipulation on the Internet. Lee regularly leads large research projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and private industry. Significant discoveries from his research group have been transferred to industry, and in 2006, doing so enabled Lee to co-found Damballa, Inc., which focused on detection and mitigation of advanced persistent threats. Lee’s awards and honors include the “Internet Defense Prize” awarded by Facebook and USENIX in 2015, an “Outstanding Community Service Award” from the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in 2013, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship in 2005, an NSF Career Award in 2002, as well as best paper awards in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Passionate about quality education, Lee serves on the advisory boards of the Faculty of Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the board of trustees at Pace Academy in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1999.

Seung Woo Lee joined the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in January of 2013. Lee received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT, focusing on designing high-energy and high-power density nanostructured electrodes for electrochemical energy storage devices, and synthesizing catalysts for electrochemical energy conversion of small molecules such as methanol oxidation and O2 reduction. He conducted his postdoctoral research in designing electrodes for lithium rechargeable batteries and catalysts for solar energy storage in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at MIT.