Dr. Beril Toktay is Regents' Professor and the Brady Family Chairholder in the Scheller College of Business. She serves as Executive Director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. A globally recognized leader in sustainable operations management, Dr. Toktay has dedicated her career to bridging academic excellence with real-world impact in sustainability research and education.

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2005, Dr. Toktay has established herself as an influential leader in sustainability scholarship and cross-institute initiatives. She founded the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business and co-created the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS). Under her leadership as Executive Faculty Co-Director, the SLS team expanded sustainability-focused academic community engagement across Georgia Tech until its 2024 institutionalization as the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education within BBISS. Most recently, she co-chaired Georgia Tech's Sustainability Next Strategic Plan Implementation Team, under which Georgia Tech recommitted to growing BBISS, elevated and restructured the Office of Sustainability, and launched the Sustain-X startup accelerator, educational innovation and transdisciplinary research seed grant programs, the Climate Action Plan, and the Sustainability Education Curriculum Committee.

A Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society, Dr. Toktay is internationally recognized for her research in sustainable operations management spanning circular economy models and climate mitigation strategies. Her circular economy research includes developing improved Extended Producer Responsibility cost allocation mechanisms recommended for adoption by the UK government. Her climate mitigation work features in a multi-university project that identified Georgia's top twenty decarbonization solutions, catalyzing the creation of the 70-member Drawdown Georgia Business Compact facilitated by the Ray C. Anderson Center.

Dr. Toktay serves on the boards of the New York Climate Exchange, Georgia Cleantech Innovation Hub, and Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. Her former professional service includes VP for Marketing, Communications and Advocacy at INFORMS, Department Co-Editor for "Health, Environment, and Society" at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Area Editor for "Environment, Energy, and Sustainability" at Operations Research. She served as the Scheller College of Business ADVANCE Professor from 2012-2020.

Dr. Toktay’s research has earned recognition including being named among the World's Top Business and Management Scientists (Research.com, 2024),the  M&SOM Best Paper Award (2021), the M&SOM Responsible Research Award (2019), and the Management Science Best Paper in Operations Management Award (2015).

Her commitment to developing the next generation of sustainability leaders earned her Georgia Tech's Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award (2018) and recognition as a E3 Impact Award Finalist (2019) by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce for Serve-Learn-Sustain's impact on Atlanta communities. She co-developed the Carbon Reduction Challenge, an interdisciplinary program that engages undergraduate students in climate intrapreneurship and which earned top ten finalist recognition from Reimagine Education among 1,184 projects from 39 countries.

Dr. Toktay holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT, an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, and B.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering and Mathematics from Bogazici University.

Anjali Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and Director of the Nunn School Program in Global Development. Her research focuses on the political economy of development, and employs quantitative analyses of data derived from India and other developing country contexts. Her specific substantive interests include the politics of service provision, democratic institutions and the link between climate change and local level politics. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Anjali was a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She obtained her Ph.D. from New York University in 2010.

Valerie Thomas is the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. 

Dr. Thomas's research interests are energy and materials efficiency, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Current research projects include low carbon transportation fuels, carbon capture, building construction, and electricity system development. Dr. Thomas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Physical Society. She has been an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow, a Member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, and a Member of the USDA/DOE Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee. 

She has worked at Princeton University in the Princeton Environmental Institute and in the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

Dr. Thomas received a B. A. in physics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

Laura Taylor is the director of Energy Policy and Innovation Center (EPIcenter) at Georgia Tech. 

Taylor has more than 30 years of experience in economics research, outreach, and policy engagement in the Southeast. Her research focuses on policy evaluation and the valuation of natural resources and the environment, including measuring the broader economic benefits associated with improved air, water, and ecosystem quality. Recent applications include understanding the land-use and community impacts of renewable energy deployment; quantifying the health effects of air pollution; and improving benefits estimation for policies designed to reduce human mortality. Her research has received funding from a variety of sources including the U.S. EPA, USDA, U.S. Department of Interior and the National Science Foundation.    

Prior to her leadership role at the EPIcenter, Taylor served as the chair of the School of Economics at Georgia Tech from 2018-2024. During her time as chair, the School of Economics increased its size significantly, hiring 19 new faculty members, and the number of students pursuing a major in economics increased by more than 50%. Economics also expanded its teaching and research in several areas including health, energy, environment, globalization, theory, and data analytics. The school’s bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. programs achieved federal STEM designation in 2019, reflecting the curriculum’s tech-centered approach to liberal arts education and emphasis on using mathematical and statistical models. The school’s undergraduate economics program is ranked No. 1 among public universities in Georgia and No. 21 among public universities nationally in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2018, Taylor was director of the Center for Environmental and Resource Economic Policy at North Carolina State University from 2007-2018.  

Taylor is an elected fellow and past president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. She has held numerous advisory board positions, including the environmental economics subcommittee of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s science advisory board and the legislative research commission advisory subcommittee on offshore energy exploration for the North Carolina General Assembly. 

Molei Tao received B.S. in Math & Physics in 2006 from Tsinghua Univ. (Beijing) and Ph.D. in Control & Dynamical Systems with a minor in Physics in 2011 from Caltech (advisor: Houman Owhadi, co-advisor: Jerry Marsden). Afterwards, he worked as a postdoc in Computing & Mathematical Sciences at Caltech from 2011 to 2012, and then as a Courant Instructor at NYU from 2012 to 2014. From 2014 on, he has been an assistant, and then associate professor in School of Math at Georgia Tech. He is a recipient of W.P. Carey Ph.D. Prize in Applied Mathematics (2011), American Control Conference Best Student Paper Finalist (2013), NSF CAREER Award (2019), AISTATS best paper award (2020), IEEE EFTF-IFCS Best Student Paper Finalist (2021), Cullen-Peck Scholar Award (2022), GT-Emory AI.Humanity Award (2023), a Plenary Speaker at Georgia Scientific Computing Symposium (2024), a Keynote Speaker at (2024) International Conference on Scientific Computing and Machine Learning, SONY Faculty Innovation Award (2024), Best Poster Award at 2024 international conference “Recent Advances and Future Directions for Sampling” held at Yale, and Richard Duke Fellowship (2025).

Yuanzhi Tang is the executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute and the Georgia Power professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the founding director of the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions.

Tang received her bachelor’s degrees in geology and economics from Peking University, Ph.D. in geosciences from Stony Brook University, and completed her postdoctoral research in environmental chemistry at Harvard University. She has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, holds three patents, and serves as co-editor in chief of Chemical Geology. She has held multiple professional leadership roles, including chair of the American Chemical Society Geochemistry Division.

Her research and leadership integrate earth, environmental, biological, materials, and sustainability sciences and innovations to advance secure, circular, and sustainable energy systems. At Georgia Tech, she leads interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborations with universities, national labs, industry, and state agencies to drive regional resource innovation and economic development. Her leadership emphasizes ecosystem building, workforce development, and translating research into tangible societal and economic impacts.

Tang joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2013 as an assistant professor and is now a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Shu Takayama earned his BS and MS in Agricultural Chemistry at the University of Tokyo. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California studying bio-organic synthesis with Dr. Chi‐Huey Wong. He then worked as a postdoc with Dr. George Whitesides at Harvard University where he focused on applying microfluidics to studying cell and molecular biology.

Takayama began his career at the University of Michigan, where led his lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Macromolecular Science & Engineering for over 17 years. In 2017, the lab moved to Georgia Tech where Shu became the Georgia Research Alliance Price Gilbert Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Takayama’s research interests are diverse and motivated by clinical and biotechnology needs. He is always interested in hearing from stakeholders in these areas who are seeking engineering collaboration.