Yilun 'Elon' Zha is a planner, urban designer, and data scientist. As a Ph.D. student in urban design and Master’s student in statistics, Elon orients his research interest towards the quantitative analysis of urban (re)design and its role in environmental, economic, and social sustainability. His past experience includes a wide variety of urban design and planning practices in China and the United States. Currently, he is working with Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones on research exploring the strategies and unintended consequences of suburban retrofits. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in City Planning from Tongji University in 2016 and 2019, respectively. In 2018, he also obtained a double Master's degree of Urban Design from Georgia Tech.

Advisor: Ellen Dunham-Jones

Perry Yang is a Professor and Director of Eco Urban Lab of the School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Perry’s work focuses on incorporating data analytics into urban design to improve ecological and energy performance of cities. He has published more than fifty articles and book chapters in this area from 2009, including the book Urban Systems Design: Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era that he co-edited and co-authored six chapters in 2020 by Elsevier. He co-edited a 2019 theme issue Urban Systems Design: From Science for Design to Design in Science in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, a prestigious journal in planning to explore new urban design research agenda and applications of emerging technologies, data analytics and urban automation to placemaking in the context of smart city movement. Beyond writing, Yang has been awarded more than ten prizes in international competitions continuously from 2005 in Asian cities, including the 2009 World Games Park at Kaohsiung, Taiwan, a project opened in July 2009 and featured by CNN as an “eco-friendly” venue. His urban design work was introduced in the January 2010 issue Ecological Urbanism at World Architecture (WA), a leading architecture journal by Tsinghua University. His recent design projects were shortlisted in the 2022 Asian Games Village in Hangzhou in 2017, the Musi River Revitalization at Hyderabad in 2018, and water town designs in China’s Yangtze River Delta region in 2020-2021 during the pandemic. From 2017 to 2023, he has been involved in smart city projects in Japan, including one of Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic sites at Urawa Misono, in collaboration with the University of Tokyo, Keio University and Global Carbon Project (GCP). 

Yang is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Urban Engineering of the University of Tokyo from 2022 to 2023, and a Visiting Scientist at CARES of the Cambridge University in Singapore in 2023. He served as the endowed Bayer Chair Professor of UNEP Institute at Tongji University from 2014 to 2018. Perry is also a faculty fellow of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems at Georgia Tech from 2018. He has served as a board member of the International Urban Planning and Environment Association (UPE) from 2007. He is a scientific committee member of International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE) from 2015. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, he was a Fulbright Scholar and SPURS Fellow at MIT from 1999 to 2000, and an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the National University of Singapore from 2001 to 2008.

She is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and a practicing designer, researcher, and educator who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. As an avid photographer and illustrator, her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects National Photography Competition and she has contributed graphics to several exhibitions and publications. As an educator, she was recognized as one of two recipients of the 2017-2018 American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS)/ Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) New Faculty Teaching Award and a 2021 AIAS Educator Honor Award. 

Her research and practice experiences span design/build, early intervention design education, transatlantic studies, and historic site documentation and visualization. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in fall 2021 for the project "From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South," supporting research and development of the Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States seminar at Georgia Tech. 

Expanding experiences abroad to enrich both teaching and research agendas , she was the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians’ H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellow. Between June 2016 and May 2017, she traveled to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Cuba, and Japan to research the impact of tourism on cultural heritage sites; research blog posts can be found here. 

Currently, she is working with Auburn University Associate Professor Liu and an interdisciplinary team from the McWhorter School of Building Science, the Department of History, and the Media Production Group on “Walking in the Footsteps of History”, an experimental survey and modeling project to digitally reconstruct the area south of the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 'Bloody Sunday' events of March 7, 1965. This project is working to record and represent the built environment through the use of 3D LiDAR scans, UAV photogrammetry, and digital modeling. The team was awarded a $50,000 grant 2019 National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant Program to compile a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Willkens serves as a Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology initiative lead for research activities related to just, resilient, and informed communities.

The Tong Lab tackles challenges in the interdisciplinary areas of bioresource engineering and sustainable chemistry. We develop innovative technologies for producing chemicals, materials, energy, and fuels from renewable resources.

Current research interests include:

• Functional biomaterials for high-efficiency circular economy
• Platform chemicals and hydrocarbon fuels from renewable resources
• Sustainable process control and modeling
• Nano-biomaterial synthesis and self-assembling
• Polymer degradation and recycling

Disciplines:

• Materials and Nanotechnology

• Energy and Sustainability

Beril Toktay is Professor of Operations Management, Brady Family Chairholder. Her primary research areas are sustainable operations and supply chain management. Professor Toktay's research has been funded by several National Science Foundation grants and has received distinctions such as the 2010 Brady Family Award for Faculty Research Excellence and the MSOM Society's 2015 Management Science Best Paper in Operations Management Award. Her research articles have appeared in Management Science, M&SOM, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management and Industrial Ecology. She became a Distinguished Fellow of the MSOM Society in 2017.

Professor Toktay has taught Supply Chain Management courses at the PhD, MBA, and Executive Education levels as well as Operations Management and Operations Research courses at the PhD level. She has developed cases and pedagogical material for MBA and Executive Education audiences and co-curricular educational initiatives at the undergraduate level. She currently teaches Business Strategies for Sustainability in MBA and Executive Education programs. She's a recipient of the 2016 Ernest Scheller Jr. Award for Service Excellence and the Georgia Tech 2015 Women of Distinction Award.

Professor Toktay served as Associate Editor for M&SOM (2007-2018), POM (2009-2013), and Management Science (2011-2017), and Area Editor (Environment, Energy and Sustainability) for Operations Research (2012-2018). She co-edited the M&SOM Special Issue on the Environment. She was the President of the MSOM Society and VP of Finance of the POM Society. At Georgia Tech, she serves as the Scheller College of Business ADVANCE Professor, a role that is focused on supporting the advancement of women and underrepresented minorities in academia. She is the founding Faculty Director of the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business and the co-architect and Executive Co-Director of Georgia Tech's Serve.Learn.Sustain Quality Enhancement Plan.

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.

Yuanzhi Tang holds undergraduate degrees in Geology and Economics from Peking University, China. She earned a Ph.D. degree in Environmental Geochemistry at Stony Brook University and then continued working in the microbiology group of Prof. Colleen Hansel.

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