Dr. Brigitte Stepanov is a war researcher and Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies. She is the founder and director of the Energy Today Lab, an interdisciplinary research hub that reflects creatively and analytically on the energy - broadly defined from labor to thermodynamics - of our contemporary world. Her research interests focus on 20th- and 21st-century French, North African, and Sub-Saharan African literary and visual culture. Trained as a scholar of French and Francophone Studies and as a mathematician, she holds degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada and a PhD from Brown University. At Brown, she was a Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and awarded an Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence.

Before coming to Georgia Tech, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of French and Arabic at Grinnell College, where she organized the Theories of Decolonization working group with the support of a grant from Grinnell’s Center for the Humanities. She has been a Silas Palmer Fellow at the Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford University, a Lecturer at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 in France, and a selected participant of the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar “The Search for Humanity after Atrocity.” Additionally, she has trained in conflict mediation, having most recently taken part in the Peacebuilding Institute hosted by the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at EMU.

Her current book project, Cruelty, War, Fiction: Redefining the In-Human, explores excessive forms of violence in warfare and their representation in fiction and visual media from Algeria, Rwanda, and France. She argues that the concept of cruelty is fundamental to any discussion of political instability, war, and crimes against humanity. More broadly, this project examines the relationship between the evolution of warfare over the last eighty years and shifting conceptions of the human in the face of “universal” manifestations of violence. This work is closely tied to her second research project, which examines literary, artistic, and cultural responses to radioactive fallout and its ensuing ecological crisis following France’s nuclear arsenal testing in Algeria and the South Pacific. Dr. Stepanov’s scholarship has appeared in Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, The French Review, Voix plurielles, and in the volume Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East (Routledge, 2021). Dr. Stepanov is also the translator of works by Peter Szendy and Laura Odello and has worked with the Derrida Seminar Translation Project.

Finally, she is a photographer, focusing on archiving memory and the geometry of ecological forms. Both facets of her work are preoccupied with minute documentation – be it to collect visual reminders of patches of lichen or the detailed brickwork of a monument. Among other venues, her work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and AS220 in Providence. Her recent exhibit, “Why I’ll Always Dream of Poland,” supported by a grant from the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown, features photographs she took while conducting research on Holocaust remembrance in Israel, Germany, France, Ukraine, Poland, Canada, and the US. Shedding light on public mourning and memorialization, the project also reflects on personal loss and family histories and attempts to bridge the gap between private experiences and public sites of inhuman violence.

Ioanna Maria Spyrou is a Ph.D. student in the School of Economics in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech. She is interested in environmental economics, policies that promote sustainability and optimal use of natural resources, and how sustainable development can be achieved by using state-of-the-art technological advances. Her current research concentrates on analyzing the impact of natural shocks, including climatological, hydrological, and agricultural, on children’s well-being. She holds degrees in Plant Protection (MS), Agriculture (BA) and Mathematics (BA) from Aristotle University, Greece, and Applied Mathematics and Statistics (MA) from City University of New York.

Advisor: Shatakshee Dhongde

As Director of Activities for three of Tech's Interdisciplinary Research Institutes: the Strategic Energy Institute, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, and the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, I'll help bring together researchers from different disciplines to address topics of strategic importance. Each interdisciplinary research group mobilizes faculty to address the needs of external stakeholders (federal, state, and local entities, corporations, foundations, and communities) by fostering an Institute-wide innovation ecosystem around a specific focus.

Susan Ryan is a member of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

Ingeborg Rocker is a senior executive of sustainable Industry Innovation & Transformation. In 2014, she joined the international software company Dassault Systemes, as the Vice President, where she developed Sustainable Cross- Industry Innovations from strategy to realization. Within this context, she launched the Smart City Project 3DEXPERIENCity, virtualizing Singapore City State and developed cyber-physical systems with the manufacturing and construction industry, placing software and hardware in the loop for the enhanced simulation, optimization, automation, operation, and maintenance of assets and processes. I. Rocker’s ongoing work focuses on sustainable cross-industry innovation fostering a circular economy. 

Ingeborg is a practicing architect, who worked as lead designer with Peter Eisenman on the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. In 2006, she co-founded Rocker-Lange Architect, a research-focused architecture firm located in Boston and Hong Kong. The office works across scales on computer-generated sustainable product design, architecture, and urbanism. The office has been recognized for its written and design work emphasizing the role the digital medium plays in the conception and realization of sustainable cross-scale design interventions. 

She holds a Dipl.-Ing in Engineering from the RWTH Aachen, an MSAAD from Columbia University, and a MA, and Ph.D., from Princeton. She is an enthusiastic educator, researcher, and academic with extensive teaching experience at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University, where she worked as an Associate and Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Design, and served as the Director of MARCH 1 Admissions, the Director of the Digital Workshop Series, the Director of the International Exchange Programs, and the Coordinator of MARCH Core- and Option studios. She is a dedicated researcher and advised more than 40+ thesis and doctoral students. 

Dr. Rocker is an academic and industry thought leader who frequently presents on sustainable industry innovation, transformation, and associated business models. Her work has been internationally published and contributes to the discourses in the industry and academy. She has presented and exhibited her work internationally and received local, national, and international recognition and awards.

Jessica Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at GT with a PhD in the Learning Sciences, specializing in geospatial analysis and visualization in informal learning. As director of the Technology-Integrated Learning Environments (TILEs) Lab at Georgia Tech, her research explores technology-mediated social learning experiences in environments such as museums and citizen science. She is a former middle school teacher and a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Faculty Fellow. Her work on the design of interactive learning technologies has been exhibited at venues such as the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the New York Hall of Science. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Roberts conducted postdoctoral research at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the Tidal Lab at Northwestern University.

Udita Ringania is a Ph.D. candidate in the school of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, advised by Dr. Saad Bhamla. Her research focuses on developing a sustainable, energy-efficient, low cost and easily scalable alternative for drying/dewatering cellulose nanomaterials, a high value forest product. She is the recipient of the 2020-2021 Blue Sky Young Researcher and Innovation Award presented by the International Council of Forest and Paper Associations (ICFPA). She has served as a leadership coach for Georgia Tech students through the LEAD program (2019-2021) and was a board member for AChEGS (2019-2020), a student run organization for graduate students. She holds a Master’s degree (2018) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and an undergraduate degree (2015) from the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India, both in Chemical Engineering. She loves plants, volunteers at Trees Atlanta, and recently started running to help raise funds for the education of underprivileged children in India.

Advisor: Saad Bhamla

Elsa Reichmanis is Anderson Chair in Chemical Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University. Prior to joining Lehigh, she was Professor and Pete Silas Chair in Chemical Engineering in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She started her independent career at Bell Labs where she was Bell Labs Fellow and Director of the Materials Research Department. She received her PhD and BS degrees in chemistry from Syracuse University. Her research interests include the chemistry, properties, and application of materials technologies for photonic and electronic applications. She has had impact in the design of new imaging chemistries for advanced lithographic applications, and designed one of the first readily accessible and manufacturable polymers for advanced silicon device manufacturing using 193 nm lithography. 

The Reichmanis research group is currently exploring polymeric and hybrid organic/inorganic materials chemistries for a range of device and electronic and sustainable energy applications. Her research, at the interface of chemical engineering, chemistry, materials science, optics, and electronics, spans from fundamental concept to technology development and implementation, with particular focus on polymeric and nanostructured materials for advanced technologies. Currently, efforts aim to identify fundamental parameters that will enable sub-nanometer scale dimensional control of organic, polymer and/or hybrid materials for applications including transistor devices, photovoltaics, and high-capacity energy storage. 

Reichmanis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995 and has participated in several National Research Council (NRC) activities. She was an elected member of the Bureau of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC); and has been active in the American Chemical Society throughout her career, having served as 2003 President of the Society. Elsa Reichmanis is the recipient of several awards, including the ACS Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2018), the ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science (1999), the ASM Engineering Materials Achievement Award (1996), and the Society of Chemical Industry’s Perkin Medal (2001). In other service, she is an Executive Editor of the ACS Journal Chemistry of Materials. 

The Reichmanis Group works at the interface of chemical engineering, chemistry, materials science, optics, and electronics spanning the range from fundamental concept to technology development and implementation. Research interests include the chemistry, properties and applications of materials technologies for electronic and photonic applications, with particular focus on polymeric and nanostructured materials for advanced technologies. in paper-based battery applications as well.