Jennifer Leavey is a principal academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences and assistant dean for Faculty Mentoring for the College of Sciences. She also coordinates the College's educational programs related to science and sustainability including the Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project and the Living Building Science Vertically Integrated Project Team.
Neha Kumar is an Associate Professor jointly appointed at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction and global sustainable development, with a focus on global health and community informatics. Her work contributes feminist perspectives to the design and integration of emerging technologies across marginalized contexts in the Global South.
Her research has been recognized by multiple ACM Best Paper and Honorable Mention awards. Neha received the College of Computing's Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty Award (2017) and the Lockheed Excellence in Teaching Award (2019). She currently serves as the President of ACM SIGCHI. She earned her Ph.D. in Information Management Systems from UC Berkeley, Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Education from Stanford University, and Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Applied Math from UC Berkeley.
Human-Computer Interaction for Global Development
Dr. Nicole Kennard is a Research Scientist II within BBISS and serves as the Assistant Director for Community-Engaged Research. She supports faculty across the university in building meaningful and co-creative research partnerships with local communities to address pressing sustainability and societal challenges. She works closely with the Center for Sustainable Communities Research & Education (SCoRE) to provide trainings for GT researchers to work with communities in research partnerships.
Kennard also leads her own community-engaged research in sustainable food systems. Her work focuses on building resilient, community-focused food systems and uplifting local agriculture, agroecology, and food sovereignty as solutions to the complex, intertwined challenges of food insecurity, climate change, and land degradation. She uses a combination of quantitative methods (lifecycle assessment, mapping, soil health and ecosystem service assessments) and qualitative methods (in-depth interviews) to support this systems-level research. She is currently working with local partners to build a food systems map for the City of Atlanta.
Kennard holds a PhD in Chemistry and Biosciences from the University of Sheffield (Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures); an MSc in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security from Newcastle University (U.S. Fulbright Scholar); and a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
In the Kaiser group, we work to improve the understanding of the emissions and atmospheric processes that influence air quality and climate. Our research focuses largely on volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are reactive organic species that are precursors to ozone and aerosol. Our work is grounded in insights from field, and aimed at understanding atmospheric composition at broad spatial and temporal scales.
Climate/EnvironmentAtmospheric Chemistry, Aerosols & CloudsRemote SensingAtmospheric composition and chemistryBiogenic and anthropogenic emissionsGlobal chemistry-transport modelingIn-situ and remote sensing
Xiaoming Huo is an A. Russell Chandler III Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Dr. Huo's research interests include statistical theory, statistical computing, and issues related to data analytics. He has made numerous contributions on topics such as sparse representation, wavelets, and statistical problems in detectability. His papers appeared in top journals, and some of them are highly cited. He is a senior member of IEEE since May 2004.
Ching-Hua Huang, Ph.D., is the Turnipseed Family Chair and Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Huang received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Huang’s expertise includes environmental chemistry, advanced water/wastewater treatment technology, contaminants of emerging concern, sustainable water reuse, waste remediation and resource recovery. Huang has supervised many research projects sponsored by various agencies, and has published more than 170 peer-reviewed journal papers, book chapters and conference proceeding papers. She is the Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society's Environmental Science & Technology Water and the Editorial Advisory Board member of Environmental Science & Technology.
Michael Helms is a versatile professional with a backgrounds in cognitive science, design theory, technology consulting, computer programming and financial services. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013, and recently completed NSF's entrepreneurial I-CORPS program as an entrepreneurial lead. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he worked as a technology consultant building business cases for the development of large data infrastructure projects. In conjunction with with the Center for Biologically Inspired Design he provides design consulting services focused on product innovation by leveraging insight gleaned from 3.8 billion years of evolution. Most recently, Helms began research with the Center for Education (CEISMC), working on modeling school interventions as complex social systems.
Marjorie Hall is pursuing a Ph.D. in History of Technology from the School of History and Sociology in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Her studies revolve around understanding the complexities of America’s environmental history as a means to developing new and better approaches to address negative human impacts on the planet. She is also interested in the intersection of policy, environmental justice, and the history of technology transitions. Marjorie earned a B.A. in English from Guilford College and a M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. She then worked at an engineering consulting firm that specialized in the remediation of toxic waste sites. Marjorie’s role was to research and document the history of the sites to determine what toxic substances were dumped, how much, and who was responsible. This work required her to learn how to synthesize information in a highly trans-disciplinary environment, working with chemists, hydrogeologists, statisticians, and engineers, to accurately piece together the history of contaminated areas. Marjorie is a native of DeKalb County and enjoys reading science fiction, hiking with her teenaged daughters, and singing in a church band.