ROBOTICS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering
- Associate Professor School of Mechanical Engineering
Aaron Young is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and is interested in designing and improving powered orthotic and prosthetic control systems for persons with stroke, neurological injury or amputation. His previous experience includes a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan in the Human Neuromechanics Lab working with exoskeletons and powered orthoses to augment human performance. He has also worked on the control of upper and lower limb prostheses at the Center for Bionic Medicine (CBM) at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. His master's work at CBM focused on the use of pattern recognition systems using myoelectric (EMG) signals to control upper limb prostheses. His dissertation work at CBM focused on sensory fusion of mechanical and EMG signals to enable an intent recognition system for powered lower limb prostheses for use by persons with a transfemoral amputation.
Job Titles:
- Assistant to the Executive
Job Titles:
- Principal Research Engineer
- Senior Research Engineer
Ai-Ping Hu is a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute's Food Processing Technology Division. Ai-Ping received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has worked at a start-up robotics company for a number of years before joining GTRI in 2009.Ai-Ping research interests include advanced controls for unstructured environments and agricultural robotics. Pulkit Kapur is a Senior Industry Manager for Robotics and Autonomous Systems at MathWorks. Prior to MathWorks, Pulkit worked at iRobot as a product manager launching several commercial robots globally. Pulkit has also worked in the areas of haptics and manipulation, developing and launching desktop-based haptic robotic devices. Pulkit has a bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering and a Master's in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Robotics from the GRASP Lab at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Pulkit has over 10 years of research and industry experience in the field of robotics and autonomous systems.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Alex Abramson is an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research, which focuses on drug delivery and bioelectronic therapeutics, has been featured in news outlets such as The New York Times, NPR, and Wired. Abramson has received several recognitions for scientific innovation, including being named a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Science List and the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 List. He is passionate about translating scientific endeavors from bench to bedside. Large pharmaceutical companies have exclusively licensed a portfolio of his patents to bring into clinical trials, and Abramson serves as a scientific advisor overseeing their commercialization. In addition to his scientific endeavors, Abramson plays an active role in his community by leading Diversity Equity and Inclusion efforts on campus and volunteering as a STEM tutor to local students.
Abramson received a B.S. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from MIT as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow under the direction of Professors Robert Langer and Giovanni Traverso. He conducted postdoctoral work at Stanford University as an NIH fellow with Professors Zhenan Bao and the late Sanjiv S. Gambhir.
The Abramson Lab develops ingestible, implantable, and wearable robotic therapeutic devices that solve key healthcare problems and provide measurable therapeutic outcomes. Our translationally focused research spans a multitude of areas, including (1) drug delivery devices for optimal drug adherence, (2) soft materials for bioelectronic sensors and therapeutics, and (3) preclinical drug screening technologies.
Alex Adams's research focuses on designing, fabricating, and implementing new ubiquitous and wearable sensing systems. In particular, he is interested in how to develop these systems using equity-driven design principles for healthcare. Alex leverages sensing, signal processing, and fabrication techniques to design, deploy, and evaluate novel sensing technologies.
Originally a musician, Alex became fascinated by how he could capture and manipulate sounds through analog hardware and digital signal processing, which led him back to his hometown (Concord, NC). Alex completed his BS at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2014 and his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 2021 (advised by Professor Tanzeem Choudhury). Alex then became the resident Research Scientist for the Precision Behavioral Health Initiative at Cornell Tech (NYC) until the fall of 2022, when he joined the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Currently, his research focuses on the equity-driven design and the development of multi-modal sensing systems to simultaneously assess mental and physical health to enable a new class of mobile health technologies.
Job Titles:
- Research Engineer II Georgia Tech Research Institute / Research Engineer II Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory
Dr. Noel is a Research Engineer II with the Aerospace and Acoustics Technologies Division in GTRI's Aerospace, Transportation, and Advanced Systems Laboratory (ATAS). She received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2009 and 2018, respectively. In her doctoral work, Dr. Noel specialized in biomechanics, with a particular focus on biological adhesive mechanisms. Her work has been highlighted in media outlets like NPR, The New York Times, Science Magazine, and the Discovery Channel. Dr. Noel's ongoing areas of research include haptic feedback for mixed reality platforms, biomechanics and bio-inspired design, and additive manufacturing.
Dr. Erturk began at Georgia Tech in May 2011 as an Assistant Professor, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2016 and became a full Professor in 2019. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked as a Research Scientist in the Center for Intelligent Material Systems and Structures at Virginia Tech (2009-2011). His postdoctoral research interests included theory and experiments of smart structures for applications ranging from aeroelastic energy harvesting to bio-inspired actuation. His Ph.D. dissertation (2009) was centered on experimentally validated electromechanical modeling of piezoelectric energy harvesters using analytical and approxIMaTe analytical techniques. Prior to his Ph.D. studies in Engineering Mechanics at Virginia Tech, Dr. Erturk completed his M.S. degree (2006) in Mechanical Engineering at METU with a thesis on analytical and semi-analytical modeling of spindle-tool dynamics in machining centers for predicting chatter stability and identifying interface dynamics between the assembly components.
Job Titles:
- Professor School of Interactive Computing
Job Titles:
- Media Contact
- Assistant Vice President of Research Communications
Animesh Garg is a Stephen Fleming Early Career Assistant Professor at School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He leads the People, AI, and Robotics (PAIR) research group. He is on the core faculty in the Robotics and Machine Learning programs. Animesh is also a Senior Researcher at Nvidia Research. Animesh earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and was a postdoc at the Stanford AI Lab. He is on leave from the department of Computer Science at University of Toronto and CIFAR Chair position at the Vector Institute.
Garg earned his M.S. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Operations Research from UC, Berkeley. He worked with Ken Goldberg at Berkeley AI Research (BAIR). He also worked closely with Pieter Abbeel, Alper Atamturk & UCSF Radiation Oncology. Animesh was later a postdoc at Stanford AI Lab with Fei-Fei Li and Silvio Savarese.
Garg's research vision is to build the Algorithmic Foundations for Generalizable Autonomy, that enables robots to acquire skills, at both cognitive & dexterous levels, and to seamlessly interact & collaborate with humans in novel environments. His group focuses on understanding structured inductive biases and causality on a quest for general-purpose embodied intelligence that learns from imprecise information and achieves flexibility & efficiency of human reasoning.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Professor of Computer Science
- Professor School of Interactive Computing
Ashok Goel is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. At Georgia Tech, he is also the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Human-Centered Computing, a Co-Director of the Center for Biologically Inspired Design, and a Fellow of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. For more than thirty years, Ashok has conducted research into artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-centered computing, with a focus on computational design, modeling and creativity. His recent work has explored design thinking, analogical thinking and systems thinking in biological inspired design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiRDQ4hr9i8), and his research is now developing virtual research assistants for modeling biological systems. Ashok teaches a popular course on knowledge-based AI as part of Georgia Tech's program on Online Masters of Science in Computer Science. He has pioneered the development of virtual teaching assistants, such as Jill Watson, for answering questions in online discussion forums (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbCguICyfTA). Chronicle of Higher Education recently called virtual assistants exemplified by Jill Watson as one of the most transformative educational technologies in the digital era. Ashok is the Editor-in-Chief of AAAI's AI Magazine.
Job Titles:
- Dean of the College of Engineering the Ohio State University
- Founder and President of the Board of Directors of Zyrobotics
Accomplished roboticist, entrepreneur and educator Ayanna Howard, PhD, became dean of the College of Engineering on March 1, 2021. Previously she was chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing, as well as founder and director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS).
Her career spans higher education, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the private sector. Dr. Howard is the founder and president of the board of directors of Zyrobotics, a Georgia Tech spin-off company that develops mobile therapy and educational products for children with special needs. Zyrobotics products are based on Dr. Howard's research.
Among many accolades, Forbes named Dr. Howard to its America's Top 50 Women In Tech list. In May 2021, the Association for Computing Machinery named her the ACM Athena Lecturer in recognition of fundamental contributions to the development of accessible human-robotic systems and artificial intelligence, along with forging new paths to broaden participation in computing.
Dr. Howard also is a tenured professor in the college's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a joint appointment in Computer Science and Engineering.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor School of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Azadeh Ansari received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran in 2010. She earned the M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2013 and 2016 respectively, focusing upon III-V piezoelectric semiconductor materials and MEMS devices and microsystems for RF applications. Prior to joining the ECE faculty at Georgia Tech, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Physics Department at Caltech from 2016 to 2017. Dr. Ansari is the recipient of a 2017 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Michigan for her research on "Gallium Nitride integrated microsystems for RF applications." She received the University of Michigan Richard and Eleanor Towner Prize for outstanding Ph.D. research in 2016. She is a member of IEEE, IEEE Sensor's young professional committee and serves as a technical program committee member of IEEE IFCS 2018.
Job Titles:
- Interim Executive Director
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Gunter is an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rice University, and later his M.S. and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in orbital mechanics. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Gunter was on the faculty of the Delft University of Technology (TU-Delft) in the Netherlands, as a member of the Physical and Space Geodesy section. His research activities involve various aspects of spacecraft missions and their applications, such as investigations into current and future laser altimetry missions, monitoring changes in the polar ice sheets using satellite data, applications of satellite constellations/formations, and topics surrounding kinematic orbit determination. He has been responsible for both undergraduate and graduate courses on topics such as satellite orbit determination, Earth and planetary observation, scientific applications of GPS, and space systems design. He is currently a member of the AIAA Astrodynamics Technical Committee, and also serves as the Geodesy chair for the Fall AGU Meeting Program Committee. He has received a NASA group achievement award for his work on the GRACE mission, and he is also a former recipient of a NASA Earth System Science Graduate Fellowship. He is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the International Association of Geodesy (IAG).
Job Titles:
- Research Development Manager
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University
My primary interest is floating ice systems - Jupiter's moon Europa and Earth's ice shelves. I am interested in how these environments work and how they may become habitable. I have chosen to focus on Europa because of its potential to have what other places may not have: a stable source of energy from tides that can power geological cycles over the lifetime of the solar system. At its most basic form, life is like a battery, depending upon redox reactions to move electrons. A planetary proxy for this is activity, whereby a planet recycles through geologic processes, and maintains chemical gradients of which life can take advantage. Without recycling, it is possible that even once habitable environments can become inhospitable. This is where terrestrial process analogs come into the picture - by studying how ice and water interact in environments on Earth we can better understand the surface indications of such on Europa (and other icy worlds). My work provides a framework by which to remotely understand planetary cryospheres and test hypotheses, until such time as subsurface characterization becomes possible by radar sounding, landed seismology, or one day, roving submersibles. Much work remains to correlate observations and models of terrestrial icy environments - excellent process analogs for the icy satellites - with planetary observations. I think about how to incorporate melting, hydrofracture, hydraulic flow, and now brine infiltration as process analogs into constructing models for the formation of Europa's geologic terrain and to study the implications for ice shell recycling and ice-ocean interactions. The inclusion of realistic analogs in our backyard-Earth's poles -using imaging and geophysical techniques is a common thread of this work, giving tangible ways to generate and test hypotheses relevant to environments on Earth and Europa. In the long term, I envision constructing systems-science level models of the Europan environment to understand its habitability and enable future exploration. I'm lucky to work with a talented group of students, post docs, and collaborators who share this vision and continue to make my life's passion, understanding the worlds around us, tenable.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication
Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the Digital Media Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he directs the Public Design Workshop: a design research studio that explores socially engaged design and civic media.
DiSalvo is also co-director of the Digital Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Center and its Digital Civics initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, and he leads the Serve-Learn-Sustain Fellows program, which brings together faculty, staff, students, and community partners to explore pressing social research themes (the 2016-2017 themes are Smart Cities and Food, Energy, Water, Systems). He has a courtesy appointment in the School of Interactive Computing and is an affiliate of the GVU Center and the Center for Urban Innovation. DiSalvo also coordinates the Digital Media track of the interdisciplinary M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction.
DiSalvo's scholarship draws together theories and methods from design research and design studies, the social sciences, and the humanities, to analyze the social and political qualities of design, and to prototype experimental systems and services. Current research domains include civics, smart cities, the Internet of Things, food systems, and environmental monitoring. Across these domains, DiSalvo is interested in how practices of participatory and public design work to articulate issues and provide resources for new forms of collective action.
Areas of Expertise:
Civic Media
Job Titles:
- Executive Vice President
- Executive Vice President for Research
- the
Chaouki T. Abdallah is the Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. As chief research officer, Abdallah provides overall leadership for the Institute's $1.45 billion portfolio of research, economic development, and sponsored activities, including the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Enterprise Innovation Institute, 10 interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs), and related research administrative support units. He also serves on the executive committee of the Council on Research for the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities (APLU), the executive committee for the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR), and the advisory committee for the Center on Measuring University Performance (MUP).
Since Abdallah assumed the role of EVPR, the Institute took occupancy of Coda, a first-of-its-kind, mixed-use facility in the heart of Tech Square, designed to create opportunities in interdisciplinary research, commercialization, and sustainability. Under his leadership, Georgia Tech also recently launched the "Commission on Research Next," a process that will map a comprehensive future for research at Tech. The initiative will also develop the Institute's strategy to bolster commercialization efforts and tech transfer initiatives, and grow critical collaborations with industry, government, the national labs, and foundations.
Job Titles:
- Provost, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs / University of Wisconsin - Madison
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Scientist
- Senior Research Scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute
Charles Pippin is a Senior Research Scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, GTRI. His research interests include collaborative autonomy algorithms, machine learning, and multi-robot systems. In his current work, he is investigating cooperation between autonomous systems, as part of GTRI's Unmanned Systems Initiative. Charles received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2013. His research advisor was Prof. Henrik I. Christensen. Charles received an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2004 and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Chairman
- Associate Professor School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Chen Zhou is the associate chair for undergraduate studies and associate professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.. Dr. Zhou's research focus includes sustainable supply chain, distribution system design and manufacturing systems. Dr. Chen is a member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, Society of Manufacturing Engineers and American Society of Engineering Education. Dr. Zhou received a B.S. degree from Tianjin University (China) in 1982, an M.S. in mechanical engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 1988.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Professor School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Job Titles:
- Professor School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Craig Tovey is a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He also co-directs CBID, the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design.
Dr. Tovey's principal research and teaching activities are in operations research and its interdisciplinary applications to social and natural systems, with emphasis on sustainability, the environment, and energy. His current research concerns inverse optimization for electric grid management, classical and biomimetic algorithms for robots and webhosting, the behavior of animal groups, sustainability measurement, and political polarization.
Dr. Tovey received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the 1989 Jacob Wolfowitz Prize for research in heuristics. He was granted a Senior Research Associateship from the National Research Council in 1990, was named an Institute Fellow at Georgia Tech in 1994, and received the Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award in 2011. In 2016, Dr. Tovey was recognized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce with the Test of Time Award for his work as co-author of the paper "How Hard Is It to Control an Election?" He was a 2016 Golden Goose Award recipient for his role on an interdisciplinary team that studied honey bee foraging behavior which led to the development of the Honey Bee Algorithm to allocate shared webservers to internet traffic.
Dr. Tovey received an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1977 and both an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1981.
Job Titles:
- Associate Vice President for Research Administration
Hope oversees sponsored programs operations at Georgia Tech. In addition to functions supporting grants and contracts, these operations administer sponsored research sub-contracting, non-disclosure agreements (and other exchange agreements in support of research), enterprise contracting systems and data, and a training and outreach team.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Manager
- Staff
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- Vice President of the Enterprise Innovation Institute
Bridges leads EI², a statewide, 12-program, 160-member organization and the nation's largest and most comprehensive university-based program of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization, and economic development.
Job Titles:
- Professor School of Aerospace Engineering Director GT Center for Space Technology and Research Director Space Systems Design Lab ( SSDL )
Dr. Glenn Lightsey is the director of the Space Systems Design Lab and director of the Center for Space Technology And Research at Georgia Tech. His research program focuses on the technology of small satellites, including: guidance, navigation, and control systems; attitude determination and control; formation flying, satellite swarms, and satellite networks; cooperative control; proximity operations and unmanned spacecraft rendezvous; space based Global Positioning System receivers; radionavigation; visual navigation; propulsion; satellite operations; and space systems engineering. Dr. Lightsey has authored and co-authored more than 140 technical articles and publications, including four book chapters. He is an AIAA Fellow and a Founding Member of the AIAA Small Satellite Technical Committee. He is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Small Satellites. Dr. Lightsey was previously employed at the University of Texas at Austin and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Prior to joining the faculty at the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Dr. Lightsey held the position of Fellow of the W. R. Woolrich Professor in Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. He also held the title of University Distinguished Teaching Professor, a position designated to less than 5% of the tenured faculty at The University of Texas. In 2011, Dr. Lightsey received the American Society for Engineering Education's John Leland Atwood Award for outstanding aerospace engineering education, and the William David Blunk Memorial Professorship for outstanding undergraduate teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor School of Interactive Computing
Dhruv Batra is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and AI, with a focus on developing intelligent systems that are able to concisely summarize their beliefs about the world with diverse predictions, integrate information and beliefs across different sub-components or `modules' of AI (vision, language, reasoning, dialog), and interpretable AI systems that provide explanations and justifications for why they believe what they believe. In past, he has also worked on topics such as interactive co-segmentation of large image collections, human body pose estIMaTion, action recognition, depth estIMaTion, and distributed optimization for inference and learning in probabilistic graphical models. He is a recipient of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2016), the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (2014), Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2014), Virginia Tech College of Engineering Outstanding New Assistant Professor award (2015), two Google Faculty Research Awards (2013, 2015), Amazon Academic Research award (2016), Carnegie Mellon Dean's Fellowship (2007), and several best paper awards (EMNLP 2017, ICML workshop on Visualization for Deep Learning 2016, ICCV workshop Object Understanding for Interaction 2016) and teaching commendations at Virginia Tech. His research is supported by NSF, ARO, ARL, ONR, DARPA, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. Research from his lab has been extensively covered in the media (with varying levels of accuracy) at CNN, BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg Business, The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, Newsweek, The Verge, New Scientist, and NPR. From 2013-2016, he was an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he led the VT Machine Learning & Perception group and was a member of the Virginia Center for Autonomous Systems (VaCAS) and the VT Discovery Analytics Center (DAC). From 2010-2012, he was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute located on the University of Chicago campus. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2010 respectively, advised by Tsuhan Chen. In past, he has held visiting positions at the Machine Learning Department at CMU, CSAIL MIT, Microsoft Research, and Facebook AI Research.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor School of Mechanical Engineering
- Georgia Tech As an Assistant Professor
Dr. Anirban Mazumdar joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering in 2018. Dr. Mazumdar studies robot mobility with the goal of understanding and achieving agile, versatile, and efficient robot behaviors in unstructured environments. His previous experience includes a postdoctoral research position in the High Consequence Automation and Robotics Group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. He has broad experience with novel robotic systems including energy efficient bipedal robots, reconfigurable aerial vehicles, prosthetic devices, and relaxed stability mobile robots.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Space Systems Design Lab
Dr. Glenn Lightsey is the director of the Space Systems Design Lab and director of the Center for Space Technology And Research at Georgia Tech. His research program focuses on the technology of small satellites, including: guidance, navigation, and control systems; attitude determination and control; formation flying, satellite swarms, and satellite networks; cooperative control; proximity operations and unmanned spacecraft rendezvous; space based Global Positioning System receivers; radionavigation; visual navigation; propulsion; satellite operations; and space systems engineering. Dr. Lightsey has authored and co-authored more than 140 technical articles and publications, including four book chapters. He is an AIAA Fellow and a Founding Member of the AIAA Small Satellite Technical Committee. He is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Small Satellites. Dr. Lightsey was previously employed at the University of Texas at Austin and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Prior to joining the faculty at the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Dr. Lightsey held the position of Fellow of the W. R. Woolrich Professor in Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. He also held the title of University Distinguished Teaching Professor, a position designated to less than 5% of the tenured faculty at The University of Texas. In 2011, Dr. Lightsey received the American Society for Engineering Education's John Leland Atwood Award for outstanding aerospace engineering education, and the William David Blunk Memorial Professorship for outstanding undergraduate teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.
Job Titles:
- Research Development Manager
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- Research Center Start - Up Manager
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- Program Support Coordinator
- Staff
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- Vice President for Research and Sponsored Programs / Clark Atlanta University
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- Director of Research Operations
Division Chief | Robotics, Modeling, & Sensing for Agriculture; Georgia Tech Research Institute
Job Titles:
- Senior Director for Strategic Partnerships
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- Coordinator
- Professor
- Professor School of Music
Gil Weinberg is a professor and the founding director of Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, where he leads the Robotic Musicianship group. His research focuses on developing artificial creativity and musical expression for robots and augmented humans. Among his projects are a marimba playing robotic musician called Shimon that uses machine learning for Jazz improvisation, and a prosthetic robotic arm for amputees that restores and enhances human drumming abilities. Weinberg presented his work worldwide in venues such as The Kennedy Center, The World Economic Forum, Ars Electronica, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum, SIGGRAPH, TED-Ed, DLD and others. His music was performed with Orchestras such as Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the National Irish Symphony Orchestra, and the Scottish BBC Symphony while his research has been disseminated through numerous journal articles and patents. Dr. Weinberg received his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and his BA from the interdisciplinary program for fostering excellence in Tel Aviv University.
Job Titles:
- Founding Member / MEPSS LLC
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- Qualcomm Chancellor 's Chair of Robot Systems UC San Diego
Henrik I Christensen is the Qualcomm Chancellor's Chair of Robot Systems and the director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego, and also a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Dr. Christensen was initially trained in Mechanical Engineering and worked subsequently with MAN/BW Diesel. He earned M.Sc. and Ph.D. EE degrees from Aalborg University, 1987 and 1990, respectively.
Upon graduation, Dr. Christensen has participated in many international research projects across four continents. He has held positions at Aalborg University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech before joining UC San Diego.
Dr. Christensen does research on robotics, with a particular emphasis on a systems perspective to the problem. Solutions must have a strong theoretical basis, a corresponding well-defined implementation, and it must be evaluated in realistic settings. There is a strong emphasis on œreal systems for real applications!
Dr. Christensen has published more than 400 contributions across robotics, vision and artificial intelligence.
Dr. Christensen served as the Founding Chairman of EURON (1999-2006) and research coordinator for ECVision (2000-2004). He has led and participated in a many of EU projects, such as VAP, CoSy, CogVis, SMART, CAMERA, EcVision, EURON, Cogniron, and Neurobotics. He served as the PI for the CCC initiative on US Robotics. He is a Co-PI on ARL DCIST RCA, TILOS, the Robotics-VO, and several projects with industry. He was awarded the Joseph Engelberger Award 2011 and also named a Boeing Supplier of the Year 2011. He is a fellow of AAAS (2013) and IEEE (2015). He was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering (Dr. Techn. h.c.) from Aalborg University, 2014.
Dr. Christensen has served or serves on the editorial board for many of the most prestigious journals in the field, incl. Intl. Jour. of Robotics Research (IJRR), Autonomous Robots, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), and Image & Vision Computing. In addition, he serves on the editorial board of the MIT Series on Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents. He was the founding co-editor-in-chief of Trends and Foundations in Robotics
Job Titles:
- Dean
- Senior Associate
- Professor
Irfan Essa is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and Senior Associate Dean in the College of Computing (CoC), at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Professor Essa works in the areas of Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Graphics, and Social Computing, with potential impact on Content Creation, Analysis and Production (e.g., Computational Photography & Video, Image-based Modeling and Rendering, etc.) Human Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Behavioral/Social Sciences, and Computational Journalism research.He has published over 150 scholarly articles in leading journals and conference venues on these topics and several of his papers have also won best paper awards. He has been awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and was elected an IEEE Fellow. He has held extended research consulting positions with Disney Research and Google Research and also was an Adjunct Faculty Member at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. He joined Georgia Tech in 1996 after his earning his Master's (1990), Ph.D. (1994), and holding a research faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab (1988-1996).
Job Titles:
- Senior Vice President, Georgia Institute of Technology and Director, Georgia Tech Research Institute
Hudgens leads more than 2,900 employees conducting more than $830 million in research across a variety of disciplines, including science, engineering, economics, policy and technical expertise to address national security, state, and industry challenges.
Job Titles:
- Professor & Distinguished Faculty Fellow Department of Biomedical Engineering
Jaydev P. Desai, Ph.D, is currently a Professor and BME Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in August 2016, he was a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). He completed his undergraduate studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1993. He received his M.A. in Mathematics in 1997, M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in 1995 and 1998 respectively, all from the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He is a recipient of several NIH R01 grants, NSF CAREER award, and was also the lead inventor on the "Outstanding Invention of 2007 in Physical Science Category" at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also the recipient of the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. In 2011, he was an invited speaker at the National Academy of Sciences "Distinctive Voices" seminar series on the topic of "Robot-Assisted Neurosurgery" at the Beckman Center. He was also invited to attend the National Academy of Engineering's 2011 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He has over 150 publications, is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics (currently in preparation). His research interests are primarily in the area of image-guided surgical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, cancer diagnosis at the micro-scale, and rehabilitation robotics. He is a Fellow of the ASME and AIMBE.
Job Titles:
- Development Officer
- Principal
Jeff comes to VentureLab after 35 years in the personal computing industry, focusing on communications, mobility, Internet services, and usability. As a software developer and architect from the earliest days of the PC, Jeff has been instrumental in creating applications and co-founding companies that led their markets and were highly regarded by customers and the industry. He co-founded his first startup with his Georgia Tech graduate advisor in 1982, and sold his most recent company, Rover Apps, in 2013. Jeff earned an AB in Mathematics from Wabash College, and his MS in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech. His personal passions include FIRST Robotics and STEM education for young people.
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- Associate Laboratory Director for Mechanical and Thermal Engineering Sciences
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- Research Development Manager
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- Director of Academic & Research Facilities Infrastructure
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- Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research
Kubanek oversees all interdisciplinary activities including the Interdisciplinary Research Institutes, Interdisciplinary Research Centers, the Pediatric Technology Center, and the Global Center for Medical Innovation.
Julian T. Hightower Chair; School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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- Assistant Director, Financial Operations
- Staff
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- Global Chief Product Officer / Honeywell
Job Titles:
- Executive Chief of Staff for the Office
- Executive Chief of Staff for the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research
Kathleen T. Gosden serves as the executive chief of staff for the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR). In the role, she advises the EVPR and the Office of the EVPR on administrative and institutional matters.
Job Titles:
- Associate Vice President for Research Operations and Infrastructure
Walton oversees the facilitation and support of research across campus and through a variety of principal investigator (PI)-facing activities within the research enterprise, including internally funded research programs. She is responsible for ensuring the effective and strategic support of research and leads in the areas of research space, research computing and data, and research administration and operations.
Job Titles:
- Senior Administrative Professional
Job Titles:
- Financial Analyst II
- Staff
Job Titles:
- Asst. Director for Administrative Operations
Job Titles:
- Associate Vice President of Corporate Engagement
Nolan leads the office that serves as the nexus for the Institute's entire partner relationship and activity portfolios to strategically shape corporate engagement at Georgia Tech for maximum impact. The office is also tasked with facilitating collaboration efforts across various partner units within Tech.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director Research Computing and Data
Job Titles:
- Interim Executive Director
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- Head Technologist and Fellow / Mubadala Capital Ventures
Raghupathy Sivakumar Vice President of Commercialization Sivakumar leads the newly established Office of Commercialization, which includes the Office of Technology Licensing and VentureLab, that serves as the central engine that drives commercialization and entrepreneurship efforts across Georgia Tech. Profile & Contact Information
Job Titles:
- Academic and Research IT Support Engineer
Job Titles:
- Professor of Interactive Computing in the College
- Professor School of Interactive Computing
Rebecca "Beki" Grinter is a Professor of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing & (by courtesy) the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on improving the experience of computing by understanding the human experience in the building and using of technologies. Her work contributes to the fields of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and computer supported cooperative work. She has also worked in the areas of robotics, networking, security, and software engineering. She has published over 80 scholarly articles, served as Papers Chair (2006) & Best Papers Chair (2010) for the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the premier conference for human-computer interaction. In 2013 she was elected to the CHI Academy. In 2010 she was recognized as a Distinguished Alumna of the University of California, Irvine. Before joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, she was a Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox PARC and a Member of Technical Staff in the Software Production Research Department of Bell Laboratories. She was also a visiting scholar at Rank Xerox EuroPARC. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Information and Computer Science both from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Leeds. Affiliations GVU Center
Job Titles:
- Director of Research Development
Job Titles:
- Senior Director, Research Program Administration
Job Titles:
- Chief Research Operations Officer
Butera facilitates and directs the Institute's research activities and oversees Research Integrity Assurance, Research Administration, and Research Development and Operations as part of the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research.
Job Titles:
- Director, Climate Change Security
Job Titles:
- Director, EVPR Administration
Job Titles:
- Research Administration Manager, Senior
Job Titles:
- Director of Business Development
Job Titles:
- Associate Vice President for Research Integrity Assurance
Myles leads the Office of Research Integrity Assurance, which includes the Human Research Protection Program (HRPP), Institutional Animal Care & Use (IACUC), Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC), Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR), and the Animal Care Program. She also serves as the Research Integrity Officer (RIO).
Job Titles:
- Vice President for Research & Innovation / University of California
Job Titles:
- Georgia State Representative
Job Titles:
- Founder and President / Encendia Inc.