Baabak Ashuri is Executive Director of the Professional Master’s in Occupational Safety and Health (PMOSH), Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professor of Building Construction, and Fellow of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) at Georgia Tech.  Dr. Ashuri’s research has advanced theoretical foundations and applications of data analytics, economic decision analysis, and quantitative methods for infrastructure systems and construction engineering and management, allowing other researchers to use his findings for enhancing the performance of infrastructure operations on several subdomains directly related to pre-construction decisions, e.g., artificial intelligence (AI) and design automation, alternative contracting methods (ACMs), infrastructure finance and public-private partnership (P3), and energy technology investments. Dr. Ashuri has 242 publications in these fields, including 86 refereed journal articles, 103 peer-reviewed conference papers, 50 research reports and guidebooks, 1 co-edited book, and 2 referred book chapters. Dr. Ashuri secured a funding amount of over $17M from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Department of Energy (DOE), Build America Beurre (BAC), Georgia Department of Transportation (Georgia DOT), South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT), Construction Industry Institute (CII), Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), Southeast Transportation Consortium (STC), Louisiana Transportation Research Center (LTRC), Turner Construction, and Perkins + Will, to name a few. Dr. Ashuri received many awards including the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) (Thomas Fitch Rowland paper award), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) High Value Research “Sweet Sixteen” Award, and the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA) (Distinguished Leadership – Faculty). Dr. Ashuri has chaired the ASCE Construction Research Council (CRC) and served on the ASCE Construction Institute (CI) Board of Governors. Dr. Ashuri serves as the Southern Region Director of the USDOT Build America Center (BAC), which leads cutting-edge research on the use of innovative financing, funding, and project delivery solutions.

Mr. Caravati is a Principal and Founder of Applied Plasma Arc Technologies, LLC and a Senior Research Scientist and Professional Geologist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the applied research arm of the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Geology from the University of Dayton, Ohio, and a Master of Science in Geology-Hydrogeology track from the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He earned a Master’s degree in Business Administration (International Business) from the Stetson School of Business and Economics at Mercer University in Atlanta. He began work with GTRI in 2002.

Mr. Caravati served as a Hydrogeologist, Project Manager, and Project Director for a wide range of water resources and water quality projects in the United States, Mexico and England. He has led numerous water resource investigations that included delineating watersheds using aerial imagery and GIS tools, well installation and testing programs, monitoring and field data collection programs, and developing ground water flow and contaminant transport models for predictive studies. Since 2008, he served as Director of the Environmental Safety and Occupational Health Programs at GTRI, and as Program Manager for environmental engineering research for a global services provider. Mr. Caravati also served as a research lead in Georgia Tech’s Plasma Arc Research Facility. 

Mr. Caravati’s areas of research include the design and prototyping of dry sanitation systems; testing of chemical and biological sensor systems for environmental applications; modeling of renewable energy systems for rural areas; water supply and wastewater studies for sustainability and energy efficiency; and water resource investigations for rural watersheds in developing countries. He serves as a Research Advisor to Georgia Tech’s Engineering Students Without Borders chapter, and in 2007 he led or participated in projects in Angola, Bolivia, and Yellowstone National Park, and served in an advisory capacity for projects in Kenya, Japan, Korea, Guam, and Ireland.

Dr. Andre Calmon is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at Scheller College of Business, the co-director of Sustainable-X, and a Brook Byers Institute Faculty Fellow. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at INSEAD.

Andre’s research uses data, analytics, and mathematical modeling to address sustainability and efficiency issues in innovative business models. More broadly, his research investigates how organizations can use analytics and business model innovation to generate positive social and environmental impact while increasing profits. His work has been published in premier management journals such as Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management.

Andre is a renowned educator, and his innovative pedagogy resulted in several award-winning new courses, case studies, and student-led ventures. In particular, the sustainability pedagogical material he developed was the Grand Prize winner of the Page Prize. Furthermore, Andre’s teaching fosters a “classroom-to-startup-to-research” pipeline, and much of his research examines new management challenges faced by startups founded by his former students.

Andre received a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT. He also holds an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade de Brasília (UnB).

Dr. Chen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering. Previously he was a Research Scientist at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Chen’s research is in the multidisciplinary fields of computational mathematics, data science, scientific machine learning, and parallel computing with various applications in materials, energy, health, and natural hazard. Specifically, his research focuses on developing fast, scalable, and parallel computational methods for integrating data and models under high-dimensional uncertainty to make (1) statistical model learning via Bayesian inference, (2) reliable system prediction with uncertainty quantification, (3) efficient data acquisition through optimal experimental design, and (4) robust control and design by stochastic optimization.

Dylan Brewer joined the faculty at the School of Economics in 2019. He received his PhD in Economics with a dual major in Environmental Science and Policy from Michigan State University in May 2019 as well as a Master of Arts degree in Economics from the same institution in 2016. Prior to his graduate studies, Dylan completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in Economics and International Relations at the University of Virginia in 2014. Dylan's research uses the tools of applied econometrics and machine learning to answer questions in energy and environmental economics. He has published research on household energy consumption, the economics of thermostat settings, recycling, electricity demand, machine learning methodology, and air quality among other topics. He teaches courses on environmental economics at the graduate and undergraduate level, and his Principles of Microeconomics course has won awards at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Kelly Comfort received her Ph.D. in comparative literature with a designated emphasis in critical theory from the University of California, Davis. She joined the Georgia Tech faculty as an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the School of Modern Languages in 2005, became Associate Professor in 2012, and Professor in 2023.

A specialist in Latin American literature and transatlantic modernisms, Dr. Comfort's research agenda focuses primarily on the intersections between Latin American modernismo and contemporaneous turn-of-the-century literary movements in Europe such as aestheticism and decadence.

Jenny became an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in August 2017. She uses both modern and paleontological specimens to identify how populations, species, and communities have responded to past climate change. Her goal is to identify strategies to conserve as much biodiversity as possible given rapidly shifting climates. She received her PhD from the Dept. of Integrative Biology at UC-Berkeley, and did postdoctoral research at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and at the University of Washington.