Dr. Carolyn Conner Seepersad is the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr., Chair of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  She joined the School in 2023 as a Woodruff Professor.  Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she served as the J. Mike Walker Professor of Mechanical Engineering and founding director of the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Design Innovation at The University of Texas at Austin.  She earned her BS in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University, BA/MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and her PhD and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech as a Hertz Fellow and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. 

Professor Seepersad’s research and teaching focus on design for additive manufacturing, simulation-based and data-driven engineering design, and process innovation in additive manufacturing.  She has earned many awards for her work, including the ASME Design Automation Award and the University of Texas Regents’ Award for Outstanding Teaching (the highest teaching award for faculty in The University of Texas System).  She is the author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and one book. Her publications have earned Best Paper Awards from the ASME Design Automation Conference, the ASME Design Theory and Methodology Conference, the ASME International Conference on Design Education, and the ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition.

In addition to her academic role, Professor Seepersad is the Editor-in-Chief of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, an elected member of the advisory board for the Design Society, a member of SME's Additive Manufacturing Technical Leadership Committee, and a former chair of the ASME Design Engineering Division Executive Committee.  She co-leads the TechMade initiative for design innovation at Georgia Tech. 

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. I received my Ph.D. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and held positions as a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Media Lab and as Assistant Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute prior to joining Georgia Tech. I direct the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) lab, where we work on developing robots that are able to effectively operate in human environments. My research interests span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adjustable autonomy, human computation and cloud robotics. Please visit the RAIL lab website for a description of our latest projects.

Blair Brettmann received her B.S. in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. She received her Master’s in chemical engineering practice from MIT in 2009 following internships at GlaxoSmithKline (Upper Merion, PA) and Mawana Sugar Works (Mawana, India). Blair received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT in 2012 working with the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing under Professor Bernhardt Trout. Her research focused on solid-state characterization and application of pharmaceutical formulations prepared by electrospinning. Following her Ph.D., Brettmann worked as a research engineer for Saint-Gobain Ceramics and Plastics for two years. While at Saint-Gobain she worked on polymer-based wet coatings and dispersions for various applications, including window films, glass fiber mats and architectural fabrics. Later, Brettmann served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago with Professor Matthew Tirrell. Currently, Brettmann is an assistant professor with joint appointments in chemical and biomolecular engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Research Interests

• Structure and rheology of complex fluids
• The local rheology of bioengineering materials, such as tissue engineering scaffolds
• High-throughput applications for systems where screening and optimization of rheological properties is of importance

Teaching Interests

Professor Breedveld’s teaching interests include foundational and advanced courses in chemical and biomolecular engineering, with particular emphasis on transport phenomena at undergraduate and graduate levels. Recently taught courses include CHBE 3205 (Fluid Mechanics), CHBE 3215 (Heat and Mass Transfer), CHBE 6200 (Advanced Transport Phenomena) and CHBE 4200/4210 Unit Operations Lab.

Education

M.S. 1996 University of Twente, the Netherlands

Ph.D. 2000 University of Twente, the Netherlands

Tony G. Chen is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on designing mechanical intelligent mechanisms for various robotics applications. Mechanical intelligence focuses on developing mechanisms and robotic platforms that make challenges for perception, control, and autonomy easier or more robust for natural, unstructured, and often unpredictable environments by virtue of their physical designs. To achieve this design approach, two main and common methods are often deployed: rapid prototyping and bio-inspiration. Chen is especially interested in three major research application areas: (i) field robotics where designing new robotic mobility platforms or equipping existing platforms with capabilities of manipulation, (ii) manipulation tasks in home and industrial environments, and (iii) biomimetic robotics for biological study.

Craig Forest is a Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech where he also holds program faculty positions in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering. He conducts research on miniaturized, high-throughput robotic instrumentation to advance neuroscience and genetic science, working at the intersection of bioMEMS, precision machine design, optics, and microfabrication. Prior to Georgia Tech, he was a research fellow in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He obtained a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in June 2007, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2003, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2001. He is cofounder/organizer of one of the largest undergraduate invention competitions in the US—The InVenture Prize, and founder/organizer of one of the largest student-run makerspaces in the US—The Invention Studio. He was a recently a Fellow in residence at the Allen Insitutte for Brain Science in Seattle WA; he was awarded the Georgia Tech Institute for BioEngineering and BioSciences Junior Faculty Award (2010) and was named Engineer of the Year in Education for the state of Georgia (2013). He is one of the inaugural recipients of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Grants, a national effort to invent the next generation of neuroscience and neuroengineering tools. In 2007, he was a finalist on the ABC reality TV show "American Inventor.”

Kamran Paynabar is the Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Iran in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from The University of Michigan in 2012. He also holds an M.A. in Statistics from The University of Michigan. His research interests comprise both applied and methodological aspects of machine-learning and statistical modeling integrated with engineering principles. He is a recipient of the INFORMS Data Mining Best Student Paper Award, the Best Application Paper Award from IIE Transactions, the Best QSR refereed paper from INFORMS, and the Best Paper Award from POMS. He has been recognized with the Georgia Tech campus level 2014 CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award and the Provost Teaching and Learning Fellowship. He served as the chair of QSR of INFORMS, and the president of QCRE of IISE.

Shreyas Kousik is an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Previously, Shreyas was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, working in the ASL under Prof. Marco. Kousik completed a postdoc with Prof. Grace Gao in the NAV Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, advised by Prof. Ram Vasudevan in the ROAHM Lab and received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, advised by Prof. Antonia Antoniou.

Kousik’s research is focused on guaranteeing safety in autonomy via collision avoidance methods for robots. His lab’s goal is to translate safety in math to safety on real robots by exploring ways to model uncertainty from autonomous perception and estimation systems and ensure that these models are practical for downstream planning and control tasks

Mohsen Moghaddam is the Gary C. Butler Family Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He directs the Symbiotic and Augmented Intelligence Lab (SAIL), where his research focuses on developing human-centered computational models, algorithms, and tools at the intersection of AI and spatial computing to enhance learning and creativity in various cognitive and psychomotor tasks within industrial settings. Previously, Dr. Moghaddam was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and an Affiliated Faculty with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. He has also served as a Visiting Professor with the HumanTech project at Politecnico di Milano and as a Visiting Scholar at the Next Level Lab, Harvard University. Dr. Moghaddam earned his PhD in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University and completed a Postdoctoral Associate position at the GE-Purdue Partnership in Research and Innovation in Advanced Manufacturing. His research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Navy, and industry partners.