Dimitri Mavris is a Regents’ Professor, Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis, and an S.P. Langley Distinguished Professor. He also serves as the director of the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) and executive director of the Professional Master’s in Applied Systems Engineering (PMASE). Dr. Mavris received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His primary areas of research interest include: advanced design methods, aircraft conceptual and preliminary design, air-breathing propulsion design, multi-disciplinary analysis, design and optimization, system of systems, and non-deterministic design theory. Dr. Mavris has actively pursued closer ties between the academic and industrial communities in order to foster research opportunities and tailor the aerospace engineering curriculum towards meeting the future needs of the US aerospace industry. He has also co-authored with his students in excess of 1,000 publications. During his tenure at Georgia Tech, Dr. Mavris has chaired and served in several Technical and Program Committees for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and served on the AIAA Board of Directors and Institute Development Committee. He is the President of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS). He is the Georgia Tech technical point of contact for the FAA Center of Excellence for Alternative Jet Fuels & Environment (ASCENT), the Georgia Tech site director for the FAA Partnership to Enhance General Aviation Safety, Accessibility, and Sustainability (PEGASAS), and the principal investigator for the Airbus/Georgia Tech Center for MBSE-enabled Overall Aircraft Design and the Siemens Center of Excellence for Simulation and Digital Twin.

Since the fall of 2000, Robert has taught several courses in the College of Management at the Bachelors, Masters and Executive Masters levels. Quantitative course experience includes Analytic Tools (statistics, regression analysis and simulation) and Management Science (linear programming, network models, decision analysis, queuing models, project scheduling and simulation). Experience teaching qualitative (case-based) courses include Operations Management, Service Operations Management and Management of Technology. He has won several student-elected teaching awards including College of Management Undergraduate Professor of the Year (2001, 2004 and 2007), MBA Elective Professor or the Year (Service Operations – 2003), MBA Core Professor of the Year (Analytic Tools – 2008) and Evening MBA Elective Professor or the Year (Management of Technology – 2011). 

Prior teaching experience includes four years at the Georgia State University Robinson College of Business where he taught MBA-level courses in Operations Management, Project Management, Operations Strategy, Global Operations Management and Applications of Simulation in Management. 

Current research interests include empirical research in Service industries, outsourcing in both manufacturing and service industries, and applications of evidence based management techniques. He is a co-author of two published papers and a case study and has several working papers in various stages of completion. He has made 22 technical presentations at academic conferences since 1994. 

Educational background includes a BS in Engineering Science from the University of Tennessee – Knoxville, an MBA from Lynchburg College (Virginia) and he has completed three of four parts of a PhD in Operations Management from Georgia Tech College of Management (ABD-All but Dissertation). 

Eight years of professional experience prior to academics includes jet engine structural design engineer at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft (West Palm Beach, FL) and as a product engineer and then an engineering manager at Babcock & Wilcox – Naval Nuclear Fuel Division (Lynchburg, VA).

Tuo Zhao is an assistant professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the school of Computational Science and Engineering (By Courtesy) at Georgia Tech. 

His research focuses on developing principled methodologies, nonconvex optimization algorithms and practical theories for machine learning (especially deep learning). He is also interested in natural language processing and actively contributing to open source software development for scientific computing. 

Tuo Zhao received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University in 2016. He was a visiting scholar in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 2010 to 2012, and the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University from 2014 to 2016. 

He was the core member of the JHU team winning the INDI ADHD 200 global competition on fMRI imaging-based diagnosis classification in 2011. He received the Google summer of code awards from 2011 to 2014. He received the Siebel scholarship in 2014, the Baidu Fellowship in 2015-2016 and Google Faculty Research Award in 2020. He was the co-recipient of the 2016 ASA Best Student Paper Award on Statistical Computing and the 2016 INFORMS SAS Best Paper Award on Data Mining.