Dr. Lewis A. Wheaton received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2005. He was a fellow at the National Institutes of Health (Medical Neurology Branch, 2001-2005) studying neural function and recovery of motor control after stroke. In mid-2005 he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center (Maryland) where he performed neuroscience research in aging and stroke motor control in Veterans.

In 2008, Dr. Wheaton joined the School of Applied Physiology at Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor. He became tenured in 2014 and is currently an Associate Professor in Biological Sciences. Dr. Wheaton is the Director of the Cognitive Motor Control Laboratory at Georgia Tech, engaged in over $1 million in state and federal research funding focused on understanding aspects of human motor control rehabilitation in aging, stroke and amputation. His lab has employed numerous high school, undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral fellows. He is the course director for 4 courses in the School of Biological Sciences (Human Neuroimaging, Movement Disorders, Human Neuroanatomy, and the History of Neuroscience). He has Chaired/Co-Chaired 3 international conferences focused on motor control research and clinical outcomes, obtaining funding by federal and private sources. His research has yielded several manuscript publications in the field of motor control neuroscience, several focused expert reviews, and numerous conference presentations both in the US and abroad.

Dr. Wheaton is also an adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation at Emory School of Medicine and a Member of the Children’s Center for Neurosciences Research at the Emory Children’s Pediatric Research Center.

Dr. Wheaton earned a BS (Biology) degree at Radford University (VA). He is an active parent volunteer at his children's schools and in the local community.

Josiah Hester works broadly in computer engineering, with a special focus on wearable devices, edge computing, and cyber-physical systems. His Ph.D. work focused on energy harvesting and battery-free devices that failed intermittentently. He now focuses on sustainable approaches to computing, via designing health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for conservation. 
   
His work in health is focused on increasing accessibility and lowering the burden of getting preventive and acute healthcare. In both situations, he designs low-burden, high-fidelity wearable devices that monitor aspects of physiology and behavior, and use machine learning techniques to suggest or deliver adaptive and in-situ interventions ranging from pharmacological to behavioral. 
   
His work is supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, and DARPA. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022. He was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant Ten, won the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Most Promising Scientist/Engineer Award, and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2021. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC, Popular Science, Communications of the ACM, and the Guinness Book of World Records, among many others.

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.

My research integrates my work in complex fluids and granular media and the biomechanics of locomotion of organisms and robots to address problems in nonequilibrium systems that involve interaction of matter with complex media. For example, how do organisms like lizards, crabs, and cockroaches cope with locomotion on complex terrestrial substrates (e.g. sand, bark, leaves, and grass). I seek to discover how biological locomotion on challenging terrain results from the nonlinear, many degree of freedom interaction of the musculoskeletal and nervous systems of organisms with materials with complex physical behavior. The study of novel biological and physical interactions with complex media can lead to the discovery of principles that govern the physics of the media. My approach is to integrate laboratory and field studies of organism biomechanics with systematic laboratory studies of physics of the substrates, as well as to create mathematical and physical (robot) models of both organism and substrate. Discovery of the principles of locomotion on such materials will enhance robot agility on such substrates

Brian 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, 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).

Education

• B.S., Mechanical Engineering, 1994, Rice University
• M.S., Aerospace Engineering, 2000, The University of Texas at Austin;
• Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering, 2004, The University of Texas at Austin;

Distinctions & Awards

Elected in 2020 to the status of Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Visiting Research Fellow, Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, 2011; NASA Earth System Science Graduate Fellowship, 2002-2004; NASA Group Achievement Award, GRACE Project Team, 2004; Dolores Zohr b Liebmann Graduate Fellowship, 2000-2003; Earl Wright Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Engineering, 2000-2001

Eunhwa Yang is an associate professor at the School of Building Construction, researching the reciprocal relationship between the built environment and human outcomes across various settings, including workplaces, university campuses, and homes. She employs Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which proposes that human outcomes are constantly influenced by the nested structures of environments. Her contributions include workplace studies, facility operation and maintenance, sustainable building practices and operations, and cognitive aging-in-place. Eunhwa's work supports a diverse range of stakeholders, including office workers, university students, and older adults, as well as facility managers/owners, corporate real estate directors, and designers, in identifying optimal spatial design, usage, and operation.

Eunhwa has been actively involved with the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) and CoreNet Global. She has received a young researcher's best paper award and a workshop grant from International Association for People-Environmental Studies (IAPS) and multiple fellowships from the International Facility Management Association (IFMA). Eunhwa has taught and developed facility management-related courses at GT. She is an advocate of utilizing and exploring diverse teaching methods, including active learning, experiential learning, and service learning. She was a fellow at the Center for Teaching and Learning at GT and the Center for Teaching Excellence at Cornell and led workshops on student engagement, collaborative learning, and rubric development. Her master’s and doctoral students have been recognized in the field, winning the IFMA Foundation scholarships and CoreNet Global Academic Challenges. Eunhwa holds an MS in Building Construction and Facility Management from Georgia Tech and a Ph.D. in Human Behavior and Design from Cornell University.

Teaching Interest:

Dr. Yang’s teaching focuses on the principles of facility management service delivery; building operation and maintenance and their associated data analytics; safety and environmental issues that protect and promote occupant health and well-being; and research methods.

Research Interest:

Dr. Yang’s research can be organized into four primary threads: 1) workplace management and strategies for workplace optimization/efficiency, 2) smart facility operation and maintenance through data integration and post-occupancy evaluation (POE), 3) the adoption of sustainable building practices and operations, and 4) design and construction for aging and aging-in-place. Her research has made theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions to these topics, addressing human outcomes and the built environment in various settings, such as workplaces, university campuses, and homes.

List of Recent Scholarly Work:

1. Bilau, I., Koo, B., Fu, E., Chau, W., Kwon, H., & Yang, E. (2025). Visual accessibility through open shelving: Impacts on cognitive load, motivation, physical activity, and user perception in older adults with mild cognitive impairment. Journal of Aging and Environment, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/26892618.2025.2576213

2. Shagar, M., Zeng, Q., Baru, A., Yang, E., & Pishdad, P. (2025). Systematic review of residential indoor environmental quality assessment surveys and the development of an exemplary novel survey identifying and analyzing tool. Building and Environment, 284, 113448. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113448

3. Ma, J.H., Erdogmus, E., & Yang, E. (2025). A user-centered building design approach using immersive virtual reality and discrete choice modeling. Building and Environment, 284, 113400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113400  

4. Koo, B., Bilau, I., Rodriguez, A. D., Yang, E., & Kwon, H. (2025). Quantifying mild cognitive impairments in older adults using multi-model wearable sensor data in a kitchen environment. medRxiv: the preprint server for health sciences. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.05.24.25328107

5. Machary, H., Motamed Rastegar, R., Gholami, Y., Yang, E., Little, E., Burke, M. A. M., Bilau, I., DuBose, J., & Zimring, C. (2025). Cognitive-aging-in-place: Home design factors influencing instrumental activities of daily living for older adults facing mild cognitive impairment. Journal of Aging and Environment, 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/26892618.2025.2506060

6. Yang, E., Chen, C., Li, K., Guo, K., Hua, Y., & Zhang, L. (2025). Challenges and strategies for energy performance contracting: A critical review. Journal of Building Design and Environment, 3(1), 202510. https://doi.org/10.70401/jbde.2025.0001

7. Zhang, X., Wang, Y., Yang, E., Xu, S., & Yu, Y. (2025). Sale to list ratio, for sale inventory, sale count, and housing value. International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, 18(2), 416-432. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHMA-08-2023-0113

8. Zhang, X., Yang, E., & Wang, Y. (2025). Time series observation of relationship between United States private residential construction spending and its indicators. International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, 18(2), 317-333. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHMA-07-2023-0096

9. Zhang, X., & Yang, E. (2025). Observation of relationship between housing value and the number of building permits in the United States using time series method. International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, 18(1), 106-122. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHMA-06-2023-0085

10. Zhang, X., Yang, E., Huang, L., & Wang, Y. (2025). Incremental population density improvement via missing middle housing under density-based and form-based zoning ordinances. International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, 18(1), 87-105. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHMA-06-2023-0074

11. Ma, J. H., Erdogmus, E., Kangisser, S. J., & Yang, E. (2025). A comparative analysis of the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality on end-user design review. Building and Environment, 267, 112237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2024.112237

Degrees with Year of Award:

Ph.D. in Human Behavior and Design, Cornell University, February 2016
M.S. in Building Construction and Facility Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, December 2009
B.S. in Architectural Engineering, SungKyunKwan University, February 2005

Areas of Expertise

• Energy efficiency in tenanted properties
• Green leasing
• Stakeholder engagement
• Data analytics and facility management
• Optimization of facility operation and maintenance
• Healthy workplaces: occupant satisfaction, health, and well-being
• Workplace strategies
• Coworking spaces

Martin Maldovan is an associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He was also a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at MIT.  Maldovan’s group is developing novel heat and mass transport processes as an enabling technology for energy converter materials and devices, micro and nanoelectronics, chemical and biological separations, and catalysis. His group focuses on designing, predicting, and controlling heat and mass transfer in rationally engineered systems with length scales ranging from macro to nano, to advance new paradigms for energy saving materials and devices.  

Ajeet Rohatgi received the B.S. (E.E.) degree from Indian Institute of Technology in 1971, the M.S. (Materials Engineering) from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1973, and the Ph.D. in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Lehigh University in 1977. He joined the Westinghouse Research and Development Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1977 and became a Westinghouse Fellow while working on the science and technology of photovoltaic and microelectronic devices. Rohatgi joined the ECE faculty at Georgia Tech in 1985 and started a program on photovoltaics, which has become one of the best in the country. He has become an internationally recognized leader in photovoltaics. He is the founding director of the first university-based DOE Center of Excellence in Photovoltaic Research and Education. He is the author of more than 300 publications and holds 10 U.S. patents. Rohatgi has received numerous awards and distinctions from professional societies and Georgia Tech. He is the founder and CTO for Suniva.