Anant Paravastu holds bachelors (MIT, 1998) and Ph.D. degrees (UC Berkeley, 2004) in chemical engineering. His Ph.D. research with Jeffrey Reimer focused on the use of lasers to control nuclear spin polarizations in the semiconductor GaAs. From 2004 to 2007, he worked as a postdoc at the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at NIH with Robert Tycko, where he learned to apply nuclear magnetic resonance to structural biology. Paravastu’s early structural biology work focused amyloid fibrils of the Alzheimer’s β-amyloid peptide. He was part of the team and community that showed that amyloid fibril formation is a complex phenomenon, with individual peptides exhibiting multiple aggregation pathways capable of producing multiple distinct aggregated structures. Between 2008 and 2015, Paravastu worked as an assistant professor at Florida State University and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Paravastu started his present position at Georgia Tech in 2015. Paravastu’s laboratory presently focuses on 3 general lines of inquiry: 1) structural analysis of peptides that were rationally designed to assemble into nanostructured materials, 2) nonfibrillar aggregates of the Alzheimer’s β-amyloid peptide, and 3) aggregation due to misfolding of proteins driven away from their natural folds.

Arijit Raychowdhury is currently an Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he joined in January, 2013. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University (2007) and his B.E. in Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering from Jadavpur University, India (2001). His industry experience includes five years as a Staff Scientist in the Circuits Research Lab, Intel Corporation, and a year as an Analog Circuit Designer with Texas Instruments Inc. His research interests include low power digital and mixed-signal circuit design, design of power converters, sensors and exploring interactions of circuits with device technologies. Raychowdhury holds more than 25 U.S. and international patents and has published over 80 articles in journals and refereed conferences. He serves on the Technical Program Committees of DAC, ICCAD, VLSI Conference, and ISQED and has been a guest associate-editor for JETC. He has also taught many short courses and invited tutorials at multiple conferences, workshops and universities. He is the winner of the Intel Labs Technical Contribution Award, 2011; Dimitris N. Chorafas Award for outstanding doctoral research, 2007; the Best Thesis Award, College of Engineering, Purdue University, 2007; Best Paper Awards at the International Symposium on Low Power Electronic Design (ISLPED) 2012, 2006; IEEE Nanotechnology Conference, 2003; SRC Technical Excellence Award, 2005; Intel Foundation Fellowship, 2006; NASA INAC Fellowship, 2004; M.P. Birla Smarak Kosh (SOUTH POINT) Award for Higher Studies, 2002; and the Meissner Fellowship 2002. Raychowdhury is a Senior Member of the IEEE

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