Rebecca Watts Hull is assistant director, faculty development for sustainability education initiatives for the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), with a courtesy appointment in the School of History and Sociology. Rebecca works with faculty to incorporate Education for Sustainable Development into their course design and teaching practices. She partners with other units to lead strategic initiatives related to sustainability education, including Sustainability Next’s Education for Sustainable Development implementation plan. Prior to her current role, Rebecca served as a Service Learning and Partnerships Specialist with the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS), and she continues to collaborate closely with Georgia Tech's community-based learning initiatives. She facilitates the "Scaling up Sustainability Across the Curriculum Community of Practice" of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) which supports collaboration among sustainability education professionals at dozens of colleges and universities. Rebecca also serves on AASHE's Advisory Council and STARS Steering Committee. Before her work at Georgia Tech, Rebecca held sustainability and educational leadership roles in the public, private and nonprofit sectors with responsibilities that included faculty development, science and environmental curriculum design, and community-based environmental education and advocacy. Rebecca earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in History and Sociology of Technology and Science, focusing her research on social movements and organizational change, and holds an M.S. in Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan. She has taught Sustainability Leadership at Emory University, Environment and Sustainability Studies at Agnes Scott College, and American Environmental History, Social Movements, Community Organizing, and Organizing for Social Change at Georgia Tech.

Molei Tao received B.S. in Math & Physics in 2006 from Tsinghua Univ. (Beijing) and Ph.D. in Control & Dynamical Systems with a minor in Physics in 2011 from Caltech (advisor: Houman Owhadi, co-advisor: Jerry Marsden). Afterwards, he worked as a postdoc in Computing & Mathematical Sciences at Caltech from 2011 to 2012, and then as a Courant Instructor at NYU from 2012 to 2014. From 2014 on, he has been an assistant, and then associate professor in School of Math at Georgia Tech. He is a recipient of W.P. Carey Ph.D. Prize in Applied Mathematics (2011), American Control Conference Best Student Paper Finalist (2013), NSF CAREER Award (2019), AISTATS best paper award (2020), IEEE EFTF-IFCS Best Student Paper Finalist (2021), Cullen-Peck Scholar Award (2022), GT-Emory AI.Humanity Award (2023), a Plenary Speaker at Georgia Scientific Computing Symposium (2024), a Keynote Speaker at (2024) International Conference on Scientific Computing and Machine Learning, SONY Faculty Innovation Award (2024), Best Poster Award at 2024 international conference “Recent Advances and Future Directions for Sampling” held at Yale, and Richard Duke Fellowship (2025).

Germán Vergara (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) specializes in environmental and Latin American history. His research and teaching explore environmental change, animal history, energy regimes, and the ecological problems of capitalism(s) and industrialization in Latin America, which he tries hard to locate in a global context. 

His first book, Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examined how and why modern Mexico transitioned from an agrarian society powered by animal muscle, water, and wood to a fossil-fueled industrial society. Within a century, Mexico went from an energy regime based on dispersed solar energy accumulated in plants and human and animal muscle to one based on the concentrated ancient sunlight trapped in fossil fuels. The book argues that the shift to a carbon-based society has been the main agent of environmental, economic, and social change in Mexico for over a century. The decision to power the country’s economy with fossil fuels locked Mexico in a cycle of endless, fossil-fueled growth. Fueling Mexico is the first study to look at the historical roots of today's global fossil-fuel energy regime from a Latin American perspective. The book was the recipient of the 2021-2023 Elinor Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History (Conference on Latin American History-CLAH) and received an honorable mention for Best Book in the Humanities 2022 from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

Germán's second book project focuses on the biodiversity and extinction crisis in the Americas. Recent estimates suggest that 41 percent of described amphibians, 26 percent of mammals, and 13 percent of birds currently face the threat of extinction worldwide. One of the global centers of biodiversity, the Americas are at the heart of the current extinction crisis. Few regions of the world have experienced as many extinctions or near extinctions as the Western Hemisphere. The book will examine the historical roots of this crisis, adopting a very long-term perspective to better understand the social, cultural, and economic patterns that have resulted in high rates of species loss. Somewhat unwisely, the book will travel from the Late Pleistocene to the modern history of capitalism in the region to ponder whether humans are a uniquely adept species at extinguishing other life forms. Less abstractly, the book will discuss topics such as the recent capitalist commodification of animals and nature, scientific ideas about extinction, animal-human relations, and conservation efforts in the Americas over the centuries. 

Germán has published on energy, forest history, animal history, species extinctions, and has a forthcoming chapter on the environmental history of mining in Mexico. His article "How Coal Kept My Valley Green: Forest Conservation, State Intervention, and the Transition to Fossil Fuels in Mexico" was published in Environmental History. "Animals in Latin American History" appeared in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latin American History. He co-edited and co-authored the Forum "Extinction and Its Interventions in the Americas" for Environmental History in 2022. 

After earning his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Germán spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in environmental history at Brown University. He has received fellowships from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS), the Charles A. Hale Fellowship for Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association, and the USMEX Fellowship Program at the University of California, San Diego. He was selected as the 2022-23 Cisneros Visiting Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University.

Education:

• Ph.D. in History, University of California, Berkeley

Areas of
Expertise:

• Agriculture
• Animal History
• Cities
• Energy History
• Environmental History
• Food
• Industrialization
• Latin America
• Mexico

Lauren Garten joined the School of Materials Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in Fall 2021. Her group focuses on developing new materials for energy and electronic applications, particularly at the nexus between ferroelectricity, ferromagnetism, electronics, and photovoltaics. 

Garten received her B.S. in ceramic engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology. She then went on to earn a Ph.D. in material science from the Pennsylvania State University for her work on ferroelectric, piezoelectric, and dielectric synthesis and characterization with Prof. Susan Trolier-McKinstry. She then became a post-doc at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory working on metastable materials for energy applications. After a very short stint as a material scientist at Sandia National Laboratory, she won the NRC Research Associateship from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Math which was hosted at the U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL). She then received the Jerome and Isabella Karle Distinguished Scholar Fellowship from NRL to work on lead-free multiferroic materials and devices.

Scott Sinquefield completed his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1998 at Oregon State University. He spent three years working with the Multi-Fuel Combustion Group at the Combustion Research Facility at Sandia National Labs (Livermore); where he performed the experimental portion of his thesis research. He joined the Chemical Recovery group at IPST in 1998 and was lead.engineer in the construction and operation of the Pressurize Entrained Flow Reactor facility. He now leads the research program on black liquor gasification. He has extensive experience in the design and construction of pilot research reactors and control systems. He also has expertise in boiler fire-side fouling and thermodynamic modeling of aqueous electrolyte systems.

Robert Harris' background is in semiconductors and microelectronics. He serves as research faculty at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in the Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory and teach in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research focus is on photonic integrated circuits, heterogeneous integration, electronic warfare, and RF electronics.

Richard Simmons is currently a Principal Research Engineer and the Director of Research and Studies at Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) where he directs cross-cutting energy projects with an emphasis on clean electric power, vehicle efficiency and alternative fuels. He is also an instructor in Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, with a specialization in design, mechatronics, and thermal systems. 

Simmons received his bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech, and masters and Ph.D. from Purdue, all in Mechanical Engineering. He is a licensed professional engineer (PE) with more than 20 years of RD&D experience in automotive, advanced materials, and alternative energy and fuels. 

From 2009 to 2012, he served a prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science S&T (Science and Technology) Policy Fellowship at the U.S. Department of State, providing technical analysis on international policy issues related to renewable energy. He has recently authored numerous publications including an open-access eBook entitled “Understanding the Global Energy Crisis” (Purdue Press, 2014), several book chapters and journal articles related to advanced energy technologies, transportation energy technology, and future energy policy strategies.

Charmain M. Alston is the senior grants administrator for IDEaS. She joined the team in 2017 with more than 26 years of experience in the federal government, and 18 years of experience with proposal and financial administration at the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate. Charmain has a BBS with a concentration in Acquisition and Contract Management.

Santanu S. Dey is A. Russell Chandler III Professor and associate chair of graduate studies in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Dey holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. 

Dr. Dey's research interests are in the area of non convex optimization, and in particular mixed integer linear and nonlinear programming. His research is partly motivated by applications of non convex optimization arising in areas such as electrical power engineering, process engineering, civil engineering, logistics, and statistics. Dr. Dey has served as the vice chair for Integer Programming for INFORMS Optimization Society (2011-2013) and has served on the program committees of Mixed Integer Programming Workshop 2013 and Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization 2017, 2020. He currently serves on the editorial board of Computational Optimization and Applications, MOS-SIAM book series on Optimization, is an associate editor for Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming A, and SIAM Journal on Optimization. He has been as associate editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing and an area editor for Mathematical Programming C.