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.

Simon Chung is a research scientist at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests range from UI security, improving the security and usability of authentication systems, to employing the latest hardware features to improve systems security.

Ashwin Renganathan is a member of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science.

My current research involves the modeling of certain types of human activity that exhibit regular spatio- and/or temporal patterns. As a case study, we have generally focused on various types of criminal behavior, since there are clear patterns in this activity and we have access to relatively large amounts of data. A large portion of this work aims to model the formation and dynamics of crime "hotspots" - spatio-temporal regions of increased criminal activity. Working with data provided by the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments, we have developed methods of measuring the repeat and near-repeat criminal events that are the hallmarks of hotspot formation. We have also constructed a family of discrete models that allow for such patterns to develop from natural criminal behavior, and have derived continuum approximations of these discrete models. Some output from one of many simulations (right) illustrates this finding, with "hot" areas in red and "cold" areas in purple. 

In addition to the work on crime hotspots, this overarching project has also included: more accurate predictions of when and where crimes will occur, based on self-exciting point process models borrowed from seismology; the study of gang territoriality, modeled via diffusive Lotka-Volterra equations; gang retaliatory violence, and how the police may be able to solve such crimes using constrained optimization; the evolution of gang rivalry networks in the presence of retaliation and third-party effects; game theoretic models for the levels of both crime and cooperation with the authorities in society; and new methods for finding the "anchor points" of criminals given the locations of crimes they committed, based on models inspired by animal foraging.