Zerrin has a doctorate in Instructional Design and Technologies from Virginia Tech, where she also earned a graduate-level certification in Human-Computer Interaction. Prior to joining CIDI, Zerrin worked with the Virginia Tech Assistive Technology Research Lab, where she conducted research related to assistive mobile reading technologies for people with visual impairments. Her research interests include pedagogical accessibility, universal design for learning, user experience in the educational context, and assistive learning technologies.

Arthi Rao is a research scientist at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development at Georgia Tech. She has had a consistent focus on Health and Place research throughout her career. She has an interdisciplinary educational and professional background in Urban Planning, Epidemiology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from Georgia Tech. Her research interests focus on social determinants of health, healthcare access, healthy communities, and spatial methods. She uses methods including spatial clustering, data mining/classification techniques and hierarchical modeling in her research. She has integrated these methods to create decision-support tools for academic and industrial applications.

She regularly collaborates with researchers at The Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech, and the American Planning Association as a subject matter expert on healthy communities’ research and geospatial methods. She has published in journals on the topics of Health Impact Assessment (HIA), sustainability, walkability analysis, regional planning, and therapeutic landscapes. She also teaches courses titled “Public Health and the Built Environment” and “Public Health Analytics” at Georgia Tech.

Specialization Area: Health and Environment

Biography:

Tony Giarrusso is a Principal Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization in the College of Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ga. His teaching, research, and consulting activities focus on GIS-based planning solutions for land conservation, coastal and marine resource management, urban planning and environmental protection. Over the past twenty-four years, Mr. Giarrusso has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on more than 30 research projects, with research sponsors including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the State of Georgia (DNR and DHR), The Nature Conservancy, The Trust for Public Land, Morehouse School of Medicine, The Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund International, and the City of Atlanta. 

Apart from his research activities, Mr. Giarrusso has been an instructor at Georgia Tech for the last twenty-one years, primarily teaching introductory GIS classes to undergraduates.

Teaching Interest:

Professor Giarrusso's teaching is focused on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, urban planning, and sustainable development. He primarily teaches at the undergraduate level. He is co-lead of the Rwanda Study Abroad in Sustainable Development, an embedded study abroad program offered during spring break. He also co-teaches a VIP class on Assistive Technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Research Interest:

Professor Giarrusso's research interests is focused on the use of GIS and Remote Sensing as planning decision-support for local and state government, primarily focused on environmental and land use issues.

List of Recent Scholarly Work:

Recent Research Articles:

1. Alice Favero, Matthew Realff, Maria Lucas, Anthony Giarrusso, and Karl Lang (2023), Geo-Spatial Economic Assessment of the Potential Development of Bioenergy Combined with Direct Air Carbon Capture (BEDAC) in the USA.
Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (51), 21681-21690 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c06975

2. Evans, Kathryn A.; Giarrusso, Anthony J.; and Zaparanick, David (2023), Perpetual Protection for Atlanta’s High-Quality Forested Land in the City, Cities and the Environment (CATE): Vol. 13: Iss. 1, Article 29.

3. Fahr, S., Powell, J., Favero, A., Giarrusso, A.J., Lively, R.P. and Realff, M.J. (2022), Assessing the physical potential capacity of direct air capture with integrated supply of low-carbon energy sources. Greenhouse Gas Sci Technol, 12: 170-188. https://doi.org/10.1002/ghg.2136

4. Portela G.T., Leong T., Webster A.,Giarrusso A.J., Fridkin S., Ray S., Swerdlow D. (2021), Immergluck L. Risk factors for non-invasive (skin and soft tissue) and invasive Staphylococcus aureus infections among children and adults living in southeastern USA: a retrospective cohort study BMJ https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/8/e059327.info

Recent Research Projects:

1. Georgia's Coastal Canopy - https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/a24f7f9055174d35adb15dab8116a734
2. Georgia's Changing Forest - https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/8a8fe7ff6b5d4113929d7a5f20044be6
3. Georgia Historic and Projected Land Cover Database - https://arcg.is/11bTaq
4. Thrive Regional Infrastructure Portal (TRIP) - https://trip-thrive-geohub.hub.arcgis.com/
5. Atlanta's Urban Tree Canopy - https://geospatial.gatech.edu/AtlantaUTC/
6. Georgia Wetlands Restoration Access Portal (G-WRAP) - https://geospatial.gatech.edu/G-WRAP/

Degrees with Year of Award:

Masters of City Planning (2000) -Georgia Institute of Technology    
Bachelor of Science in Biology (1993) - Georgia State University

Nancey Green Leigh is a Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and adviser for the economic development planning, working with masters and doctoral students. Maintaining an active research program, Leigh is currently leading a project entitled "Workers, Firms and Industries in Robotic Regions," funded by the National Science Foundation's Robotics Initiative. She previously led a large scale research effort by three universities focused on sustainable industrial systems for urban regions. Both of these efforts as well as other funded research (brownfields, urban land and manufacturing, resilient infrastructure) contribute to Leigh's long term focus on advancing sustainable development for local and regional economies. As Associate Dean for Research, Leigh is focused on strengthening the research impact of the College of Design. She develops and administers competitive initiatives to support individual and collaborative research by college faculty and affiliated researchers. She oversees the college's seven major research units. She also is engaged in building research connections within Georgia Tech between the College of Design, other colleges and Interdisciplinary Research Institutes, as well as to external funders and collaborators in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Leigh has published more than 60 articles and four books, Routledge Handbook of International Planning Education (2019 with S.P. French, S. Guhathakurta, and B. Stiftel), Planning Local Economic Development, 6th edition (2017 with E.J. Blakely) adopted for courses in a wide array of universities; Economic Revitalization: Cases and Strategies for City and Suburb (2002 with J. Fitzgerald); and Stemming Middle Class Decline: The Challenge to Economic Development Planning (1994). She was co-editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research from 2012 to 2016, and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2008.

Michael’s love of design at all scales is evident in his teaching, research and practice. 

He is a registered architect, director of the Modern Cities Europe Program, and creative director at Gamble + Gamble Architects in Atlanta. From 2015 to 2022, he directed the Master of Architecture program in the School of Architecture.  His design-driven research operates at a variety of scales, from house to city, with emphasis on innovation, alternative energy, and building technology pursued within the context of a larger concern for the creation of healthy, well-conceived environments. He has received numerous awards for excellence in design and scholarship. www.gg-architects.com 

Michael was the first point of contact for the $30 million Living Building gift, a.k.a. Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design (KBISD), and actively participated in pre-planning and fund acquisition, design competition and team formation, all the way through building execution, implementation and certification.  He also led a series of interdisciplinary design studios that paralleled the effort, and chaired the Academic and Research Council connected to the project.  He is co-author of the novel organizational structure of the living building workgroups, now tested, and currently  serves as chair of the KBISD advisory council and leads the Living Building Pilot Project Program, comprised of faculty, researchers and students from across campus, now in round three of funding. 

Michael’s research has received grants from The Alcoa Foundation, The Kendeda Foundation, Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, the National Endowments of the Arts, and received First Prize for Research in an international competition sponsored by the Environmental Design and Research Association. Gamble has published essays on the design of the public realm in Harvard Design Magazine with W. Jude Leblanc.