My primary interest is floating ice systems - Jupiter's moon Europa and Earth's ice shelves. I am interested in how these environments work and how they may become habitable. I have chosen to focus on Europa because of its potential to have what other places may not have: a stable source of energy from tides that can power geological cycles over the lifetime of the solar system. At its most basic form, life is like a battery, depending upon redox reactions to move electrons. A planetary proxy for this is activity, whereby a planet recycles through geologic processes, and maintains chemical gradients of which life can take advantage. Without recycling, it is possible that even once habitable environments can become inhospitable. This is where terrestrial process analogs come into the picture - by studying how ice and water interact in environments on Earth we can better understand the surface indications of such on Europa (and other icy worlds). My work provides a framework by which to remotely understand planetary cryospheres and test hypotheses, until such time as subsurface characterization becomes possible by radar sounding, landed seismology, or one day, roving submersibles. Much work remains to correlate observations and models of terrestrial icy environments - excellent process analogs for the icy satellites - with planetary observations. I think about how to incorporate melting, hydrofracture, hydraulic flow, and now brine infiltration as process analogs into constructing models for the formation of Europa's geologic terrain and to study the implications for ice shell recycling and ice-ocean interactions. The inclusion of realistic analogs in our backyard-Earth's poles -using imaging and geophysical techniques is a common thread of this work, giving tangible ways to generate and test hypotheses relevant to environments on Earth and Europa. In the long term, I envision constructing systems-science level models of the Europan environment to understand its habitability and enable future exploration. I'm lucky to work with a talented group of students, post docs, and collaborators who share this vision and continue to make my life's passion, understanding the worlds around us, tenable.

Dr. Fumin Zhang joined Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007 as an assistant professor. He received a Ph.D. degree in 2004 from the University of Maryland (College Park) in Electrical Engineering, and held a postdoctoral position in Princeton University from 2004 to 2007. His B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in electrical engineering, are from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Fumin Zhang's research focuses on mobile sensor networks that demonstrate bio-inspired long duration autonomy. He has contributed to the co-design of control, sensing, and communication algorithms for mobile sensing agents that collect information to model spatial temporal stochastic fields. An application domain of his research has been marine robots for environmental sensing and data collection. He has established a theoretical framework for the investigation of battery supported Cyber-Physical Systems. He also developed a co-design methodology for real-time scheduling, realtime control, and battery management. He is currently serving as the co-chair for the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Marine Robotics and is the associate editor for IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IEEE Transactions on Control of Networked Systems. He also serves as the deputy editor-in-chief for the Cyber-Physical Systems Journal.

Dr. Magnus Egerstedt is Dean of The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine and has previously served as the Executive Director for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Egerstedt conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of multi-robot systems. Magnus Egerstedt is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science, and he has received a number of teaching and research awards, including the Ragazzini Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the Outstanding Doctoral Advisor Award and the HKN Outstanding Teacher Award from Georgia Tech, the Alumni of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology, and the CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

In 1979 Dr. Lee conducted radiation research as an undergraduate assistant at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he modeled and simulated the nongray particulate radiation in an isothermal cylindrical medium. At MIT, he designed high-performance fluidic amplifiers and fluid signal transmission systems and investigated analytically and experimentally the effects of temperature changes on fluid power control systems for flight backup control applications. Dr. Lee began at Tech in 1985 as an Assistant Professor.

Accomplished roboticist, entrepreneur and educator Ayanna Howard, PhD, became dean of the College of Engineering on March 1, 2021. Previously she was chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing, as well as founder and director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS).

Her career spans higher education, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the private sector. Dr. Howard is the founder and president of the board of directors of Zyrobotics, a Georgia Tech spin-off company that develops mobile therapy and educational products for children with special needs. Zyrobotics products are based on Dr. Howard’s research.

Among many accolades, Forbes named Dr. Howard to its America's Top 50 Women In Tech list. In May 2021, the Association for Computing Machinery named her the ACM Athena Lecturer in recognition of fundamental contributions to the development of accessible human-robotic systems and artificial intelligence, along with forging new paths to broaden participation in computing.

Dr. Howard also is a tenured professor in the college’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a joint appointment in Computer Science and Engineering.

Alenka Zajic is currently the Ken Byers Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia, in 2001 and 2003, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 2008. Before joining Georgia Tech as an assistant professor, Zajic was a post-doctoral fellow in the Naval Research Laboratory and visiting faculty in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Zajic is the recipient of the following awards: IEEE Atlanta Section Outstanding Engineer Award (2019), The Best Poster Award at the IEEE International Conference on RFID (2018), NSF CAREER Award (2017), Best Paper Award at the 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (2016), the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Communications and Electronics (2014), Neal Shepherd Memorial Best Propagation Paper Award (2012), the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Telecommunications (2008), the Best Student Paper Award at the Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (2007), IEEE Outstanding Chapter Award as a Chair of the Atlanta Chapter of the AP/MTT Societies (2016), LexisNexis Dean's Excellence Award (2016), and Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award (2016). She was an editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications 2012-2017 and an executive editor for Wiley Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2011-2016 .

Thad Starner is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Computing. Thad was perhaps the first to integrate a wearable computer into his everyday life as an intelligent personal assistant. Starner's work as a Ph.D. student would help found the field of Wearable Computing. His group's prototypes and patents on mobile MP3 players, mobile instant messaging and e-mail, gesture-based interfaces, and mobile context-based search foreshadowed now commonplace devices and services. Thad has authored over 100 scientific publications with over 100 co-authors on mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI), pattern discovery, human power generation for mobile devices, and gesture recognition, and he is a founder and current co-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. His work is discussed in public forums such as CNN, NPR, the BBC, CBS's 60 Minutes, The New York Times, Nikkei Science, The London Independent, The Bangkok Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Physiological and biomechanical mechanisms underlying fine motor skills and their adjustments and adaptations to heightened sympathetic nerve activity, aging or inactivity, space flight or microgravity, neuromuscular fatigue, divided attention, and practice in humans. He uses state-of-the-art techniques in neuroscience, physiology, and biomechanics (e.g., TMS, EEG, fMRI, single motor unit recordings, microneurography, mechanomyography, ultrasound elastography, and exoskeleton robot) in identifying these mechanisms.

Mark Riedl is an Associate Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. Mark's research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, virtual worlds, and storytelling. The principle research question Mark addresses through his research is: how can intelligent computational systems reason about and autonomously create engaging experiences for users of virtual worlds and computer games. Mark's primary research contributions are in the area of artificial intelligence approaches to automated story generation and interactive storytelling for entertainment, education, and training. Narrative is a cognitive tool used by humans for communication and sense-making. The goal of my narrative intelligence research is to discover new computational algorithms and models that can facilitate the development of intelligent computer systems that can reason about narrative in order to be better communicators, entertainers, and educators. Additionally, Mark has explored the following research topics: virtual cinematography in 3D virtual worlds; player modeling; procedural generation of computer game content; computational creativity; human creativity support; intelligent virtual characters; mixed-initiative problem solving; and discourse generation. Mark earned a Ph.D. degree in 2004 from North Carolina State University. From 2004-2007, Mark was a Research Scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies where he researched and developed interactive, narrative-based training systems. Mark joined the Georgia Tech College of Computing in 2007 where he continues to study artificial intelligence approaches to story generation, interactive narratives, and adaptive computer games. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, the U.S. Army, Google, and Disney. Mark was the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award and an NSF CAREER Award.