Sam Coogan received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2015, he was a postdoctoral research engineer at Sensys Networks, Inc., and in 2012 he spent time at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Before joining Georgia Tech in 2017, he was an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering department at UCLA from 2015–2017. His awards and recognitions include the 2020 Donald P Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council recognizing "an outstanding young engineer in the field of automatic control", a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2019, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2018, and the Outstanding paper award for the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems in 2017.

Dr. Tsiotras holds the David & Andrew Lewis Endowed Chair in the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also associate director at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. His current research interests include nonlinear and optimal control and their connections with AI, planning, and decision-making, emphasizing autonomous ground, aerial, and space vehicles applications. He has published more than 350 journal and conference articles in these areas. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Dr. Tsiotras was an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia. He has also held visiting appointments with the MIT, JPL, INRIA, Rocquencourt, the Laboratoire de Automatique de Grenoble, and the Ecole des Mines de Paris (Mines ParisTech). Dr. Tsiotras is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the IEEE Technical Excellence Award in Aerospace Controls, the Outstanding Aerospace Engineer Award from Purdue, the Sigma Xi President and Visitor's Award for Excellence in Research, as well as numerous other fellowships and scholarships. He is currently the chief editor of the Frontiers in Robotics & AI, in the area of space robotics, and an associate editor for the Dynamic Games and Applications journal. In the past, he has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and the Journal of Dynamical and Control Systems. He is a Fellow of the AIAA, IEEE, and AAS.

Evangelos Theodorou earned his Diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece in 2001. He has also received a MSc in Production Engineering from TUC in 2003, a MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Minnesota in spring of 2007 and a MSc in Electrical Engineering on dynamics and controls from the University of Southern California(USC) in Spring 2010. In May of 2011 he graduated with his Ph.D., in Computer Science at USC. After his Ph.D., he became a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. In July 2013 he joined the faculty of the school of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor. His theoretical research spans the areas of control theory, machine learning, information theory and statistical physics. Applications involve autonomous planning and control in robotics and aerospace systems, bio-inspired control and design.

Marilyn Smith is a Professor in the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is director of Georgia Tech's Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence (VLRCOE), where she leads a seven-university team of experts in vertical lift research for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and NASA. She has partnered with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to successfully win multiple research funding mechanisms for both organizations that total more than $200 million dollars. As the director of the AE School's Computational Nonlinear Computational Aeroelasticity Lab, Prof. Smith leads an internationally recognized and award-winning research team in the areas of unsteady aerodynamics and computational aeroelasticity using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) across rotary-wing, fixed wing and launch vehicles, as well as sustainable energy. As a member of the NASA FUN3D development team, Prof. Smith contributes to state-of-the-art unstructured algorithm development, in particular for overset, moving frames. As an affiliate of the Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL), she helps to integrate high performance computing with the design process. Prof. Smith is the author or co-author of more than 200 technical publications, and her research products are in active use by the US Government and other organizations, including the Drone Racing League. She is active internationally on three NATO AVT Panels investigating nonlinear gusts behaviors on UAVs and collaboration of experimental/computational aerodynamics. She is on Board of Directors of the Vertical Lift Consortium (VLC) and the Vertical Flight Society (VFS). She is also the Deputy Technical Director for Aeromechanics for the VFS. Prof. Smith has demonstrated her leadership as ARO Dynamic Stall Workshop Chair (2019); 70th AHS Annual Forum Technical Chairperson (2014); 69th AHS Annual Forum Technical Deputy Chairperson (2013); and 2014 Overset Grid Symposium (OGS) Chairperson. She was a member on the first International Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop Organizing Committee and is a member of the OGS organizing committee. Prof. Smith has been a guest expert in aviation for National Geographic, PBS, and NPR, as well as local television and numerous publications.

Dr. J.V.R. Prasad is a professor in the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology working in the area of flight mechanics and control. He received his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India and his M.S and Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. He is currently a co-principal investigator and the associate director for the US Army, Navy and NASA sponsored Vertical Lift Rotorcraft Center of Excellence (VLRCOE) program at Georgia Tech. He has extensive research and design experience in rotorcraft system modeling and control, propulsion system modeling and control, and autonomous air vehicle modeling and control. He published parts of four books, sixty refereed journal papers, more than 250 conference papers and 80 research project reports. He has 18 invention disclosures and five patents to his credit. He is a recipient of the 2009 Melville Medal award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the 2015 Aero Lion Technologies Outstanding Journal Paper award from the International Journal of Unmanned Systems. He served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Helicopter Society (AHS), chair of the Handling Qualities and UAV Tech Committees of the AHS, and as member and secretary of the Atmospheric. Flight Mechanics Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He currently serves as a member of the editorial board for the International Journal on Mathematical Modeling and Simulation and the advisory board for the International Journal of Unmanned Systems. He is a Fellow of the AIAA, a Technical Fellow of the AHS and a member of the ASME.

E. Glenn Lightsey is the John W. Young Chair Professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He currently serves as the interim director for the Space Research Initiative at Georgia Tech. Previously, he was the director of the Space Systems Design Lab from 2016-2023 and Center for Space Technology And Research at Georgia Tech from 2019-2023. 

Lightsey’s research program focuses on the technology of small satellites, including: guidance, navigation, and control systems; attitude determination and control; formation flying, satellite swarms, and cooperative control; proximity operations and unmanned spacecraft rendezvous; space based Global Positioning System receivers; radionavigation; propulsion; satellite operations; and space systems engineering. His group has built and operated several spacecraft for government sponsors. 

Lightsey has co-authored more than 180 technical articles and publications, including four book chapters. He is an AIAA Fellow and a Founding Member of the AIAA Small Satellite Technical Committee. He is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Small Satellites. In the past he served as Associate Editor of the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics and Associate Editor of the AIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. Lightsey was previously employed at the University of Texas at Austin and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Dr. Ye Zhao started as an Assistant Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in January 2019. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and obtained his Ph.D. from UT Austin, where he worked on robust motion planning and decision-making for robot manipulation and locomotion problems with frictional contact behaviors. At Georgia Tech, he directs the Laboratory for Intelligent Decision and Autonomous Robots. His research interests lie broadly in planning, control, decision-making, and learning algorithms of highly agile, contact-rich, and human-cooperative robots. Dr. Zhao is especially interested in computationally efficient optimization algorithms and formal methods for challenging robotics problems with formal guarantees on robustness, safety, autonomy, and real-time performance. The LIDAR group aims at pushing the boundary of robot autonomy, intelligent decision, robust motion planning, and symbolic planning. The long-term goal is to devise theoretical and algorithmic underpinnings for collaborative humanoid and mobile robots operating in unstructured and unpredictable environments while working alongside humans. Robotic applications primarily focus on agile bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion, manipulation, heterogeneous robot teaming, and mobile platforms for extreme environment maneuvering.

Jonathan Rogers joined the Georgia Tech faculty in Fall 2013 as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University from 2011 to 2013.

Dr. Anirban Mazumdar joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering in 2018. Dr. Mazumdar studies robot mobility with the goal of understanding and achieving agile, versatile, and efficient robot behaviors in unstructured environments. His previous experience includes a postdoctoral research position in the High Consequence Automation and Robotics Group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. He has broad experience with novel robotic systems including energy efficient bipedal robots, reconfigurable aerial vehicles, prosthetic devices, and relaxed stability mobile robots.

Dr. Mazumdar started at the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in January of 2019 and currently has a courtesy appointment with the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. She graduated with her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Sandia National Laboratories in the Diagnostic Science and Engineering group. Her research interests include the design of new diagnostic techniques and sensor systems for studying combustion, multiphase flows, hypersonic flows, and energetic materials. Her group utilizes new composite sensing materials, optical diagnostics, magnetostatics, and system identification methods to study these complex physical phenomena.