Jennifer DuBose
College of Design
Principal Research Associate
Jennifer R. DuBose, M.S., is the executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab and principal research associate in the College of Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is responsible for the operations of the Lab as well as project development and research. She also heads up the Innovation Accelerator for the Cognitive Empowerment Program, working with people living with mild cognitive impairment to develop practical solutions to everyday challenges. Her work focuses on how design effects our experience of built environments, can encourage behaviors we want and contributes to better health outcomes. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on evidence-based design topics such as the non-visual impacts of lighting, and design of doffing spaces to reduce healthcare worker self-contamination. She has conducted several major research efforts around the impact of design on teamwork and collaboration in a range of healthcare settings including the Military Health System, Indian Health Services, clinics for underserved populations as well as Mayo Clinic. [ website ]
Jon Duke
College of Computing
Principal Research Scientist
Dr. Jon Duke is Director of the Center for Health Analytics and Informatics at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and a Principal Research Scientist in the Georgia Tech College of Computing. Dr. Duke has led over $24 million in funded research for industry, government, and foundation partners. His research focuses on advancing techniques for integrating, analyzing, and communicating complex health data with applications spanning research, quality, public health, and clinical domains. Dr. Duke graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his internal medicine residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He completed fellowship training in Medical Informatics and a master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction at Indiana University. [ website ]
David Edwards
Policy Advisor for Neighborhoods
Office of the Mayor
David Edwards is the Founding Executive Director of the Center for Urban Research and a Professor of Practice in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He also serves as the Policy Advisor for Neighborhoods in the Office of the Mayor in Atlanta. He is the former CEO of Purpose Built Communities, a nonprofit focused on revitalizing distressed urban neighborhoods. Mr. Edwards served as the Global Offerings Manager for IBM’s Smarter Cities program and served as the Chief Policy Advisor for the City of Atlanta during the term of Mayor Shirley Franklin. He spent eight years in corporate management consulting, most recently at the Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Edwards also led the strategic planning team at Columbia University while serving as the Associate Provost for Academic Affairs. Mr. Edwards began his career at the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President.
Ben Freeman
School of Biological Sciences
Assistant Professor
Ben Freeman is an Assistant Professor and Elizabeth Smithgall-Watts Endowed Faculty in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, where he teaches Ecology. He was previously employed at the University of British Columbia as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow up until 2022.
Dr. Freeman received his Ph.D. from the Cornell University Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, where his main focus was the study of birds in tropical mountains. He has contributed to over 50 peer-reviewed publications, which cover a range of topics related to biology, ecology, ornithology, and biogeography.
His current research focuses on explaining the origin and loss of biodiversity, how different species are being affected by climate change and other major environmental challenges, as well as the factors that influence species’ geographic ranges. Dr. Freeman uses observations, experiments, and large datasets to address these fundamental questions. [ website ]
Gian-Gabriel Garcia
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Assistant Professor
Dr. Gian-Gabriel Garcia joined the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in 2021. His research focuses on the design, analysis, and optimization of data-driven frameworks at the intersection of prediction and decision-making. This scholarship is motivated by the need to address fundamental methodological challenges in data-driven modeling and high-impact problems in healthcare, including concussion, chronic diseases, opioid-related overdose, and maternal health. His research has been awarded Best Paper in the IISE Transactions Focus Issue on Operations Engineering and Analytics, First Prize in the INFORMS MIF Paper Competition, and the SMDM Lee B. Lusted Prize, among others. He has received federal funding as PI from the NIH and AHRQ. Before joining ISyE, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He earned his PhD and MS in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan and his BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. [ website ]
Jennifer Kim
School of Interactive Computing
Assistant Professor
Jennifer Gahee Kim is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Kim’s research interests lie in human-computer interaction and digital health, where she investigates how social and health information systems can be designed to promote diversity, advocacy, and empathy. With her research, she is especially passionate about impacting the lives of neurodiverse people and the communities around them. [ website ]
Joe Lachance
School of Biological Sciences
Associate Professor
Dr. Lachance an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been a faculty member since January 2015. Honors received at Georgia Tech include a CTL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award and a Doc Blanchard Professorship. Dr. Lachance is also the Director of a Department of Education GAANN training grant in Biology. As a tenured faculty member at Georgia Tech, he has supervised three postdocs, six PhD students, twenty-one MS students, and twenty-three undergraduates. He is active in multiple scientific societies and has been elected to the executive committee of the American Association of Anthropological Genetics. Dr. Lachance’s work has appeared in journals that include Cell, Nature, Nature Genetics, and the American Journal of Human Genetics. His NIH-funded research focuses on how hereditary disease risks have evolved over time, and he is building predictive models of health and disease. This research program bridges the gap between evolutionary genomics and genetic epidemiology. [ website ]
Zahra Mobini
Scheller College of Business
Assistant Professor
Zahra Mobini is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at Scheller College of Business, Georgia Tech. Her research interests revolve around the design and analysis of human-centric solutions to operations management problems, with a focus on healthcare operations. Using empirical and analytical methods, she studies how advancements in technology, clinical protocols, policies and regulations influence provider and patient behavior, and how to align their incentives for optimal outcomes. Her research has been supported by the Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines (WAIM) Research Fellowship with funding from the NSF’s Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier Initiative.
Zahra Mobini completed her PhD in Management Science – Operations Management at the UT Dallas Jindal School of Management and was a George Family Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech’s ISyE before joining Scheller. [ website ]
Richard Starr
Institute for People and Technology
Research Scientist
Richard Starr is the director of research operations and Research Scientist at the Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology. He has deep academic and industry expertise associated with health data management and healthcare research. His research is focused in the areas of healthcare informatics and terminologies, data privacy and security, and research infrastructure and operations. His recent work has been on various projects representing entities like: CDC, Georgia Department of Public Health, Georgia Department of Community Services, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University, and the Georgia All-Payer Claims Database.
Lauren N. Steimle
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor
Dr. Lauren Steimle is the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and an Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her expertise is in operations research/industrial engineering with applications to public health and medicine. Her work builds on optimization, simulation, and predictive modeling to design effective, efficient, and equitable strategies to prevent and control diseases and adverse health outcomes at both the population- and individual-levels.
Dr. Steimle received her Ph.D. and M.S.E in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, and her Bachelor’s degree in Systems Science and Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. She is the recipient of the Best Paper of IISE Transactions Focus Issue on Operations Engineering & Analytics, the INFORMS Service Science Best Cluster Paper Award (Finalist), and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. [ website ]
Ravi Subramanian
Scheller College of Business
Gregory J. Owens Professor
Ravi Subramanian is a Professor of Operations Management at the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech. He served as Faculty Director of Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Denning Technology and Management Program from 2013 to 2016.
Ravi’s research focuses on environmental and social sustainability and interfaces operations and supply chain management with a range of disciplines, including public policy, industrial ecology, strategy, organizational behavior, and marketing. Ravi’s published research predominantly spans three categories: (i) environmental sustainability in firms and supply chains; (ii) value and effectiveness of corporate sustainability efforts; and, (iii) transparency and disclosure. More recently, he has extended his research along themes centered on socioeconomic impact. Ravi’s research has been published in Journal of Industrial Ecology, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and has been cited in Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Reuters, and Yahoo Finance, among others. [ website ]
Iris Tien
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Williams Family Associate Professor
Dr. Iris Tien is Williams Family Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Tien joined the faculty in 2014 after receiving her Ph.D. in Civil Systems Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2014. She received her M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2010, and graduated High Honors with a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Minor in English in 2008 from UC Berkeley.
Dr. Tien’s research is in probabilistic methods for modeling and reliability assessment of civil infrastructure systems. Her research leverages her unique interdisciplinary expertise encompassing traditional topics of civil engineering, sensing and data analytics, stochastic processes, probabilistic risk assessment, and decision making under uncertainty. Her work on interdependent infrastructure systems modeling and analysis has twice won 1st Place Paper Awards in resilient critical infrastructure. Dr. Tien has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering to participate in three Frontiers of Engineering Symposia. She was also selected to organize the session on Resilient and Reliable Infrastructure at the U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium; and speak on Community Resilience at the National Academies Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Symposium. [ website ]
Mayra Pineda-Torres
Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
Assistant Professor
Mayra Pineda-Torres is an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Texas A&M University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of health, labor, and gender economics. She is mainly concerned with topics related to teenagers and women’s equality and welfare, and her body of work explores the health and economic implications of reproductive health care policies. This includes studies on the long-run impacts of contraception and abortion policies implemented in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s and contemporary policies such as mandatory waiting periods for abortion and targeted regulations of abortion providers. Her current projects include studies on the implications of legal access to abortion on intimate partner violence and educational attainment and the effects of expanding educational opportunities on teenage fertility. [ website ]
Eunhwa Yang
School of Building Construction
Assistant Professor
Eunhwa Yang is an assistant professor at the School of Building Construction, researching the reciprocal relationship between the built environment and human outcomes across various settings, including workplaces, university campuses, and homes. Eunhwa employs Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which proposes that human outcomes are constantly influenced by the nested structures of environments. Her contributions include workplace studies, facility operation and maintenance, sustainable building practices and operations, and cognitive aging-in-place. Eunhwa’s work assists individuals such as office workers, university students, and older adults, as well as facility managers/owners, corporate real estate directors, and designers, in identifying optimal spatial design, usage, and operation. She has published 40 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings and teaches graduate-level courses on facility management, environmental issues, health outcomes, and research methodologies. Eunhwa holds an MS in Building Construction and Facility Management from Georgia Tech and a Ph.D. in Human Behavior and Design from Cornell University. [ website ]