Dr. Arthur Porto
Dr. Arthur Porto is the Assistant Curator of Artificial Intelligence at the Florida Museum of Natural History. His research integrates artificial intelligence and evolutionary biology, focusing on the development of AI-assisted tools for processing biodiversity data. He has held academic positions at Louisiana State University and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Oslo. Dr. Porto has an extensive publication record and has been recognized with numerous grants and awards for his contributions to the fields of AI and evolutionary biology.
Charlotte Alexander, J.D.
Charlotte S. Alexander is Professor of Law and Ethics at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. Her scholarship focuses on the efficiency, transparency, and openness of the court system, with a particular interest in civil litigation. She uses empirical and computational methods to process large quantities of legal data and uncover patterns in case filing, progress, and resolution. She has an additional research interest in employment law and litigation.
Alexander received her B.A. from Columbia University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was elected president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. After law school, she clerked for Judge Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and then served as a Skadden Fellow and senior staff attorney at Georgia Legal Services’ Farmworker Rights Division.
Alexander’s work is published or forthcoming in a wide variety of peer reviewed and law journals, including Science, the N.Y.U. Law Review, Texas Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, American Business Law Journal, Industrial Relations, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. She has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Labor, and private foundations. In 2023, she worked as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar with the Justice Innovation Lab of the National Judicial Training College in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on projects involving court delays and access to justice.
Dr. James Stroud
Dr. James Stroud is an Elizabeth Smithgall Watts Early Career Assistant Professor of School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. He earned a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Florida International University. He is an integrative evolutionary ecologist who investigates how ecological and evolutionary processes may underlie patterns of biological diversity at the macro-scale.
He primarily studies lizards and his research is highly multidisciplinary, combining field studies with macro-ecological and evolutionary comparative analyses. Stroud’s current interests are particularly focused on measuring natural selection in the wild, often taking advantage of non-native lizards as natural experiments in ecology and evolution.
In 2024, he was named an Early Career Fellow by the Ecological Society of America. He joins the ranks of nine newly appointed ESA Fellows and ten 2024-2028 ESA Early Career Fellows, elected for “advancing the science of ecology and showing promise for continuing contributions” and recently confirmed by the organization’s Governing Board. He was also awarded the prestigious Founder’s Prize by the British Ecological Society (BES), the largest scientific society for ecologists in Europe.
Dr. Patrick McGrath
Dr. Patrick McGrath is an Associate Professor in Biological Sciences and the Director of 5 year BS/MS degrees in Biology and Bioinformatics. His research group is interested in researching the genetic basis of heritable behavioral variation, specifically focusing on the areas of molecular evolution, neuroscience, and systems biology. The McGrath Lab is interested in using fundamental mechanistic studies with C. elegans nematodes and Lake Malawi Cichlids to identify, predict, and understand how genetic variation impacts the function of the nervous system. They are studying laboratory adapted strains and harnessing directed evolution experiments to understand how genetic changes affect development, reproduction, and lifespan. They combine quantitative genetics, CRISPR/Cas9, genomics, and computational approaches to address these questions. Their hope is that their work will lead to insights into evolution, multigenic disease, and systems biology.
Dr. McGrath received his B.S. in Astronomy from the University of Illinois – Urbana/Champaign. He completed his PhD in Physics at Stanford University, where he worked with Dr. Harley McAdams on systems biology of the bacterial cell cycle. From there, he moved to Rockefeller University to work with Dr. Cori Bargmann on the evolution of behavior using the nematode C. elegans. He started his laboratory at Georgia Tech in 2012.
Dr. Benjamin Freeman
Dr. Ben Freeman is an Assistant Professor and Elizabeth Smithgall-Watts Endowed Faculty in the School of Biological Sciences. He and his research group study the origin and loss of biodiversity, with specific focus on how climate change is leading to species loss. They use observations, experiments and big datasets to test how climate and species interactions shape where species live—and how species are on the move as climate continues to change.
Dr. Freeman earned his B.A. from Macalester College under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Davis in 2006. He later completed his PhD at Cornell University under the mentorship of Dr. John Fitzpatrick in 2016. From there, he moved to the University of British Columbia, where he was a Banting/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with the Biodiversity Research Centre.
Richard Clark
Rick Clark is the Executive Director of Strategic Student Access at Georgia Tech. He has served on a number of national advisory and governing boards at the state, regional, and national level. Rick travels annually to U.S. embassies through the Department of State to discuss the admission process and landscape of higher education. He is the co-author of the book The Truth about College Admission: A Family Guide to Getting In and Staying Together, and a companion workbook published under the same title. A native of Atlanta, he earned a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a M.Ed. from Georgia State University. Prior to coming to Tech, Rick was on the admissions staff at Georgia State, The McCallie School and Wake Forest University.
Dr. Jeffery Cannon
Dr. Jeffery Cannon is a Landscape Ecologist at the Jones Center at Ichauway. His lab focuses on landscape ecology of forest disturbance and restoration in pine systems of the U.S. and emphasizes technology application in forestry and natural resources. Current projects include (1) quantifying hurricane risk to forest resources through multi-scale studies of wind risk, (2) understanding overstory drivers of forest dynamics in longleaf and related systems, and (3) research to improve restoration outcomes in ponderosa pine and longleaf pine forests. Jeff holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Mississippi State University (2009), an M.S. in Biology from the University of Mississippi (2011), and a Ph.D. in Plant Biology from the University of Georgia (2015).