Symposium Chairs
B. Aditya Prakash, Georgia Tech
Dr. B. Aditya Prakash is an associate professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”). He received a Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012, and a B.Tech (in CS) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) -- Bombay in 2007.
He has published one book, more than 80 papers in major venues, holds two U.S. patents, and has given several tutorials at leading conferences. His work has also received multiple best-paper/best-of-conference selections and travel awards. His research interests include Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI, with emphasis on big-data problems in large real-world networks and time-series, with applications to epidemiology, health, urban computing, security, and the Web.
His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Department of Energy (DoE), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), and various companies. Tools developed by his group have been in use in many places including ORNL, the CDC, Walmart, and Facebook. He received a Facebook Faculty Award in 2015, was named as one of ‘AI Ten to Watch’ 2017 by IEEE, and received the NSF CAREER award in 2018. His work has also been highlighted by many media outlets and popular press. He was previously on the faculty of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He is a member of the infectious diseases modeling MIDAS network and core faculty at the Center for Machine Learning (ML@GT) and the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) at Georgia Tech. Aditya’s Twitter handle is @badityap.
Paul Torrens, NYU
Dr. Paul M. Torrens is a professor in Tandon's Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Center for Urban Science + Progress at New York University.
His work centers on the development and application of modeling and simulation tools for exploring and explaining complex urban systems, intricacies of behavior at the interface between cities and people, and emerging cyberinfrastructure for urban spaces and places.
Torrens was the recipient of a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation in 2007, and in 2008 George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Krista Wigginton, Michigan
Dr. Krista Rule Wigginton is an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the faculty at UM, she was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 2011-2012. Her research focuses on the applications of environmental biotechnology in drinking water and wastewater treatment. In particular, her research group develops new methods to detect and analyze the fate of emerging pollutants in the environment. Dr. Wigginton received her B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of Idaho, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Engineering from Virginia Tech. After completing her Ph.D. degree, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland from 2008-2011.
Dr. Wigginton is a Co-Principal Investigator for the NSF grant award: Advancing Technologies and Improving Communication of Urine-Derived Fertilizers for Food Production within a Risk-Based Framework.
John Yin, Wisconsin
Dr. John Yin is a professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He trained at Columbia University, earning dual bachelor’s degrees in the liberal arts and chemical engineering while pursuing cello studies at Juilliard School and piano studies at Columbia. Yin earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at UC-Berkeley and pursued post-doctoral research as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow working under Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. He started his academic career as an assistant professor at the Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, where he was awarded an NSF Young Investigator Award and Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE). He moved to UW-Madison as an associate professor with tenure in 1998 and was promoted to full professor in 2004. In his research, Yin develops new experimental measures and computational models that aim to elucidate how viruses grow and how their infections spread. Yin has co-authored more than 70 publications in the areas of computational and experimental molecular and cell biology, with an emphasis on virus-host interactions. He has further served on the NIH study section for Modeling and Analysis of Biological Systems (MABS). In 2009 Yin was selected to lead the Systems Biology Theme of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, a joint public-private venture to promote cross-disciplinary research, education, and outreach at the UW-Madison, and he was recently recognized with a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professorship for 2015-2020. Yin plays a 1918 Andre Bernard cello, he earned a 1725 rating at the US Table Tennis Association Open in Las Vegas, and he is an enthusiastic convert to sous vide quantitative cooking.
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