Contributors
Willow Brugh is a project manager at Truss, where she combines centralized and distributed decision-making structures for use in disaster response and humanitarian aid.
Jerry Chow is a manager in experimental quantum computing at IBM, where his research focuses on superconducting qubits for quantum computing systems.
Francesca D’Arcangelo serves on the senior staff of the homeland protection systems group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Her work focuses on systems analysis and architecture development for homeland defense, including chemical and biological threat defense, border security, and air and maritime surveillance.
Rebekah Drezek is a professor of bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering at Rice University. She conducts translational research at the interface of bioengineering, photonics, clinical medicine, and nanotechnology to develop novel optically based strategies for minimally invasive real-time screening, detection, and treatment of cancer, and new technologies to improve women’s health care.
Sara Gamble is a physicist at the US Army Research Office, where she manages a quantum information science program that seeks to understand, control, and exploit quantum phenomena beyond classical capabilities. Specific research interests include foundational quantum physics; quantum sensing, imaging, and metrology; and quantum computation and networking.
Robert Hanson is director of prioritization and modeling at the National Risk Management Center of the Department of Homeland Security, where he develops advanced analytical capabilities to estimate the impacts of cyber and physical disruptions on critical infrastructure systems.
Darrell Irvine is a professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is focused on the application of engineering tools to problems in cellular immunology and the development of new materials for vaccine and drug delivery. His current focus is vaccine development for HIV and immunotherapy of cancer.
Marissa Jablonski is an environmental advisor to the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, Office of Food for Peace at USAID. Her technical work, which integrates science and engineering, emphasizes community engagement in development and sustainability.
Darshan Karwat is an assistant professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and The Polytechnic School at Arizona State University. He leads re-Engineered, an experiment in interdisciplinary engineering that embeds peace, social justice, and ecological holism at the heart of technical design and decision making. His team’s work focuses on energy systems and transitions; climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience; community-based engineering; the politics of engineering; environmental policy and governance; space systems; and fluid and gas dynamics.
Shelby Kimmel is an assistant professor of computer science at Middlebury College. She studies quantum computers, which take advantage of the laws governing small physical systems in order to solve computational problems. She designs algorithms for quantum computers and tries to prove that their performance is better than the best classical algorithms. She also creates efficient and accurate ways of characterizing errors in experimental quantum computers and sometimes dabbles in quantum complexity theory and quantum information theory.
Ester Kwon is an assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego, where she is interested in developing nanomaterials that interface with biology as tools, diagnostics, and therapeutics, especially for the brain.
Grace Metcalfe is an atomic and molecular physicist at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Her program brings together academia, industry, and government labs to investigate many-body, nonequilibrium quantum systems, dissipation engineering, new quantum phases of matter, and novel quantum materials.
Julia Moline is deputy chief of the Public Assistance Program Delivery Branch at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Her team implements new processes, roles, tools, and software systems to improve delivery of public assistance. They also process every financial assistance application after disasters, develop and improve software systems, and deploy field operation leaders.
Mira Olson is an associate professor of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering at Drexel University. Her primary research interest is in protecting water source quality, including remediation of contaminated groundwater, assessing the impact of water resources technology on underlying groundwater supply and quality, and understanding the fate and transport of both chemical and biological agents in the environment.
Julie Pietrzak is a professional civil engineer and senior project manager at Enovate Engineering. She has design expertise in flood resiliency, track and rail, earthen embankments, and stormwater management. She conducts research to define the relationship between storm surge and simultaneous rainfall and develops innovative flood mitigation solutions for mass transportation projects and power and signal facilities throughout the New York City region.
Firas Saleh is an associate director of hydrology at Jupiter, where he implements intelligent decision-support tools to save lives and property by predicting the impact of extreme weather and climate change on infrastructure resilience. The tools help answer important scientific questions and evaluate tipping points caused by both manmade and natural stressors.
Evan Scott is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University. His lab applies engineering and materials-based strategies to the investigation and treatment of diverse inflammation-driven processes, primarily focusing on heart disease, cancer, and vaccination. He aims to achieve controlled elicitation or suppression of the immune system via the rational design of self-assembling nanostructures that serve as bioresponsive therapeutic delivery systems.
Sarah Sheldon is on the quantum computing research staff at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. She studies quantum control in superconducting quantum computing architectures; designs new methods of characterizing quantum systems; reduces error rates on quantum gates, the primitive operations that build quantum circuits; and verifies multi-qubit experiments for noisy intermediate scaling quantum computers.
Grant Stokes is the head of the Space Systems and Technology Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he is responsible for the Laboratory’s programs in space control and electro-optical systems and technology.
Iris Tien is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where her research is in risk and reliability of civil infrastructure systems related to interdependent critical infrastructure systems modeling, structural risk and reliability, and big data analytics for real-time infrastructure assessment. Her research enables the probabilistic assessment of complex infrastructure networks under varying operating and hazard conditions in an environment where information about the system is uncertain and dynamically evolving to improve reliability, resilience, and overall performance.
Andrew Tsourkas is a professor of bioengineering and radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he combines chemistry, nanotechnology, and protein engineering to design and create novel targeted imaging and therapeutic agents that improve cancer detection and treatment.
Josh Vertalka is the chief data scientist at Resilient Solutions 21, where he develops purpose-built real-world applications of cutting-edge data science methods and theories to solve complex urban problems in practical and actionable terms. He also oversees the connection between research methods and the advancement of extreme event theories.
Jennifer West is the Fitzpatrick Family University Professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, where she focuses on the design of novel bio-functional materials for medical applications ranging from coronary artery bypass grafting to cancer therapy. This includes research in tissue engineering, where synthetic polymer design can mimic functions of the natural extracellular matrix, thus providing cues to support and guide the formation of new tissues in the laboratory to use for transplantation.
Norman Yao is an assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Employing a variety of theoretical, numerical, and experimental tools, his research interests lie at the interface among atomic, molecular, and optical physics, condensed matter, and quantum information science.
