Jonathan Dordick

Vice President, Strategic Alliances and Translation, Institute Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Biological Sciences
Jonathan S. Dordick, Ph.D., is Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with joint appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences.He received his B.A. degree in Biochemistry and Chemistry from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. in Biochemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At Rensselaer, he served as the Vice President for Research, the Director of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, and Department Chair. He was the founding Co-Director of the Rensselaer-Mount Sinai Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine. Prior to joining Rensselaer, he was Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at the University of Iowa, where he also served as the founding Associate Director of the Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing. He has served the biochemical engineering community as a previous chairman of the Biotechnology Division of the American Chemical Society and as an editor of Biotechnology & Bioengineering. Dr. Dordick has made foundational contributions to enzyme technology, microscale cell culture engineering, drug discovery and human toxicology, and biomanufacturing. He pioneered the development of enzymatic and chemoenzymatic methods for new materials synthesis, initiated the field of molecular bioprocessing, which combines biocatalytic molecular diversity and in vitro metabolic pathway engineering with high-throughput and high-content microfluidic- and microarray-based tools to generate biologically active compounds, and greatly expanded a fundamental understanding of enzymatic catalysis in abiotic environments critical for chemical and pharmaceutical processing. Finally, he has used biomolecular discovery and engineering to address clinical translation in areas of infectious and neurological diseases, anticoagulant therapy, and highly sensitive point-of-care biosensors based on CRISPR technology. Dr. Dordick has received numerous awards and honors, including election to the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Inventors, and receipt of the DIC Award for Excellence in Biochemical Engineering and James E. Bailey Award, both of the Society of Biological Engineering, Amgen Award in Biochemical and Molecular Engineering, AIChE Food, Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering Award, ACS-BIOT Marvin J. Johnson Award, ACS-BIOT Elmer Gaden Award, and International Enzyme Engineering Award. He is Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers. Dr. Dordick has cofounded several companies, including EnzyMed, Solidus Biosciences, Inc., Redpin Therapeutics, SynAppBio, and Lavaage, Inc. He has also served on multiple White House-sponsored panels and committees in biomanufacturing. Dr. Dordick has published over 430 papers and is an inventor/co-inventor on over 50 patents and patent applications.

Jonas Braasch

Professor and Associate Director for Research, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)
Jonas Braasch is a Professor at the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and teaches in the Graduate Program in Architectural Acoustics. His research interests span collaborative virtual reality systems, binaural hearing, auditory modeling, multimodal integration, sensory substitution devices, aural architecture and creative processes in music improvisation. For his work, he has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, DFG (German Science Foundation), the European Research Council, New York State Council on the Arts, the Christopher and Dana Reeve and Craig H. Neilsen Foundations. He obtained a master’s degree from Dortmund University (Germany, 1998) in Physics and two Ph.D. degrees from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (2001, 2004) in Electrical Engineering/Information Science and Musicology. As a soprano saxophonist, he has worked with Curtis Bahn, Chris Chafe, Stuart Dempster, Mark Dresser, Zach Layton, Francisco Lopez, Pauline Oliveros, and Doug van Nort – among others. Within his saxophone practice, Jonas Braasch developed his horn of sounds concept, which is the first method for wind instruments to use different sound generators to create a palette of sounds and styles using one main instrument to achieve an enhanced awareness of internal diversityJonas Braasch is an acoustician, musicologist, and sound artist who teaches courses in Acoustics, Music, and the Doctoral Seminar at the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He obtained a master's degree from Dortmund University (Germany, 1998) in Physics and two PhD degrees from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (2001, 2004) in Electrical Engineering/Information Science and Musicology. Mr. Braasch is the co-founder and director of the Communication Acoustics and Aural Architecture Research Laboratory (CA3RL) which is part of RPI's Architectural Acoustics Program. His research interests include Binaural Hearing, Multi-channel Audio Technology, Telematic Music Systems, Perceptual Audio/Visual Integration, Intelligent Systems, and Musical Acoustics. Jonas Braasch (co-)authored more than 60 journal and conference papers and 3 monographs. For his work, he has received funding from the NSF, NSERC, DFG (German Science Foundation), and NYSCA. As a soprano saxophonist and sound artist, he has on-going collaborations with Curtis Bahn, Chris Chafe, Michael Century, Mark Dresser, Pauline Oliveros, Doug van Nort, and Sarah Weaver - among others. In 2006, he has been awarded with the Lothar-Cremer Prize, the highest recognition of the German Acoustical Society for young investigators.

Johnson Samuel

Associate Professor
Dr. Johnson Samuel has been serving as a faculty in the mechanical, aerospace and nuclear engineering department of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), since the Spring of 2011. As director of the Nano/Micro-scale Manufacturing and Material Design Lab (NanoM3 Design Lab) at Rensselaer, he leads research and education efforts in the areas of advanced manufacturing and material design. His research has attracted funding from multiple agencies including the National Science Foundation, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Defense Health Program, Army Research Lab, DARPA and The Boeing Company. He is the recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award for his proposal titled “Microstructure-specific machining strategies for bone” (2014), The Outstanding Young Alumni Award, MechSe Dept. Univ. of Illinois- Urbana  Champaign (2016), Rensselaer School of Engineering Research Excellence Award (2016), and the World Economic Forum Young Scientist Cohort (2016) Besides research, Dr.Samuel is also passionate about training and developing the next generation of manufacturing engineers in the US. He was awarded the Rensselaer Class of 1951 Outstanding Teaching Award (2014) and the School Of Engineering Education Innovation Award (2015) in recognition of his manufacturing education efforts at Rensselaer.

Patricia Search

Director, Center for Global Communication+Design and Professor
In her current art work and multimedia research, Patricia Search designs multimedia installations that explore the aesthetics of space, time, and action in computer interface design. “I work with digital media and create interactive installations that highlight ways to use diverse media, exploration, physical interaction, and social discourse to create immersive experiences for online communication,” Search said. “These multisensory environments create perceptual dichotomies that juxtapose realism and fantasy, logic and emotion, continuity and transition. The installations incorporate non-Western perspectives of space, time, and action inspired by indigenous cultures, resulting in innovative ways to use interaction design to define a sense of place. As a result, my research is expanding the syntax of experience design and shaping new dimensions in relational aesthetics through the integration of physical and virtual environments. In these installations, multiple viewers use the interaction with physical and virtual elements, social discourse, and memory to define the aesthetics of the experience and a sense of place.” Patricia Search has had over 40 solo exhibitions and multimedia installations of her art throughout the United States, including 11 in New York City, as well as exhibitions in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany and Taiwan. She has also participated in over 150 group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Greece, China, and Japan. She was awarded a Fellowship in Computer Art from the New York Foundation for the Arts and received a Fulbright Senior Specialists Grant to work on multimedia projects with two universities in Australia. In 2005, she received the Creative Achievement Award from the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA), and in 2010, she was awarded the IVLA James G. Sucy Distinguished Service Award. She was President of IVLA from 2009-2010. She received the best paper award for her research from the World Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, and she received the IVLA Editors’ Choice Award for best papers in 2003 and 2007. Her art has been published in numerous journals and three television documentaries including a PBS documentary. Patricia Search served as Co-Editor of the international Journal of Visual Literacy and was a contributing editor for the International Journal of Learning for two years. She has co-edited five books on visual literacy research. She served on the Board of Directors of the International Visual Literacy Association and the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST).

William Wallace

Professor Emeritus
 He is presently engaged in research on the application of agent based technology to problems in incident management and emergency response, issues in trust and ethical decision making, resilience supply networks, and in studying emergent and improvisational behavior in social media immediately before and following a disaster.  Professor Wallace’s research has been supported by agencies and organizations such as the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (including the U.S, Coast Guard), U.S. Department of Transportation and Army Research Office, and has resulted in over 200 archival publications. He was a member of the National Research Council's Board on Infrastructure and the Built Environment and served on the National Research Council Committee on Social Science Research on Disasters.  Professor Wallace received the International Emergency Management and Engineering Conference Award for Outstanding Long-Term Dedication to the Field of Emergency Management, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Third Millennium Medal and is a Fellow of the IEEE, and received the 2004 INFORMS President’s Award for work that advances the welfare of society. In addition, he was either Project Director or co-Project Director for research that resulted in the ITS-America “Best of ITS” award in the area of Research and Innovation and four project of the year awards from ITS-New York.  

Vivek Ghosal

Department Head of Economics and Virginia and Lloyd W. Rittenhouse Professor
Dr. Ghosal is Professor and Department Head of Economics, and Virginia and Lloyd W. Rittenhouse Chaired Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences. He was the Acting Dean, School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, from January-July 2023. He is an Affiliated Faculty member at Rensselaer's Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), and at the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA).Professor Ghosal's current research and policy interests include: (1) biopharmaceuticals markets focusing on innovation, pricing and FDA regulations; (2) Antitrust laws and enforcement; (3) big data, artificial intelligence and competition law and economics; (4) firm strategy related to innovation, M&As, and pricing; and (5) firms' decision-making under uncertainty. The courses he currently teaches include: (1) Economics of Biotechnology and Medical Innovations; and (2) Economics of Regulations and Firm Strategy.Before joining Rensselaer in 2016, he was the Richard and Mary Inman Chaired Professor at the School of Economics at Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech., he was the Director of the MS and PhD. programs from 2012-2016. Prior to his position at Georgia Tech., he was a Senior Economist at the Economic Analysis Group, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice (1998-2001). In this position, he worked on mergers and acquisitions, horizontal and vertical market power, tying agreements, joint ventures, regulatory reform, and innovation and efficiency. Some of the markets he investigated include electricity, nuclear fuel, natural gas, coal, information technology, radio broadcasting, oilfield drilling services, and postal.Professor Ghosal has published two edited books: The Political Economy of Antitrust (Elsevier, 2007); and Reforming Rules and Regulations: Laws, Institutions and Implementation (MIT Press, 2010). He has published in peer-reviewed journals in Economics, Management, and Law & Economics, including: Review of Economics and Statistics; Journal of Law and Economics; Journal of Industrial Economics; International Journal of Industrial Organization; Research Policy; Small Business Economics; Managerial and Decision Economics; Business Strategy and the Environment; Journal of Competition Law & Economics; Review of Industrial Organization; Review of Law & Economics; Journal of Economics and Business; Illinois Law Review; China Economic Review; and Harvard Public Health Review. His research has been published as book chapters by publishers such as: MIT Press; Stanford University Press; Elsevier Science; Edgar Elgar; Routledge; and Springer.Dr. Ghosal's international appointments have included Visiting Professor (2010-2018) at the European Business School (Wiesbaden, Germany) where he conducted research and lectured on regulations and business strategy, with emphasis on environmental regulations, sustainability, and innovation in the automobile and other manufacturing industries. He was a Visiting Professor (2010-2016) at the joint Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Paris) and Korea Development Institute School of Public Policy and Management (Seoul, South Korea) international program on regulatory reform and competition policy. In this position he provided executive education lectures and workshops to international public policy professionals. On topics related to antitrust, competition law and enforcement, regulations, and mergers and acquisitions, he has delivered executive education lectures in Taipei, Lima, New Delhi, and Tokyo. He has taught Summer graduate school workshops at the University of Amsterdam, Ludwig Maximilians University (Munich), and Central European University (Budapest).Professor Ghosal's grants, contacts and research have included industries such as: automobiles; high-speed rail; healthcare; transportation; information technology; telecommunications and media; energy and electricity; and paper products. His externally funded research grants have included issues related to: regional economic and business development; infrastructure investments; public-private partnerships; impact of environmental regulations; regulatory assessments; and innovation and efficiency. The organizations he has received funding from include: U.S. Department of Transportation; Georgia Department of Transportation; Ragnar Soderberg's Foundation (Sweden); Woodruff Foundation; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Paris); Center for Paper Business and Industry Studies (Georgia Institute of Technology); and Scripps Foundation.Professor Ghosal has been a consultant for international organizations, governments, consulting firms and companies on issues related to antitrust, regulatory reform, business and economic modeling of markets, industry studies, and statistical and econometric modeling. He has provided project and expert reports, and testimony.Dr. Ghosal is member of the Editorial Boards of the journals: Business Strategy and the Environment (Wiley); Review of Industrial Organization (Springer); Journal of Industry Competition and Trade (Springer), Southern Economic Journal (Wiley); and Business Strategy and Development (Wiley).

Tomek Strzalkowski

Professor
Prof. Tomek Strzalkowski research interests span a wide spectrum of human language technology including computational linguistics and sociolinguistics, socio-behavioral computing, interactive information retrieval, question-answering, human-computer dialogue, serious games, social media analytics, formal semantics, and reversible grammars. He has directed research sponsored by IARPA, DARPA, ARL, AFRL, NSF, the European Commission, NSERC, as well as a number of industry-funded projects. He was involved in IBM’s Jeopardy! Challenge in advanced question answering. Dr. Strzalkowski has published over a hundred and fifty scientific papers, and is the editor of several books, including Advances in Open Domain Question Answering. He serves on the Editorial Board of the journal of Natural Language Engineering.   Prior to joining RPI, Dr. Strzalkowski was Professor of Computer Science at SUNY Albany. At SUNY, he was the founding Director of the Institute for Informatics, Logics, and Security Studies with research budget of more than $35 million. He came to SUNY from GE CRD where he was a Natural Language Group Leader and Principal Scientist. At GE, Dr. Strzalkowski directed projects on automated technical manuals, medical informatics, speech recognition, automated summarization, as well as multimedia processing including language and video. Before coming to GE, he was a research faculty at the Courant Institute of New York University, where he worked on applications of natural language processing to information retrieval.   Current projects include research into social dimensions of information spread online, internet ethnography, and building effective AI defenses against disinformation and exploitation of human socio-cognitive vulnerabilities online, including social engineering attacks. Some example projects include: GATOR: The Goal-oriented Autonomous Dialogue System. We develop a new type of human-machine dialogue system that uses deep learning technologies (such as transformers) to learn how to recognize and generate dialogue plans, i.e., semantic and pragmatic structures that represent one party’s goals and intentions, as well as the impact these are having on the other party. Unlike the current transformer-driven chatbots, the core learning is not to transform one language expression (input) into another language expression (response) but instead to construct a response plan that would properly address the plan in the input and the history of interaction. Consequently, the learning process takes three types of information: (1) the input utterance; (2) its semantic-pragmatic plan, i.e., the plan that was used to produce the utterance, and (3) the history of interaction up to this point. Furthermore, the cumulative history of the dialogue is not merely the memory of the utterances exchanged earlier, but it captures, in a condensed semantic form, the evolving state of the parties’ objectives as well as the emerging sociolinguistic behavioral patterns of both (all) parties. Personalized AutoNomous Agents Countering Social Engineering Attacks (PANACEA) protects online users against current and future forms of social engineering. PANACEA serves as an intermediary between attackers (human, automated, hybrid, coordinated) and the potential victim(s) they target. Depending upon the nature and source of communication, PANACEA either handles it autonomously, or allows the user to proceed with an exchange while monitoring the conversation and intervening as needed by (1) inserting or modifying users’ messages, (2) instructing the user how best to respond, while at the same time (3) initiating an investigation to identify the attacker. (DARPA ASED Program) COMETH (Computational Ethnography from Metaphors and Polarized Language). The objective of this project is to develop a methodology and accompanying software tools for constructing dynamic socio-behavioral models of communities based on online content that their members produce. A community can be defined by the set of salient concepts that its members recognize, along with the values they assign to them. The resulting causal models are then applied to derive culturally biased interpretations of novel information by prototyping the process by which such new information is adapted to fit into the community current model. (DARPA UGB) Social Convos: A New Approach to Modeling Information Diffusion in Social Media. In this project, we recast our understanding of all social media as a landscape of collectives, or “convos”: sets of users connected by a common interest in an (possibly evolving) information artifact, such as a repository in GitHub, a subreddit in Reddit or a group of hashtags in Twitter. Convos are represented by the collections of features that capture their internal social dynamics. Furthermore, convos are basis for modeling large and small internet-based communities as “hybrid organisms” that interact in various ways with one another and react collectively to external stimuli, including information and disinformation campaigns. (DARPA SocialSim)

Tianyi Chen

Assistant Professor
Tianyi Chen has been with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as an assistant professor since August 2019. Dr. Chen is the inaugural recipient of IEEE Signal Processing Society Best PhD Dissertation Award in 2020, a recipient of NSF CAREER Award in 2021 and a recipient of Amazon Research Award in 2022. He is also a co-author of the Best Student Paper Award at the NeurIPS Federated Learning Workshop in 2020 and at IEEE ICASSP in 2021. Dr. Chen's current research focuses on theoretical and algorithmic foundations of optimization, machine learning, and statistical signal processing.

T. Ravichandran

Irene and Robert Bozzone '55 Distinguished Chair, Professor of Information Systems, Associate Dean for Research, and Director of the Center for Supply Networks and Analytics
Professor Ravichandran is an associated faculty member in the School of Engineering and a faculty for the IT program in the School of Science. He teaches course in the graduate and doctoral programs at Rensselaer. He periodically teaches some of these courses in top business schools in Asia and Europe and brings a global perspective to his teaching. His long term research interests focuses on digital strategies of firms and the mechanisms through which digitization is transforming firms, markets, supply networks and industries. His research has been funded by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Ministry of Education, Singapore. He has published extensively in leading scholarly journals in Information Systems (Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly; European Journal of Information Systems, Information Technology Management), Decision Sciences (Decision Sciences; Logistics Information Systems) Strategic Management (Organization Science), Technology Management (IEEE Transaction on Engineering Management, Journal of High Technology Management Research,) as well as in leading practitioner journals (Communications of the ACM). His research has won several awards including the 1) Best Paper, IT and Healthcare Track, International Conference in Information Systems, 2019; 2) Best Information Systems Publication in 2010 (Association of Information System); 3) Best Published Paper Award, 2010 (Information Systems Research); 4) Best Paper Award, Software Technology Track (HICSS, 2010); 5) Best Paper Award Honorable Mention (IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2007); 6) Best Academic Paper Award (Second Supply Chain Management Symposium, McMaster University, 2004); 7) Best Paper Award (OCIS Division, Academy of Management, 2001). He has served in editorial roles in premier academic journals: as a Senior Editor of MIS Quarterly and as a Department Editor for IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, as an Associate Editor of both MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research. Prior to joining Rensselaer, Dr. Ravichandran had extensive business experience having served as a Consultant to the Reliance Group, as the Assistant Director of National Productivity Council, India and as a Production Manager in Flakt AB (now Asea Brown Boweri). He has also been a successful entrepreneur; he started, built and ran an IT services firm.