T. Ravichandran

Irene and Robert Bozzone '55 Distinguished Professor
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.

Susan Smith

Sr. Lecturer
Interdisciplinary work is at the core of Susan Smith’s research and educational interests.  Her undergraduate work in Biology serves as a basis for her research in Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Race and Biomedical Ethics. Her master’s work at the University of Guelph was completed under the direction of Michael Ruse and focused on the nature of human action with respect to free will and determinism.  At the University at Buffalo, working with Jorge J.E. Garcia, she explored the metaphysical basis of race with a focus on its intersection with healthcare.Dr. Smith’s current work explores the ethical issues related to genetic testing and, specifically, informed consent.  She is also actively investigating the perpetuation of racial disparities in medicine and medical research and solutions for their elimination. Additionally, she continues to explore ethical issues with data privacy and algorithmic bias. Before coming to RPI, Dr. Smith taught at Mercyhurst University, Canisius College, and the University at Buffalo.  She has taught courses in Biomedical Ethics, Research Ethics, Philosophy of Human Nature and Science, Technology and Human Values.  Teaching has been a passion for her since she received her undergraduate degree in Education from the University of Windsor.  Dr. Smith encourages students to critically examine their own beliefs and to attempt to create rational defenses for those beliefs.  Dr. Smith was selected by the graduating class of 2021 as one of four professors at Rensselaer to present a "Last Lecture" as somemone who had a last positive impact on their undergraduate experience. She was the recipient of the 2022 Teaching Excellence Award for the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Rensselaer.Prior to her arrival at Rensselaer, Smith was the Director of the Social Science Interdisciplinary Degree Programs at the University at Buffalo and served on the advisory board of the University at Buffalo Genomics, Education and the Microbiome (GEM) Community of Excellence. 

Stanley Dunn

Professor Emeritus
Dunn joined Rensselaer in 2008 as Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Education and full Professor in the School of Engineering. Dunn’s experience includes developing university-wide initiatives in such areas as packaging engineering, water resource management, and homeland security. He also has extensive experience building academic programs, including overseeing the country’s first engineering-based clinical training program in prosthetics and orthotics. Dunn has mentored 14 Ph.D. students, 23 M.S. students, and many undergraduate students. These students have come from biomedical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, computer science, mathematics, dentistry, as well as the M.D./Ph.D. program. The author of three books and 150 papers on different subjects including digital subtraction radiography, Dunn is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Applied Packaging Research, and has served as an editor and officer of several journals and professional organizations.

Sibel Adali

Associate Dean of Science for Research and Graduate Studies
Sibel Adali is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which she joined in 1996 after obtaining her PhD from the University of Maryland. Her work concentrates on cross-cutting problems related to trust, information processing and retrieval, and social networks. She has worked as the ARL-lead Collaborative Technology Alliance (CTA) wide Trust Coordinator and the Social and Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) Associate Director. She is the author of the book "Modeling Trust Context in Networks", which was published by Springer in 2013. At Rensselaer, Adali served as the Associate Head and Graduate Program Director of the Computer Science Department 2015-2018. She currently serves as the Associate Dean of Science for Research and Graduate Studies. She teaches the introductory problem solving course in Computer Science as well as courses in databases. In 2015, Adali received the Trustees' Outstanding Teacher Award, the highest teaching award given by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  

Shekhar Garde

Dean of School of Engineering, Elaine and Jack S. Parker Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering
Shekhar Garde is the Dean of Engineering and the Elaine S. and Jack S. Parker Chaired Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He received his bachelor's (University of Bombay, 1992) and PhD (University of Delaware, 1997) degrees in chemical engineering and was a director's fellow at Los Alamos National Labs (1997-1999), before joining Rensselaer in 1999.  His research focuses on understanding the role of water in biological interactions.  He has published over 100 papers (cited 12,000+ times) and presented 135 invited talks at leading universities and conferences. He won the NSF CAREER Award (2001), Rensselaer Early Career Award (2004), and was the 2011 Robert W. Vaughan Lecturer at CalTech. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (2014) and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2015). Garde co-leads the award-winning Molecularium Project, which has produced digital dome and IMAX movies and a web-based gaming portal for children. In 2011, Garde was honored with the Explore-Discover-Imagine Award by the Children's Museum of Science and Technology in the Capital District (Albany), NY.

Shaowu Pan

Assistant Professor
Shaowu Pan received his B.E. in Aerospace Engineering and B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Beihang University, China in 2013. After that, he received M.S. and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in April 2021. Then he started as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the AI Institute in Dynamic Systems at the University of Washington, Seattle from 2021 to 2022. His research interests lie in the intersection between computational fluid dynamics, data-driven modeling of complex systems, scientific machine learning, and dynamical systems. He has published his work in journals ranging from Journal of Machine Learning Research, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, AIAA Journal, SIAM Applied Dynamical Systems, Chaos, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Computational Mechanics, etc. 

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) Artificial Intelligence Markets focusing on Big-Tech partnerships, antitrust and regulations; (2) Biopharmaceuticals markets focusing on innovation, pricing and FDA regulations; and (3) Antitrust laws and enforcement. Currently he teaches the course "Economics of Biotechnology and Medical Innovations."Before joining Rensselaer in 2016, he was the Mary and Richard 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. His recent writing on "Big Tech Investments in AI Startups Do Not Raise Competitive Red Flags" appeared in the Big Tech-AI Investment Symposium published by ProMarket (University of Chicago). 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, Seoul, New Delhi, Amsterdam, 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 & paperboard.. 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.He worked as an expert with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Paris, 2005-2012) on developing the Competition Assessment Toolkit which served as an international framework adopted by many countries for identifying and revising regulations and their impact on competition. As part of this OECD initiative, Dr. Ghosal traveled to several countries to present training workshops to national government agencies, public policy and regulatory professionals to help with implementation of the framework.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.

Kristin Bennett

Associate Director of the IDEA
Dr. Bennett brings over 30 years of research experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and their applications to problems in health, science, and industry. Her research specialty is working with people with problems and data and then developing novel machine learning and AI models and work flows to solve their problems. She serves as Associate Director of Institute of Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA). Her role is to both lead major data science research projects, develop and lead teams for new research projects, and create data science research education programs. Her work with industry includes projects with GE (PI) and Global Foundries (co-Pi). She have been PI or Co-Pi on many data science research projects funded by GE (PI), Global Foundries (co-PI), Albany Capital District Physicians Health Plan (HMO, PI), IBM (co-PI), United Health Foundation/OPTUM Labs (PI), HBI Solutions (Healthcare Data Science, PI), Albany Medical Center (Hospital, PI), Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (co-PI), NIH (PI and co-PI) and NSF (PI and co-PI). She has worked with electronic medical records and public health data to develop solutions to problems such as Treatment Effect Estimation, Emergency Department Readmission, Critical Care Management, and High Cost Medicare Patients. She works in emerging research areas such as health equity, ML fairness, and synthetic health data. She has been program chair and area chair, PC member and/or organizer for conferences in machine learning, data mining, and operations research including KDD, AAAI, Intl. Conf. on Continuous Optimization, International Conference on Machine Learning, NIPS, IEEE Conf. on Data Mining, COLT, INFORMS, and SIAM ICDM. She has over 130 research publications. She has been a plenary speaker at major conferences including AAAI, IJCNN, and IEEE BIBM. She founded and directs the Data INCITE Lab which does novel applied data analytics research. Data INCITE fully integrates education and research. Over 250 undergrad students have done research in Lab on real problems for actual clients resulting in publications and applications. Recent awards from her group include “MortalityMinder” https://mortalityminder.idea.rpi.edu which was a winner in the AHRQ Visualization of Social Determinants of Health Contest, 2019 and Best Student paper at ACM BCB 2021.

Dorit Nevo

Professor, Management Information Systems; Vice Provost and Dean, Graduate Education
Dorit Nevo is a Professor of Management Information Systems at the Lally School of Management. She joined RPI in 2012, and prior to that was an Associate Professor at the Schulich School of Business in Toronto. Professor Nevo obtained her BA and MS in Economics and PhD in Management Information Systems. Since joining RPI, she held the roles of program director for the MS in Business Analytics, Acting Associate Dean for the Lally school of Management, and MS and MBA programs director. Dorit’s research focuses on interactions between computers and their users within the business environment. This work was published in leading academic and business journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Sloan Management Review, and the Wall Street Journal. She also examines how news readers receive the advice of fake news algorithms. This work received media attention from the ACM and IEEE among others. On the teaching front, Dorit mostly teaches Statistics and Data Science at the Lally School of Management. She is the recipient of the RPI Trustees’ Outstanding Teacher Award and the David M. Darrin ’40 Counseling Award in Celebration of CLASS.

Donald Schwendeman

Professor, Director, Center for Modeling, Optimization and Computational Analysis (MOCA)
Dr. Schwendeman received his B.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, and earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) under the supervision of Professor G.B. Whitham, FRS.  Dr. Schwendeman took a one-year postdoctoral research position at Caltech working with Professor H.B. Keller, before joining the faculty in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Rensselaer as an assistant professor in August, 1987.  Dr. Schwendeman received promotions to associate professor with tenure and then professor, and was Head of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, 2012-2024. Dr. Schwendeman is the Director of the Center for Modeling, Optimization, and Computational Analysis (MOCA). Dr. Schwendeman's research focuses on the development and analysis of numerical methods for systems of partial differential equations (PDEs) that arise in applications of science and engineering.  A significant portion of his work has centered around the development of numerical methods for systems of PDEs modeling wave phenomena in reactive and nonreactive flows.  This work has included numerical studies of shock wave focusing and convergence, transonic and hypersonic aerodynamics, and multi-phase and multi-material high-speed reactive flow.  In other work, Dr. Schwendeman has developed a class of new numerical methods for fluid-structure interaction problems and conjugate heat transfer, and he has developed high-order accurate methods for Maxwell's equations and related systems.  All of this work has been in collaboration with researchers at national labs (Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore) and at Rensselaer. Dr. Schwendeman is also actively involved in undergraduate and graduate education and career development.  He has been a leader among the consortium of universities organizing the Mathematical Problems in Industry Workshop (1993-present), and the originator and lead organizer of RPI's Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling Camp (2004-2018).  Dr. Schwendeman has also been an active member of the NSF-funded Research Training Grant (RTG) program in the department, which supports the research and education of several graduate students and postdoctoral research fellows.