Dr. Ameres returned to RPI after a successful career in industry developing multimedia tools and technology in a number of fields. He has developed groundbreaking MIDI and music software, tools for game developers as well as video and audio compression and streaming technology (including over a dozen patents now held by Google) that has become the format of choice on many of the most popular video platforms on the internet. Ameres completed his M.S. and Ph.D. at RPI while working as Sr Research Engineer at Rensselaer's Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) where he and collaborators developed "The Campfire", a novel, immersive and interactive visualization system allowing for a unique form of "spatialization" of complex data. He continues to develop applications for The Campfire as an affiliate of Rensselaer's Institute for Data Exploration and Analytics (IDEA). Fun facts: Ameres' family connection to RPI goes back to the class of 1918 and includes 6 alumni of the Institute (so far)! Coincidentally, Ameres' high school best friend is a direct descendent of none other than Stephen Van Rensselaer himself!

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.

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.

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.

Deborah McGuinness is a leading expert in knowledge representation and reasoning languages and systems and has worked in ontology creation and evolution environments for over 20 years. Most recently, McGuinness is best known for her leadership role in semantic web research, and for her work on explanation, trust, and applications of semantic web technology, particularly for scientific applications. “I am interested in making smart systems that help people and machines function better,” said McGuinness. “My slant on this work is to research, develop, and use semantic technologies that allow people and machines to represent, reason with, visualize, and explain information in ways that support understanding and (re)use.   My application areas cover a wide range of domain areas, but often in earth and space science informatics and health informatics.”

Curt Breneman was born in Santa Monica, California in 1956, and went on to earn a B.S. in Chemistry at UCLA in 1980 followed by a Ph.D. in Chemistry at UC Santa Barbara (with an emphasis on Physical Organic and Computational Chemistry) in 1987. Following two years of post-doctoral research at Yale University, Dr. Breneman joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and began a program in molecular recognition and computational chemistry based on his concept of "Transferable Atom Equivalents", or TAEs, as building blocks for describing the electronic and reactive character of molecules. Dr. Breneman currently holds the rank of Full Professor in the RPI Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and is the Director of the NIH RECCR Center. He later served as Head of the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology and now as Dean of the School of Science. The Breneman research group primarily specializes in the development of new molecular property descriptors and machine learning methods that can be applied to a diverse set of physical and biochemical problems. Of paramount interest are methods that can increase the information content of molecular descriptors, and machine learning techniques that can exploit this data for the creation of fully validated, predictive property models. Current application areas include pharmaceutical ADME prediction, virtual high-throughput screening of drug candidates, protein chromatography modeling (HIC and ion-exchange), as well as polymer property prediction.

Chris Carothers is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interest are in massively parallel systems focusing on modeling and simulation systems of all sorts. Prof. Carothers is an NSF CAREER award winner and is currently active in the DOE Exascale Co-Design Program associated with designs for next generation exascale storage systems as well as the NSF PetaApps Program, and the Army Research Center's Mobile Network Modeling Institute

I am a Professor in the Department of Computer Science with a courtesy appointment in ECSE Department. I have been serving as the founding Director of Data Science Research Center, and Associated Director of IDEA at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. I received MS. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, both from Columbia University , in 1987 and 1994, respectively. Before joining RPI, I was a Member of the Technical Staff at the Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. My current research interests include applied machine learning in bioinformatics, medical informatics, and cyber security. I am a Fellow of the IEEE, a Senior Member of ACM, and a member of AAA.

Dr. Boleslaw K. Szymanski is the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Director of the ARL Social and Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from National Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, in 1976. Dr. Szymanski published over four hundred scientific articles. He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Science in Poland, an IEEE Fellow and a member of the IEEE Computer Society, and Association for Computing Machinery for which he was National Lecturer. He received the Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award in 2003 and the Wilkes Medal of British Computer Society in 2009. His research interests cover the broad area of network science with current focus on social and computer networks.