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 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, and Associate Dean of Science for Research and Graduate Studies 2018-2026. 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 the RPI faculty, and the Darrin Counseling Award, the highest teaching and mentoring award given by the RPI students.

Shekhar Garde is the Thomas R. Farino Jr. ’67 and Patricia E. Farino Dean of the School of Engineering and the Elaine S. and Jack S. Parker Chaired Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering 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. At RPI he was promoted to full Professor and named Elaine and Jack Parker Endowed Chair in Engineering in 2006, appointed Department Head of the Howard P. Isermann Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in 2007, and named Dean of Engineering in 2014. His research focuses on understanding the role of water in biological interactions.  He has published over 100 papers (cited 12,500+ times) and presented 150 invited talks at leading universities and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation NSF CAREER Award, Rensselaer Early Career Award, and was the 2011 Robert W. Vaughan Lecturer at CalTech. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 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.

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.

Dr. Karyn Rogers joined the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2013 after serving as a Research Scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, and a Deep Ocean Exploration Institute Postdoctoral Scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Dr. Rogers completed her PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, with previous degrees awarded from Stanford University (M.S. 2001) and Harvard University (A.B. 1996). Dr. Rogers is a member of the New York Center for Astrobiology (NYCA) and the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA). Dr. Rogers’ research focuses on the relationships between microbial communities and environmental conditions in extreme ecosystems, and is broadly applied to understanding the nature of the origin of life on Earth, the potential for life throughout the solar system, and the extent of life in modern extreme environments. To advance our understanding of environmental microbiomes in these systems, Dr. Rogers research program includes field research in early Earth and Mars analog environments as well as laboratory experimental studies of microbial behavior under extreme conditions. Additionally, the group is exploring the viability of abiotic synthesis of biomolecules over a range of early Earth conditions. The driving question in this research is how realistic environmental conditions combine to form habitable niches that can both support the early emergence of life as well as the long-term survival of life in these environments. Dr. Rogers’ fieldwork includes several terrestrial hydrothermal systems including Cerro Negro Volcano, Nicaragua, the Vulcano shallow marine hydrothermal system in Italy, and several modern deep-sea mid-ocean ridge environments. These field endeavors are combined with extensive laboratory analytical and experimental techniques to develop a holistic picture of functional microbial ecosystems. More specifically, laboratory techniques include cultivation of extremophiles under high pressure, high temperature, acidic, and anaerobic conditions; a next-generation genomics approach to determine the functional environmental microbiome in extreme systems; geochemical analyses and modeling of environmental and bioenergetics parameters; and the synthesis of these datasets using novel data analytics. Dr. Rogers’ research program currently includes two postdoctoral associates, four graduate students (in both Earth & Environmental Sciences and the Department of Biological Sciences), and several undergraduate researchers. The laboratory is housed in Jonsson-Rowland Science Center and includes a state of the art high-pressure microbial cultivation facility. Additionally, Dr. Rogers is the US Lead for the Deep Carbon Observatory’s (Sloan Foundation) High Pressure Sampling, Transport, and Cultivation User Facility and the co-chair of the UNOLS Deep Submergence Science Committee New User Program. Dr. Rogers teaches courses in Geobiology, Aqueous Geochemistry, the Origin of Life, Advanced Geomicrobiology, and Planetary Habitability.

Juergen Hahn is the Director of the Jackson Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in addition to holding appointments in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering. He received his Diploma degree in engineering from RWTH Aachen, Germany, in 1997, and his MS and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Chair for Process Systems Engineering at RWTH Aachen, Germany, before joining the Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2003 and moving to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2012. He served as the Department Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer from 2013-2025. His research interest focuses on computational systems biology with a specific emphasis on data science approaches applied to autism spectrum disorder and he has authored over 170 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Hahn is a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship (1995/96), received the Best Referee Award for 2004 from the Journal of Process Control, the CPC 7 Outstanding Contributed Paper Award in 2006, was named Outstanding Reviewer by the journal Automatica in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2010 CAST Outstanding Young Researcher, and has been elected as an AIMBE Fellow in 2013, an AIChE Fellow in 2020, and a Fellow of BMES in 2022. He served on the IEEE CSS Board of Governors in 2016, has been a CACHE Trustee since 2014, and is serving as the chair of the BMES Council of Chairs in 2024. He was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2024 and inaugurated in 2025. He is currently serving as deputy editor-in-chief for the Journal of Process Control and as associate editor for the journals Control Engineering Practice, the Journal of Advanced Manufacturing and Processing, and the Journal of Personalized Medicine. 

Dr. José Holguín-Veras is the William H. Hart Professor, and Director of the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment; and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) Center of Excellence on Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his B.Sc. in Civil Engineering, Magna Cum Laude, from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1981; his M.Sc. from the Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1984; and his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in 1996. He has been a faculty at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, City College of New York (1997-2002), and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2002-present). His work has received numerous awards, including the 2013 White House Champion of Change Award for his contributions to freight transportation and disaster response. His research emphasizes the integration, synthesis, and projection of the knowledge that exist in multiple disciplines to produce solutions to the complex and multifaceted problems—which have proven to be too complex to be solved by single-disciplinary approaches—that impact freight transportation and humanitarian logistics. His research taps into the knowledge of social sciences to build more realistic mathematical models of humanitarian logistics, and integrate cutting edge economic principles into freight transportation modeling, so that a complete picture could be developed on the broader impacts of transportation activity on the economy and the environment; and on the most effective ways to conduct post-disaster humanitarian logistics. His research blends field research and measurements, applied and basic research to ensure that theory relates to reality; and, ultimately, to a set of actionable policy recommendations that contribute to the betterment of the economy and society. Current research activities focus on three major areas: freight transportation demand modeling, sustainable freight policy, and humanitarian logistics. His work on freight demand modeling focuses on enhancing the realism of spatial price equilibrium (SPE) models, and development of simplified modeling techniques. His work on sustainable freight policy studies the interactions between the agents (e.g., shippers, carriers, receivers) involved in freight activity, to define ways to exploit these interactions to foster sustainable development and operations. An important third area, of profound human impact, focuses on the development of novel forms of humanitarian logistics. His research group has pioneered the multidisciplinary study of post-disaster humanitarian logistic operations. His research has: identified the key lessons learned from the response to the largest disasters of recent times; translated these lessons into actionable policy recommendations; and shared these suggestions with disaster response agencies. As part of the field work, his research group has conducted detailed analyses of the most prominent disasters of recent times, including: Hurricane Katrina, the Port-au-Prince earthquake, the tornadoes in Joplin and Alabama, Hurricane Irene, and the Tohoku disasters in Japan. His contributions to the solution of regional and national problems are numerous as they span modeling, policy, and research. In particular, his ability to transition research into practice—navigating complex implementation environments—has been recognized with appointments to prestigious positions. As a member of the Board of the New York State Thruway Authority—as the only researcher and Hispanic American in the board’s history—he helps oversee toll policy and the replacement of the $4 billion Tappan Zee Bridge, one of the largest construction projects in the US. He is overseeing all-electronic-toll-collection, toll setting, financing, asset management, and helps the agency reach a higher level of efficiency. His policy contributions also cover disaster response; as a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Disaster Research Roundtable, he advises the federal government in disaster response on the basis of his field research after large disasters and catastrophic events. He has been member of numerous panels for the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other agencies. His research, routinely implemented by practitioners, has been impactful. His work on freight generation and freight trip generation has led to the development of freight trip generation models—to be incorporated in the next edition of the ITE Trip Generation Manual—that are more accurate than any currently available. Equally transformative has been his research on freight tour models, freight origin-destination estimation, and others that are being incorporated into transportation modeling packages such as TRANSCAD, TRANUS, among others. One of his most visible contributions is the NYC off-hour-delivery project, which is having a transformative effect on urban freight policy. This project has blossomed into a potent freight demand management tool that has won the enthusiastic support of the private sector. It is estimated to lead to economic savings of 100-200/million dollars per year, and reductions of: 202.7 metric tons (t)/year of CO, 40t/year of HC, 11.8t/year of NOx, and 69.9 kg/year of PM10). Recognizing these significant impacts, the City of New York adopted OHD as part of its sustainability plan, and the Federal Highway Administration created a program to foster OHD, based on the one pioneered in NYC, and to replicate it in other US cities. Because of its impacts, TIME magazine identified off-hour deliveries as one of the “10 Ideas that Make a Difference” in traffic congestion. His leadership positions include: President of the Scientific Committee of the Pan-American Conferences of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, member of the Scientific Committee of the World Conference of Transport Research, Elected Member of the Council for the Association for European Transport, member of the International Organizing Committee of the City Logistics Conferences, member of technical committees at numerous professional organizations, and member of the editorial boards of the leading journals. He has led dozens of technical sessions, and has participated in numerous technical committees at the Transportation Research Board (e.g., Intermodal Freight, Urban Freight, Freight Economics, Freight Planning and Logistics, Road Pricing, Task Force of Freight Demand Modeling), European Transport Conference, World Conference of Transport Research, Pan-American Conference of Transport and Traffic Engineering, and others. He is a member of a number of high level public sector committees and boards. His current appointments include: United States Department of Transportation’s National Freight Advisory Committee (2013-2015), Board of the New York State Thruway Authority (2010-present), National Academy of Sciences’ Disaster Research Roundtable, National Academy of Sciences’ Committee for Review of USDOT Truck Size and Weight Study (2013-2014), Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Core Group on Community Engagement (June 2011-present), Advisory Panel for the NY-NJ-CT-PA Regional Catastrophic Planning Group (March 2010-2013), and Advisory Panel of the Mohawk Corridor Multimodal Transportation Study (2010-2012). The list of awards he has received includes: the 2013 White House Champion of Change Award, CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (2001-2006); the Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award in 1996, from the Council on University Transportation Centers, the Salute to the Scholars Award from the City University of New York (in 2000 and 2001); the 2006 Robert E. Kerker Research Award in recognition of Excellence in Research of Special Importance to Practitioners and Scholars of Public Administration and Policy in New York State; the 2007 School of Engineering Research Award; and a Proclamation from the Council of the City of New York (2001). He is a fellow of: State Academy of Public Administration (2006), International Road Federation (1991), Japanese International Cooperation Agency (1989), and the Organization of American States (1982-1984). According to Google Scholar, he is the most widely published and cited freight researcher in the world. He has more than 150 technical publications in the most prestigious venues, and, reflecting his influence, his work has been cited more than 1,300 times by his peers. He has given 15 plenaries, 40 invited lectures, and hundreds of presentations in professional conferences. As a Principal Investigator (PI), he has managed about $13.4 million in competitively awarded contracts from the most prestigious funding agencies: USDOT ($8.2 million), NSF ($3.9 million), New York and New Jersey State Departments of Transportation ($1.3 million), among others. These projects have focused on freight research ($8.4 million), disaster research ($2.8 million), road pricing ($1.2 million), and others ($1.0 million). As a Co-PI, he has worked on about $10 million in projects. He has extensive professional experience in both developing and developed countries. His professional experience includes the analysis of the intermodal alternatives for the trans-isthmian corridor that runs parallel to the Panama Canal, and the development of numerous national and regional transportation plans in Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and other countries. He has been consultant in transportation planning, modeling, and economics for international companies and financial institutions, such as The World Bank, United Nations, Inter-American Development Bank, among many others.

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.

Dr. Johnson Samuel is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He is also the founding director of the Center for Smart Convergent Manufacturing Systems, a New York State-designated Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) established in July 2025. Dr. Samuel’s current research focuses on convergent manufacturing, robotic material processing, and smart manufacturing systems. His work is supported by a range of federal, state, and industry sponsors, including the U.S. National Science Foundation, Army Research Lab, NASA, DARPA, Boeing, the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute, CESMII, Empire State Development, and NYSERDA. Since joining RPI in Spring 2011, he has supervised 10 Ph.D., 7 M.S., and 34 M.Eng. students. His team has published in top-tier journals such as Nature Communications, Nano Energy, Carbon, Additive Manufacturing, Journal of Physical Chemistry C, Applied Physics Reviews, ASME Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, and the SME Journal of Manufacturing Processes. His research contributions have been recognized with several honors, including the ASME Richard Skalak Award - Bioengineering Division (2024), US National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2014), Outstanding Young Alumni Award from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2016), and the Rensselaer School of Engineering Research Excellence Award (2016). Dr. Samuel is deeply committed to educating and mentoring the next generation of U.S. manufacturing leaders. His education efforts have been recognized with the David M. Darrin '40 Counseling Award (2025), Rensselaer Class of 1951 Outstanding Teaching Award (2014), and School of Engineering’s Education Innovation Award (2015). Dr. Samuel has held multiple leadership roles within ASME’s Manufacturing Engineering Division (MED) and NAMRI/SME. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of ASME MED (2023–2028). Previous roles include Technical Program Chair of the 2017 ASME Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference and Chair of MED’s Manufacturing Equipment Technical Committee. At NAMRI/SME, he chaired the Scientific Committee for the Manufacturing Education, Workforce Development, and Outreach Track. He has also served as Associate Editor for leading journals, including the Journal of Manufacturing Processes (SME), ASME Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, and Journal of Machining Science and Technology.

Dr. Lin joined the Rensselaer faculty as an Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2017. Her research interests include topics in Health Economics, Industrial Organization, and Applied Econometrics.  She currently focuses on issues related to health information technology (IT) adoption, as well as how health IT impacts hospital financial and quality performance.