Esra Büyüktahtakιn Toy, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at Virginia Tech. Dr. Toy’s research focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art in multi-stage stochastic programming with a mix of optimization theory and machine learning algorithms. Dr. Toy’s work has been pioneering epidemics modeling and logistics optimization to tackle epidemics in a variety of contexts, including healthcare, agriculture, and forestry. Examples of applications include infectious diseases that ravage the human body, such as COVID-19, Ebola virus disease (EVD), and HIV, and invasive species that create havoc on forests, such as the emerald ash borer (EAB) in North America and Canada, Zebra Mussels harming native species in Great Lakes, and Sericea Lespedeza damaging agricultural products in the Great Plains. Her work helped policymakers optimize resource allocation strategies to fight harmful invasions impacting human and environmental health. Dr. Toy is the recipient of the 2016 NSF CAREER Award. She has also been awarded various projects by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Forest Service, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center (MAISRC). She has published her research in 44 flagship journals in Operations Research and ISE. She has served as the President-Elect and President of INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) and is the associate editor for the Springer Nature Operations Research Forum journal.

Kerrie Douglas is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She holds a PhD in Educational Psychology and Masters of Science in Education from Purdue. She is the lead of the Science and Ethics for Educational Data (SEED) lab. Her research is focused on improving methods of evaluation and assessment in large-scale engineering learning contexts. She works on problems of validity, equity and how to make inferences about diverse groups of learners. She has been Primary Investigator or Co-PI on more than $24 million of external research awards. In 2020, she received an NSF RAPID award to study engineering instructional decisions and how students were supported during the time of emergency remote instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since May of 2020, she’s been invited to speak at 14 national and international events about how to support and assess students in online learning environments. In 2021, she received the NSF Early CAREER award to study improving the fairness of assessment in engineering classrooms.

Dr. Rausch is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches aerospace engineering & biomedical engineering. His research focuses broadly on understanding soft tissue disease with specific interest in cardiovascular disease. In 2020, he won the NSF CAREER award that has enabled him and his students to study blood clot mechanics and to further their outreach efforts. His research and educational efforts are also currently supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Naval Research.