Rebecca Willett is a Worah Family Professor in the Wallman Society of Fellows and the Departments of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. She completed her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in 2005 and was an Assistant then tenured Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University from 2005 to 2013. She was an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Harvey D. Spangler Faculty Scholar, and Fellow of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2013 to 2018.  Prof. Willett received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007, was a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group 2007-2011, and received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award in 2010. Prof. Willett has also held visiting researcher positions at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA in 2004, the University of Wisconsin-Madison 2003-2005, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in 2003, and the Applied Science Research and Development Laboratory at GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare) in 2002. Her research interests include network and imaging science with applications in medical imaging, wireless sensor networks, astronomy, and social networks. She is also an instructor for FEMMES (Females Excelling More in Math Engineering and Science; news article here) and a local exhibit leader for Sally Ride Festivals. She was a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Rice University Presidential Scholarship, the Society of Women Engineers Caterpillar Scholarship, and the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship.

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Anima Anandkumar is Bren Professor at Caltech and Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA. She received her B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She did her postdoctoral research at MIT and an assistant professorship at the University of California Irvine. She has received several honors such as the IEEE fellowship, Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, and Faculty Fellowships from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Adobe. She is part of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network.

Dr. Juan de Pablo is the inaugural Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology, and the Executive Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. He leads cross-University, multidisciplinary, and globally focused efforts to accelerate the momentum of NYU’s vast science and technology enterprise for the purposes of solving humanity’s largest challenges. Dovetailing with those efforts, de Pablo steers Tandon’s engineering research and education to play a central role in addressing a multitude of areas, from human health, to advances in materials discovery, to the sustainability of the planet.

Before joining NYU, Dr. de Pablo served as the Executive Vice President for Science, Innovation, National Laboratories, and Global Initiatives at the University of Chicago; the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering; and a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.

A prominent materials scientist and chemical engineer, de Pablo’s research focuses on polymers, biological macromolecules such as proteins and DNA, glasses, and liquid crystals. He is a leader in developing molecular models and advanced computational approaches to elucidate complex molecular processes over wide ranges of length and time scales. He has developed advanced algorithms to design and predict the structure and properties of complex fluids and solids at a molecular level, and has been a pioneer in the use of data-driven machine learning approaches for materials design.

David Miller’s research focuses on answering open questions about the fundamental structure of matter. By studying the quarks and gluons -—the particles that comprise everyday protons and neutrons —produced in the energetic collisions of protons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, Miller conducts measurements using the ATLAS Detector that will seek out the existence of never-before-seen particles, and characterize the particles and forces that we know of with greater precision. Miller’s work into the properties and measurements of the experimental signatures of these quarks and gluons –or jets” –is an integral piece of the puzzle used in the recent discovery of the Higgs bosons, searches for new massive particles that decay into boosted top quarks, as well as the hints that the elusive quark-gluon-plasma may have finally been observed in collisions of lead ions.

Besides studying these phenomena, Miller has worked extensively on the construction and operation of the ATLAS detector, including the calorimeter and tracking systems that allow for these detailed measurements. Upgrades to these systems involving colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory, CERN, and elsewhere present an enormous challenge and a significant amount of research over the next several years. Miller is also working with state-of-the art high-speed electronics for quickly deciphering the data collected by the ATLAS detector.

Miller received his PhD from Stanford University in 2011 and his BA in Physics from the University of Chicago in 2005. He was a McCormick Fellow in the Enrico Fermi Institute from 2011-2013.

Risi Kondor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Statistics, and the Computational and Applied Mathematics Initiative at the University of Chicago. He joined the Flatiron Institute in 2019 as a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Computational Mathematics. His research interests include computational harmonic analysis and machine learning. Kondor holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, an MS in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. He also holds a diploma in Computational Fluid Dynamics from the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics and a diploma in Physics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

Julia Lane is the Executive Director for Research Partnerships & Strategy, responsible for shaping and executing the strategic vision of DSI, building new research partnerships and outreach strategies to foster interdisciplinary collaborations, and ensuring that the University continues to broaden applications of data science and computing approaches.