Dr. Tim Lieuwen is the Regents’ Professor, holder of the David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair, and the executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech. His interests lie in the areas of clean energy and propulsion systems, energy policy, acoustics, fluid mechanics, and combustion. He works closely with industry and government, focusing particularly on fundamental problems that arise from development of clean combustion systems or utilization of alternative fuels.

Dr. Lieuwen is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of four major societies. Other national awards include the ASME Westinghouse Gold Medal and AIAA Lawrence Pendray Award. He serves on governing or advisory boards of 3 DOE national labs (ORNL, PNNL, and NREL). He has authored or edited four combustion books, including the textbook Unsteady Combustor Physics, and more than 400 other publications. He has also received five patents, all licensed to industry, and founded and serves as CTO of, TurbineLogic, an analytics firm working in the energy industry. He is a member of the National Petroleum Counsel and is editor-in-chief of an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics book series.

Prof. Jillian Goldfarb received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University in 2004 and Ph.D. from Brown University in 2008, and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Cornell University. Her research tackles issues surrounding energy generation and its impact on the environment. On campus, Prof. Goldfarb is a Fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, the Cornell Institute of Politics and Global Affairs, the Cornell Dairy Center of Excellence, and an Expert in the Cornell Energy Systems Institute. Prof. Goldfarb served as an Associate Principal Editor for the journal Fuel, led the Fall 2022 American Chemical Society Fall National Meeting Theme “Sustainability in a Changing World” and is a member of the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement.

By understanding how pollutants from energy generation impact the environment, and designing new processes to convert renewable sources to energy and materials that remove such pollutants, we can mitigate energy’s impact on the environment while enabling widespread access to modern energy for all. On-going research projects include investigating the conversion of biomass to biofuels via pyrolysis and hydrothermal carbonization, fabricating sustainable materials for water treatment, and designing slow-release soil amendments from waste biomass. To complement these efforts, she and her collaborators explore various aspects of public understanding of science to better design public outreach campaigns to garner support for renewable energy policies and combat bias and hesitancy in trusting scientists. Her work appears in top journals such as Energy Conversion and Management, Journal of Cleaner Production, New England Journal of Medicine, Energy Policy, Green Chemistry, and beyond.

Dr. Sili Deng received her doctoral degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. After being a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, she joined MIT as an assistant professor in 2019. Dr. Deng received the Bernard Lewis Fellowship from the Combustion Institute in 2016, Frontiers of Engineering Award from the US National Academy of Engineering in 2021, and NSF CAREER Award in 2022.

Dr. Deng leads the Deng Energy and Nanotechnology Group at MIT. The group focuses on energy conversion and storage, specifically, the fundamental understanding of combustion and emissions, scientific machine learning for reacting flows, carbon-neutral energetic materials, and flame synthesis of materials for catalysis and energy storage.  

Dr. Sibendu Som is the Interim Director for the Center for Advanced Propulsion and Power (CAPP) in the Transportation and Power Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory. From 2017 to 2021, he was manager of the Multi-physics Computational Research section. That team develops predictive simulation capabilities for industry in order to develop advanced high-efficiency, low-emission propulsion systems. Several computational models that the team developed are part of commercial computational codes. The group leverages the latest developments in high-performance computing (HPC) and machine learning (ML) to accelerate these high-fidelity simulations.

Dr. Som earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009. Dr. Som has more than a decade of experience in multi-physics and multi-scale modeling of piston engines and gas turbines using HPC systems and artificial intelligence/ML tools. His current research focuses on the development of two-phase models and reacting flow models for propulsion and manufacturing applications. He also manages a large group of scientists working on topics ranging from piston engines, gas turbines, energy storage, offshore wind, and others.

Among many accolades, Dr. Som is an SAE Fellow, recipient of the ASME George Westinghouse silver medal for eminent achievement and distinguished service, and a Recipient of the University of Illinois at Chicago ​“Distinguished Alumni Award”.