Role: Executive Committee

Krista Rule Wigginton is a Professor of Environmental Engineering and the Associate Dean for Graduate and Professional Education in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research explores pathogens in the environment, with a focus on innovative detection methods and mechanistic descriptions of how pathogens lose infectivity in natural and engineered system. … Read more

Patricia Raun, co-lead of the COMPASS Center’s Empower Thrust, is a professor of theatre arts at Virginia Tech, where she also serves as the director of the Center for Communicating Science. Among Raun’s honors are a 2024 appointment as Alumni Distinguished Professor, a preeminent faculty position at Virginia Tech recognizing her exceptional teaching, research, and … Read more

Naren Ramakrishnan is the Thomas L. Phillips Professor at Virginia Tech and leads AI & Machine Learning Research for Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus. He is the founding director of the Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics and the Amazon-Virginia Tech Initiative in Efficient and Robust Machine Learning. Naren’s research interests span data science, forecasting, … Read more

Dr. Rajagopalan is the Robert E. Hord Jr. Professor in the Department of Chemical  Engineering at Virginia Tech. She serves as the Program Director for an Interdisciplinary  Graduate Education Program on Computational Tissue Engineering at Virginia Tech.  In 2017, she was elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. In 2010, Dr. … Read more

X.J. Meng is a University Distinguished Professor of Molecular Virology with joint appointments in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. He received his PhD in Immunobiology from Iowa State University (Ames, IA) and completed his postdoctoral training at NIAID, NIH (Bethesda, MD). Meng has been a faculty member … Read more

Dr. Adam Lauring is a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine/Division of Infectious Diseases and the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Michigan. He received his MD and PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle. Dr. Lauring pursued his post-graduate clinical and research training at the University of California, San … Read more

Dr. Anthony Atala the W. Boyce Professor and Chair of the Department of Urology at the Wake Forest School of Medicine and the G. Link Professor and Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. His work focuses on bioprinting and growing human cells, tissues and organs for transplantation and therapy and for developing … Read more