Advisory Board

Dr. Bjorn Birgisson

Chair

School of Environmental, Civil, Agricultural and Mechanical Engineering

Dr. Bjorn Birgisson, joined the University of Georgia (UGA) at the beginning of 2022 as a professor and the Chair of the School of Environmental, Civil, Agricultural and Mechanical Engineering. He is the Georgia Power E-Mobility Distinguished Professor and the Executive Director for the Georgia Network for Electric Mobility.

Prior to joining UGA, he served as the J.L. “Corky Frank/Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC Chair in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University and Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Eminent Professor. He previously served as the Pro Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Aston University in the United Kingdom and as the Vice President for Research as KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden’s premier technical university. He is an International Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, a Fellow of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Engineering Mechanics Institute. He has served as PI/Co-PI on $58 million in competitive research grants. His research focus areas include infrastructure systems and system-of-systems, resilience, future mobility including both autonomous and electric vehicle mobility, and convergent physics assisted artificial intelligence for future asset management.

Dr. Birgisson received his PhD in Civil Engineering in 1996 from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Fred R. Beyette Jr.

Chair

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Fred R. Beyette Jr. received his B.Sc. in 1988, his M.Sc. in 1992 and his Ph.D. in 1995 from Colorado State University.  After a 1 year post-doc at the University of Sheffield, Dr. Beyette joined the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Cincinnati in 1996.  In 2017, Dr. Beyette accepted the position of Founding Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he continues to serve.  Dr. Beyette’s research focuses on the development of mixed technology embedded systems spanning a range of applications from health/wellness to environmental monitoring.  In addition to serving as the Chair of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UGA, Dr. Beyette oversees educational programs that support expertise and workforce development in Electric Mobility.

Dr. Gagan Agrawal

Director

School of Computing

Gagan Agrawal started in July 2023 as the First Director of the School of Computing at University of Georgia. Prior to joining UGA he currently a Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the School of Computer and Cyber Sciences at Augusta University. In his role at Augusta University, he has been responsible for driving the research momentum at the new school, growing its research funding portfolio from under $100,000 to over 10 million in 3 years. At Augusta he was also a program director for PhD and MS programs in the school, core director for the High Performance Computing (HPC) core, and co-chair of the Research Technology Advisory Committee (RTAC). At Augusta University he successfully lead a proposal for an Engine Development Award from NSF’s TIP, one of the first such awards from NSF’s newest directorate.

He received his undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 1991 and MS and PhD degrees from University of Maryland, College Park, in 1994 and 1996, respectively. He served as Assistant Professor in Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) at University of Delaware between 1996 and 2001. Between 2001 and 2019, he served as Associate Professor, Professor, Graduate Director and Interim Department Chair at Ohio State University. He has carried out research in High Performance Computing, Cloud / Grid systems, Scientific Data Management, Data Mining, Social Media Analytics, and lately, Cybersecurity. His work in these areas has resulted in more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, more than 9000 citations, and 35 advised or co-advised students finishing their PhD. He has served as PI or co-PI for 27 different awards from National Science Foundation (NSF) worth nearly 22 million dollars (and PI for 18 awards totaling nearly 11 million dollars). He has also received significant funding from Department of Energy (DOE), National Security Agency (NSA) and others. He has served on the editorial board of four journals and served as program committee co-chair, area chair, or program committee member for many conferences.

Dr. Beshoy Morkos

Director

Manufacturing Optimization, Design, and Engineering-Education Lab (MODEL)

Beshoy Morkos is an associate professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia where he directs MODEL (Manufacturing Optimization, Design, and Engineering Education Lab) Group. His research group currently explores the areas of system design, manufacturing, and their respective education. His system design research focuses on developing computational representation and reasoning support for managing complex system design through the use of Model Based approaches. The goal of Dr. Morkos’ manufacturing research is to fundamentally reframe our understanding and utilization of product and process representations and computational reasoning capabilities to support the development of models which help engineers and project planners intelligently make informed decisions.  On the engineering education front, Dr. Morkos’ research explores means to improve persistence in engineering education by leveraging students’ design experiences. Dr. Morkos’ research is supported by federal [National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR), United States Navy, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)] and industry partners [Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Sun Nuclear, Northrop Grumman, Rockwell Collins, PTC, Alstom].

Dr. Morkos received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University . He graduated with his B.S. and M.S in Mechanical Engineering in from Clemson University. His past work experience includes working at the BMW Information Technology Research Center (ITRC) as a Research Associate and Robert Bosch Corporation as a Manufacturing Engineer.