Dr. Madhava Syamlal is the founder and CEO. He holds a B.Tech in chemical engineering from IIT (BHU) and MS and Ph.D. from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. He retired from US DOE’s National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) as Senior Fellow for Computational Sciences and Engineering. He made numerous contributions to the theory and numerical techniques of multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the open-source CFD software MFIX, which is used worldwide by industry and academia. He led the development of a co-simulator integrating the commercial process simulator Aspen Plus® and the CFD software FLUENT®. He was the founding Technical Director of the Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative, a $48 million DOE project, which created software tools that are being used to develop low-carbon energy technologies. He served as the principal investigator of the MFIX-Exa project ($13 million) under DOE’s Exascale Computing Project for developing CFD software for exascale supercomputers. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has received several awards, including three R&D 100 awards, DOE Secretary’s Achievement Honor Award, Illinois Tech Alumni Professional Achievement Award, and AIChE’s 2020 Elsevier PTF Award for Lifetime Achievements.

Dr. Sankaran Sundaresan is the Norman John Sollenberger Professor of Engineering and professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton University. He received a B. Tech. degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of technology-Madras (Chennai, India) in 1976 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Houston in 1980. He joined Princeton University in 1980. His research interests center around theory and computational fluid dynamics algorithms with applications to multiphase flow problems that arise in chemical, energy conversion, and pharmaceutical industries and chemical reaction engineering. He has been recognized by Princeton University through the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and an award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the recipient of AIChE’s Richard H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical reaction Engineering, Thomas Baron Award in Fluid-Particle Flow, and the Elsevier Lifetime Achievement Award in Particle Technology. He also holds appointments as Permanent Guest Professor at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany and Distinguished Professor at the Indian Institute of technology-Madras.

Dr. Jeremy Levy is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.  He received an A.B. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1988, and a Ph.D. degree in physics from UC Santa Barbara in 1993.  After a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, he joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1996.  His research interests center around the emerging field of oxide nanoelectronics, experimental and theoretical realizations for quantum computation, semiconductor and oxide spintronics, quantum transport and nanoscale optics, and dynamical phenomena in oxide materials and films.  He is a Class of 2015 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow, a Fellow of the APS and AAAS, a recipient of the 2008 Nano50 Innovator Award, and the NSF Career Award.  He has received the University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor’s Distinguished awards for research (2004, 2011) and teaching (2007). He served as the Founding Director of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute from 2012-2022.

Dr. Al Mink works at the intersection of technology and US National Security. He consults for the US Air Force and defense contractors. He also teaches a graduate course for American University on technology strategy for business.

Al earned his Bachelor’s degree in computer science from MIT, his Master’s in business from Carnegie-Mellon, and a recent Ph.D. in Cloud Computing from George Mason University. Al is a former combat pilot and technology leader in US Air Force, having retired at the rank of Colonel after 22 years of service. In the private sector, he ran a $100M business unit. He has also held the positions of COO and CTO at a leading technology organization. He’s on the board of AFCEA, the professional association for technology in national security; is a co-founder of FAST ROPE and is a life member of the Air Force Association. 

Al is engaged in the entrepreneur ecosystem, having served as the regional chair and then at large member of the global MIT Enterprise Forum. He sits on the Board of Advisors for several startups, reviews SBIR I & II proposals for the National Science Foundation and has led expert panels on startup funding.

Dr. Peyman Givi is a Distinguished Professor and the James T. MacLeod Chair of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously, he held the rank of University Distinguished Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he received the Professor of the Year Award from Tau Beta Pi (2002). Dr. Givi has had frequent visiting appointments at the NASA Langley & Glenn (Lewis) centers and received NASA's Public Service Medal (2005). He is among the first 15 engineering faculty nationwide who received the White House Presidential Faculty Fellowship from President George Bush. He also received the Young Investigator Award of the Office of Naval Research and the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation. Dr. Givi is on the Editorial Boards of the AIAA Journal, Computers & Fluids, Journal of Applied Fluid Mechanics, and a past advisory board member of Progress in Energy and Combustion Science. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was named a Distinguished Alumnus in 2022, and BE (Summa Cum Laude) from Youngstown State University, where he was named the 2004 Phi Kappa Phi Distinguished Alumnus and the 2012 STEM College Outstanding Alumnus. Dr. Givi has achieved Fellow status in AAAS, AAM, AIAA, APS, ASME, and the Combustion Institute; and was designated ASME's Engineer of the Year 2007 in Pittsburgh.

Dr. S. Subbiah, a veteran in the commercial simulation software industry with over 35 years of experience, has a rich history. After graduating from the Univ. of Delaware with a PhD in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), he joined a small group at Creare Inc. (that would later spin-off to form Fluent Inc.) in developing the Fluent CFD software.  Over the next 17 years, he was one of the key leaders at Fluent Inc., who helped Fluent become the world’s leading CFD software with ~$145M in global revenue from all the major industrial nations.  Dr. Subbiah played key roles in leading product strategy, sales, marketing, customer support, and consulting.  After the sale of Fluent to Ansys Inc. in 2006, he was part of Ansys’ leadership team and led their N. American Sales and Customer Service operations.  Most recently, Dr. Subbiah was the CEO of Zemax Inc., a global optical simulation software company based in Seattle.  Under his leadership, Zemax expanded its global presence, introduced new award-winning products, and grew revenue at double digits annually while increasing profits. After the sale of Zemax in 2021 for $400M, Dr. Subbiah now serves as an advisor, mentor, and Board member to various start-ups.  In addition to his PhD, Dr. Subbiah holds an MSE in Mechanical Engineering from the Univ. of Pennsylvania and a B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.