Laura Cadonati (moderator) is a Professor with the School of Physics, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Sciences and past Director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech. Her research interests include gravitational waves and particle astrophysics, with particular focus on the detection, characterization and astrophysical interpretation of short-duration gravitational wave signals that are produced by cataclysmic astrophysical events such as the collisions of black holes or core collapse supernovae.  She is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and a past member of the Borexino solar neutrino and the DarkSide dark matter collaborations.  Dr. Cadonati was deputy spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and chair of the LIGO Data Analysis Council.  She received her undergraduate degree in Italy, with a Laurea in Physics at the University of Milano, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University. She has been Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  She is aGeneral Councilor and Fellow of the American Physical Society, has chaired the Division of Gravity of the American Physical Society,  and was awarded an NSF Career Award.

Dr. Jennifer Leavey (panelist) is the Assistant Dean for Faculty Mentoring for the Georgia Tech College of Sciences where she has served as a faculty member in the School of Biology since 2005. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia and earned her B.S. from Georgia Tech in 1995 and Ph.D. from Emory in 2001. She is the director of the Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project, an interdisciplinary educational initiative with the goal of recruiting and retaining students in STEM careers through the study of how urban habitats affect honey bee health and how technology can be used to study bees. In her spare time, Jennifer fronts Leucine Zipper and the Zinc Fingers, a band that writes bacterial love songs and punk rock anthems about entropy.

Inna Zakharevich (panelist) was born to a family of mathematicians, and unfortunately has continued the tradition. Her first mathematical talk, at a math circle in senior year, was on Hilbert's third problem, which was solved (by Dehn, in 1901) with the statement that it is impossible to cut apart a cube and make the pieces into a regular tetrahedron. This topic then stuck, and her thesis (and much of her subsequent work) was on that topic. She studies algebraic K-theory, category theory, and occasionally origami at Cornell.

Dr. Corrine Yap (panelist) is a Visiting Assistant Professor with the Georgia Tech School of Mathematics, as well as a postdoctoral fellow with the Algorithms and Randomness Center. Her research focuses on intersections of combinatorics and statistical physics. She received her PhD from Rutgers University in 2023. While a graduate student, she served as the founder and president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) student chapter and chair of the graduate student Liaison Committee. Outside of the department, Corrine is the newly-minted director of MathILy-Er, a summer program for high school students where she teaches primarily discrete math via inquiry-based instruction. She has taught at the sister programs MathILy-Er and MathILy since 2014. In her “spare time,” she travels to math departments around the country to perform her one-woman play Uniform Convergence, which she began writing when she was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College studying mathematics and theater. Her website is https://corrineyap.com/.

Surabhi Sachdev (panelist) is one of the lead analysts looking for gravitational-wave signals in the Advanced LIGO and Virgo data. She is currently co-chairing the compact binary coalescence working group of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. She received her PhD. from CalTech in 2019, after which she was an Eberly post-doctoral fellow at the Penn State University and a postdoc at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She joined the Georgia Tech Physics faculty in 2022. Her research interests lie in multi-messenger astrophysics, stellar astrophysics, cosmology, and science with future gravitational-wave detectors.