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This summer we have a jam-packed lecture series featuring presenters with wide-ranging expertise in multiple disciplines on Vanderbilt's campus and globally. These exciting talks will provide an excellent opportunity to gain exclusive insight into the projects that we here at VU-ISIS (and other departments) are working on and affiliated with.

2023 SCHEDULE

Dr. William Barbour is research scientist at VU-ISIS. His studies have been interdisciplinary, with a Ph.D. in civil engineering, an M.S. degree in sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems, and a B.S. in Biosystems Engineering. William previously worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and CSX Transportation. He has received funding support from the Roadway Safety Institute, Federal Highway Administration, and Eno Center for Transportation. William was awarded the Top Doctoral Fellow from the Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program in 2020 and Student of the Year from the Roadway Safety Institute in 2017. His career and research interests focus on the application of novel and advanced computational techniques to transportation systems engineering. He has applied these interests in a variety of transportation domains: freight railroad operations, highway traffic, urban mobility, and connected and autonomous vehicle dynamics.

Chandreyee Bhowmick is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University, advised by Prof. Xenofon Koutsoukos. She completed her B.E. degree from Jadavpur University, India and M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, both in Electrical Engineering. Her research focuses on developing resilient algorithms for distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning, federated machine learning and fully distributed peer-to-peer learning. She also has a background in control theory and its applications. Some of her current works are aimed at designing controllers using machine learning techniques. In the summer of 2021, she worked as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon Web Services, focusing on applications of reinforcement learning in supply chain and renewable energy.

Akhilesh is currently an Engineering Graduate Fellow pursuing his PhD in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He is a Teaching Assistant advised by Dr. Aniruddha Gokhale, at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems. His Ph.D. focuses on composition of surrogate models. Akhilesh's primary research area is in control systems design and engineering with applications to various industrial applications. He also considers the application of Reinforcement Learning as one of the possible replacements for various control applications and theories while considering the optimality of the information that are being used for training the RL models.

Gabriel Luis has been the Director of Graduate Recruiting for the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt for almost 4 years, overseeing the recruitment of domestic and international students for undergraduate summer research, Masters and PhD programs in engineering. He has a host of experience in the field domestically and internationally having worked in recruitment, international relations, and teaching prior to joining Vanderbilt. Gabriel is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, English, and Spanish. He received his B.A. from Emory University, and his M.A. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.                 For this session, Gabriel is happy to present to you information on Vanderbilt's Masters and FULLY FUNDED Ph.D. programs, and answer any questions.