Dr. Nadim Aziz has served as the South Carolina EPSCoR Director since May 2023, having previously led the program from 2016 until his retirement in 2021. Upon returning to SC EPSCoR, he established the SC EPSCoR Faculty Research Development Academy, which provides training and proposal development support to help faculty prepare competitive NSF submissions. Prior to joining SC EPSCoR, Dr. Aziz was a Professor of Civil Engineering at Clemson University, where he also served as Department Chair, Associate Provost, and Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost.

Kelly Caine is a Professor of Human-Centered Computing at Clemson University where she founded the Humans and Technology Lab (www.hatlab.org) and directs research at the intersection of human-centered computing and cybersecurity. Her work in these areas has been continuously funded by agencies such as the National Science Foundation for more than fifteen years. She is co-author of Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Research and has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers. She and her students have received awards for their collaborative research from the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, the American Public Health Association, and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. In 2024-2025 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Iceland. She serves as the Associate Director of the Human Factors Institute and is key faculty in Clemson’s Cybersecurity Center. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Forbes, Wired, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press.

Bernard “Chip” Cole is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vermont (UVM). He is currently the Director of the Vermont Space Grant Consortium and Vermont EPSCoR, where he manages a wide range of programs that support STEM education and NSF- and NASA-aligned research. His research focuses on statistical methods in biomedicine, with emphasis on applications to clinical oncology and cancer epidemiology. His current work involves novel statistical methods to ascertain complex biomarker/treatment-effectiveness interactions in clinical trials.

Cole is an active collaborating biostatistician at the UVM Cancer Center and the International Breast Cancer Study Group. He served on the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (2013–2017). He previously held faculty appointments at Brown University (1993–1997) and at Dartmouth College (1997–2007), where he was Director of Biostatistics at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center. At UVM, Cole served as Interim Dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences (2009–2013), and as co-director of the Cancer Control and Population Health Sciences research program at the UVM Cancer Center (2014–2019).

Amber Doiron is an Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (UVM). Doiron develops new polymeric biomaterials and nanomaterials to add environmental sensitivity to magnetic resonance contrast agents, sensors, and hydrogel wound dressings. She is the Director of the Biomedical Nanotechnology and Biomaterials Lab and is the Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum Chair at the University of Vermont. She brings a background in chemistry and experience as Chief Scientific Officer and Founder of NanoPulse Biosciences LLC to the design of materials for biomedical applications. 

Doiron is an NSF CAREER Award holder in addition to having been funded by the NIH, NASA, and various foundations. Doiron is also passionate about engineering education and is an active member of ASEE and program evaluator for ABET. She has developed and teaches courses in the topic areas of biomaterials, medical imaging, transport phenomena, and fluid dynamics. She won the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences awards for Excellence in Research in 2025, Professional Service in 2023, and Innovation in Teaching in 2022. 

Josiah Hester is an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing and Computer Science at Georgia Tech, where he leads the Ka Moamoa Lab and directs research at the intersection of sustainable computing, embedded systems, and resilient cyberinfrastructure. His work focuses on battery-free and energy-harvesting computing systems for applications in sustainability, healthcare, and environmental sensing, including pioneering advances in intermittent computing and the “Internet of Batteryless Things.” His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, NIH, ARPA-H, and the Department of Defense. In 2025, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest U.S. government honor for early-career scientists and engineers. His work has been featured in Communications of the ACM, Scientific American, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, and Popular Science.

Vuk Marojevic is the Paul B Jacob Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University. He graduated from University of Hannover, Germany, and Barcelona Tech (UPC), Spain, with an MS and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. His research interests include mobile communications, software radios, spectrum sharing, wireless testbeds and testing, and wireless security with application to mission-critical networks, O-RAN, AI-RAN, V2X, and uncrewed aircraft systems. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and the IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine.

Joe Near is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Vermont. His research interests include data privacy, computer security, and programming languages. Joe received his BS in computer science from Indiana University, and his MS and PhD in computer science from MIT.

Joe's research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, IARPA, and Amazon. He has received the NSF CAREER and DARPA Riser awards.

Donna Rizzo is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Vermont, with a joint appointment in Computer Scienc. Her research focuses on developing computational and data-drive methods, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, geostatistics, and optimization, to understand human impacts on coupled natural0human systems and to support decision-making under uncertainty. She directs interdisciplinary collaboration that span, hydrology, water quality, climate-land use interactions, infrastructure resilience, disease transmission and communication science in serious illness care.
 

She has over 25 years of experience in AI, geostatistics, and optimization, and more than 30 years of experience in surface and subsurface system modeling and large-scale data visualization. Since joining UVM in 2002, she and her students have worked across five colleges on multi-scale environmental and societal challenges and co-founded a Vermont-based company to translate research innovations into practice.

Rizzo has served as Principal or Co-Principal Investigator on 48 external awards for more than $16M, and as core faculty or key personnel on large collaborative awards totally more than $116M from sources including NSF, NIH, NOAA, USGS, DARPA, EPA and DOE. She and her students have published more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and multiple book chapters. She has also contributed to public policy as a member of the Vermont Senate’s Artificial Intelligence Tak Force on responsible AI growth and governance.

Sanjib Sur is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2018. His research spans AI for healthcare, mobile and ubiquitous sensing, and millimeter-wave networks, focusing on (i) contactless systems that leverage wireless signals to sense human health, activities, and environments, and (ii) next-generation millimeter-wave network architectures. He has served as PI or Co-PI on several funded projects totaling over $5 million, with sponsors including the NSF and the Office of Naval Research, and has both academic and industrial experience, including research positions at Hewlett-Packard Labs and Texas Instruments. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2022), multiple best-poster awards at ACM HotMobile and UbiComp, and the President of India Gold Medal (2012). At USC, his honors include winning the Provost's Research Competition (2026), the College of Engineering and Computing Young Investigator Award (2024), and the Breakthrough Stars Award (2023). He holds 12 granted US patents, with 9 more pending. He regularly serves on NSF and NIH review panels.

Dr. Ramtin Zand is the Principal Investigator of the Intelligent Circuits, Architectures, and Systems (iCAS) Lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina (USC). His research focuses on physical AI systems, edge computing, neuromorphic computing, and applied AI/ML. Zand’s research is supported by federal agencies including NSF, ONR, ARMY, and AFRL, as well as industry partners such as Intel, AMD, and Juniper Networks.

He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and has received multiple best paper and research awards, including recognitions from ACM GLSVLSI (2018, 2019, 2025, 2026), IEEE ISVLSI (2021), ACM/IEEE DAC (2024, 2025), and IEEE COINS (2025). Dr. Zand is a recipient of the 2024 NSF CAREER Award and the 2024 Young Investigator Research Award from the Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing.