Carolyn Seepersad, PhD

Carolyn Conner Seepersad is the Carolyn J. Greer Centennial Professor and Woodruff Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where her research on additive manufacturing and topology-based design has contributed to how engineers think about the relationship between manufacturing constraints and structural performance. Seepersad grew up in Valley Fork, W.Va., earned her B.S. in mechanical engineering at West Virginia University in 1996, and then attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy, politics, and economics in 1998. She completed her doctoral degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech in 2004, where her dissertation introduced methods for robust topological design exploration with applications to materials design. After 18 years as a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin — where she founded the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Design Innovation — she returned to Georgia Tech in 2023 as a Woodruff Professor and was named Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, effective Jan. 1, 2026. She serves as editor-in-chief of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design and has received the ASME Design Automation Award and multiple teaching honors.