
About Us: People & Culture: Director Bio
Dr. Stephen E. Cross, GTRI Director
Dr. Stephen E. Cross is a vice president of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute. He also holds faculty appointments as a Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and as an Adjunct Professor in the College of Computing. Within Georgia Tech, he serves on the President's Cabinet and on the following Georgia Tech-wide research advisory boards: the Health Systems Institute, Bioinformatics (joint with Emory University), the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, the Strategic Energy Initiative and the Tennenbaum Institute for Enterprise Transformation.
Dr. Cross was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington, D.C. before he joined Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1994. At Carnegie Mellon University, he was the director and CEO of the Software Engineering Institute. While there, he also held a faculty appointment as a Principal Research Scientist in the Institute for Software Research and the Robotics Institute. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2003, Dr. Cross was profiled in BusinessWeek Online in a special issue entitled Gurus of Tomorrow's Tech in 2002.
During his career, Dr. Cross has:
- Published over 60 papers on information technology and technology transition
- Presented invited keynotes at numerous international conferences
- Provided expert testimony to the U.S. Congress on several occasions
Dr. Cross served as a judge for the 2007 Wall Street Journal’s Technology Innovation Awards, which recognize innovations that break with conventional processes and go beyond marginal improvements in existing products and services. He also currently serves on the advisory board for the Alabama A&M Research Institute. In addition, he has chaired and served on advisory boards or study panels for the:
- Air Force Research Laboratory
- Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, where he co-chaired a 2006 study on disruptive innovation
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Defense Science Board
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- National Research Council
- Science Foundation Ireland
Dr. Cross is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and a former editor-in-chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems. He is the associate editor of the Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Systems Management.
The Georgia Legislature created GTRI in 1919 to facilitate industry adoption of leading-edge research. GTRI currently employs a staff of nearly 1,300 in Georgia and 12 additional operating locations throughout the United States and Ireland, with annual research expenditures exceeding $170 million.

