Gisele Bennett

Gisele Welch Bennett is an American professor of electrical engineering and Senior Vice President For Strategic And Research Initiatives at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, Dr. Bennett was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Director of the GTRI Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). She also founded the Logistics and Maintenance Applied Research Center (LandMARC) at GTRI.

Bennett holds a 1987 B.S. and a 1989 M.S. from the College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida and a 1995 Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, all in electrical engineering.

After earning her Ph.D., Bennett began working at GTRI as a research scientist in 1996 and as a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1997. In 2000, she founded the Logistics and Maintenance Applied Research Center (LandMARC) and is currently its director. Bennett became the director of the GTRI Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory in 2005. In 2014, she was named an Optical Society of America fellow for 2015.

Bennett is a member of the Army Science Board. She is a Fellow in The Optical Society (OSA) and International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). She has held officer positions in OSA and IEEE and serves in a variety of professional activities involving optical engineering research. She has been a topical editor and has served as a feature editor for Applied Optics and is a visiting lecturer for SPIE and OSA.

Bennett has served as a research proposal reviewer for the National Institute of Health and National Science Foundation and a reviewer for numerous referred journals. She is one of the first 10 Fellows chosen for Georgia Tech’s University Leadership program. In 2017, she won the Progress and Service Award for Sustained Impact in Administration from the Georgia Tech Research Corporation.

• 2015, Fellow, The Optical Society
• 2015, Fellow, International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE)