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Esma Karagoz is an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she also leads the Computational Systems Engineering Lab (CSEL). Her research is centered around systems engineering,  and multidisciplinary design and optimization, with a strong emphasis on developing sustainable and intelligent systems to enhance competitiveness in modern enterprises. In her research, she utilizes data-driven techniques to understand complex system behavior and improve the decision-making processes throughout the life cycle of systems. 

Dr. Karagoz holds a Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering, and M.S. degrees in aerospace engineering and computational science and engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her B.S. degree in aerospace engineering from the Middle East Technical University. As a graduate researcher at Georgia Tech, she has contributed to several research projects funded by the industry and government on model-based systems engineering and future aircraft concepts. She was also selected as a Rising Star in Aerospace by the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Esma's doctoral dissertation titled "MM-ADM: A Model-Based Approach to Multidisciplinary Design to Support Automated Decision-Making" was conducted in consultation with Prof. Dimitri Mavris, who is the director of Aerospace Systems Design Lab at Georgia Tech.  As part of her thesis work, Esma created a systems engineering methodology that leverages the physics-based multidisciplinary knowledge in semantic modeling, and uses the combined heterogeneous knowledge for decision-making with the help of graph data science approaches.