Dr. Astrid Layton is an assistant professor and Donna Walker Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M University in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. She was elected to serve as member and chair of ASME’s Design Theory and Methodology technical committee. She is also a guest editor for IEEE’s Open Journal of Systems Engineering. She is the recipient of several awards, including a 2021 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers & Information in Engineering (IDETC-CIE) best paper award. Dr. Layton research focuses on bio-inspired systems design, using biological ecosystems as inspiration for achieving sustainability and resilience in the design of complex human networks/systems/systems of systems.