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 Industrial and Systems Engineering and as an adjunct professor in the College of Computing. In addition, he serves as the executive director of Georgia Tech Ireland and the secretary of the Georgia Tech Applied Research Corporation.

The Georgia Legislature created GTRI in 1919 to facilitate industry adoption of leading-edge research. GTRI currently employs a staff of nearly 1,200 in Georgia and 10 additional operating locations throughout the United States and Ireland, with annual research expenditures exceeding $130 million.

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 (USA) 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 International 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.