Dylan Brewer joined the faculty at the School of Economics in 2019. He received his PhD in Economics with a dual major in Environmental Science and Policy from Michigan State University in May 2019 as well as a Master of Arts degree in Economics from the same institution in 2016. Prior to his graduate studies, Dylan completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in Economics and International Relations at the University of Virginia in 2014. Dylan's research uses the tools of applied econometrics and machine learning to answer questions in energy and environmental economics. He has published research on household energy consumption, the economics of thermostat settings, recycling, electricity demand, machine learning methodology, and air quality among other topics. He teaches courses on environmental economics at the graduate and undergraduate level, and his Principles of Microeconomics course has won awards at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Kelly Comfort received her Ph.D. in comparative literature with a designated emphasis in critical theory from the University of California, Davis. She joined the Georgia Tech faculty as an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the School of Modern Languages in 2005, became Associate Professor in 2012, and Professor in 2023.

A specialist in Latin American literature and transatlantic modernisms, Dr. Comfort's research agenda focuses primarily on the intersections between Latin American modernismo and contemporaneous turn-of-the-century literary movements in Europe such as aestheticism and decadence.

Jenny became an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in August 2017. She uses both modern and paleontological specimens to identify how populations, species, and communities have responded to past climate change. Her goal is to identify strategies to conserve as much biodiversity as possible given rapidly shifting climates. She received her PhD from the Dept. of Integrative Biology at UC-Berkeley, and did postdoctoral research at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and at the University of Washington.

Jessica Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at GT with a PhD in the Learning Sciences, specializing in geospatial analysis and visualization in informal learning. As director of the Technology-Integrated Learning Environments (TILEs) Lab at Georgia Tech, her research explores technology-mediated social learning experiences in environments such as museums and citizen science. She is a former middle school teacher and a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Faculty Fellow. Her work on the design of interactive learning technologies has been exhibited at venues such as the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the New York Hall of Science. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Roberts conducted postdoctoral research at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the Tidal Lab at Northwestern University.

Perry Yang is a Professor and Director of Eco Urban Lab of the School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Perry’s work focuses on incorporating data analytics into urban design to improve ecological and energy performance of cities. He has published more than fifty articles and book chapters in this area from 2009, including the book Urban Systems Design: Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era that he co-edited and co-authored six chapters in 2020 by Elsevier. He co-edited a 2019 theme issue Urban Systems Design: From Science for Design to Design in Science in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, a prestigious journal in planning to explore new urban design research agenda and applications of emerging technologies, data analytics and urban automation to placemaking in the context of smart city movement. Beyond writing, Yang has been awarded more than ten prizes in international competitions continuously from 2005 in Asian cities, including the 2009 World Games Park at Kaohsiung, Taiwan, a project opened in July 2009 and featured by CNN as an “eco-friendly” venue. His urban design work was introduced in the January 2010 issue Ecological Urbanism at World Architecture (WA), a leading architecture journal by Tsinghua University. His recent design projects were shortlisted in the 2022 Asian Games Village in Hangzhou in 2017, the Musi River Revitalization at Hyderabad in 2018, and water town designs in China’s Yangtze River Delta region in 2020-2021 during the pandemic. From 2017 to 2023, he has been involved in smart city projects in Japan, including one of Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic sites at Urawa Misono, in collaboration with the University of Tokyo, Keio University and Global Carbon Project (GCP). 

Yang is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Urban Engineering of the University of Tokyo from 2022 to 2023, and a Visiting Scientist at CARES of the Cambridge University in Singapore in 2023. He served as the endowed Bayer Chair Professor of UNEP Institute at Tongji University from 2014 to 2018. Perry is also a faculty fellow of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems at Georgia Tech from 2018. He has served as a board member of the International Urban Planning and Environment Association (UPE) from 2007. He is a scientific committee member of International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE) from 2015. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, he was a Fulbright Scholar and SPURS Fellow at MIT from 1999 to 2000, and an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the National University of Singapore from 2001 to 2008.

Kate Pride Brown is an environmental and political sociologist whose research focuses on a range of issues, including environmental activism in Russia and conservation policy in the United States. She received her doctorate from Vanderbilt University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment. Her book, Saving the Sacred Sea: The Power of Civil Society in an Age of Authoritarianism and Globalization (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines the conflict between local and transnational environmentalists, multinational corporations, and the Russian government over the future of Lake Baikal, the largest, deepest and oldest freshwater lake on Earth. While she continues to study environmental issues in Russia, especially around Lake Baikal, Dr. Brown has also published research on water and energy politics and policy in the United States. She is currently studying the "nuclear renaissance" in the southeastern United States. Among other honors, she has received a Fulbright Fellowship, a Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State, and funding from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her research has appeared in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Energy Research and Social Science, Environmental Politics, Environmental Sociology, Ethnography, Memory Studies, Nature and Culture, Research in Political Sociology, Social Movement Studies, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, Water Policy and WIREs Water.

Christos Athanasiou is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech's Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, leading the Daedalus Lab. The lab's mission is to advance science and technology in biological and man-made systems for tackling grand social and environmental challenges with a major focus on energy storage, environmental remediation, and sustainable space exploration. Christos holds a Ph.D. in Photonics from EPFL. Initially, he carried out postdoctoral research at Brown University's School of Engineering, and later jointly at Brown University and MIT Media Lab.