Marilyn Brown is a Regents' and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. She joined Georgia Tech in 2006 after a distinguished career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she led several national climate change mitigation studies and became a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. 

Her research focuses on the design and impact of policies aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, with an emphasis on the electric utility industry, the integration of energy efficiency, demand response, and solar resources, and ways of improving resiliency to disruptions. Her books include Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Green Savings: How Policies and Markets Drive Energy Efficiency (Praeger, 2015), and Climate Change and Global Energy Security (MIT Press, 2011). She has authored more than 250 publications. Her work has had significant visibility in the policy arena as evidenced by her numerous briefings and testimonies before state legislative bodies and Committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Dr. Brown co-founded the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and chaired its Board of Directors for several years. She has served on the Boards of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Alliance to Save Energy, and was a commissioner with the Bipartisan Policy Center. She has served on eight National Academies committees and is an Editor of Energy Policy and an Editorial Board member of Energy Efficiency and Energy Research and Social Science. She served two terms (2010-2017) as a Presidential appointee and regulator on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider. From 2014-2018 she served on DOE’s Electricity Advisory Committee, where she led the Smart Grid Subcommittee.

Oliver Chapman is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Public Policy in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Oliver’s research focuses on how local socio-economic conditions influence sustainable lifestyles and how policies and programs can encourage sustainable decision making with special attention to their impact on ethics. Currently, he is utilizing survey data to better understand why energy efficient heat pump technology is underutilized in the marketplace. For the past two years, he has been working with Drawdown Georgia in an interdisciplinary team across multiple universities researching and performing analyses on a range of carbon drawdown solutions for Georgia's energy sector with emphases on their potential for economic growth, social well-being, and impact on ethical issues. Oliver received the School of Public Policy Outstanding Masters student award in 2021. He also served two terms as a Graduate Senator in the Georgia Tech Graduate Student Government.

Oliver holds a Master of Science in Public Policy Analysis from the Georgia Institute of Technology in, and Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.

Advisor: Marilyn Brown

Min is a Ph.D. student in the School of Public Policy of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. With her interdisciplinary background, she aims to understand what drives the electrification and clean energy transition. Her research focuses on how different environmental policies affect household adoption, and possible ethical concerns in those policies. She is also interested in how environmental policies spur innovation of clean technologies.

Min has worked on finding socioeconomic, attitudinal, and drivers and barriers to household adoption of clean technologies such as solar panels, electric vehicles, and efficient HVAC systems, and on analyzing the potential of rooftop solar in Georgia. Besides research, she loves playing piano, reading novels, learning new languages, and traveling to new places.

Min received her Master’s degree in Technology Policy from Seoul National University, and her Bachelor’s degree from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in Chemical Engineering, earning Summa Cum Laude. She was also a Fulbright scholar for the 2020-2022 academic years.

Advisor: Daniel Matisoff

Richard Barke is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy. He received his BS in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a minor in geophysics, launching an interest in the many intersections between science and public policy. He obtained his MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Rochester. He taught at the University of Houston before returning to Georgia Tech where he chaired the creation of the Ivan Allen College and the School of Public Policy and has served as school chair and as Associate Dean of IAC. He was a consultant to the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government on reforming the congressional science budget process and the processes by which Congress receives scientific and technology advice and was a visiting scholar on similar matters at the University of Ghent, Belgium. His consulting and sponsored research has included companies subject to federal and state regulations; the Houston Area Research Center; the US Departments of Commerce, Energy, and the Army; the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; and seven National Science Foundation grants. 

His research interests focus on the regulation of risk, the roles of politics within science, and of science within politics. He has presented his work at more than one hundred scholarly panels and conferences. In addition to a dozen book chapters Dr. Barke has published in Risk Analysis; Minerva; Social Science Quarterly; Policy Studies Journal; Science, Technology, and Human Values; and Public Choice and is the author of Science, Technology, and Public Policy (CQ Press) and co-author of Governing the American Republic (St. Martin's). Among his awards are Georgia Tech's Outstanding Service Award, the IAC Faculty Legacy Award, ANAK Faculty of the Year, and the Georgia Tech Student Government Association Faculty of the Year Award (twice). He teaches courses on political processes, intergenerational policy, ethics and risk, and regulatory policy, and has team-taught courses with faculty from all six colleges at Georgia Tech. His current work is on long-term policy-making.

Brad Fain, principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and at the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP), has been appointed as executive director of CACP. The appointment was announced on January 2, 2019 by Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Dean Jacqueline Royster.

Housed in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, CACP focuses on key issues that influence the development, implementation and adoption of communications technologies. CACP work includes assessment of policy issues and production of regulatory filings, identification of future options for innovation, and articulation of a clearer vision of the ever-changing technology landscape. The Center’s research addresses a wide range of advanced communications policy issues and related technology applications, particularly in the wireless and new technology arenas.

Fain brings to bear more than twenty-five years of experience in human performance. He directs Georgia Tech’s HomeLab research initiative and leads a team that is pioneering research into issues and products design to assist with successful aging in place. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992 and has extensive experience developing technologies, evaluation processes, and curriculum in the field of accessible design. He has also led or assisted in a variety of research programs on the design of fixed and rotary wing crew interfaces, and he currently leads a project to build a virtual reality usability testbed for first responder technologies enabled by FirstNet for the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). He has performed over one hundred accessibility evaluations for national and international customers in twenty projects. He has executed over two hundred consumer product evaluation projects. He pioneered the development of Consumer Product Integration (CPI) as a design process for the realization of products with universal design features.

Fain led the National Council on Disability’s (NCD) universal design research program. The focus of the research program was to determine the impact of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act on the design and procurement of electronic and information technologies. Fain’s report contained universal design policy recommendations that were endorsed by the NCD and sent to the president of the United States for consideration. He conceived and led the development of an information portal containing information pertaining to the design and procurement of accessible electronic and information technologies. The Accessibility Assistant (http://accessibility.gtri.gatech.edu) is the culmination of eight years of accessibility research at Georgia Tech and serves over 1,500 visitors monthly.

Fain has also led the technical portion of the EAC’s Military Heroes Initiative to search for new technologies that would allow recently wounded soldiers to place a private and secure vote. He served as the technical director of the EAC’s Accessible Voting Technology Initiative (AVTI) to develop technologies solutions that facilitate accessible voting for the general population. The AVTI resulted in the development of a voting system test bed used to conduct accessibility research for ballot design and novel hardware design. He also led a NIST research grant to determine best practices for quantifying and certifying the accessibility and usability of new voting systems. Fain served as the technical director for the Information Technology and Technical Assistance Training Center (ITTATC) project. He led the needs assessment and technical assistance portions of the ITTATC project and has developed materials to support accessibility curriculum development efforts. He led the development of the Accessibility Evaluation Facility to support independent third-party evaluations of electronic and information technology accessibility and usability. In addition, he led the development of training materials to educate designers and accessibility specialists in the measurement of accessibility. In 2004, Fain modified the AEM to measure ease of use for special populations and, as a result, GTRI was named as the national test lab for the Arthritis Foundation’s Ease of Use Commendation Program.

Michael Hoffmann is a Professor for Philosophy in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. He is the Director of the Reflect! Lab, Co-Director of ETHICx, the Ethics, Technology, and Human Interaction Center, and he directs the VIP Digital Deliberation. He is doing research in three areas. In political philosophy, he focuses on the question of how democratic institutions should be designed that strengthen democracy. In AI ethics, he works on participatory design for human well-being. And across multiple disciplines he develops methods and collaborative software tools to support deliberation, argumentation, and consensus-building, as well as instruments to assess the skills and dispositions needed for these activities.

Jason Borenstein, Ph.D., is the Director of Graduate Research Ethics Programs and Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Technology. His appointment is divided between the School of Public Policy and the Office of Graduate Studies. He is also Affiliated Faculty at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM). Dr. Borenstein is an associate editor of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics, a Founding Editor of the journal AI and Ethics, co-editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s Ethics and Information Technology section, and an editorial board member of the journal Accountability in Research. He is also Editor for Research Ethics for the National Academy of Engineering's Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science. He was the Founder and formerly Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Philosophy, Science & Law. Dr. Borenstein’s research interests include bioethics, engineering ethics, robot ethics, and research ethics.

He is currently a Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) on a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Institutional Transformation: The Role of Service Learning and Community Engagement on the Ethical Development of STEM Students and Campus Culture". He is a Co-PI on the NSF-funded “Fairness, Ethics, Accountability, and Transparency (FEAT) in Computer and Information Science and Engineering Workshop” that took place August 29 and 30, 2019 on Georgia Tech's campus. He is also a Co-PI on the NSF-funded project “Do the Right Thing: Competing Ethical Frameworks Mediated by Moral Emotions in Human-robot Interaction" and on the NSF-funded project "EAGER: Pilot Study on Bias and Trust in AI Systems". In addition, he is a Co-PI on the Mozilla Responsible Computer Science Challenge funded project “Cultivating an Ethics-Inclusive Mindset Through Role Play in Undergraduate Computer Science Courses”. His work has appeared in numerous professional journals including AI & Society, Communications of the ACM, Science and Engineering Ethics, Ethics and Information Technology, IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, IEEE Technology & Society Magazine, Accountability in Research, and the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review.

Dr. Borenstein’s teaching and research interests include robot & artificial intelligence ethics, engineering ethics, research ethics/RCR, and bioethics.