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.

Olianike Olaomo is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of History and Sociology in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Her research interest is in international agriculture and development, emphasizing fair treatment in agriculture, community development, climate change, and farmers' interactions with living environments. Her focus on the developing world, with particular interest in her home country of Nigeria, has always involved the integration of disciplines such as science, engineering, social science, policy, planning, design, and business.

Olianike’s previous research includes assessing the role of rural women in local government relative to the information technology that they are able to access, the impact of the adoption of an E-wallet system on smallholder farmers in Nigeria, as well as building an open access value chain in the marketing and processing of cassava in Nigeria.

Olianike earned her Master’s degree from Auburn University in Rural Sociology, and her Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Extension & Management from the Federal College of Animal Health and Production Technology in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Advisor: Kate Pride Brown

Eric Greenlee is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing. Eric’s research focuses on designing Internet-connected environmental sensing systems in areas with limited infrastructure. By simultaneously addressing the cost, power, and usability concerns of project stakeholders, he aspires to make sensor deployments more accessible for partners who promote environmental justice. Currently, Eric is working closely with indigenous Ojibwe knowledge-holders to co-design a sensing platform to improve outcomes for Manoomin (wild rice), which is central to the Ojibwe way of life and is especially sensitive to environmental change. He recently received the Dartmouth College Postgraduate Project Fellowship to strengthen partnerships in Madagascar, as well as the Georgia Institute of Technology President’s Fellowship. Eric loves spending time outside and hopes to make field science an integral part of his research.

Eric earned a Master of Engineering degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and Bachelors of Arts and Engineering degrees in Electrical Engineering from Dartmouth College.

Advisor: Ellen Zegura

She is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and a practicing designer, researcher, and educator who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. As an avid photographer and illustrator, her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects National Photography Competition and she has contributed graphics to several exhibitions and publications. As an educator, she was recognized as one of two recipients of the 2017-2018 American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS)/ Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) New Faculty Teaching Award and a 2021 AIAS Educator Honor Award. 

Her research and practice experiences span design/build, early intervention design education, transatlantic studies, and historic site documentation and visualization. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in fall 2021 for the project "From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South," supporting research and development of the Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States seminar at Georgia Tech. 

Expanding experiences abroad to enrich both teaching and research agendas , she was the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians’ H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellow. Between June 2016 and May 2017, she traveled to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Cuba, and Japan to research the impact of tourism on cultural heritage sites; research blog posts can be found here. 

Currently, she is working with Auburn University Associate Professor Liu and an interdisciplinary team from the McWhorter School of Building Science, the Department of History, and the Media Production Group on “Walking in the Footsteps of History”, an experimental survey and modeling project to digitally reconstruct the area south of the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 'Bloody Sunday' events of March 7, 1965. This project is working to record and represent the built environment through the use of 3D LiDAR scans, UAV photogrammetry, and digital modeling. The team was awarded a $50,000 grant 2019 National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant Program to compile a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Willkens serves as a Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology initiative lead for research activities related to just, resilient, and informed communities.

Anjali Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and Director of the Nunn School Program in Global Development. Her research focuses on the political economy of development, and employs quantitative analyses of data derived from India and other developing country contexts. Her specific substantive interests include the politics of service provision, democratic institutions and the link between climate change and local level politics. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Anjali was a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She obtained her Ph.D. from New York University in 2010.

Dr. Nicole Kennard is a Research Scientist II within BBISS and serves as the Assistant Director for Community-Engaged Research. She supports faculty across the university in building meaningful and co-creative research partnerships with local communities to address pressing sustainability and societal challenges. She works closely with the Center for Sustainable Communities Research & Education (SCoRE) to provide trainings for GT researchers to work with communities in research partnerships.

Kennard also leads her own community-engaged research in sustainable food systems. Her work focuses on building resilient, community-focused food systems and uplifting local agriculture, agroecology, and food sovereignty as solutions to the complex, intertwined challenges of food insecurity, climate change, and land degradation. She uses a combination of quantitative methods (lifecycle assessment, mapping, soil health and ecosystem service assessments) and qualitative methods (in-depth interviews) to support this systems-level research. She is currently working with local partners to build a food systems map for the City of Atlanta.

Kennard holds a PhD in Chemistry and Biosciences from the University of Sheffield (Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures); an MSc in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security from Newcastle University (U.S. Fulbright Scholar); and a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dori Pap is the Managing Director of the Institute for Leadership and Social Impact (formerly the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship). She directs the Leadership for Social Good Study Abroad Program in Central and Eastern Europe, coordinates the Impact Speaker Series, runs the annual Ideas to Serve student social innovation competition, and teaches courses on social entrepreneurship. 

Outside Tech, Dori serves on the board of Global Growers Network, a nonprofit organization that connects the agricultural talent of the refugee community in and around Atlanta to opportunities in sustainable agriculture. She is a board member for the Center for Civic Innovation, an organization that works at the frontline of civics education and advocacy, and she serves on the board of the Georgia Social Impact Collaborative. Dori is a triple Yellow Jacket and is currently pursuing her doctorate degree at the Institute for Higher Education at UGA.

Shatakshee Dhongde is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Economics at Georgia Tech. She obtained her PhD. from the University of California, Riverside. She is also a research affiliate with the Institute of Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research has focused on the economics of poverty. Poverty is a multidimensional concept and is often not captured by income levels. Her papers measure poverty in its many forms and have been published in leading economics journals. In particular, her research on measuring multidimensional poverty in the United States has been highlighted in the national media, including NPR. She was awarded the Nancy and Richard Ruggles Prize for young researchers by the International Association of Review of Income and Wealth (IARIW). She serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice.