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.

Dr. Baoyun Ge received his B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2012 and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018. He then worked at C-Motive Technologies, Inc., a start-up company pioneering in the commercialization of electrostatic machines. From May 2022 to July 2024, Dr. Ge was with the University of Florida as an assistant professor before joining the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dr. Ge's previous research thrusts on electrostatic machines established multi-level connections (physics, circuits, and topologies) with magnetostatic machines. He has extensive experience in analytical modeling and high-performance computational models. These experiences and the duality between electrostatic and magnetostatic machines inspired Dr. Ge to work on multiphysics synthesis, which is about overcoming the limitations of conventional intuition-based multiphysics design by leveraging advanced mathematical tools.

Baoyun enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter.

Valerie Thomas is the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. 

Dr. Thomas's research interests are energy and materials efficiency, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Current research projects include low carbon transportation fuels, carbon capture, building construction, and electricity system development. Dr. Thomas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Physical Society. She has been an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow, a Member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, and a Member of the USDA/DOE Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee. 

She has worked at Princeton University in the Princeton Environmental Institute and in the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

Dr. Thomas received a B. A. in physics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

Milton Mueller is an internationally prominent scholar specializing in the political economy of information and communication. The author of seven books and scores of journal articles, his work informs not only public policy but also science and technology studies, law, economics, communications, and international studies. His books Networks and States: The global politics of Internet governance (MIT Press, 2010) and Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2002) are acclaimed scholarly accounts of the global governance regime emerging around the Internet. Mueller’s research employs the theoretical tools of institutional economics, STS and political economy, as well as historical, qualitative and quantitative methods. Mueller’s prominence in scholarship is matched by his prominence in policy practice. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Internet Governance Project (IGP), a policy analysis center for global Internet governance. Since its founding in 2004, IGP has played a prominent role in shaping global Internet policies and institutions such as ICANN and the Internet Governance Forum. He has participated in proceedings and policy development activities of ICANN, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and regulatory proceedings in the European Commission, China, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He has served as an expert witness in prominent legal cases related to domain names and telecommunication policy. He was recently elected to the advisory committee of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and appointed in 2014 to the IANA Stewardship Coordination Group. Mueller has also been a practical institution-builder in the scholarly world, where he led the creation of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), an international association of scholars.

Julia Yang, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. Her research has enabled fundamental understanding of battery materials by advancing computational approaches to resolve transport in disordered electrodes and explain reactivity in organic electrolytes. She is a co-author on more than 14 publications and four patents, a recipient of the Harvard University Center for the Environment Fellowship (2022-2024), and a NextProf Nexus alum (2023). She is deeply committed to educating the next generation of diverse minds by prioritizing equity, inclusivity, and belonging, starting from within the classroom and beyond. 

Prof. Yang received her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering, with an additional major in Physics, from Carnegie Mellon University and her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from U.C. Berkeley as an NDSEG Fellow under the guidance of Prof. Gerbrand Ceder. During her graduate studies, she was an AI Resident with X, the Moonshot Factory. She led postdoctoral work at Harvard University as an Environmental Fellow working with Prof. Boris Kozinsky and collaborating with Prof. Ah-Hyung Alissa Park. 

Ellen is Director of the Master of Science in Urban Design degree, an authority on sustainable suburban redevelopment, and a leading urbanist. Author of over 100 articles, she is co-author with June Williamson of the retrofitting suburbia book series documenting successful retrofits of aging big box stores, malls, and office parks into healthier and more sustainable places. Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, (Wiley, 2009, 2011) received a PROSE award as the best architecture and urban planning book of 2009 and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Harvard Business Review, NPR, PBS, TED and other prominent venues. Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley, 2020) expands on the first book examining how new retrofits are helping communities disrupt automobile dependence, improve public health, support an aging population, leverage social capital for equity, compete for jobs, and add water and energy resilience. 

Ellen serves on several national boards and committees, is former Chair of the Board of the Congress for the New Urbanism, lectures widely and conducts community workshops. In both her teaching and research she focuses on helping communities address new challenges that they were never designed for – whether that’s through her unique database of successful suburban retrofits or studio classes on anticipating autonomous vehicles, coping with climate change or suburban blight. She taught at UVA and MIT before joining Georgia Tech as Architecture Program Director from 2000-2009.

Omar I. Asensio is an Associate Professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy and the Director of the Data Science & Policy Lab at Georgia Tech. During the 2023-2024 academic year, he was a fellow at the Institute for Business in Global Society at Harvard Business School. Professor Asensio’s research focuses on climate and electrification strategies at the intersection of technology, AI, and sustainability. He employs large-scale data, field experiments, and human-in-the-loop AI systems to address innovation challenges in energy systems, transportation, and human mobility. He contributed to the zero emission vehicles (ZEV) policy guidance for COP26 and the Glasgow Climate Pact.

Prof. Asensio is a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) New Voices 2021 cohort, which recognizes early- to-mid career leaders for exceptional contributions to science, engineering and medicine. He is a two-time former chair of the Natural Resource, Energy, and Environmental Policy section of APPAM, and is the recipient of the 2023 Faculty Excellence in Research Award from the Ivan Allen College. At Georgia Tech, he is a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Fellow and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Data Engineering & Science (IDEaS), the Machine Learning Center, and the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI).

Professor Asensio has received multiple awards for his research, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS) Emerging Scholar Award, and the Research Impact on Practice Award (RIPA) from the Academy of Management’s Organizations & the Natural Environment Division (ONE-NBS). His work has been published in leading journals such as Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, and PNAS. 

Professor Asensio’s research and teaching have been supported by awards from the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, ESRI, the U.S. State Department’s Diplomacy Lab, and the U.S. Department of Energy. His work has informed policy advisory communications for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the UK government, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the IndiaAI initiative. His research has been featured in popular press, including Bloomberg, Scientific American, Motor Trend, Fast Company, NPR’s All Things Considered, Yahoo! News, The Huffington Post, and the Washington Post.

Dr. Asensio serves as Associate Editor of Data & Policy journal published by Cambridge University Press. He earned his doctorate in Environmental Science & Engineering with specialties in Economics from UCLA.