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.

Gaurav Doshi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics. His research interests are in energy and environmental economics, empirical industrial organization, and applied econometrics. His work focuses on the impacts of energy policy on market power and emissions from the fossil fuel sector, technology adoption in the renewable sector, and transition to renewable energy in the US.

Gaurav’s current research uses tools and techniques from industrial organization to study how firms respond to policy changes in electricity and energy markets. He currently teaches courses on Machine Learning for Economics. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Gaurav received his Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2023.

Abdel-Khalik joined the Georgia Tech faculty as the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor in 1987. He was appointed to his current position as the Southern Nuclear Distinguished Professor in 1993. He served as Associate Director of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering between 1990 and 1992 and as the Georgia Tech Secretary of the Faculty between 2002 and 2006. He served as a member of the USNRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) between 2006 and 2012, including two years as Chairman (2009-2011).  Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, Abdel-Khalik served as a faculty member in the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Department (1976-1987) and as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Engineering (1973-1975) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Abdel-Khalik also served as a Senior Engineer at Babcock and Wilcox Nuclear Power Generation Division (1975); as a Guest Research Scientist at the Nuclear Research Center in Karlsruhe, Germany (1979); and as an Invited Professor at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (1982).

Abdel-Khalik currently serves as a member of the External Advisory Boards for the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University and the Mechanical Engineering Department of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He also serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for Badr University in Cairo, Egypt.

Gregory F. Randolph is an Assistant Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning. His research examines how local economies and urbanization patterns are shaped by major 21st-century transitions—technological, energy, and demographic—with a focus on inequality. He is currently writing a book on agrarian-to-urban transformations in India, under contract with Oxford University Press. He is also a research lead for FutureWORKS, a five-year program on the future of work in the Global South funded by the International Development Research Centre (Canada), through which he is examining the impact of decarbonization on spatial inequalities.

In addition to his academic research, Professor Randolph works with both governmental and non-profit institutions in their efforts to create inclusive urban economies. A decade ago, he co-founded the Just Jobs Network, a non-profit institute based in New Delhi that advises governments across the Global South on labor and employment policies. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Kindred Futures, an Atlanta-based organization working to build collective wealth in Black communities in the American South. He has also served as a policy advisor to the Los Angeles City Council and consults with multilateral organizations such as the World Bank on issues of sustainable development.

Professor Randolph's research has been supported by a range of academic institutions and foundations: the International Development Research Centre (Canada), London School of Economics, Asian Development Bank, U.S. Departments of Education and State, USC Lusk Center, Solidarity Center, and German Marshall Fund. He has been awarded the Fulbright-Hays and Fulbright-Nehru research fellowships. His opinion writing has appeared in media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Hindustan Times, Indian Express, and The Jakarta Post.

Dr. Randolph obtained his PhD in urban planning and development from the University of Southern California and his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. He speaks Hindi and Bahasa Indonesia.

Patrick Kastner is a researcher and educator specializing in environmental performance simulation and decarbonization of buildings and cities, and directs the Sustainable Urban Systems Lab at Georgia Tech. He is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and holds a courtesy appointment with the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

His goal is to empower urban decision-makers with software tools that place sustainability at the forefront of the profession. He leads a Vertically Integrated Project titled Surrogate Modeling for Urban Regeneration (SMUR), which attracts a diverse group of students ranging from sophomore to graduate level, representing various engineering disciplines and other related fields across Georgia Tech.

He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Systems Science and Engineering from Cornell University in 2022. During his doctoral research, he developed Eddy3D, a microclimate modeling software toolkit for Rhino & Grasshopper, now adopted by leading institutions in both academia and practice. He previously taught at Cornell and UPenn.

Originally from Germany, Kastner holds an M.S. in Sustainable Building Science from TU Munich, and a B.S. in Energy Engineeringfrom FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. While in Munich, he was fortunate enough to study at the Center for Digital Technology and Management and enjoyed his time leading the operations team at TEDxTUM.

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.

Shu Takayama earned his BS and MS in Agricultural Chemistry at the University of Tokyo. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California studying bio-organic synthesis with Dr. Chi‐Huey Wong. He then worked as a postdoc with Dr. George Whitesides at Harvard University where he focused on applying microfluidics to studying cell and molecular biology.

Takayama began his career at the University of Michigan, where led his lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Macromolecular Science & Engineering for over 17 years. In 2017, the lab moved to Georgia Tech where Shu became the Georgia Research Alliance Price Gilbert Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Takayama’s research interests are diverse and motivated by clinical and biotechnology needs. He is always interested in hearing from stakeholders in these areas who are seeking engineering collaboration.

Tim Lieuwen is the executive vice president for research (EVPR) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In this role, he oversees the Institute’s $1.4+ billion portfolio of research, economic development, and sponsored activities. This includes leadership of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the Enterprise Innovation Institute, 11 interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs), and related research administrative support units.

In his 25-plus years at Georgia Tech, Lieuwen earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering (1996 and 1999, respectively) and has held multiple leadership positions. He has been the executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) and served as the interim chair of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering in 2023.

Lieuwen has received numerous honors and recognition for his work in clean energy systems and policy, national security, and regional economic development. Additionally, he has been awarded the titles of Regents’ Professor and the David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair in AE. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.