Marilyn Brown

Brown, Engle, Nemirovski Elected to National Academy of Sciences

admin — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 16:20:38 +0000

Brown, Engle, Nemirovski Elected to National Academy of Sciences admin Wed, 06/18/2025 - 12:20

Scientific endeavors across Georgia Tech are broad, deep, and varied — a fact underscored last week when the National Academy of Sciences announced three Tech scholars among its newest members.

Marilyn Brown is one of the nation’s top analysts of clean energy policy; Randall Engle is a leader in understanding individual differences in memory and attention; and Arkadi Nemirovski has helped shape the field of continuous optimization.

Each now joins an elite group of the nation’s foremost scientists in a historic moment for the Institute: It’s the first time three scientists from Tech have been elected to the Academy in a single year.

“The election of Georgia Tech faculty members from across multiple disciplines into the National Academy of Sciences is extraordinary,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost, executive vice president for Academic Affairs, and K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “We are incredibly proud and congratulate Professors Brown, Engle, and Nemirovski on this well-deserved honor. This distinction is a testament to their significant contributions and an honor that recognizes that critical research happens at the intersection of disciplines.”

Election to the National Academy of Sciences is among the highest honors a scientist can receive, recognizing “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research,” as the Academy puts it. It has been reserved for just 2,403 people in the United States. Nominations for new members can come only from current Academy members.

“In the hierarchy of scientific acknowledgment, the only things higher are the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize,” said Engle, professor in the School of Psychology. “In my wildest dreams, I never imagined it for myself.”

Engle studies the nature of working memory and its relationship to attention control. At its most basic, his work focuses on how people differ in their ability to concentrate on a single task. Understanding these differences helps us understand why individuals’ cognitive performance varies.

Engle came to Georgia Tech in 1995 to lead the School of Psychology. After 13 years, he stepped down to create the Georgia State University/Georgia Tech Center for Advanced Brain Imaging. His work has been influential in social and developmental psychology, emotion, and psychopathology, among other areas. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“I don’t know of any successful scientists who do what we do for the glory. We are driven by questions and are so fortunate to have jobs where people actually pay us to spend our lives looking through the metaphorical microscope,” Engle said. “At the same time, we all love having our work acknowledged and respected by our scientific heroes. That is what this feels like: People who I have read about in my field since I was an undergraduate are saying that my work has value.”

Like Engle, Nemirovski expressed surprise at his election to the Academy, despite more than five decades of contributions to optimization theory and algorithms.

“While I respect my professional achievements, I do not value them as matching the honor,” said Nemirovski, who came to Georgia Tech in 2005 and is the John Hunter Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Yet he is credited with several significant achievements in the field of convex optimization — the Ellipsoid algorithm (with D. Yudin), mirror descent, interior point methods for nonlinear convex problems (with Y. Nesterov), and robust optimization (with A. Ben-Tal) — and in non-parametric statistics (with A. Juditsky).

In fact, Nemirovski credited his collaborators with helping him build an impactful career.

“The excellent professional training I got under supervision of Professor Eugene Shilov at the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, and the honor and privilege to communicate and, in many cases, to collaborate with outstanding colleagues — Boris Polyak, Rafail Khasminskii, Yuri Nesterov, Aharon Ben-Tal, Anatoli Iouditski, Alexander Shapiro, David Donoho, Stephen Boyd — their influence made me what I am as a professional,” he said.

Nemirovski also is a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brown has established herself as an international leader in the analysis of clean energy policies. She’s a pioneer in incorporating behavioral and social science principles into complex energy-engineering models that are used to evaluate policy proposals and to assess opportunities such as the size of the energy-efficiency gap in the United States.

She developed an approach as a regulator of the Tennessee Valley Authority that characterizes energy efficiency in terms of a power plant — in essence, the size, cost, and reliability of the plant that would not have to be built if companies took steps to conserve energy. She also developed carbon accounting methods at Georgia Tech that were applied to the first carbon footprint assessments of the nation’s largest 100 metropolitan areas.

“Being elected to the National Academy of Sciences is a great honor,” said Brown, Regents Professor and Brook Byers Professor in Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. “It is also a great testament to the outstanding faculty and students across Georgia Tech, who are fostering the kind of sustainable energy systems and policies that will help the world step back from the brink of climate disaster.”

Brown arrived at Georgia Tech in 2006 after establishing herself at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a national leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. A year later, she and her co-authors won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III Assessment Report on Mitigation of Climate Change.

Earlier this year, Brown also was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

“Colleagues like Professors Brown, Engle, and Nemirovski are what makes Georgia Tech such a special place,” Bras said. “They are true scholars and dedicated teachers, and they are examples to their students, their friends, and colleagues. We all rejoice with them.”

Summary sentence

Election to the Academy is among the highest honors a scientist can achieve.

Summary

Brook Byers Professor, Marilyn Brown is among 3 Georgia Tech faculty elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Election to the Academy is among the highest honors a scientist can achieve.

Scientific endeavors across Georgia Tech are broad, deep, and varied — a fact underscored last week when the National Academy of Sciences announced three Tech scholars among its newest members. Marilyn Brown is one of the nation’s top analysts of clean energy policy; Randall Engle is a leader in understanding individual differences in memory and attention; and Arkadi Nemirovski has helped shape the field of continuous optimization. Each now joins an elite group of the nation’s foremost scientists in a historic moment for the Institute: It’s the first time three scientists from Tech have been elected to the Academy in a single year.

Department of Energy Awards Georgia Tech Grant for Energyshed Project

admin — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:23:12 +0000

Department of Energy Awards Georgia Tech Grant for Energyshed Project admin Wed, 12/07/2022 - 11:23

For decades, the U.S. energy generation, transmission, and distribution model has been developed and planned around large-scale power plants that combust fossil fuels to create power that is then transferred to population centers via a network of powerlines.

With the recent and rapid growth of distributed renewable technologies — wind, solar, and hydropower, and storage assets like batteries — a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology is reimagining the planning paradigm for electric power infrastructure. The hope is to help shape new models that are better suited to community needs and include input and decision-making at the local level.

As envisioned, the Georgia Energyshed (G-SHED) will analyze the benefits, costs, and effects of various electricity generation, distribution, and usage-and-demand scenarios via use-case tests and modeling. That data will then be used to inform policy decisions at the local level and the implementation of new ideas for the 11-county metro Atlanta area as defined by the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC).

“What’s unique about this proposal is we’re using this funding to explore a new planning mechanism that would really listen to the voices of these communities around their energy matrix,” said Richard Simmons, director of research and studies at Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute. Simmons is the project's principal investigator.

Announced on November 2, the energyshed award is part of the federal agency’s push to encourage a regional approach to understanding local energy demands and needs — and the best solutions to solve them tailored to those communities. Through its Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, the DOE funding is part of a wider strategy to help communities understand the impacts and benefits of consuming energy that they generate locally.

“The idea is not only to better include these communities in the conversation, but demonstrate that they can realize more local benefits from their and input and decisions.”

Leading the initiative is the Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center (EPICenter). An arm of the Strategic Energy Institute, EPICenter is tasked with marrying innovation with energy technology and policy; contributing to sound recommendations for the Southeast through unbiased research and analysis.

“This grant is ideally suited for the mission of the EPICenter, which really tries to take leading energy technology and apply it in a local context that is mindful of the economic and social implications,” Simmons said.

The Georgia Tech team also includes researchers from the School of Public Policy, the School of City and Regional Planning, and the College of Engineering.

To conduct the work, Georgia Tech is collaborating with key partners: the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), which has engaged in similar planning and modeling processes for regional water and transportation usage and trends; and the Southface Institute, a sustainability non-profit with extensive experience in outreach, and community engagement research. Another nonprofit, the Partnership for Southern Equity, has also provided a letter endorsing the initiative.

A New Approach to Resource Management
The G-SHED idea is modeled after the watershed concept, which takes a regional, solutions-based approach to address water demand and usage at the community level. Much like watersheds, where water collection, processing, distribution, use, and discharge is determined at the community level, Simmons said the idea is to explore how a similar approach can be valid for planning and infrastructure related to energy systems, such as electricity.

“There do appear to be some critical advantages by looking at local generation, consumption and even storage of renewable energy,” said Simmons. “That might help not only meet the needs of the local populace, but it could have conversion efficiency benefits and have more direct impact on both the economic and environmental wellness of the area.”

While individual people and organizations already make energy-related decisions — consumers buying electric vehicles or developers erecting green or sustainable office buildings, for example — there’s greater impact when broadened to the community or regional level, said Joe Hagerman, EPICenter director.

“So, when decisions are made, they are being made at a community level and capture a more representative local understanding. That information can be shared both upstream and downstream to the utilities, planners, and policymakers,” Hagerman said. “We’re hoping to create a tool that will help people make those decisions in a more holistic way, rather than making it all individually.”

Ensuring All Voices Are Heard
A key component of the G-SHED effort is to ensure all communities are included in the regional energy planning and decision-making processes.

Marilyn Brown, Regents’ Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy, has conducted pioneering work on energy burdens in the Southeast.

“The goal is balanced growth and shared prosperity in the Atlanta metropolitan area by helping local communities and neighborhoods,” Brown said.

The Southface Institute and ARC will leverage novel socio-technical tools developed by Georgia Tech to assess ways metro Atlanta can ensure all residents benefit from the transition to a cleaner and more sustainable energy economy. The team will survey community groups about energy use and service options, access to rate plans, ease of understanding electric bills, and familiarity with community energy options. Then, they will build an online toolkit to address these needs and help them learn how to use it.

“Focusing on that aspect is critical to the overall project’s success because rising energy and utility costs fall disproportionately on those who can least afford them and yet have limited influence in the decision making,” said Chandra Farley, the city of Atlanta’s chief sustainability officer.

Nationally, Atlanta is 4th highest in median energy burden levels (behind Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham, respectively) and 3rd highest among low-income household populations.

“Evaluating energy needs at the local and metro area level with direct input from the communities who have typically had no voice in energy decision making is an important tool in energy planning,” Farley said. “The work that Georgia Tech is leading on energysheds will support community-informed energy planning and reinforce our efforts in the city of Atlanta to address energy affordability and advance access to the benefits of renewable energy projects leading to healthier communities and economic empowerment.”

Summary sentence

Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center leads effort to develop new energy planning models for metro Atlanta

Summary

The U.S. Department of Energy award, announced on November 2, is part of the federal agency’s push to encourage a regional approach to understanding local energy demands and needs.

Dateline

Wed, 12/07/2022 - 12:00

peralte.paul@comm.gatech.edu

Contact

Peralte C. Paul
peralte.paul@comm.gatech.edu
404.316.1210

Associated importer

Keywords

energyshed

go-researchnews

Marilyn Brown

Green Buzz

Joe Hagerman

Richard Simmons

Department of Energy

News room topics

Business and Economic Development

Science and Technology

Marilyn Brown Tapped as First Woman to Receive Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award

bwaye3 — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 16:39:17 +0000

Marilyn Brown Tapped as First Woman to Receive Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award bwaye3 Fri, 04/29/2022 - 12:39

Marilyn Brown is a world-leading expert on renewable energy and energy efficiency, a transformative intellectual thinker, and one of the founders of the field of energy and climate policy.

Her research has shaped energy policy in the U.S. and globally. Over the past two years, she has been tapped for several prestigious honors, including being elected to both the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and receiving the 2021 World Citizen Prize in Environmental Performance. Now, she is the first woman to receive the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award in the 38 years of its existence. It is the highest honor given to a Georgia Tech professor. The award is presented to a professor who has made significant, long-term contributions to teaching, research, and public service.

Brown is the Regents and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. She joined Georgia Tech after 22 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she directed several national climate change mitigation studies and became a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures.

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, she was the joint highest-ranking female manager. Brown was attracted to Georgia Tech after working with a high-level group of scientists from Oak Ridge, the Imperial College of London, and Georgia Tech on a project involving next-generation energy, including advanced broadband. “I really liked the people from Tech who I worked with on the project,” said Brown. “They had a can-do attitude. At other universities, they might say, ‘That can’t be done.’ The people from Georgia Tech said, ‘We’ll find a way.’” In 2006, she was encouraged to apply for the position of — and was chosen as — a full professor in the School of Public Policy in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Throughout her career, Brown has been known for her transdisciplinary, action-based research and linking behavior to policy. “I started my career in the physical sciences at Rutgers. “From the beginning, I brought sciences into my work and have been quantitative. It has given me the ability to span sciences and related fields,” said Brown. “I tell my students they have to be quantitative in math and the physical sciences to be effective in energy.”

The focus of her research has been on the clean energy transition — bridging engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and policy studies to advance the design, adoption, and diffusion of clean energy technologies and policies. She is particularly interested in energy disparities and work to strengthen energy infrastructure, especially in areas of financial need. “It is all about the diffusion of innovation to the benefit of all,” she said.

Drawdown Georgia

Brown also leads the research program Drawdown Georgia, which she helped to create with the inspiration and funding of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation. Georgia Tech alumnus Ray C. Anderson was founder and chair of Interface Inc., and a pioneer in sustainability.

Drawdown Georgia was created and is being conducted in partnership with Emory University, the University of Georgia, and Georgia State University, as well as the Southface Institute, the Partnership for Southern Equity, and Greenlink Analytics.

Drawdown Georgia has identified a roadmap to significantly cut Georgia’s greenhouse gas emissions and achieve carbon neutrality. The Drawdown Georgia study, localized for Georgia’s urban and rural areas, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021. The plan identified technology and practices that could resonate with individuals, towns, and corporations throughout the state, including ways to bring more clean energy resources and technologies to rural Georgia and help people use limited resources more efficiently.

Through collaboration with the Scheller College of Business, 25 Georgia CEOs from throughout the state agreed to join Drawdown Georgia. The project includes a dashboard of emissions by Georgia’s 159 counties, tracked monthly. The next step will be to track implementation of the 20 solutions in the plan, measuring investments by counties, and the use of electric vehicles, rooftop solar systems, alternative transportation, recycling, composting, afforestation, and silvopasture — the integration of trees and livestock operations on the same land.

Sustainability as a Way of Life

When asked what she wishes people knew about sustainability, Brown said, “Sustainable technologies and behaviors are not costly. They can be good for your pocketbook. Consider the home refrigerator. Twenty-five years ago, it consumed 2,000 kilowatt hours a year. Today it requires less than 600 kWh, and they don’t cost any more than they used to. People just have to be smart about what they choose and pay attention to cradle-to-grave resource issues.”

Brown also lives her values. At her home, she grows vegetables and composts, has rooftop solar, a Tesla Powerwall battery, and uses heat pumps for water heating, air conditioning, and heat. Her family has an energy focus. Her husband, Frank Southworth, is an adjunct professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tech, and an accomplished transportation planner. Their daughter, Katie Southworth, is an attorney with Southface Energy Institute.

Working with Students

Brown created and co-leads the Climate and Energy Policy Lab in the School of Public Policy at Tech. She developed the Master of Sustainable Energy and Environmental Management degree. She has advised 19 Ph.D. students, many of whom have gone on to leading roles in government agencies, academia, and industry.

She is known as an excellent mentor, communicator, and educator, inside and outside of the classroom. She challenges students to expand their knowledge and excel in their project work while developing their confidence and leadership skills. She has been described as generous with her time in providing students with guidance on professional development. As she was one of very few women in her field when she began her career, she has been purposeful about mentoring women.

Background

Brown earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Rutgers University, and a Master of Regional Planning degree from the University of Massachusetts. She holds a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in geography, with a minor in quantitative methods. Before joining Oak Ridge National Laboratory, she was an associate professor of geography at the University of Illinois, the first woman to earn tenure in geography there. Previously, she was a lecturer in the Department of Geography and Geology at Ohio Wesleyan University.

She has authored six books and more than 250 publications, and contributed to the United Nations 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize that year. Her work has had significant influence and visibility in the policy arena as evidenced by her impact on policies and programs, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program, and briefings and testimonies before state legislative and regulatory bodies, committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and numerous international organizations.

Brown served two terms (2010-2017) as a presidential appointee and U.S. Senate-confirmed regulator on the board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the nation’s largest public power provider. At TVA, she contributed to reducing TVA’s CO₂ emissions by 60% over a 15-year period. She also chaired for eight years the Nuclear Oversight Committee, which was responsible for bringing the most recent nuclear unit into commercial operation in the U.S., in 2016 at Watts Bar in Tennessee.

Reflecting her commitment to the role of demand-side management, Brown co-founded the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance (SEEA), chaired its board of directors for several years, hired its first executive director, and provided SEEA’s first office space at Georgia Tech.

Quotes from Colleagues and Former Students

“In her work, she conceptualizes the coevolution of technology and society, with an emphasis on how to change unsustainable systems for the provision of energy, food, mobility, water and other areas. Rather than adhering to a narrow interpretation and application of geography and economics, her disciplinary background, she uses sociotechnical insights to inform her research and sheds light on the complex processes of societal transformation needed for addressing the climate and biodiversity crises as well as steep inequalities. In short, she draws on science to make extremely compelling, insightful, and even beautiful contributions to addressing contemporary challenges.”

Benjamin Sovacool
University Distinguished Professor of Business and Social Sciences – Aarhus University, Denmark
Professor of Energy Policy, Science Policy Research Unit – University of Sussex Business School, United Kingdom
Professor of Earth and Environment – Boston University, United States

“Dr. Brown’s contributions to the school and Institute extend beyond her own record to also include those of her students, who are excelling and driving important work both in and out of academia. Her students have founded startups in the explosive new climate tech field, lead energy and climate policy for major corporations like Google, work at multiple energy commissions at the state and federal level in regulatory staff roles, lead new areas of research in economics and policy in research centers across the world, and recently, one of her students was appointed as a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy. I don’t believe that it is a coincidence that this group of exceptional people all happened to emerge from the same lab at Georgia Tech. Dr. Brown played a formative role in helping develop the attitudes and thought processes that have enabled her students’ success and grown the influence of Georgia Tech around the globe.”

Matt Cox
CEO and Founder, Greenlink Analytics

“Marilyn challenges students to reflect on what can be done to show impact and relevance. She challenges students and collaborators to identify gaps in research that need to be addressed to advance science and discovery. Marilyn has had an exemplary career in teaching, research, and service, and her impact is significantly amplified by the hundreds of students and collaborators she has developed into the current and future generation of research and policy leaders and mentors.”

Melissa V. Lapsa
Building Technologies Program Manager
Energy Science and Technology Directorate
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

“Marilyn led by example as a Clean Energy and Education Empowerment (C3E) ambassador who sought to inspire the next generation of clean energy practitioners and researchers. I have always been impressed by the way Marilyn brought her intellectual acumen, strong moral compass, and sound judgement to bear on the deliberations and decision making with the wide range of different stakeholders involved in C3E. Moreover, Marilyn always made it a point to recognize the work of women researchers in academia and national laboratories in terms of the impact and importance of their contributions.”

Ellen Morris
Director, University Partnerships
NREL (a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy)

“The regularly scheduled Friday meetings of students and faculty at Dr. Brown’s direction were among the most innovative and rigorous discussions of clean energy policy and economic analysis anywhere.”

“Through both her body of work and numerous former students who work at or with the [Georgia Public Service Commission], she has a major indirect influence on the direction of utility regulation in this state and around the country.”

Benjamin H. Deitchman
Utility Analyst, Georgia Public Service Commission
Georgia Tech, Ph.D. in Public Policy, 2014

Summary sentence

Marilyn Brown is the 2022 recipient of the highest honor given to a Georgia Tech professor, the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award.

Summary

Marilyn Brown, Regents and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy, is a world-leading expert on renewable energy and energy efficiency, a transformative intellectual thinker, and one of the founders of the field of energy and climate policy. Now, she is the first woman to receive the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award in the 38 years of its existence. It is the highest honor given to a Georgia Tech professor.

Dateline

Fri, 04/29/2022 - 12:00

Contact

Patti Futrell
Faculty Communications Program Manager

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

Marilyn Brown

Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award

go-sei

go-rbi

go-bbiss

News room topics

Campus and Community

Marilyn Brown

Brown, Engle, Nemirovski Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Read More...

Related links

Keywords

News room topics

Categories

Department of Energy Awards Georgia Tech Grant for Energyshed Project

Keywords

News room topics

Categories

Marilyn Brown Tapped as First Woman to Receive Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award

Keywords

News room topics

Categories