Marilyn Brown, Regents’ Professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy, has been reappointed as a Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems. Recommended by their peers, recipients are chosen by the Provost and approved by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents.

Brown is one of three Brook Byers Professors on campus. The appointments recognize superior scholarly achievement and the potential for further progress. 

Brown directs the Climate and Energy Policy Lab and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. She is a leading expert on scenarios for a clean energy future. Using sophisticated energy-engineering models, Brown has brought a fact-based and authoritative perspective to energy sustainability discussions, influencing policy initiatives across the globe, the U.S., and particularly the South. Her research over the past several years has examined the impact of energy benchmarking to address information gaps in the real estate industry; trade-offs between electric and diesel urban delivery trucks; the potential for U.S. electrical efficiency improvements; the potential for co-generation to improve U.S. industrial competitiveness; and the evolution of smart grid governance.

Through the Brook Byers Professorship, Brown will endeavor to expand the sustainability dialogue across campus as a means to establish Georgia Tech as a thought leader on technologies and policies for a clean energy future. In addition to serving as a Regents’ and Brook Byers professor, Her research focuses on the design and modeling of energy and climate policies, with an emphasis on the electric utility industry, energy efficiency, and resources on the customer side of the meter. She has authored more than 250 publications and six books.

Brown’s deep expertise in climate and energy policy helped shape numerous reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including one that led to the organization receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

She has served on eight committees of the National Academies and is in her second term on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electricity Advisory Committee. Since 2010, she has been a presidential appointee to the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority where her efforts have helped put the agency on a track to reduce its CO2 emissions in 2020 by 40% below 2005.

The School of Public Policy is a unit of Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.