Dr. Valerie Thomas will be speaking on "Potential for Renewable Energy in Georgia". She is the first speaker in a series of eight Georgia Tech professors who will be lecturing about various issues related to sustainability. This lecture series is being organized by Students Organizing for Sustainability (SOS).

About Dr. Valerie Thomas:
Most academics specialize in either public policy or engineering. Georgia Tech Associate Professor Valerie Thomas explores the nexus between the two. Thomas, who holds a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, sees public policy and sustainable technology as complementary fields. "Dealing with the future energy problems of the world is difficult and the problems are fundamental engineering problems," explains Thomas, who held postdoctoral appointments in nuclear arms control at Carnegie Mellon and Princeton and spent last year working with Congress on key environmental issues as an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. To work on the world's energy problems, she researches a variety of engineering technologies, from making recycling and waste management more efficient using information technology to reduced fossil fuel use and air transportation. She also attends weekly Environmentally Conscience Design and Manufacturing Program meetings to discuss research on environmentally benign products. "We're working together and building links," she says of the professors and students who attend the meetings. "There's a lot of expertise at Georgia Tech that doesn't exist elsewhere."