Meet the Expert: Valerie Thomas

Shifting focus from theoretical physics to research on environmental problems over the course of her distinguished career, the professor is working to decarbonize the industrial complex.

Climate change might feel like an intractable problem but Valerie Thomas wants us to take heart. “It’s not hard, we make it hard. We can recreate our industrial system,” says the Professor at the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Thomas is the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and has a joint appointment at the School of Public Policy. She admits that the challenge of global warming feels large because there are so many people and major systems and big money involved. “But these are doable problems,” Thomas says.

Such an active approach to solving challenges does not come easy but Thomas has fine-tuned a take-charge method ever since her high school days at Garrison Forest, a school for girls outside of Baltimore, Maryland. She remembers a chemistry teacher asking the class what they wanted to learn, encouraging them to be active participants in their education. That deviation away from being a passive recipient of knowledge took deep root.

Today, Thomas has a fluid teaching style, shifting ideas and topics around depending on the classroom. Fluidity has also been a hallmark of her long and illustrious career sparked by an early interest in theoretical and quantum physics.

The pursuit of physics

Attracted to the idea of small-group education that the Swarthmore College honors program offered, Thomas attended the liberal arts college for undergraduate studies, with interests in physics, philosophy and music. Despite having participated in the Young Artists program for piano at Tanglewood, Thomas eventually decided music was not for her. She graduated with a major in physics and a minor in math, a subject she admits was challenging. “The only way I could be a theoretical physicist was to really do a lot of math,” she says.

It was at Swarthmore that Thomas attended regular meetings about “Physics in Public Policy” at the home of a physics professor, Rush Holt. The group would discuss a Scientific American article or other reading for the week. Those meetings were the beginning of a long professional relationship with Holt. After leaving Swarthmore, Holt was the assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, near Princeton University where Thomas worked. Holt eventually ran for Congress and got elected. And when Thomas was a physics science fellow in Congress, she worked in Holt’s office.

After undergraduate study, Thomas pursued high energy theory in her “difficult but fantastic” doctoral studies at Cornell. Her thesis dissertation focused on monopole catalysis of proton decay in grand unified theories. While her doctoral work focused on theoretical physics, the seed for physics in society that was sown at Swarthmore took root and bloomed at Cornell.

As it happened, some of the giants in the fields of science activism and nuclear arms control—Hans Bethe, Kurt Gottfried, Carl Sagan, Peter Stein, and emerging leaders Lisbeth Gronlund, George Lewis, David Wright, Chris Chyba—were at Cornell at the same time. A group of physics students, including Thomas, launched a nuclear arms control organization on campus hosting speakers and symposia. After completing her PhD at Cornell, Thomas joined Carnegie Mellon in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy as a postdoctoral fellow in 1986.

Extending her field of studies in the area, a second postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton’s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies on nuclear security gave Thomas an opportunity to travel to the Soviet Union to conduct nuclear arms control verification experiments on the Black Sea. She also was a participant and organizer of workshops for young scientists from the Soviet Union and the United States, and expanding to include scientists from China and other nations, an annual event that continues to this day: International Symposium on Science and World Affairs. It was where she first met her husband.

After several years, Thomas decided to change her career focus. “I had by that point realized that there was a lot to do in nuclear but for that I would go more into policy. I decided instead to work in research and academia on environmental problems,” she says. “I was able to do that at Princeton, at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and later at the Princeton Environmental Institute.”

Thomas says she was lucky that Georgia Tech called saying they had a position at the intersection of sustainability and technology.

Research avenues at Georgia Tech

At the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Thomas has been advising students in a number of research avenues. A planning grant from the National Science Foundation helps build collaborations with students and faculty working on energy in East Africa. Thomas has been advising three PhD students at the African Center of Excellence in Energy for Sustainable Development, based at the University of Rwanda College of Science and Technology. “One of my former PhD students from there is now a postdoc here, which is really terrific,” she says. The work involves complex optimization modeling, lifecycle assessment, and economic analysis, that addresses questions such as: “How do you build an electricity system where there isn’t much of one? Do you go more for a decentralized solar rooftop or do you use the grid?” Thomas says.

Greenhouse gas emissions are the primary target of Thomas’s research whether that’s through new ways of manufacturing cement or paper; or finding standardized ways of measuring the emissions. Invited to chair a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to evaluate methods for quantifying greenhouse emissions from alternative transportation fuels, Thomas has focused her attention on improving the evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrogen and aviation biofuels are two promising alternatives to fossil fuels. If they are to be widely adopted, “our measures need to provide a reasonable estimate of the likely climate impact,” Thomas says.

“I’m working a lot on what we can do to modify major processes, energy and industrial production, to make them have much lower greenhouse gas emissions,” Thomas says. She urges all hands on deck in addressing the challenges ahead. “This is not a quick science problem that you do on the side for fun. If we’re going to actually transform our entire energy and industrial system, we need to do this really well and have the person power to do it,” she says, “This is a huge, difficult, potentially very expensive problem. I feel that our entire engineering enterprise needs to focus on this.”

That all-hands-on-deck focus is what galvanizes Thomas in her work every day. She encourages students to seek clarity in their learning as well. “I like to ask students to work on a problem not because I want to check if they know the answer, but because I think working on the question, even if you can’t do it, especially if you can’t do it, gets you engaged in the problem,” she says. Thomas encourages students to not lose sight of the forest for the trees, when working on research. “Having more depth and less decoration in terms of the complexity of your model” is key, she says.

Thomas remembers a formative moment when, at the end of her tenure as a science fellow in Congress, a politician posed her a question about her upcoming teaching job at Georgia Tech: “To what end?” he asked. That question—to what end?—drives her research too. Always curious and ready to push the envelope, “I always ask, ‘How much of a row am I hoeing?’ ‘Is there an actual benefit?” she says.