Brigitte Stepanov is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies. She is the founder and director of the Energy Today Lab, an interdisciplinary energy humanities lab engaged in research, pedagogy, and service with support from the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), and the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE). She is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies within the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and co-director of the African Studies minor (reach out to her or to Dr. Ippolito to learn more). Multifaceted inquiry drawing on multiple disciplines is at the heart of Dr. Stepanov’s research, teaching, and creative work. Trained as a humanities scholar and as a mathematician, she holds degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada and a PhD from Brown University. At Brown, she was a Fellow with the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and received the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence. Before coming to Georgia Tech, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of French and Arabic at Grinnell College. At Georgia Tech, she received the CTL Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2025 and the ML Excellence in Teaching Award in 2026.

Learn more about her work here.

Sean Singh Matharoo is Assistant Professor & Jacques Hardré Fellow of French and Francophone Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is transdisciplinary scholar of French- and English-language speculative literature, media, and philosophy, which he studies in the contexts of postcolonial studies, the energy humanities, and performance studies. As an alumnus of the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity, he is updating his doctoral thesis into a book, which is provisionally titled Solar Energology: Reading the Damned Poetics of a Dying Earth. Matharoo’s research and teaching responds to the Anthropocenic energy crisis and the need to transition to alternative energy sources by asking how literature, media, and philosophy may contribute to the decolonization of petroculture by impelling us to find, in language, the gift of solar-powered futures.

Matharoo is also a noise musician whose collaborative pieces about the environment may be understood to problematize the presupposition of colonial-racial divisions in thinking and being.

He is Book Review Assistant Editor for Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and the Environment and a partner/collaborator with Vision Inclusive.

Lukas Graber received his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich in 2002 and 2009 respectively. He conducted the experimental part of his M.S. research project on transient recovery voltage in the high voltage laboratories of Bonneville Power Administration, Portland, Oregon. His Ph.D. research focused on SF6 leakage detection in gas insulated switchgear and was awarded with the ETG Innovation Prize. Before he joined Georgia Tech in 2015, he worked several years at the Center for Advanced Power System, Florida State University - initially as a post-doctoral research associate and later as a research faculty member. His focus was on superconducting power cables and fault current limiters, ultra-fast mechanical switchgear, short circuit forces in substations, and grounding aspects of power distribution on future all-electric Navy ships. He authored and coauthored 40+ publications in journals and conference proceedings and holds several patents. Besides fundamental and applied research projects, he is also interested in commercialization aspects of new technologies. He is a guest technical editor for special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. In his free time, he likes to tinker with audio electronics, play the trumpet, scuba dive in Floridian waters, and paraglide in mountain ranges around the world.

Ruthie Yow joined the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE, previously the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain) in 2017. In her capacity as Service Learning and Partnerships Specialist, her work focuses on deepening the capacity of faculty and students to understand and act on equity as central to the creation of sustainable communities. Specifically, she supports course and project development around themes such as Water, Green Infrastructure, & Citizen Science; and Equitable and Sustainable Development.  She is a graduate of the inaugural Transformation Alliance Academy which trained participants to organize stakeholders around equitable transit-oriented development. Her recent sustainability-related public scholarship includes the 2018 Saporta Report piece, "Citizen Scientists Gathering Information to Inform Policy Decisions in West Atlanta."  Before coming to Serve-Learn-Sustain, her research and teaching engaged equity at the intersection of race, power, and education in the American South. Her book, Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City, documents the erosion of educational opportunity in metro Atlanta schools and how to address that deepening crisis; it was published by Harvard University Press in 2017.  This background in educational equity research equipped her to nurture the projects of the K12 Education Working Group, a working group of the RCE Greater Atlanta. RCE Greater Atlanta was acknowledged by the United Nations University in 2017 as a new Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development. The K12 Education Working Group endeavors to connect educators, nonprofits, government agencies and industry around the common mission of sharing and augmenting sustainability-focused curricular resources and programs and nourishing networks of educators dedicated to robust and inclusive sustainability education for all students. Her volunteer work around equity includes service as the Secretary of the Board of Marietta YELLS (Youth Empowerment through Learning, Leading, and Serving) and as the Co-Director of Tutor Recruitment for Common Good Atlanta. Ruthie has a PhD in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University.  

Christine Eveker is a former graduate student in the Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies (ALIS) program at Georgia Tech, with a concentration in French. She is an enthusiastic contributor to the research efforts of the Energy Today Lab, as the subject of energy humanities and the broader environmental humanities are among her areas of interest.

Christine holds a BA in Communication from Loyola University of Chicago and an MFA in Film Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. After pursuing a fruitful career in publishing and communications in both the private and government sectors, she decided to continue her education, concentrating on her love of French. She obtained a BA in French from the University of Central Florida, as well as the DALF C1 and C2 French language diplomas issued by the French Ministry of Education. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in French Studies at Tulane University.

In addition to the energy/environmental humanities, her other research interests include French cinema, feminist issues, and ecocriticism as it relates to both of these areas of study.

Hello! I am Aidan Zeissner, a fourth-year Literature, Media, and Communication major with threads in Social Justice and Science, Technology, and Culture at Georgia Tech. I also study French through the Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies major.

Though energy humanities is a relatively new subject to me, the expansive reach of energy provides a whole web of interdisciplinary subjects to learn from. For ETL, I am particularly interested in seeing the ways in which ableist systems inform the way in which we view human labor. On a larger scale, the ways in which capitalism and white supremacy (as well as other systems) influence human energy direct the topics I connect to energy as an expansive term.