Valerie Margaret Thomas (born 1959)[4] is an American physicist and environmental engineer, with broad research interests in environmental technology including aspects of the subject relating to materials science, energy systems, transportation and transportation energy use, and economics.
She earned her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1986, working in theoretical high energy physics with Tung-Mow Yan as her doctoral advisor.
[4] After finishing her doctorate, she shifted her focus to environmental science, with a postdoctoral research visit to Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked with Granger Morgan in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.
From 2004 to 2005 she worked as a Congressional Science Fellow for New Jersey congressman Rush Holt Jr., and in 2005 she took her present position at Georgia Tech.
[7] Thomas was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1998, after a nomination from the APS Forum on Physics and Society, "for her efforts to build an active interface between the science of materials and pollutants, and the avenues mechanisms necessary to build sound management strategies, and to build international networks of environmental science and policy researchers".