Dana-Marie Thomas

Dana-Marie Thomas is a Researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) within the Resilient Infrastructure and Security Center and Strategic Energy Security Group. Her work focuses on enhancing stakeholder participation, supporting resilient infrastructure deployment, and addressing community vulnerabilities in evolving threat landscapes, with emphasis on energy security and resilience.

Her educational background includes a Bachelor's in Marketing from Morgan State University, a Master's in Cybersecurity Management and Policy from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in Public Policy and Administration from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Thomas's research spans energy and food security, energy resilience, energy technologies, technical assistance for community decision-making, stakeholder engagement, energy-water-food systems nexus, AI applications for energy systems, critical materials supply chains, cybersecurity in manufacturing, and human dimensions of cyber resilience. Her interdisciplinary approach addresses complex challenges at the intersection of energy, resilience, built environment, and health.

Recent publications demonstrate strong trends in agrivoltaics implementation, energy resilience assessment methodologies, and cybersecurity risk frameworks for distributed energy resources, contributing to community-scale clean energy deployment and critical infrastructure protection.

She actively participates in NREL's InSPIRE team accelerating agrivoltaics adoption and holds memberships in the Association for Data and Cyber Governance, Cloud Security Alliance, IEEE, Scrum Alliance, and Women in Cybersecurity.