Dr. Pearce’s responsibilities within the Myers-Lawson School of Construction include graduate and undergraduate education and advisement, development of new research and educational initiatives on sustainability, establishment of collaborations with other programs and institutes around the world, and research, teaching, and technical assistance for government agencies, professionals, and laypeople with interests in the built environment. Dr. Pearce has developed and deployed curricula for undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education in SFI, provided technical assistance and facilitation of sustainable problem solving in industry, and pursued active promotion and publicity of the School via publication, participation in professional associations and conferences, and contribution to the activities of funding organizations.

Dr. Pearce has served as a Principal or Co-Principal Investigator for forty-two funded projects (with a total value of over $1.7 million), and has collaborated on multiple other successful proposals for external sponsors including the United States Army, United States Air Force, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Army Environmental Policy Institute, the U.S.D.A. Forest Service, and multiple corporations and state agencies. Dr. Pearce has represented organizational sustainability initiatives at over 100 conferences and symposia both nationally and internationally, and has developed and taught lectures and courses of varying lengths on sustainable facilities and infrastructure reaching hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students and over a thousand practicing professionals around the world.

Dr. Pearce is the author or co-author of nineteen refereed journal and conference papers, over 100 other publications and technical reports, and one book chapter. She also served as the founding general editor of the peer-reviewed international Journal of Green Building through May 2007. Dr. Pearce has made invited presentations or keynote speeches on her research findings at 30 regional, national, and international conferences, and in over 70 other forums around the world. She has taught or co-taught fourteen different graduate and undergraduate courses at Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech, is a regularly invited lecturer, collaborator, and/or co-instructor for other courses, and has served as the lead trainer for an array of public offerings and contract courses taught over fifty times to professionals in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction industry in the US and abroad. In addition to her research and educational duties, Dr. Pearce is also actively involved with service activities, having served on ten doctoral committees in the Colleges of Engineering and Architecture, as supervisor or advisor for 30 M.S. and undergraduate research students, on 17 different campus committees, as a reviewer for multiple technical journals and sponsor proposal review panels, and on three different non-profit organization advisory boards.

Dr. Pearce received her Ph.D. in 1999 from Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with research on measuring the sustainability of built facilities and prioritizing facility improvement options to increase built environment sustainability. She received her M.S. in Civil Engineering degree from Georgia Tech in 1994, with research on the development of an artificial neural network model for conceptual construction estimating, and her B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, with research on video-based vehicle detection using artificial neural networks.