Rate My Professor Bill Drummond

William J. (Bill) Drummond is an associate professor in the School of City and Regional Planning within the College of Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He holds a BA from Duke University awarded in 1975 and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Drummond has served on the Georgia Tech faculty since at least 1988, when he taught the institution's first geographic information systems class through the City Planning program. He advanced from assistant professor to his current associate professor position in the School of City and Regional Planning. Drummond directs the Georgia Tech Master of Science in Geospatial Intelligence for Society and Technology (MS-GIST) degree program and served as lead organizer for the new Bachelor of Science in Urban Planning and Spatial Analytics, the first such undergraduate degree in the state of Georgia.

Drummond's research specializations encompass geographic information systems, spatial analysis, and urban climate change mitigation and adaptation. He is the lead developer of GIS for Climate Change, a web-based mapping platform that visualizes local climate impacts and solutions across Georgia datasets. As co-principal investigator for the Drawdown Georgia project, funded by the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, he developed the Drawdown Georgia GHG Emissions Tracker, an interactive dashboard calculating greenhouse gas emissions at state and county levels. This work contributed to a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study demonstrating pathways for Georgia to halve its carbon footprint. His publications include 'GIS as a visualization tool for economic development' (1993), 'Exurban Industrialization: Implications for Economic Development' with Arthur C. Nelson and David S. Sawicki (1995), and 'Logistics Centered Talent: A Perspective on Supply and Demand' with Jan L. Youtie and Nancy Nolan (2005). Drummond has influenced urban planning through tools enabling local climate policy analysis and briefings such as the ARC/EPA Drawdown Georgia Tracker presentation in 2023.