People Spotlight: Meet Rob Thomas

Our People Spotlight series gives you an inside look at our technical experts around the world. This week, we are highlighting a senior sustainability planner from our Buildings + Places business in the U.S. East region and providing an insight into his inspiration and work.

Rob is a member of AECOM’s High Performance Buildings and Sustainability team that provides sustainability consulting services for planning, design and construction projects across a range of sectors, including infrastructure, commercial, education, transportation and hospitality. Prior to joining AECOM, he has worked for the City of Newark, New Jersey, as the Chief of Energy and Environment, spearheading Newark’s sustainable infrastructure work in energy, transportation/mobility, resiliency, telecommunications and conservation.

Tell us about what inspired you to join the industry.

I studied mechanical engineering technology in college and was most interested in alternative energy resources, specifically residential and utility scale solar and development. Since this preceded the energy and decarbonization movement we’re seeing today, I started my career in the public sector focusing on establishing demand-side management projects aimed at increasing the energy efficiency of building systems in municipal and community facilities. These programs spanned from concept development through construction and included HVAC system improvements, lighting retrofits, building automation systems, renewable energy and other technologies.

There are many challenges in developing a deep energy retrofit project, especially incorporating renewable energy systems and innovative building technologies in a policy and regulatory environment that may add time and cost to the project. Finding solutions to reduce existing energy policy and regulatory challenges presented me with an opportunity to take on regulatory responsibilities with the City of Newark and later inspired me to seek out a more technical space to learn how to develop, design and build solutions to improve infrastructure assets in our communities. This led me to AECOM and our High Performance Building and Sustainability team.

What is your favorite AECOM project that you’ve worked on and why?

I especially enjoy all the work I’ve been doing with the Innovation Laboratory initiative (iLAB) team. With subject matter experts across disciplines and regions, the iLAB team provides innovation as a service to deliver High Performance and Net Zero Carbon projects that help clients reach their decarbonization goals.

Within the iLAB team, I’m part of a smaller group of practitioners, focused specifically on building systems. We use tools we’ve developed in-house, together with the ScopeX team, to identify optimization strategies (such as using alternative building materials) to decarbonize building assets. We present our clients with the business case for incorporating these strategies into the design work at the early stages of a project, expediting the conceptual design process. We also have life cycle assessment specialists on our team focusing on embodied carbon analysis, which is becoming more critical to our clients.

One example of an iLAB project is with the City of Richmond, Virginia, where we used a tool to help quantify potential carbon reductions and validate recommended net zero strategies. This work will help the city gain a better sense of reductions that could be achieved through policy changes, to help justify enacting sustainability regulations and reduce citywide emissions.

Tell us a story of how your work positively impacted the community.

The work that our teams are doing with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will affect this region for years to come. The Port Authority oversees aviation, marine ports, ferry operations, tunnels, bridges, terminals, passenger rail and commercial properties such as the World Trade Center for New York and New Jersey — it’s a huge economic engine for this region.

We are working with the Port Authority to establish a roadmap for how the agency can meet its aggressive net zero carbon reduction targets by 2050. This plan addresses all aspects of the agency’s operations and will help electrify equipment, transition to alternative fuels, make buildings more energy efficient, and mitigate air quality issues in environmental justice communities. As the first transportation agency committed to eliminating GHG emissions by 2050, the Port Authority will become an industry leader by implementing its Net Zero Roadmap.

As a resident of New Jersey, it’s great to have a hand in keeping people moving, sustainably. 45 percent of our pollution in New Jersey comes from trucks and buses, so electrification of these vehicles will have a direct impact on air quality, particularly in cities like Newark. People will literally be able to breathe easier because of the work we’re doing, and that makes me happy.

Share a piece of career advice.

Be open to opportunities because you never know where they’ll take you. By saying no, you could be boxing yourself into a corner. When I started doing energy retrofit work, I had zero regulatory experience. My knowledge of policy and legislation was gained on the job, from digging into federal codes and guidelines to understand how they related to state and local governments, and how they could be interpreted, together with building codes, to gain more flexibility on specific projects.

When I was presented with an opportunity in the regulatory world, it was outside of my comfort zone and my area of expertise. But by staying open, I was able to learn all about the power of regulation, and this is key to some of the work I’m doing today. That’s just one example of being open to opportunities and communicating with leadership, whether it be your direct managers or leadership, about what you want to do and what you can do.