Joshua Rhodes holds a Ph.D. candidate in Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. His current research examines the area of residential smart grid applications, including system-level applications of energy efficiency and distributed generation. He is also interested in policy and the impacts that good policy can have on the efficiency of the local economy, especially policy that utilizes market forces to increase the efficiency of the residential building stock. He holds a double bachelors in Mathematics and Economics from Stephen F. Austin State University, a masters in Computational Mathematics from Texas A&M University, and a masters in Architectural Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.