For Kim Greene, helping others isn’t just a career—it’s a calling. As chair, president, and CEO of Georgia Power, the UAB alumna leads one of the South’s largest power companies, ensuring millions have access to clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy.

Yet, Greene’s journey to make people’s lives better began far from the energy industry. As a teenager, Greene dreamed of becoming a doctor. When she enrolled as a graduate student at UAB, her sights were set on the Master of Biomedical Engineering program.

Today, Greene isn’t directly involved in biomedical engineering, but it’s the mentorship she gained at UAB through Dr. Martha Bidez—and the Advanced Safety Engineering and Management (ASEM) concentration Bidez started in the Master’s in Engineering Program—that has led her to revolutionize safety at Georgia Power and give back to UAB to honor the mentor who meant so much.

Mentorship matters

Originally from Knoxville, Tennessee, Greene was interested in a number of graduate programs before choosing the UAB School of Engineering for her master’s. Apart from wanting to be close to home, during her tours she met two professors—Dr. Linda Lucas and Bidez—which sealed her decision.

“They were so compelling and inspirational in their work,” Greene recalled. “I had never had a woman engineering professor. The fact that there were two was amazing to me.”

By the time Greene graduated, she envisioned a career designing artificial orthopedic implants at a company in small-town Indiana. However, after getting married during her graduate studies, she faced a shift in plans when her husband secured a job in Birmingham as a pilot; opportunities for pilots in rural Indiana were limited.

She ended up finding a job in the energy industry—one she was sure she wouldn’t like—at Southern Company Services. “I told myself I’d get a job here in Birmingham, try it out for a while, and then I’d switch to the job I actually wanted, but instead, I found that I loved it,” Greene said.

Thirty-four years later, Greene is not just still working in the energy industry but has gone far beyond that first job. Today she leads Georgia Power, a Southern Company subsidiary that services more 2.8 million customers.

The science of safety

Even though Greene’s career took her down a different path than the one she envisioned, the real-world problem-solving skills and emphasis on teamwork she gained at UAB stuck with her.

“When I came to Southern Company, even though it was a bit of a different language for me to learn, a lot of the lessons that I had gained—the process, procedures, and higher-order thinking that I had developed during my master’s program at UAB—were extraordinarily valuable to me,” she said.

Bidez started the ASEM concentration after Greene graduated, but as an alumna Greene serves on the ASEM advisory council. Through this experience, she said she has implemented much of what she learned from Bidez and that program into how Southern Company now approaches safety.

The power industry comes with a number of high-hazard positions. A decade ago, when Greene was chief operating officer for Southern Company, she oversaw all the company’s power plants, transmission lines, and engineering. Greene’s focus on and confidence in ensuring employee safety can be traced back to Bidez and the ASEM program.

“She taught me about how the science of safety was evolving,” Greene said. “Southern Company has been a leader in the electric utility industry and how we are approaching safety, and it’s thanks to Dr. Bidez.”

Greene and Bidez stayed connected until Bidez unfortunately passed away in 2016. Another one of her former mentees, ASEM director Donald S. Burke, Ph.D., now leads the program, which focuses on prevention through design.

Burke says that UAB’s program is unusual in that it’s housed within a school of engineering, but that this approach brings value to students in their future careers, as Greene herself has experienced. “We prevent accidents and illnesses by designing out those hazards through an engineering lens.”

For Burke, having Greene implement the things she’s learned from the ASEM to Georgia Power makes him feel like the program is doing what Bidez meant for it to do.

“We’re grateful to have Kim’s support and feedback,” Burke said. “To have Kim not only be a leader in one of these companies in the industry, but a leader of a company that is leading in safety is invaluable to us at UAB.”

Improving lives

One of the most surprising aspects of the energy industry for Greene was that her passion for helping people, which originally led her to biomedical engineering at UAB, was the exact goal of Southern Company: to improve the communities they serve.

Greene has never seen more clearly the way energy improves lives than when Hurricane Helene ripped through Georgia in 2024. The hurricane caused more damage and destruction than the combined force of the three most powerful storms in the state’s history: Hurricanes Matthew, Irma, and Michael.

“It is critical to restore power after a tragedy such as that, so that people can begin restoring their lives,” Greene said. Georgia Power and 20,000 employees and partners deployed over 46,000 square miles of Georgia to restore power to 1.5 million customers in just over a week.

“I’ve never seen such destruction, yet there was a feeling of hopefulness and inspiration with everyone coming together,” Greene said. “Our teams are at their best when times are at their worst.”

Giving back

To say thanks to UAB and honor Bidez, Greene recently completed a $30,000 gift to name the Martha Bidez, Ph.D., Advanced Safety Engineering and Management Office. This space will become the ASEM program director’s office, permanently linking ASEM’s current leadership to Bidez’s remarkable contributions. The office will be housed in the new state-of-the-art engineering facility, Frances and Miller Gorrie Hall, set to open in June 2025.

She also recently partnered with the UAB National Alumni Society to be a guest speaker at an Atlanta Alumni Network event. “It’s a privilege to be able to be a part of the alumni community, and I do feel that UAB provided me with a terrific educational experience that even went beyond my time at the University.”

During the event, she discussed the initiatives Georgia Power is undertaking to serve customers, including advancements in nuclear energy, addressing extraordinary economic growth in Georgia, and ensuring reliability. She also fielded questions and met other Atlanta-area alumni.

After three decades in her career, Greene advises alumni and engineering students to be bold: “The world needs you,” she said. “We need engineers who are technically savvy, care about their community and want to make a difference, so be bold. We need you!”