Climate Tech Virtual Conference
Wednesday, March 24th, 2021
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Recorded talks:
Matthew Gordon - Executive Director at Climate Tech Action Network (CTAN)
Opening remarks
Will Kletter - Director of Customer Success at ClimateAi
Shared Resilience: Using A.I. to create a more resilient food system for farmers, consumers, and the planet
Elena Berman - Chief Science Officer at Kairos Aerospace
Dramatically reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations using aerial sensing
Saul Griffith - Author of Rewiring America / Founder and Chief Scientist at Otherlab
Rewiring America
Blake Putney - Executive Vice President for Strategy at Hydrostar
A New Catalyst is Enabling Low Cost Electrolyzers that can make Carbon Free Hydrogen an Economic Reality
Schedule
Schedule (PST)
Keynote Speaker: Saul Griffith - Author of Rewiring America / Founder and Chief Scientist at Otherlab
9:30 AM - Elliot Kulakow and Simon Wandanda - Cofounders of Fortium Africa
From 0 to UN Contractor: Bootstrapping a Solar EPC in East Africa
Elliot Kulakow started life along a typical tech trajectory - he studied physics at Cornell and entered the tech industry in data science. Then he worked for a company focused on Africa and recalibrated. Now he's working on resilient infrastructure and spending as much time as possible in the field.
Simon Wandanda is an electrical engineer with a focus on renewable energy, equitable access, and clean transport. Prior to founding Fortium Africa, Simon delivered 500kWp in solar water pumping solutions and 2MW of mini-grids across East Africa.
10:30 AM - Lauren Dunford - Cofounder and CEO of Safi
Manufacturing Excellence for All of Us - Good for Business, Good for the Planet
Lauren Dunford co-founded Safi while getting her MBA at Stanford University. Safi’s team brings both manufacturing experience and success building world-class cloud software at scale. Safi has expanded quickly to 80+ plants across Mexico, East Africa, and the USA, and is gearing up to grow even more in 2021 towards a vision of the world's 10 million factories all operating at peak efficiency.
11:30 AM - Will Kletter - Director of Customer Success at ClimateAi
Shared Resilience: Using A.I. to create a more resilient food system for farmers, consumers, and the planet
Will Kletter is currently the Director of Customer Success at ClimateAi, and previously was a principal in the agribusiness practice at the Boston Consulting Group. He has over ten years of experience in climate change and sustainability topics across environmental consulting, investing, venture capital, startups, and growth strategy. Will studied political science at Yale University, and received his MBA / MS in Natural Resources from the University of Michigan.
12:30 PM - Elena Berman - Chief Science Officer at Kairos Aerospace
Dramatically reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations using aerial sensing
Elena Berman is the Chief Science Officer of Kairos Aerospace. In this role, Elena is responsible for all aspects of research, development, hardware engineering, and advanced data analytics. She is passionate about climate change and focused on developing and refining methodologies, metrics, and data collection to provide actionable and reliable data-based analytics to significantly reduce methane emissions. Prior to joining Kairos, Elena was Director of Research for Los Gatos Research, designing high-performance spectroscopic analyzers and serving as principal investigator on government funded collaborative research projects. Elena received her PhD in physical chemistry from Stanford University.
Keynote:
2:00 pm - Saul Griffith - Author of Rewiring America / Founder and Chief Scientist at Otherlab
Rewiring America
Saul Griffith is an engineer and inventor who helps government agencies and Fortune 500 companies understand energy infrastructure and deep decarbonization as Founder and Chief Scientist at Otherlab. He’s been a principal investigator and project lead on federally-funded research projects for agencies including NASA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-e), National Science Foundation and United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM). He was awarded the MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2007.
3:00 pm - Blake Putney - Executive Vice President for Strategy at Hydrostar
A New Catalyst is Enabling Low Cost Electrolyzers that can make Carbon Free Hydrogen an Economic Reality
Blake Putney is an independent consultant for a green energy startup developing technology to balance the electric grid. He also works with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to perform risk analysis of architectures for human missions to Mars. He formerly was a Principle Consultant for Valador and a corporate Vice President and Deputy Manager of the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) Facility Systems Group. A recognized expert in developing relevant, elegant, and transparent risk models for complex systems, he has 45 years of experience and has been responsible for programs that provide services to U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and utility organizations worldwide.
4:00 pm - Timothy Latimer - Cofounder of Fervo Energy
The Geothermal Decade
Tim Latimer is a fellow at Activate, Clean Energy Leadership Institute and a co-founder of Fervo Energy, which commercializes technology to develop, own and operate geothermal assets as the dispatchable foundation to a 100% clean energy future. Previously, he was a drilling engineer with BHP where he worked in the Permian and Eagle Ford basins. With a growing appreciation of the urgency of climate change, Tim left the petroleum industry 2015 to pursue an MBA/MS in Environment and Resources from Stanford University where he launched Fervo Energy.
5:00 pm - Shashank Samala and Noah McQueen - Cofounders of Heirloom Technologies
Low cost Direct Air Capture (DAC) via Carbon Mineralization
Shashank Samala is the cofounder and CEO of Heirloom Technologies. Shashank grew up in southeast India, where he saw firsthand the impacts of climate change on the world's most vulnerable people. He previously founded Tempo Automation, a software powered electronics manufacturer building mission-critical electronics for reusable rockets, satellites, medical devices, and other high reliability industries. Prior to Tempo, Shashank helped Square grow its small business customer base in its early years. Shashank holds a BS from Cornell University.
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