Speaker Bios

Ian Adams is the Managing Director at Evergreen Climate Innovations. He brings more than a decade of experience working in energy and climate across investing, operations, and government. Ian works to identify technology and market trends, evaluates new investment opportunities, and develops new initiatives to support the companies in Evergreen’s investment portfolio.

Spencer is the CEO of Bedrock Materials, whose mission is to develop, commercialize and scale ultra-low cost sodium-ion battery materials for use in automobiles. Sodium-ion batteries offer most of the performance of lithium ion, but with less reliance on critical minerals like cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, and nickel.

Jungwoo Lee is a materials scientist working to make better batteries. Jungwoo is the Chief Technology Officer at South 8 Technologies. Prior to South 8, Jungwoo earned a PhD from UC San Diego for work on thin-film battery technology and pioneering battery characterization efforts.

Dr. Bin Li is Senior Vice President of Product Development at Wildcat Discovery Technologies. Dr. Li has thirty years of research experience in inorganic materials, including fifteen years in battery research.Upon joining Wildcat in 2007, Dr. Li was jointly responsible for the development of Wildcat’s proprietary high-throughput platform for hydrogen storage and battery materials.

Weikang and his team at ExPost are creating a sustainable and profitable battery recycling business via a patent-pending process named Purification-Regeneration Integrated Materials Engineering (“PRIME”), efficiently regenerating vital cathode active materials from manufacturing scraps and spent batteries.

Karthee is the Founding Managing Partner at MFV Partners, a Silicon Valley based, early-stage deep tech venture fund targeting technology startups disrupting traditional industries like Logistics, Automotive, Manufacturing, and others. Karthee invests in frontier-tech startups in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Energy, Quantum Computing, and data platforms. 

Celina leads the battery engineering team in commercializing and manufacturing the first North American-based lithium-sulfur cell technology at scale. Having been a battery technology executive at some of the top companies in the industry, such as Tesla, Panasonic, Uber, and Quantumscape, Celina has unparalleled experience and knowledge in the highly sophisticated areas of material engineering, cell engineering, manufacturing engineering, manufacturing operations, supply chain, and battery regulatory strategy that work in concert to deliver commercially viable, high-quality, and qualified battery architectures for the automotive, aerospace, micromobility, and consumer electronics sectors.

Frederik serves as a technology scout for EV and battery-related technologies, involving the identification and evaluation of new battery technologies, presenting at leading conferences such as AABC and IBS, and negotiating and coordinating with startups to secure BMW's access to cutting-edge technology. 

Colleen Farrell Wright is the Vice President of Corporate Strategy for Constellation. Wright is responsible for the development of the enterprise strategy at Constellation, the nation’s largest producer of carbon-free energy and the leading competitive supplier of energy products and services to 2 million homes and businesses across the United States. In this role, Wright also advances new technologies, policies, and business model transformations through partnerships, grants and research and development.

Erik is currently the CTO of Unigrid Battery, where they aim to develop solid-state batteries for stationary energy storage applications. He is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the NanoEngineering department at UC San Diego, where he researched solid-state batteries in the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion, namely in the synthesis and evaluation of materials to find longer-lasting, stable chemistries.

Kang Xu is an MRS Fellow, ECS Fellow, ARL Fellow (emeritus), and currently the Chief Scientist of SES AI Corp based in Boston, MA. He has been conducting electrolytes and interphasial chemistry research for the past 30 years, published 350+ papers, wrote/edited 5 books/chapters, and obtained 20+ US Patents, with total citation of ~70,000 and an h-index of 128. He is a Clarivate’s highly-cited author, and one of the top 2% most influential researchers in the Stanford Database. 

Chibueze Amanchukwu is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. His research is focused on enabling long duration electrical (batteries) and chemical energy storage for a sustainable energy future. 

Susan Babinec leads a comprehensive strategy that expands the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) vision for a future electric grid that includes a range of optimized energy storage capabilities.

Claus Daniel is Associate Laboratory Director for Advanced Energy Technologies (AET). He leads an organization of scientists, engineers, and analysts working to develop globally needed solutions to deeply decarbonize the economy.

Laura Gagliardi is the Richard and Kathy Leventhal Professor in the Department of Chemistry, with joint appointments in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the James Franck Institute. She also directs the Chicago Center for Theoretical Chemistry. The Gagliardi group develops novel wave function-based quantum chemical methods and applies them to study problems related to renewable energies. 

Ozge Guney-Altay, PhD, is the director of Polsky Science Ventures. In this role, she is responsible for leading and managing the startup initiatives for science and technology at the University of Chicago. Ozge is an entrepreneur specializing in strategic and fiscal development of tech businesses.

Sean L. Jones is the deputy laboratory director for science & technology at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. In this role, he serves as Argonne’s chief research officer and its senior science strategist and advisor. He works with the laboratory director and associate laboratory directors to implement a laboratory-wide science strategy and further develop Argonne’s $1.1 billion multidisciplinary science and technology portfolio. 

Ryan Kellogg is a Professor and the Deputy Dean for Academic Programs at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research. Ryan's research examines energy and environmental economics and policy, often with a focus on energy markets and firms' behavior.

Erin Lane is Vice President and Chief of Staff in the Office of the President. In this role Lane serves as an advisor and senior staff member to President Alivisatos to help advance his University-wide agenda. She is responsible for supporting presidential strategic initiatives, convening groups across academic and administrative units of the University, and developing partnerships within and outside the University.

Nadya Mason is the dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago and the Robert J. Zimmer Professor of Molecular Engineering. She specializes in experimental studies of quantum materials, with a research focus on the electronic properties of nanoscale and correlated systems, such as nano-scale wires, atomically thin membranes, and nanostructured superconductors.

Y. Shirley Meng is a professor of molecular engineering at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. She also serves as the chief scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) Argonne National Laboratory.Her work pioneers in discovering and designing better materials for energy storage by a unique combination of first-principles computation guided materials discovery and design, and advanced characterization with electron/neutron/photon sources.

Sam Ori is the Executive Director at EPIC and the Becker Friedman Institute. From 2013 to 2015, he served as Executive Vice President at Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a Washington, DC-based organization dedicated to reducing American oil dependence in order to enhance economic and national security. From 2007 to 2013, Sam led SAFE’s policy work on a variety of topics, ranging from global oil and natural gas markets to transportation technology.

Jiwoong Park is Professor of Molecular Engineering at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Chair of the Department of Chemistry, having joined the University of Chicago in 2016. The Park Group research focuses on the science and technology of nanomaterials. The research is multidisciplinary and includes researchers with diverse backgrounds, including chemistry, physics, material science, and electrical engineering.

Shrayesh Patel completed his undergraduate degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2007, then received his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. The Patel Group focuses on functional polymers (e.g. electronic conductors, ion conductors, redox-active) for energy conversion and storage applications. The current focus is on batteries and thermoelectrics. 

Venkat Srinivasan is the director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) and deputy director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR). Dr. Srinivasan is interested in moving technologies to market and has been exploring ways to develop an ecosystem, focused on batteries, to accelerate technology commercialization. 

Sihong Wang’s research focuses on the development of biomimetic polymer electronics and bio-energy harvesting for interfacing with the human body and other biological systems as wearable and implantable devices.