Maury Dobbie

Executive Director, Colorado Energy Research Collaboratory
21st Century Energy Symposium Chair 2011-2021

Maury Dobbie has been the Executive Director of the Colorado Energy Research Collaboratory since July 2016. Since 2007, the Colorado Energy Research Collaboratory has been a successful energy research partnership between Colorado School of Mines, University of Colorado-Boulder, Colorado State University, and National Renewable Energy Laboratory. She also splits her time as the External Relations Director for the Energy Institute at Colorado State University. With the four Collaboratory entities as co-hosts, Maury has headed up the annual 21^st Century Energy Transition Symposium event since 2011. She was the former Assistant Director at the Center for the New Energy Economy founded by former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. Maury began her entrepreneurial career at age 19 founding and operating six diverse companies, holding CEO or principal positions. Before joining CNEE, she was president/CEO of a regional not-for-profit economic development corporation in northern Colorado. In 1994, Maury founded a video production company and expanded it rapidly into an award-winning multimedia enterprise, with a web-development department and live event services. Dobbie served as a board member on the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Cluster (CCEC) and has been a part of Colorado’s new energy economy initiative since 2006. Maury is currently the chair of the board for the CCEC non-profit under the Colorado C3E initiative focused on driving revolutionary growth of the clean energy economy by educating, mentoring and empowering women and girls. She worked with industry partners to create Colorado State University’s Systems Engineering Program and the Clean Tech Certification Program at Front Range Community College. For 8 years she served the state in the Colorado Community College System made up of 13 colleges in 42 different locations in the state and served some of the years as chair of the board. Maury was named Top Women in Energy 2020, received the national award as Top Woman in Business by Office Depot, as well as named Women of Influence by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Bryan Willson

Executive Director
Energy Institute
Colorado State University

Dr. Bryan Willson is Executive Director of the Energy Institute at Colorado State University, where he also occupies the Bryan Willson Presidential Chair in Energy Innovation and serves as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering. CSU’s Energy Institute comprises over 200 faculty members working in energy and works closely with the Colorado energy startup community to help grow clean energy companies. The Energy Institute is headquartered at CSU’s Powerhouse Energy Campus, a 100,000 sq ft research facility that also houses over 15 early stage energy companies; it’s work on cleantech commercialization has been honored by the Economist, Scientific American, the Smithsonian Institution, university technology transfer associations, and the governments of Denmark, Spain, and China. Dr. Willson served as a Program Director at ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, from 2012-2016 and continued as a consultant / advisor to the agency until early 2019. He has worked for over 30 years to develop and deploy large-scale technology solutions related to energy, air quality, and human health. As an entrepreneur, Dr. Willson is co-founder of Envirofit International, Solix BioSystems, Factor(e) Ventures and Xpower. His research laboratory, the Engines & Energy Conversion Laboratory, has made important contributions in many areas, including: internal combustion engines, advanced vehicles, oil & gas production technology, advanced electrical grids, advanced biofuels, energy access for the developing world, and advanced building technologies. Dr. Willson is a Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers and has worked in over 40 countries.

Gregor Henze

Interim co-director, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI)
Endowed professor, Department of Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering
University of Colorado Boulder
Joint professor, National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Gregor P. Henze, Ph.D., P.E. is interim co-director of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, joint professor at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and endowed professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado.. His teaching focuses on the building energy systems side of architectural engineering, i.e., thermal environmental engineering, HVAC and refrigeration systems, design of energy efficient buildings, building control and automation systems, data science for building engineering applications, and sustainable building design. His research emphasizes model-based predictive optimal control and model-free reinforcement learning control of building energy systems, building thermal mass refrigeration systems, model-based benchmarking of building operational performance, whole-building fault detection and diagnosis, control strategies for mixed-mode buildings that incorporate both natural and mechanical ventilation, uncertainty quantification of occupant behavior and its impact, human presence detection, energy analytics and decision analysis as well as the integration of building energy system operations with the electric grid system. He is the primary author of more than 170 research articles, four of which have received best paper awards. Moreover, he is co-founder and chief scientist of QCoefficient, Inc., a startup developing real-time optimal control solutions for grid-interactive efficient buildings.

Rob Braun (Topic: Electrochemical Energy Conversion)

Rowlinson Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Colorado School of Mines

Dr. Robert Braun is the Rowlinson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado School of Mines and leads the Advanced Energy Systems group (https://aes.mines.edu). He received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2002. From 2002 to 2007, Dr. Braun was at United Technologies Fuel Cell and Research Center divisions where he last served as project leader for UTC’s mobile solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) power system development program. Dr. Braun has a multidisciplinary background in mechanical and chemical engineering, and his research focuses on energy systems modeling and analysis, techno-economic optimization, and numerical simulation of transport phenomena occurring within fuel cell and alternative energy systems. His industry experience encompasses development of low-NOx burners, CO₂-based refrigeration, and fuel cell technologies (incl. PEMFC, PAFC, MCFC, SOFC, and PCFC). Dr. Braun’s current research activities focus on hybrid fuel cell/engine systems, renewable energy pathways to synthetic fuel production, grid-scale energy storage, novel protonic ceramics, supercritical CO₂ power cycles, and dispatch optimization of concentrating solar power plants. He is a Link Energy Foundation Fellow, a member of ASME, ECS, and ASHRAE, has over 50 journal publications, and holds 6 U.S. patents.

Ivan Smalyukh (Topic: Energy Efficient Systems & Materials)

Professor, Department of Physics
University of Colorado Boulder

Ivan I. Smalyukh joined University of Colorado Boulder in 2007. He is also a founding fellow of Renewable Sustainable Energy Institute (a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NREL) and Materials Science Engineering Program. He is a senior investigator of the NSF Materials Science and Engineering Center and directs the Soft Matter Physics Research Group at CU-Boulder with 34 research group members (PhD and undergraduate students, postdocs and visiting scholars). Prior to CU-Boulder, Prof. Smalyukh did his postdoctoral and PhD studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Kent State University, respectively, as well as was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Smalyukh also held visiting professor positions at the Newton Institute (University of Cambridge, UK) and at the Max Planck Institute (Stuttgart, Germany), as well as held Paris Sciences Char and CNRS Chair positions at ESPC and University of Paris Sud, respectively (both in France). Prof. Smalyukh’s research encompasses soft condensed matter physics, building energy efficiency, aerogels, liquid crystals, colloids, polymers, biomaterials and their photonic, electro-optic and energy-related applications. He published >200 peer-refereed articles, including 7 in Nature and Science. He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society. He received many awards, including the Bessel and Glenn Brown Awards, NASA iTech award and Mid-Career Award of International Liquid Crystal Society, the PECASE Award from the Office of Science and Technology of the White House and the GSoft Award from the American Physical Society.

Todd Bandhauer (Topic: Decarbonizing Industrial Heat)

Director of Research, End Market, and Commercialization Hub CoLab
Associate Department Head for Graduate Studies
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Colorado State University

Dr. Bandhauer has been a member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering since August 2013. He has six years of experience in industry at Modine Manufacturing Company and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developing components for energy systems. His work has resulted in eight refereed conference and journal papers and 21 issued and pending patents. He is the Director of the Research, End Market, and Commercialization Hub CoLab housed at the Powerhouse Energy Campus which currently includes 12 graduate and undergraduate students. Dr. Bandhauer received his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jonathan White (Topic: Energy Cybersecurity)

Director Cybersecurity Program Office
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Jonathan White, Ph.D., is the director of NREL’s Cybersecurity Program Office. In this role, White coordinates NREL’s cybersecurity research portfolio and provides strategic guidance for the growth of staffing, capabilities, and facilities. He oversees programmatic relationships with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, and the private sector. He also serves as laboratory program manager to the DOE Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response. Previously, White managed NREL’s Secure Cyber-Energy Systems group within the Energy Security and Resilience Center, where he led a team of researchers and analysts who specialize in cybersecurity vulnerability analysis, encryption technologies for distributed energy resources, and advanced modeling, emulation, and visualization tools to evaluate the security of power-communications networks. The focus of NREL’s cybersecurity research is centered on intrinsic security design principles for bulk power renewables, distributed energy resources, and next-generation grid control systems. Prior to joining NREL, White spent over a decade performing research in wind turbine physical damage monitoring and wind plant control systems at Sandia National Laboratories. He was the lead engineer for DOE’s first research multi-turbine wind plant, the Scaled Wind Farm Technology Facility (SWiFT), where he was involved with projects on wind blade validation, data analysis, wind plant control, and wind plant reliability. During this time, White led a joint Sandia-NREL effort to forensically identify natural and cyber-physical vulnerabilities after a wind turbine catastrophically failed at the facility. The effort led to an extensive cyber-physical assessment and consequence-driven mitigation study by DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office on wind energy systems.

Kyri Baker (Topic: Building-to-Grid Interactions)

Assistant Professor
Building Systems engineer/civil systems
University of Colorado Boulder

Dr. Kyri Baker received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009, 2010, and 2014, respectively. From 2015 to 2017, she worked at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Since Fall 2017, she has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Baker is a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI). Her research focuses on renewable energy integration by changing the way the electric power grid operates. In particular, she develops computationally efficient optimization and learning algorithms for energy systems ranging from building-level assets to transmission grids. https://www.kyrib.com

Jeffrey Logan (Topic: NREL’s Electrification Futures Study)

Manager, 21^st Century Power Partnership
National Renewable Energy Lab
Policy & Analysis Group
RASEI, University of Colorado Boulder

Jeffrey Logan has nearly 30 years of experience in energy policy analysis, low-carbon market development, energy security, and strategic planning. Over the past 12 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), he has led innovative work on international power sector transformation, beneficial electrification, natural gas and renewable energy synergies, renewable energy policy design, and collaboration with key developing countries. He currently manages the 21^st Century Power Partnership, a key initiative under the Clean Energy Ministerial. He also leads the Policy and Analysis Group at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Logan served as Special Advisor and Review Editor for the IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation, published in 2011. He had previous positions at the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the World Resources Institute, the International Energy Agency, and Pacific Northwest National Lab. Logan has served as an advisor to the World Bank, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and an assortment of utilities and policymakers around the world. He has published approximately 90 technical reports and journal articles, and testified to Congress 5 times. Logan spent 5 years living in Nepal, Mainland China and Taiwan, and has spoken around the world on energy and climate change topics. Logan has undergraduate degrees in aerospace engineering and liberal arts from Pennsylvania State University, and graduate degrees in public administration and environmental science from Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA).

Tom Bradley (Topic: Hydrogen)

Department Head, Woodward Endowed Professor
Systems Engineering
Colorado State University

Dr. Bradley is Department Head and Woodward Endowed Professor of Systems Engineering in the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering at Colorado State University, where he conducts research and teaches a variety of courses in system engineering, multidisciplinary optimization, and design. Dr. Bradley’s research interests are focused on applications in Automotive and Aerospace System Design, Energy System Management, and Lifecycle Assessment. He earned BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California – Davis, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology with an emphasis in systems engineering and decision support. Prior to his academic career, Bradley was sole proprietor of an independent consulting company, performing hybrid electric vehicle design and control modeling for the Electric Power Research Institute in support of vehicle development programs at Ford, Daimler Chrysler and BAE Systems. Dr. Bradley’s research is focused on using advanced system design tools with experimental validation to advance the state of the art in practical, demonstrable systems.

Ryan Richards

Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science
Co-Director Mines/NREL Nexus
Colorado School of Mines

Dr. Ryan Richards is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, Professor of Chemistry, and Co-Director of the Mines/NREL Nexus at the Colorado School of Mines and holds a joint appointment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory both in Golden, Colorado USA. Ryan received his BS from Michigan State University, MS from Central Michigan University and Phd from Kansas State University. He has been a visiting scientist at the Boreskov Institute of Catalysis in Novosibirsk, Russia and a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute für Kohlenforschung in Germany. His independent career started as an Assistant Professor at Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) and in 2007 he moved to Mines and NREL where he was promoted to Professor in 2012. Prof. Richards has more than 160 publications, 7 patents and 3 edited books in the areas of Green Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, Catalysis and Nano-Materials.

Carrie Eckert (Topic: Bioenergy & CBI)

Interim co-Director, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute
University of Colorado, Boulder
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Carrie Eckert, Ph.D. is an Interim co-director for the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, a joint institute between the University of Colorado, Boulder and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Her research is focused on the development of non-model microbes for the production of biofuels and other value-added chemicals from renewable and sustainable feedstocks. She is the Rapid Genetics team lead for the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (https://cbi.ornl.gov/), a Bioenergy Research Center funded by the DOE Office of Science led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She is also involved in a number of other DOE-funded collaborative projects to enable high throughput genome editing technologies in novel bacterial and yeast systems for gene-to-trait discovery and accelerated genome engineering. Dr. Eckert holds a B.S. in Biology at the University of South Dakota and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado, Anschutz Campus. In July 2021, she will be moving to Oak Ridge National Laboratory to lead their new Synthetic Biology group.

Michael McGuirk (Topic: CO₂ Capture from Dilute Sources)

Assistant Professor
Department of Chemistry
Materials Science Program
Colorado School of Mines

Dr. McGuirk attended the University of Minnesota, where he majored in chemistry and minored in biochemistry, graduating summa cum laude with high honors, and working in the labs of Prof. Bill Tolman (chem) and Prof. Lincoln Potter (biochem). Mike then left Minnesota to pursue his Ph.D. in chemistry under Prof. Chad Mirkin at Northwestern University, where he focused on the design and synthesis of stimuli-responsive coordination complexes for regulated catalysis. After his time at NU, Mike joined Prof. Jeffrey Long’s group at UC-Berkeley as a Philomathia post-doctoral fellow. In the Long Group, Mike’s work was focused on the design, discovery and characterization of non-classic gas adsorption in metal–organic frameworks. In 2019 Mike joined the Department of Chemistry at Colorado School of Mines as an assistant professor. At Mines, the McGuirk group leverages atomic-level understanding of functional materials to achieve desirable performance in an range of sustainability-motivated applications, such as CO₂ capture, H₂ storage and delivery, and plastic recycling.

Tom Gennett (Topic: Hydrogen Storage & Carriers)

Professor of Chemistry/Department Head
Colorado School of Mines
Principle Scientist
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Currently, Dr. Gennett holds a joint appointment as a Professor of Chemistry/Department Head at the Colorado School of Mines along with serving as a Principle Scientist at NREL. In his current role as Department Head he oversees a Ph.D granting Department with 27 faculty. Within his joint appointment at NREL he is currently the PI and co-Director of the DOE-HFTO Energy Material Network HyMARC consortium with Mark Allendorf of SNL. His CSM/NREL research group consist of a combination of staff scientists, postdocs and graduate students that total >15. Through efforts at both a National Laboratory and Academic Institution he has developed a unique skill set in basic and applied research, teaching and administrative/budget management. This experience includes an extensive set of collaborations with other National Laboratory scientists, industrial OEMs, academic colleagues and internationally scientists within IEA-HIA Task 40 multi-country collaboration. Our work is focused on developing and understanding materials for hydrogen and energy storage with specific applications for transportation and grid storage. We have several on-going projects: (a) investigation into the mechanism of room temperature hydrogen sorption for carbon and framework sorbents while in parallel we develop next-generation characterization methodologies to understand the fundamental nature of gas-solid interactions; (b) investigation of plasmonic, bio-inspired, porous liquids and frustrated Lewis-acid base materials for hydrogen carrier applications.

Ellison Carter (Topic: Air & Human Impacts)

Assistant Professor, Dept. Civil & Environmental Engineering
Colorado State University

Dr. Ellison Carter joined the Civil and Environmental Engineering department as an Assistant Professor this January. She earned a BS in Biology and a BA in Spanish, in addition to a minor certification in Chemistry, from Indiana University. After working with forest and marine ecologists in Costa Rica, she went on to complete MS and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering (Environmental and Water Resources program) from the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on indoor air quality and interventions, particularly in low-income housing. Dr. Carter then moved to a postdoctoral position at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, where she carried out field-based studies in China concerning air quality, climate, energy, and health. Her current research combines interests and expertise in air quality, exposure science, and chemistry and aims to answer questions relevant to energy policy and housing and transportation planning and their impacts on air pollution exposure and human health. Research Interests include Air Quality, Exposure Science, Surface Chemistry, Health Impacts of Air Pollution, Housing and the Built Environment. Education: B.A. 2004, Indiana University – Spanish; B.S. 2004, Indiana University – Biology; M.S. 2009, University of Texas - Civil Engineering; Ph.D. 2013, University of Texas - Civil Engineering

Ben Kroposki (Topic: Autonomous Controls for Power Grids)

Director – Power Systems Engineering Center
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Dr. Ben Kroposki is the Director of the Power Systems Engineering Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) where he leads NREL’s strategic research in the design, planning and operations of electrical power systems. He has over 30 years of experience in the design, testing, and integration of renewable and distributed power systems and has more than 150 publications in these areas with over 7,800 citations. Dr. Kroposki received his BSEE and MSEE from Virginia Tech and Ph.D. from the Colorado School of Mines. Dr. Kroposki is the recipient of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Ramakumar Family Renewable Energy Excellence Award. This award has been established to recognize outstanding contributions in the field of developing, utilizing and integrating renewable energy resources in the national and global energy scenarios. As an IEEE Fellow, Dr. Kroposki was recognized for his leadership in renewable and distributed energy systems integration. Dr. Kroposki is also an Adjunct professor at the Colorado School of Mines and University of Colorado and teaches courses on integrating renewable energy into power systems.

Scott Quillinan (Topic: Carbon Storage)

Director of Research
School of Energy Resources
University of Wyoming

Scott Quillinan is the director of research for the School of Energy Resources (SER) and the director of the Center for Economic Geology Research (CEGR) at the University Of Wyoming. A geologist by training, Scott focuses his research interests on the energy transition and thoughtful approaches to decarbonize fossil fuel energy systems. Scott began his career with the Wyoming Geological Survey where he directed the Groundwater division and founded the Unconventional Resources Division. Prior to his current position at SER, Scott is one of the founding members of CEGR, known then as the Carbon Management Institute. Scott’s current programs include Wyoming CarbonSAFE (a commercial-scale CO2 geologic storage project at a coal-fired power plant), exploration and production of rare earth elements and critical materials, and identifying low-carbon approaches to traditional energy resource development in the U.S and China. Scott co-chairs the Center of Advanced Energy Studies’-Innovative Energy Systems Work Group housed at Idaho National Laboratories and is a Faculty member for the Department of Energy Program-Research Experience in Carbon Storage.

Gregory Clough (Topic: Supply Chain Transparency)

Deputy Director
Payne Institute for Public Policy
Colorado School of Mines

Gregory Clough is the Deputy Director at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at Colorado School of Mines. The Payne Institute conducts cutting-edge, interdisciplinary policy analysis and educates current and future leaders about the security, governance, and policy challenges presented by rapid changes in the energy, environment, and natural resource sectors. He has a bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Colorado and a master’s degree in Advanced International Studies from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. He has extensive expertise international experience working on various aspects of international supply chain governance and was previously the Director of the international NGO, Oceans Beyond Piracy.

Bryan Willson

Executive Director
Energy Institute
Colorado State University

Dr. Bryan Willson is Executive Director of the Energy Institute at Colorado State University, where he also occupies the Bryan Willson Presidential Chair in Energy Innovation and serves as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering. CSU’s Energy Institute comprises over 200 faculty members working in energy and works closely with the Colorado energy startup community to help grow clean energy companies. The Energy Institute is headquartered at CSU’s Powerhouse Energy Campus, a 100,000 sq ft research facility that also houses over 15 early stage energy companies; it’s work on cleantech commercialization has been honored by the Economist, Scientific American, the Smithsonian Institution, university technology transfer associations, and the governments of Denmark, Spain, and China. Dr. Willson served as a Program Director at ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, from 2012-2016 and continued as a consultant / advisor to the agency until early 2019. He has worked for over 30 years to develop and deploy large-scale technology solutions related to energy, air quality, and human health. As an entrepreneur, Dr. Willson is co-founder of Envirofit International, Solix BioSystems, Factor(e) Ventures and Xpower. His research laboratory, the Engines & Energy Conversion Laboratory, has made important contributions in many areas, including: internal combustion engines, advanced vehicles, oil & gas production technology, advanced electrical grids, advanced biofuels, energy access for the developing world, and advanced building technologies. Dr. Willson is a Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers and has worked in over 40 countries.