Dr. Saul Griffith has multiple degrees in materials science and mechanical engineering and completed his PhD in Programmable Assembly and Self Replicating machines at MIT. He is the co-founder of numerous companies including: Low Cost Eyeglasses, Squid Labs, Potenco, Instructables.com, HowToons and Makani Power. Saul has been awarded numerous awards for invention including the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Collegiate Inventor's award, and the Lemelson-MIT Student prize.
Gillian Caldwell is the Campaign Director for 1Sky, a new national campaign to build a diverse nationwide movement and convince our federal government to take bold action to tackle the climate crisis and harness the enormous economic opportunity of the renewable energy economy by 2010. She is also a film maker and an attorney with thirty years of experience advocating for social justice in the United States and around the world. Most recently, Gillian served as Executive Director of WITNESS, which uses the power of video to open the eyes of the world to human rights abuses.
Brian Sager manages Nanosolar's government programs, its intellectual property portfolio, and its relationships with customers in the United States. Prior to co-founding Nanosolar, he led a high-growth biotechnology practice at Ernst & Young where he advised industry-leading companies on corporate finance issues, R&D portfolio management, and technology licensing. He has worked with both private and public companies at all stages of growth, including Genentech, Hewlett-Packard, Maxygen, Genencor, and Symmyx. Dr.
Cristina L. Archer is an assistant professor of energy, meteorology, and environmental science in the Department of Geological and Environmental Science of California State University Chico, as well as a consulting assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. Her research interests include wind power, meteorology, air quality, climate change, and numerical modeling. She received her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University in 2004.
Wes Boyd is the co-founder of MoveOn.org, a prominent online political action organization. Mr. Boyd is also a software industry veteran, having founded a leading entertainment software company, Berkeley Systems. Berkeley Systems was best known for Flying Toaster screen savers, and other entertainment software. In the 1980s, prior to his work in consumer software, Mr. Boyd authored software for blind and visually impaired users allowing the first full access to Macintosh computers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Boyd was a consultant in social research methodology and tools.
Dr. Dawn Manley is the manager of the Systems Research and Analysis Department at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. She is responsible for developing and leading programs in transportation energy systems analyses as well as in chemical and biological terrorism preparedness. Prior to this, Dawn served as manager of the reacting flow research department, which studies the fundamental science of chemistry-fluid dynamic interactions via advanced laser diagnostic and high performance computer simulations, as part of Sandia’s Combustion Research Facility.
Michael is an author and political strategist who works on and writes about energy technology innovation, climate change, economic development, rain forest conservation, social values, national security and human rights. As president of the Breakthrough Institute, he is a leading national advocate for the U.S. to make large, public-private investments in clean energy and decarbonization technologies to achieve energy independence, restore America's economic competitiveness, and slow global warming.
Christina Page is the first Director of Climate and Energy Strategy at Yahoo!, the largest knowledge-sharing community on the Web. Ms. Page began her career in 1992 as an Editorial Assistant with National Public Radio. She then served as a Field Instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School, from 1995 to 2000. Prior to joining Yahoo! in June 2007, Ms.
Danny Kennedy is Sungevity’s President. A long time social entrepreneur, Danny has achieved global recognition as an environmental activist, spokesperson, and opinion leader. Most recently, Danny was the Campaigns Manager for Greenpeace Australia Pacific where he managed 35 staff in 5 offices in 4 countries. In 2001, he ran Greenpeace’s California Clean Energy Campaign, the successes of which helped lead to the current California Solar Initiative. Danny was the founder and first Executive Director of Project Underground and has served on several nonprofit boards.
Robert Hambrecht is the Chief Financial Officer at Greenlife International, a project development company that is building biofuel and agricultural businesses in Argentina and other Latin American companies. Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mr. Hambrecht is providing financial leadership to Greenlife as it seeks investment and is helping manage its key partnerships in Argentina as it structures investments in agricultural and biofuel infrastructure.
This is just a quick update to let everybody know about what the Next Agenda team has been doing. We spent a lot of the summer working with the Breakthrough Institute, covering their inaugural Breakthrough Dialogue conference, "Modernizing Liberalism." The conference, which was put on in conjunction with launch of a new journal, brought together dozens of top thinkers from a range of disciplines to figure out new ideas that could adapt liberalism to today's realities.
