Green Innovation and Sustainable Development Forum

Nobel Laureate
12th US Secretary of Energy
Stanford Professor

Steven Chu is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics, of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, and of Energy Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

From January 2009 to April, 2013, Dr. Chu served as U.S. Secretary of Energy under President Barack Obama. During his tenure, he began several initiatives, including ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy), the Energy Innovation Hubs, and the Clean Energy Ministerial meetings. As the first scientist Cabinet member, Chu recruited dozens outstanding scientists and engineers to the Department of Energy, and was personally tasked by President Obama to help stop the BP Oil leak.

From 2004-2009, he was the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Professor of Physics and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California Berkeley. Prior to those positions, he was the Theodore and Francis Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. During this time, he helped start Bio-X, a multi-disciplinary initiative combining the physical and biological sciences with engineering and medicine.

His contributions include the introduction of laser cooling and optical trapping of atoms and particles, atomic fountain clocks and atom interferometers, the optical tweezers of biomolecules, and single molecule FRET of biomolecules tethered to surfaces. His current research is in biophysics, molecular and cellular physiology, medical imaging, nanoparticle synthesis and battery research. He has received many awards, including the 1997 Nobel Prize for laser cooling and optical trapping of atoms. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Inventors, and a foreign member of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Academia Sinica, the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

He received an A.B. degree in mathematics, and a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Rochester, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and 35 honorary degrees.

Chair, California Energy Commission

David Hochschild was appointed chair of the California Energy Commission by Governor Gavin Newsom in February 2019. He fills the environmental position on the five-member Commission where four of the five members are required by law to have professional training in specific areas - engineering or physical science, environmental protection, economics, and law.

Chair Hochschild's career has spanned public service, environmental advocacy, and the private sector. He first got involved in the solar energy field in 2001 in San Francisco as a special assistant to Mayor Willie Brown where Chair Hochschild launched a citywide $100 million initiative to put solar panels on public buildings. He also cofounded the Vote Solar Initiative, a 60,000-member advocacy organization promoting solar policies at the local, state, and federal levels. He was executive director of a national consortium of leading solar manufacturers and worked for five years at Solaria, a solar company in Silicon Valley. From 2007 to 2008, he served as a commissioner at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

For his work to advance clean energy, Chair Hochschild was awarded the Sierra Club's Trailblazer Award, the American Lung Association's Clean Air Hero Award, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Million Solar Roof True Champion Award. Chair Hochschild holds a bachelor of arts from Swarthmore College and a master of public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also was a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs.

Executive Director of Energy Innovation

Anand R. Gopal is Energy Innovation’s Executive Director, Policy Research, where he leads the firm’s research and modeling teams, supporting policy design to reduce emissions equitably at the speed and scale required to meet the climate challenge. Anand has worked in clean energy and climate for two decades, predominantly in policy analysis.

From 2018 to 2021, he was a program officer in the Environment Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In this role, Anand managed the program’s global strategic grantmaking on clean power and transportation, as well as support for climate policy in India. His grantmaking strategy focused on quickly, resiliently, and reliably electrifying the global economy with clean power to safeguard people from the catastrophic effects of climate change.

Prior to the Hewlett Foundation, Anand was a research scientist in clean energy and transportation at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he led LBNL’s global research on energy policy solutions for climate mitigation. Anand’s research used interdisciplinary methods from engineering and economics.

He is Vice Chair of the Board at the International Council on Clean Transportation and a board member at Veloz, and is a regular contributing author on clean transportation at Forbes. Anand serves on the Drive Electric Campaign’s steering committee, which aims to accelerate the global transition to zero-emission road transport.

He holds a Ph.D. in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. in environmental systems engineering from Humboldt State University, and a B.S. in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Former Chairman of California Energy Commission

Robert Weisenmiller is a former Chair of the California Energy Commission and one of the world’s leading voices on energy.

For more than nine years, he served at the California Energy Commission under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Weisenmiller’s work is instrumental in shaping California’s pioneering energy policies including addressing exponential electricity growth, costs, and environmental impacts through greenhouse gas-reducing solutions, advancing cost-effective energy efficiency standards for buildings and appliances, encouraging innovative clean energy Research & Development projects, and developing the state’s electricity demand forecast.That forecast is the foundation of California’s highly analytical and comprehensive electric system planning.

He co-founded and managed MRW & Associates, using his expertise to assist businesses, financial institutions, and public regulatory agencies in strategic planning, policy development, energy market analysis and regulation, power pricing for qualifying facility projects, marginal cost analysis, rate design, and implication of utility mergers.

He has provided expert witness testimony to more than 100 state and federal public regulatory agencies and court proceedings, did power market due diligence for dozens of project financings, and has authored numerous publications on electricity and natural gas markets.

Council Member, City of Palo Alto

Patrick Burt founded Acteron Corp., a high-tech manufacturing company, and served as CEO from 1984 to 2010. Since then he’s launched two medical device start-ups. The high-tech veteran also has extensive experience in city government, having served on the Palo Alto City Council between 2008 and 2016 and on the Planning and Transportation Commission prior to that. When he ran again in 2020, Burt was able to tout his many supports on the campaign site PatBurt.org, including the Palo Alto Weekly’s endorsement: “Burt will be relentless in pushing for more transparency and responsiveness from city staff and better community outreach and engagement. ... He has never been afraid to voice concerns about city management and to push new and creative ideas.” The top vote-getter in the 2020 election, Burt was tapped to serve as vice mayor in 2021—supported in part by his colleagues because of his years of experience, which they said would serve the city well during the COVID-19 crisis.

Director, Stanford Precourt Institute of Energy
Member, National Academy of Science

Professor Yi Cui is the Director of Staford Precourt Institute for Energy and Faculty Director of the Sustainability Accelerator,

Cui’s research focuses on the fundamentals of nanomaterials and their applications in batteries, catalysts, wearables, carbon capture, mineral extraction, and environmental technology. He has founded five companies to commercialize technologies developed by his research group.

Cui has published approximately 550 research papers and has an outstanding H-index impact score of 251 (Google Scholar). In 2014, he was ranked No. 1 in materials science by Thomson Reuters’ “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.” In 2022, Cui became an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Materials Research Society, Electrochemical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is an associate editor of Nano Letters. He is a co-director of the Battery 500 Consortium, and co-director of Stanford’s StorageX Initiative. His selected awards include the Global Energy Prize (2021), U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Award (2020), Materials Research Society Medal (2020), and Blavatnik National Laureate (2017).

President of APEC Sustainable Energy Center;
Vice director of National Industry-education platform of Energy Storage, Tianjin University, China
Senior visiting scholar at the Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States
member of the Renewable Energy Expert Committee of the China Energy Research Association

Dr. Zhu Li is engaged in long-term research on energy transformation and sustainable cities, published over 200 academic papers, prepared over 40 research reports in both Chinese and English, and published 15 APEC publications.

Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Advisory Board Members, the APEC Energy Research Centre

Dr. Zhou is a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She has led many international programs at LBNL on energy efficiency and greenhouse gas mitigation, often focused on China. Dr. Zhou is currently the Technical Program Manager for the Net Zero World Action Center, an initiative launched by the U.S. government to work with countries to implement their climate ambition pledges and accelerate transitions to net zero, resilient, and inclusive energy systems. In addition, Dr. Zhou is a Lead Author of the chapter on Mitigation and Development Pathways of the recently-released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III Sixth Assessment Report on Mitigation of Climate Change. Dr. Zhou is a co-chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of California-China Climate Institute and a Senior Scholar at the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California-Berkeley. Dr. Zhou is one of the two U.S.-designated Advisory Board Members of the Asia Pacific Energy Research Centre under the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and a Council member for Global Future Council of the World Economic Forum. Dr. Zhou served as the Deputy Director (2010-2012) and the Director (2012-2021) of the $100M presidential bilateral U.S.-China Clean Energy Center-Building Energy Efficiency (CERC-BEE) program.

She also served as a Lead Author for the chapter on Mitigation and Development Pathways in the Near- to Mid-Term of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. She received the 2017 R&D100 Award for the BEST City tool, 2020 R&D100 Award for the BETTER tool, and is the finalist for 2016 C3E Awards for mid-career women’s leadership and achievement. Dr. Zhou was also the Co-Chair of 2016 Buildings Summer Study of American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) .

As the U.S. Director of CERC-BEE, Dr. Zhou led the team involving many researchers from different national laboratories (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory), universities (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California Davis), and industry partners such as Dow Chemical, DuPont, BASF, Johnson Controls, and Schneider. Under her leadership of this complex, dynamic program, the team has had notable achievements in building energy efficiency and the construction industry and has earned awards for numerous technological breakthroughs and innovations. The team has produced 17 new products, 20 new copyrighted software tools, and 84 peer-reviewed publications to advance building energy performance. The team has been awarded R&D 100 Awards in 2013 and 2016, a 2016 Gold Edison Award, a 2018 Best of Design Award for Digital Fabrication, and a 2019 Keeling Curve Prize Honorable Mention.

Dr. Zhou’s expertise includes integrated energy system and emission modeling, energy efficiency for end use sectors in buildings, appliances, industry and transport; and on microgrids/distributed energy resources as well as low carbon/smart city development. Prior to LBNL, she was an assistant professor in two universities in Japan for four years. She has more than 280 publications, including ones published in Nature Energy and Nature Communications.

President of LONGi America

Brad Li is an accomplished and highly respected executive. Throughout his career, Brad has a proven track record of increasing shareholder value and building cross-culture, purpose-driven teams that have significantly improved end-to-end effectiveness and revenue. A global leader who understands diversity, Mr.Li brings over 20 years of executive management leadership to accelerate business growth.

As President of the Americas Region at LONGi Green Energy’s Distributed Generation Business Group, Brad reports to the Chairman of the company directly and focuses on strategy and business development, which involves sales, marketing, product portfolio, and customer service to drive business growth and market share. Prior to joining LONGi in 2023, Mr. Li was the Global Chief Commercial Officer of the healthcare division at Smoore International, overseeing commercial strategy and global business development. Before that, Mr. Li was President of ZTE North America & CEO of ZTE USA, where he led ZTE’s evolution from a white-label manufacturer to becoming the fourth largest overall in the region and second largest in the prepaid market. Before being named the CEO of ZTE USA, Brad held various leadership positions in sales, marketing, and product development, managed multiple branch offices globally, and built local teams from the ground.

Brad Li earned an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis, an M.S. and B.S. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, and a certification in Business Law from Cornell University.

Founder and Host, Climate One

Greg Dalton founded Climate One at The Commonwealth Club in 2007 after traveling to the Russian Arctic on a global warming symposium with climate scientists and journalists. Today Climate One produces a weekly radio show broadcast on public stations in California and across the country in addition to a podcast that is heard around the world. Greg also hosts a monthly TV show on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast and DirecTV.

Climate One is the only regular talk show that engages high-level leaders from business, policy, advocacy and academic circles in a conversation about building sustainable economies, resilient communities and a healthier future. Past guests include science icon Jane Goodall, music legend Graham Nash, former Vice President Al Gore, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, Tea Party co-founder Debbie Dooley, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Chevron CEO Dave O’Reilly, GM Chairman Dan Akerson, Ford Motor Co. Chairman Bill Ford, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, and many other leaders.

Greg previously was a journalist for 12 years covering news in Beijing, Vancouver, New York and San Francisco for the Associated Press, South China Morning Post, McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and Industry Standard magazine.