About Us

Maria is the CEO and Founder of Ardinall Investment Management, an investment firm focused on sustainable investing and resilient infrastructure that she started in 2017. Prior to Ardinall Investment Management, she spent 15 years at Goldman Sachs, where she served as a Portfolio Manager and Managing Director in the Goldman Sachs Investment Partners (GSIP) Group. Maria currently serves as a director on the board of Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE: PXD), Macquarie Infrastructure Corporation (NYSE: MIC), Nabors Energy Transition Corp (NYSE: NETC), on the board of CDPQ (one of Canada’s largest pension plans), and on the advisory board of Eni Next (Eni SpA’s corporate venture arm). She also serves as a director on several private companies’ governing and advisory boards in the energy transition space. Maria sits on the advisory board of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, on its executive committee, and serves as co-chair of its Women in Energy program. She is also a member of the MIT Corporation’s Development Committee and sits on the MIT Economics Department’s Visiting Committee. Maria has held her CFA since 2004, and holds a dual degree in economics and management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She resides in New York City with her husband and three children.

Tyler is Head of Commercial & Expansion at Base Power. Previously Tyler served as the VP, Innovation at Schneider, a global specialist in energy management. Prior to that, he was Chief Strategy Officer at Bidgely, an energy analytics company that helps utilities and consumers accelerate the energy transition. Before joining Bidgely, Tyler was the head of Tesla’s Residential Energy business. At Tesla, Tyler led an organization of over 3,000 technical and operational team members to scale home battery and solar solutions globally. Tyler spent over 8 years at Tesla and has a wealth of experience in energy product development, operations, and commercialization. Tyler is passionate about helping scale new technologies that enable affordable and reliable electricity. Tyler graduated from Dartmouth College where he studied climate science, and he has been working in the climate technology sector for over a decade.

Darrell is Vice President of Energy Storage Product Management and Hardware Engineering for the Energy Storage and Optimization (ES&O) team at Wartsila. Wartsila was recognized in 2022 and 2023 as the third largest integrator of energy storage solutions with projects across six contentment. Darrell’s team developed the Quantum energy storage solution that is providing over 7.5 gigawatt-hours of utility scale battery storage. Prior to Wartsila Darrell was the Director of Electrical Engineering at NECES, where he was responsible for the electrical engineering development on energy storage products. During his tenure NECES Darrell delivered numerous energy storage solutions incorporating lithium-ion battery technologies for utility scale energy storage, AGV, and UPS applications. In 2020 Darrell helped deliver the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage facility, providing 250MW/750MWh. Darrell has a passion for helping the industry meet the economically growing challenges of utility scale energy storage projects with the highest safety and environmentally responsible solutions possible.

Carl is Chairman and Co-Founder of High Meadows Foundation and High Meadows Fund. He is a board member and advisor at a number of environmental and educational organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), where he was formerly Chairman and is currently a Trustee in the US and Chair of the Board of Trustees in Europe. Carl is a Member of the Council of The Wilderness Society, a Director at Climate Central, and a Member of the Advisory Board of Private Capital Research Institute at Harvard Business School. He is also an Advisory Council member of the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. Carl was a Co-Founder and Managing Director of Berkshire Partners LLC, a private equity investment firm based in Boston, MA, and serves as a Senior Advisor after retiring. He received an AB from Princeton University, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and served in the US Marine Corps Reserve. Carl and his wife, Judy, own High Meadows Associates, which operates farms in southern Vermont.

Sanjay Sarma is the Chief Executive Officer, President and Dean of the Asia School of Business, and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He was the Vice President for Open Learning at MIT for nearly 10 years, during which he oversaw OpenCourseWare and led the creation of MITx, MicroMasters, the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative and the Jameel World Education Lab. As a researcher, he co-founded the Auto-ID Center at MIT and developed many of the key technologies behind the EPC suite of RFID standards now used worldwide. He was also co-founder and CTO of OATSystems, which was acquired by Checkpoint Systems (NYSE: CKP) in 2008. Between 2010 and 2012, Sarma led MIT’s team to establish the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He has served on the boards of several companies including Hochschild Mining (LON: HOC — until 2021), Aclara Resources (TSE:ARA –since 2021), GS1US, EPCglobal, CleanLab and several startups. Dr. Sarma received his Bachelors from the Indian Institute of Technology, his Masters from Carnegie Mellon University and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Sarma worked at Schlumberger Oilfield Services in Aberdeen, UK, at Lawrence Berkeley Labs and at OATSystems. His current research interests are Internet of Things, street scanning, sensing, RFID, autonomy, cybersecurity, logistics, manufacturing and education. He is the Author of 3 books including The Inversion Factor, Grasp, and Workforce Education.

Named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter Diamandis is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the Executive Founder of Singularity University. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 25 companies in the areas of health-tech, space, venture capital and education. He is Co-founder and Vice-Chairman of two public companies, Celularity and Vaxxinity. Dr. Diamandis is Co-founder & Chairman of Fountain Life, a fully-integrated platform delivering predictive, preventative, personalized and data-driven health. Finally, he also serves as Co-founder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with a half-billion dollars under management being investing in exponential technologies and longevity companies. Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of four books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think, BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World and The Future is Faster Than You Think. Most recently he co-Authored the #1 best seller LIFE FORCE with Tony Robbins which chronicles the extraordinary healthcare and biotech revolution unfolding before our eyes. He earned degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Diamandis’ favorite saying is “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”

Dr. Ravi Kanjolia is a Technology Fellow at EMD Electronics, a business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt Germany. He is a recognized industry expert and technology executive in semiconductor materials and processes with successful management and global R&D team-building experience. He is responsible for developing an innovation pipeline of electronics materials for applications in the microelectronics industry for advanced architectures and devices. He brings fundamental chemistry knowledge to develop solutions for various applications in semiconductors/displays and other related fields. In the past, he served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Head of R&D for SAFC Hitech and EMD Performance Materials for over 20 years. As CTO, he was directly responsible for the worldwide R&D of Deposition Materials and drove strategic collaborations with universities, government labs, OEMs, and IDMs for technology development, enabling pre-competitive R&D to products and applications. He deployed several materials to high volume manufacturing (HVM) while building a robust IP portfolio. He also held senior R&D leadership positions in Epichem and Morton Thiokol. Dr. Kanjolia holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry in organometallic chemistry and has over 75 refereed scientific journal articles, reviews, book chapters, and over 30 patents. Currently, he serves on the technical committee of Area Selective Deposition (ASD) and is a Science Advisory Board member of Jump/nCore programs of Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). He also serves as the Industry Advisory Board member of the NSF-sponsored ATOMIC center at Penn State. He is a recipient of the 2021 Mahboob Khan Outstanding Industry Liaison Award of SRC recognizing his contributions to student mentoring, research collaboration, and technology transfers. He was invited to attend the White House Semiconductor R&D Roundtable in 2016, which focused on growing competitive semiconductor manufacturing in the US.

Nikhil Koratkar is a co-founder of Alsym Energy and the John A. Clark and Edward T. Crossan Chair Professor in Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Professor Koratkar’s research has focused on the synthesis, characterization, and application of nanostructured materials. This includes graphene, carbon nanotubes, transition metal dichalcogenides, hexagonal boron nitride, phosphorene, tellurene, perovskites as well as metal and silicon nanostructures produced by a variety of techniques such as mechanical exfoliation, chemical vapor deposition, and oblique angle sputter and e-beam deposition. He is studying the fundamental mechanical, electrical, thermal and optical properties of these one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) materials and developing a variety of composites, coating and energy storage device applications using these materials. Professor Koratkar is a winner of the NSF CAREER Award (2003), RPI James M. Tien ’66 Early Career Award (2005), the Electrochemical Society’s SES Young investigator Award (2009), American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award (2015), IIT-Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award (2019) and RPI’s William H. Wiley ‘1866 Distinguished Faculty Award (2021). He was elected ASME Fellow in 2016, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2021, and Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2023. He has published a book on graphene as an additive in composite materials and over 230 archival journal papers and 5 Patents (>29,000 Citations, H-Index = 81). In 2018 and 2021, Clarivate Analytics named him in their highly cited researchers list. Professor Koratkar has served as an Editor of Carbon since 2010, and has served on the Editorial Board of Energy Storage Materials since 2015. Professor Koratkar joined the faculty of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in January 2001 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and to Full Professor in 2009. In 2011, he was also appointed a Full Professor in the Department of Materials Science at RPI. In 2012, Professor Koratkar was appointed the John A. Clark and Edward T. Crossan Chair Professor in Engineering at RPI.