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Keynote Speakers

Jeffrey Ubben

Founder and Managing Partner, Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager, Inclusive Capital Partners

Jeffrey W. Ubben is a Founder, Managing Partner, member of the Management Committee, Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager of Inclusive Capital Partners. Mr. Ubben is a retired Founder of ValueAct Capital, where he was Chief Executive Officer, member of the Management Committee, Chief Investment Officer, and Portfolio Manager. Mr. Ubben is a director of The Exxon Mobil Corporation, AppHarvest, Enviva Partners, LP, and Nikola Corporation. He is a former director of The AES Corporation, former chairman and director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc., and a former director of Catalina Marketing Corp., Gartner Group, Inc., Mentor Corporation, Misys plc, Sara Lee Corp., Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Willis Towers Watson plc, and several other public and private companies.

In addition, Mr. Ubben serves on the boards of Duke University and the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, and formerly served as Chair of the National Board of the Posse Foundation for nine years. Mr. Ubben has a B.A. from Duke University and an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Dr. Jennifer Gerbi

Acting Director & Deputy Director for Technology, ARPA-E

Dr. Jennifer Gerbi leads the development, launch, and execution of high-risk, high-reward energy R&D programs at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Previously as a Program Director at the Agency, her focus included improving the energy efficiency and management of buildings via advanced sensing systems and storage, novel insulating materials for windows, and renewable energy generation via photovoltaics.

Prior to joining ARPA-E, Gerbi worked at Dow Corning in multiple capacities, most recently, as an Applied Engineering and Technical Service Leader, where she led an electronics application engineering and development team, working directly with large global customers to enable technical solutions via silicones in consumer and crossover healthcare electronics markets. From 2007 to 2011, Gerbi served as a Senior Materials Scientist at The Dow Chemical Company, focusing on the copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar technology effort, and before that, completed her postdoctoral fellowship on developing thin film diamond coatings for electronics and healthcare markets.

Dr. Gerbi holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also received an M.S. in Physics from the University of Virginia and a B.A. in Physics from Bard College.

Chris Shelton

Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer | President, AES Next
The AES Corporation

As Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer | President of AES Next, Chris is charged with developing high value, technology-enabled growth for the AES portfolio of businesses. These efforts are driven by innovative business models and technologies, including energy efficiency, digital customer engagement, automation, renewables, e-mobility, and other solutions.

Chris has over 20 years of technology related investment, business development, and systems architecture experience and has been a leader in the origination and expansion of new business efforts at AES. These include the development of AES’ industry leading energy storage business, which became Fluence Energy, the fast-growing distributed solar business, and the recent investment in and expansion of Uplight, a leading customer action platform for the utility industry.

His past work in AES also includes the launch of a retail electricity business where he pioneered the bundling of environmental offsets with customer electricity consumption and began the first AES wind development efforts.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics and is the past Chairman of the Energy Storage Association.

Amy Duffuor

General Partner, Azolla Ventures

Amy Duffuor is a General Partner at Azolla Ventures with responsibility to identify and evaluate investment opportunities, lead investments, and serve on the boards of portfolio companies. Her professional background spans business, finance, and impact across three continents.

Prior to this, Amy was a renewables and power investment banker at Bank of America. There, she worked with CEOs of public and private companies to raise investment capital including the IPO of Sunnova (NYSE: NOVA), a residential solar company initially valued at approximately $1 billion. Before her stint on Wall Street, Amy ran early-stage social venture accelerators around Southeast Asia for a Singapore-headquartered impact investing firm called Impact Investment Exchange. Earlier in her career, Amy was a management consultant at State of Flux, a London-based consulting firm that specializes in supply chain and procurement. She serves as a board member for Prime Impact Fund portfolio companies Clean Crop Technologies and Noon Energy, in addition to serving on the board of the Northeast Clean Energy Council (NECEC), the Leadership Council of Activate, a fellowship that supports entrepreneurial scientists tackling the world’s biggest challenges, and the Advisory Circle of GreenTech Noir, a global community for Black people working in sustainability and climate tech. Amy holds a B.A. from Columbia University, an M.Phil with Distinction from the University of Oxford, and an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Fireside Chats

The 2021 Energy Conference was part of Energy Week at Duke University