Bringing Together Women In Cleantech At WCS Talks (Sunnyvale, California)
For the 4th year, Women in Cleantech and Sustainability will host its WCS Talks, a TED-style talk with speakers from a diverse range of companies and roles. There are still tickets available for the event Saturday, November 4. It will be held at the Google Sunnyvale, California, campus. WCS is expecting about 300 attendees.
Motivated by the scarcity of cleantech events featuring female keynote speakers, WCS founder and Chairwoman (and occasional CleanTechnica contributor) Lisa Ann Pinkerton decided to create her own event. WCS Talks was born in 2014 to showcase women’s unique views on leadership, business, and policy, and this year is no exception.
The speakers this year are from a range of industries (not all cleantech, but all focused on sustainabilty in their respective roles), and are offering unique keynote discussions, all helping to bring awareness to the broad impact women are making in cleantech and sustainability.
Speakers at this year’s Women in Cleantech and Sustainability include:
Courtney Bass (HR Business Partner at Google): Courtney is an advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, and has spent her career developing and implementing strategies that both individuals and teams can leverage for meaningful collaboration and growth.
Kate Brandt (Lead for Sustainability at Google): Kate Brandt leads sustainability across Google’s worldwide operations and products and coordinates with Google’s data centers, real estate, supply chain, and product teams to ensures the company is capitalizing on opportunities to strategically advance sustainability and circular economy. Kate will be talking about Circular Cities & Technology.
Cynthia Christensen (Co-Owner and Commercial/Utility Sales Director at Namaste Solar): Cynthia has expertise in both renewable and energy efficiency organizations involved in commercial and utility projects.
Michael Kobori (Vice President, Sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co.): Michael Kobori has led sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co. since 2001 and is responsible for the company’s sustainability vision and strategy across all business functions. Under Michael’s tenure, Levi Strauss & Co. has been an industry leader in sustainability. Michael’s topic will be ‘On the Outside Looking In: Succeeding in the Dominant Culture.’
Lenka Kollar (Director of Business Strategy, NuScale Power): Lenka Kollar is the Director of Business Strategy at NuScale Power where she is working to bring NuScale’s small modular reactor to market through business plan development and clean energy outreach. Lenka will be speaking about Inclusivity in Cleantech.
Marcela Cabrera Luna (CES Tesla, Customer Experience & Partnerships, Tesla): Marcela currently works at Tesla with customer experience and partnerships, executing her vision and collective goal to helps us move in the right direction with sustainable lifestyles and a 100% clean energy future. She will be speaking about The Role of the State, International Law and the International Community: Intersection of Human Rights and Climate Change, and Universal Jurisdiction and Cleantech as Solutions.
Mona Maitra (Vice President – Energy & Resource Innovation, Silicon Valley Bank): Mona is a Vice President in Silicon Valley Bank’s Energy and Resource Innovation practice. Over the past six years at SVB, she has worked with cleantech companies of all stages (pre-revenue through public) and across sectors to help them scale by advising on capital structures, treasury needs and strategic growth opportunities.
Natalie Musick (Director of Product Management at OPower/ Oracle): Natalie Musick leads the web energy management product team at Opower, now a part of Oracle Utilities. They are building SaaS web and mobile software solutions to enable the ongoing transformation of Electric, Gas and Water Utilities and their relationships with customers. Natalie will be talking about The Utility of the Future: Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and Customer Engagement.
Urvi Nagrani (Director of Marketing and Business Development at Motiv Power Systems): As a leader at Motiv, Urvi contributes to projects from concept through administration, crafting policy goals to support environmentally friendly policies enabling Motiv to deploy zero-emission vehicles and improve air quality in a socially responsible way. Urvi will be speaking about What California’s Climate Change Investments Mean For Your Business
Nike Opadiran (Counsel, Energy and Infrastructure Projects at Skadden): Nike Opadiran is a Counsel in Skadden’s Energy & Infrastructure Projects group and concentrates her practice on the development, financing, and acquisition and divestiture of energy and infrastructure-related projects in the United States and around the world. Nike will be speaking about why Transmission Lines Matter.
Watch this video below to see why WCS is so impactful:
And then, check out this example talk from WCS 2016 with Dr. Laura Stachel, which looks at the linkage between energy access and maternal health, showing how cleantech solutions need to offer solutions to the most vulnerable among us .
>
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Latest CleanTechnica.TV Video
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
