Dr. Noël Bakhtian serves as Director of Tech Acceleration at the Bezos Earth Fund, the $10 billion philanthropic commitment to fight climate change and protect nature in this decade while advancing environmental justice.

Formerly, Dr. Bakhtian held positions in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) national lab system, including most recently serving as founding Executive Director of the Berkeley Lab Energy Storage Center – a lab-wide center accelerating the translation of basic and applied research into real-world energy storage solutions at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Previous to that, she served on the Senior Leadership Team at the Idaho National Laboratory.

Before moving to the national labs, Dr. Bakhtian served as a senior policy adviser for environment and energy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), held positions at DOE headquarters as the inaugural Energy-Water Nexus lead at the DOE Office of International Affairs and as technical lead on numerous innovative grant programs for DOE’s Wind and Water Power Technologies Office including the Wave Energy Prize, consulted on energy innovation for DARPA, and served as an energy and environment Fellow in the U.S. Senate.

Dr. Bakhtian earned her engineering doctorate at Stanford University’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; holds master’s degrees from Stanford University and the University of Cambridge, where she was a Churchill Scholar; and completed her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and physics at Duke University. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

She also serves as a member of the National Academies Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) and Board on Energy and Environmental Systems (BEES); is Vice Chair of the NASA Advisory Council’s (NAC) Science Committee; and is an inaugural Board Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s non-profit foundation, Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation (FESI).