guest speaker series 2014 spring

Brad Mattson is Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Siva Power, an advanced solar technology company based in Silicon Valley. He joined Siva Power in 2011, bringing together a world-class team focused on making CIGS thin film technology and manufacturing the foundation of the Gigawatt Era in solar.

Mattson is a renowned entrepreneur from the semiconductor industry and began his career at Applied Materials. He later founded and scaled both Novellus and Mattson Technology, to date, the only founder of two publicly-traded semiconductor equipment firms. Novellus was acquired for $3.3 billion. Immediately prior to Siva Power, Mattson was a venture partner for Vantage Point Capital Partners, where he focused on renewable energy, in particular solar.

Mattson has been listed as one of the top 50 most influential people in the semiconductor industry. He has also received the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from Ernst & Young, the Distinguished Alumni Award from San Jose State University and the Founders Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Santa Clara University.

Mattson is the author of an upcoming book, “Solar 2.0” (working title).

Dr. Daniel Kammen is the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. He was appointed the first Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) Fellow by Secretary of State Hilary R. Clinton in April 2010.

Dr. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), Co-Director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, and Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center. He has founded or is on the board of over 10 companies, and has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities.

Dr. Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell and Harvard, and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He serves on the Advisory Committee for Energy & Environment for the X-Prize Foundation.

During 2010-2011 Dr. Kammen served as the World Bank Group’s Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. He was appointed to this newly-created position in October 2010, in which he provided strategic leadership on policy, technical, and operational fronts. The aim is to enhance the operational impact of the Bank’s renewable energy and energy efficiency activities while expanding the institution’s role as an enabler of global dialogue on moving energy development to a cleaner and more sustainable pathway.