NERS Advisory Board Member

Section: Policy/NGO

Actuate

Director of Climate

Biography

Lara is passionate about technologies that meaningfully reduce carbon emissions and contribute to a cleaner environment. At Actuate, she designs and runs programs that get emissions-reducing technologies on the ground faster: experimenting with new approaches that will speed demonstration, deployment, and scale-up of climate change mitigation systems. Prior to Actuate, Lara worked on energy technology innovation at Exelon. She led the Corporate Strategy technical team from her post in Danville, California, advising the company on energy technology trends, investing in early- and mid-stage energy storage technologies, and running Exelon’s partnership R&D program. Before her time at Exelon, she directed the Office of Energy Supply Security in the U.S. DOE Office of Policy and Systems Analysis, where she was responsible for policy and analysis related to coal, gas, and nuclear power and energy cyber and physical security. She served as AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, focusing on nuclear power and waste issues, energy finance, and electricity storage. She received her PhD in 2011 from MIT in Engineering Systems, studying deployment of advanced technologies for nuclear waste recycling, and she holds dual masters degrees from MIT in nuclear engineering and technology policy. She is a native Californian, and completed her B.S. in physics at UCLA in 2004.