Meeting the Energy Challenge

Lindsay Anderson is an Associate Professor in Biological and Environmental Engineering, the Norman R. Scott Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, and the Kathy Dwyer Marble and Curt Marble Faculty Director for Energy at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

Professor Anderson is enthusiastic about achieving a low-carbon energy future, and her research interests lie broadly in the use of systems approaches to enable high penetration of renewable resources through leveraging demand-side and distributed resources. The Anderson Lab is diverse and energetic, and it addresses many aspects of this vision through a highly interdisciplinary research program that leverages operations and optimization, as well as environmental and systems engineering.

Professor Anderson also holds field memberships (i.e., supervises Ph.D. students) in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Systems Engineering at Cornell.

Before coming to Cornell, Professor Anderson was an Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Western University in Canada. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Western and a B.S. and M.S. in Environmental Engineering at the University of Guelph (Canada).

Christian Belady is the Vice President of Datacenter Advancement Development in Cloud Operations & Innovation (CO+I) at Microsoft. This group is responsible for developing breakthrough technologies in cooling, energy storage/generation, free space optics and cryogenics. Previously, he was responsible for leading data center developments worldwide, including operations, construction, server development, site selection, terrestrial/undersea network, advanced development and research, energy, and sustainability. Christian joined Microsoft in 2007 as the Principal Infrastructure Architect for GFS to improve efficiency and cost in the company’s data center infrastructure. In this role, he drove sustainability initiatives for the company and the infrastructure industry. Christian holds engineering degrees from Cornell University (B.S.) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (M.S.) as well as a business degree from the University of Texas at Dallas (M.A.), where he was honored with the 2010 Distinguished Alumni Award.

Kenneth Davies is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Birch Infrastructure, PBLLC. Birch develops, owns, and operates the energy and water infrastructure required to supply hyperscale data centers, assuming and managing inherent risks involved in delivering data centers with mission-critical utility service. Prior to founding Birch, Kenneth was Director of Innovation for Energy Strategy & Research at Microsoft, where he was responsible for overseeing the company’s wholesale renewable energy and portfolio management strategies. Previously, he was Managing Director of Market Analytics at Altenex, the first brokerage house for corporate renewables. Kenneth holds a B.S., summa cum laude, in Mechanical Engineering and an MEng in Operations Research, both from Cornell University, as well as an M.S. in Environmental Studies, with a focus on energy economics, from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Reid Spolek works on energy strategy for Google’s global data centers. He previously led the global renewable strategy for Amazon Web Services (AWS) global data centers and also ran business development for Berkeley Energy Sciences Corp., an energy storage company that successfully merged with Amber Kinetics in early 2013. Prior to that, Reid worked in private equity investing, management consulting, and nonprofit strategy. He received his Master of Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Bachelor’s in Economics and Journalism from Northwestern University.

Susanna Kass is a member of the Climate 50 – The World’s Topmost Influential Climate Leaders in Data Centers and Cloud. She is a data center advisor to the United Nations Sustainable Development Program (UN-SDG), working with hyperscalers in the data center and ICT sector to tackle climate change. Susanna is an Energy Fellow at Stanford University and a guest lecturer at Stanford and the National University of Singapore. She has over 25 years of global data center operational experience and has led distributed teams across 17 countries of 200+ megawatts in data center design, build, and operation. She is a STEM mentor, having led more than 300 girls to certificate completion, as well as an author of publications on clean energy, circular economy, and sustainability for ICT. Susanna has also won numerous awards in innovation and in sustainability data center design.