Speaker 2021

Bio

S.K. Chou is a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore. He chairs the Technical Committee of the NUS Cooling Energy Science and Technology Singapore (CoolestSG) Consortium. Between 1992 and 2007, he held positions as Director, Industry and Technology Relations Office, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Vice-Dean of the NUS Faculty of Engineering. Professor Chou was the founding executive director of the NUS Energy Studies Institute, established in 2007. He is Emeritus President of the Institution of Engineers, Singapore, and a Fellow of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers. He is also a Fellow of the Singapore Academy of Engineering, the ASEAN Academy of Engineering and Technology, the Energy Institute, UK, and the ASEAN Federation of Engineering Organisations. He is an editor of the Elsevier published Applied Energy and a member of the editorial board of Advances in Applied Energy.

Bio

Sadie Cox is a Senior Analyst in the Markets & Policy Group of the Strategic Energy Analysis Center at NREL. Sadie’s areas of expertise include renewable energy policy and strategy design and good practices, advancing technical solutions for resilient power systems, and assessing development impacts of clean energy and climate actions. Sadie is also a technical lead on the USAID-NREL Partnership for various technical toolkit platforms, including the Renewable Energy Data Explorer, the Resilience Energy Platform, and International Jobs and Economic Development Impacts (I-JEDI) Model.

Bio

Samantha Hung is the Chief of Gender at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) where she provides leadership for advancing gender equality across all aspects of ADB operations and knowledge work. Samantha has over 20 years of experience in gender equality at project, program and policy levels in the Asia Pacific. Before ADB, she held various gender advisor and specialist roles for the New Zealand Agency for International Development, Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, UNICEF, Australian Government Office on the Status of Women and UK Institute of Development Studies attached to the University of Sussex.

Samantha is also a seasoned provider of management support, including for an ADB Vice President and the Director General of Budget and Human Resources, and was previously the Deputy Representative of ADB’s European Representative Office. She started her international development career as a Australian-funded volunteer in Vietnam.

Samantha is a dual Australian/UK citizen. She holds a Masters in International Development from RMIT University in Melbourne, Honors Law and Commerce degrees from the University of Melbourne, and a post-graduate qualification in Human Resources Management from CIPD, UK.

Bio

Sandhya Sundararagavan is the Lead on the Energy Transitions Team at World Resource Institute where she works on developing and supporting progressive policies, technical solutions and strategies for sustainable clean energy transformation.

Prior to this, she worked with Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), Center for Study of Science, Technology & Policy (CSTEP), The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI) in various capacities. She led several power sector programs focusing on renewable grid integration, power sector planning, electricity market reforms and modelling efforts, and supported electricity sector stakeholders extensively at both national and state level. Sandhya holds an MS from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA and a Mechanical Engineering degree from Pune.

Bio

Dr. Sardar Mohazzam, is the Managing Director of NEECA, Ministry of Energy (Power Division). He holds Ph.D. in Public Policy in the area Energy and Environmental Policy on Fulbright scholarship. He has served as Advisor with public sector, academia, and international development partners. He has led the MIT Climate Co-lab Initiative on Energy Water Nexus. He is proactively involved in restructuring and institutionalization of Energy Efficiency as well as Climate Change mitigation (NDCs) at national and provincial level.

Bio

Bio

Saurav Kumar is the CEO and co-founder of Euler Motors, an automotive start-up focused on transforming transportation in the country with electric vehicles. He leads product development and business functions.

Saurav is an innovator who is fascinated with technology and work on driving advancements that helps to make lives better. Before Euler Motors, Saurav co-founded Cube26 Software Pvt. Ltd, a successful mobile technology platform that helps to improve consumer engagement experience. Cube26 was funded by Tiger Global and Flipkart. Cube26 was acquired by Paytm at the beginning of 2018.

An alumnus of Delhi College of Engineering, he had successfully raised funds from DSIR to build an autonomous ground vehicle. After completing engineering, he joined INRIA in France where he worked on the next generation of Driving Assistance Systems to mitigate roadside accidents. Later, he joined Cornell University’s Master’s program in Computer Science focusing on Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. During his Cornell days, he worked on building a machine learning and computer vision system for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles that received the accolade from the Office of Naval Research, U.S.A.

Bio

Scott Countryman is the founder of the Philippine based marine conservation organization Reeph. For the past ten years he led his NGO to help establish marine protected areas as well as develop technologies and programs to monitor, restock and rehabilitate coral reefs. Prior to becoming a full time marine conservationist, Scott was the Founder and Chief Executive at PeopleSupport Philippines and Digital Media Exchange. He is a licensed US Coast Guard Ship’s Captain, boat builder promoting electric propulsion systems, has and Masters in Business, and envisions a future where commercial activity in our oceans is carbon negative and regenerative to marine ecosystems.