Pat Holmes is the Conservation Program Coordinator for the Colorado Conservation Trust (CCT), a statewide organization that works to protect Colorado’s unique landscapes.  He received his Master of Environmental Management Degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies with a focus in conservation finance.  Prior to joining CCT, he helped to launch the State of the Rockies Project at Colorado College, serving as the program coordinator there for two years.  Pat has also worked with the Sonoran Institute and the Yale Center for Business and Environment.  He is a past fellow of the Kinship Conservation Institute and was selected as the recipient of a Wyss Foundation scholarship for conservation in the Intermountain West. 

2.                  Doug Vilsack

Doug Vilsack is the founder and Executive Director of Elephant Energy.  He is a lawyer from Colorado, working with the law firm of Davis Graham & Stubbs in Denver in the practice areas of environmental law, Indian law, and renewable and alternative energy law.  Doug focused on environmental and energy-related issues while attending the University Of Colorado School Of Law and continues to work with students at the University on a variety of energy-related projects.  Doug first traveled to Namibia in 2005 to work for the World Wildlife Fund and has returned on numerous occasions to continue his work with community-based conservation organizations.  Prior to his work in Namibia, Doug attended Colorado College and founded the Paddle for the Presidency, a non-profit venture that organized an expedition that canoed the entire length of the Mississippi River and registered over 2000 young voters during the 2004 Presidential election.

3.                  Elizabeth Lokey

Elizabeth Lokey is a professor at Boise State University.  Prior to her work at Boise State, she was a Senior Consultant with Camco’s carbon offset origination team in Denver, Colorado.  She develops forestry, landfill, and agricultural projects that absorb or reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ensure that these projects have the proper monitoring and documentation to earn credit through a variety of North American voluntary and compliance offset programs.  At Camco, she also managed a project on carbon capture and sequestration funded by the UK’s Strategic Programme Fund and currently is working on an inventory of abandoned coal mines in China as a part of an EPA Methane to Markets grant.  Prior to joining Camco, Elizabeth was a high school Spanish and science teacher for five years and earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder where she was a National Science Foundation Fellow. During her time in graduate school, she gained experience working for E Source, Rocky Mountain Institute, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Emerging Energy Research.  She is the author of many articles on voluntary and compliance renewable energy markets, emerging U.S. carbon markets, renewable energy purchasing options, and published a book entitled Renewable Energy Projects under the Clean Development Mechanism:  A Guide to Latin America with Earthscan Publishers.

4.                  Lakshman Guruswamy

Lakshman Guruswamy, the Nicholas Doman Professor of International Environmental Law at the University of Colorado School Of Law, was born in Sri Lanka, and is one of the world's recognized experts in International Environmental Law.  Prior to joining the University of Colorado in 2001, he taught in Sri Lanka, the UK, and the Universities of Iowa and Arizona. Lakshman, is a frequent speaker at scholarly meetings around the country and is widely published in legal and scientific journals.  He is the author of over 30 scholarly articles published in law reviews as well as peer reviewed journals.  He is also the Director of the Center for Energy & Environmental Security (CEES) of the University of Colorado, an ambitious interdisciplinary project that seeks to find renewable energy solutions for the energy deficits confronting not only the United States, but more particularly the developing countries of the world.

5.                  Peter Warren

6.                  Ron Larson

Ron Larson has been a renewable energy activist since the 1970s, when he worked on the first two solar bills passed by Congress.  He co-founded the Colorado Renewable Energy Society, a chapter of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), of which he was once the Vice President, and helped pass the Colorado’s first Renewable Portfolio Standard.  He is now retired, but very active in volunteer renewable energy efforts, often overseas.  Ron has been at the forefront of renewable energy innovation for years, pioneering work in solar energy and low cost cookstoves.  He is now a leading proponent of biochar, a renewable energy technology that burns biomass in a low oxygen environment to produce char, which can be used as fertilizer and gasses that can power vehicles or electric generators.

7.              Carol Murphy

Carol Murphy works in Southern Africa on a wide variety of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) projects and is currently working with communities situated in Sioma Ngweze National Park in Southwestern Zambia.  Carol is a Human Geographer with a Masters Degree in Environmental Science and a post-graduate teaching degree.  Since attending the first ever PRA training course held in South Africa in 1993, she has developed a career in environment and rural development using a strong participatory approach.  She began working as senior researcher for WILD in the Caprivi Region of Namibia.  She continued her work in Caprivi with Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC) and Conservation International (CI) and still lives there today.

8.              Barbara Farhar

Dr. Farhar is a senior research associate at the University of Colorado's Institute of Behavioral Science.  For more than 25 years, she has been a pioneer in the area of renewable and sustainable energy policy development, directing research on the interaction between technology and society and diffusion of innovations. As a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), she gained national recognition for her work on the human dimensions of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Today, she is an internationally recognized expert on the use and adoption of new energy technologies.

Dr. Farhar has produced more than 240 publications and papers on the relevance of behavioral analysis to energy policy, strategic planning for federal research, public opinion about energy and environmental policy, energy efficiency R&D planning, and technology transfer. She has been published in Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Science. She is also on the board of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society.

9.              Tim Wade

10.              Jonah Levine

Jonah Levine holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Applied Ecology and a Master’s of Science in Telecommunications and Utility Engineering. Over the past decade Jonah has worked as a wildlife biologist, tracking threatened and endangered species, and then as a research engineer solving challenges related to wind energy development and energy storage. Jonah’s diverse background has allowed him to work with a number of cutting edge organizations including: the Rocky Mountain Institute; the Turner Endangered Species Fund; Geo-Marine Environmental Consulting; and University of Colorado-Boulder. A combined interest in biomimicry –biologically inspired design- lead to an interest in the topic of biochar. Biochar production is a method that can simultaneously increase soil productivity, sequester atmospheric carbon, and produce renewable. Jonah currently works for both University of Colorado-Boulder (CU) and for Biochar Engineering Corporation (“BEC”). For CU, Jonah is currently working to organize a US National biochar organization and an annual US biochar conference (the last conference proceeding; the next conference).  For BEC, Jonah is working to advance business, engineering, and educational development.