2024 Main Stage Speakers
These tightly crafted talks from diverse perspectives and disciplines are designed to have a lasting impact beyond the conference day.
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Aina Abiodun
President & Executive Director | VertueLab
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Alando Simpson
CEO | COR Disposal & Recycling
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Alicia Chapman
Owner and CEO | Willamette Technical Fabricators
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Cynthia Carmina Gómez
Futurist, Educator, Community Engagement Specialist, Nonfiction Creative Writer
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Edward B. Hill
Co-Founder | CDO - Food Loop Northwest
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Jacob Dunn
Principal | ZGF Architects
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Joseph Bull
Dean of the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science | Portland State University
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Marcelino Alvarez
CEO | Photon Marine
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Noel Kinder
Chief Sustainability Officer & Advisor | Nike (retired)
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Patti Brooke
Managing Director | Moonbeam Exchange
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Ajay Malhotra
On Stage Host
Vice President | CBRE
Showcase Speakers
On our Main Stage we will be highlighting some Oregon-based projects and organizations making real headway with climate solutions that can benefit us all. These Showcase speakers will share with us a short story of their project and let us know how we can help move it forward.
Dexter Turner
Founder and CEO | OpConnect
Dexter is the founder and CEO of OpConnect, Inc., an electric vehicle charging solutions company based in Portland, Oregon. He holds a MS in Aerospace Engineering and an MBA and is a serial entrepreneur, having founded two previous companies in the aviation industry. His previous start-ups include a contract software development company that has been in business since 2002, and an aircraft instrumentation company that was bootstrapped, achieved over $1m in annual sales in under 4 years, and was sold to a publicly traded company for 68 times return on the original investment.
Since incorporating OpConnect in 2016, Dexter has led the business to achieve $6m in annual sales with thousands of EV charging stations operating in 25 States and Canada. Dexter is the inventor on 9 patents, has over 25 years of engineering and leadership experience and is one of the founding members of Dream Corps’ Green For All Business Council, which is dedicated to bringing clean technologies to low-income communities and communities of color.
James Metoyer
Founder and Executive Director | EnerCity Collaborative
As founder and executive director of EnerCity Collaborative (ECC), James guides ECC’s work to ensure the financial, environmental, and health benefits of a clean energy economy are fully realized in BIPOC, underserved, and frontline communities. James works with pre-apprenticeship training programs, community-based organizations, and other nonprofits to help professionals find careers in weatherization, residential energy auditing, deep-energy retrofitting, and net-zero building.
James’s passions are teaching students about energy efficiency, bridging the gap between the medical industry and the built environment to create healthy outcomes, and working to ensure that historically underserved populations have equitable access to healthy, safe, durable, sustainable and energy efficient housing.
Jocelyn Quarrell
CEO | Bold Reuse
Jocelyn Quarrell is a reuse and sharing systems expert with 15+ years of experience building and scaling access to sustainable services that enable humanity to greatly reduce our impact on the planet. As CEO of Bold Reuse, Jocelyn leads a diverse and inclusive team of innovators and changemakers who are reimagining the future of packaging. Before co-founding Bold Reuse, Jocelyn worked to launch bike share systems in NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco. She has also served as a member of the City of Portland's Bicycle Advisory and Off-Road Cycling Master Planning committees.
Keith Crossland
CEO / Co-Founder | Carbon Negative Solutions
Keith Crossland believes everything in life outside of math and science was once made up by a fellow human. This means you can choose to be bound to the limitations of others' imagination or you can bring your own thoughts to the physical world. No mistaking which route he chooses!
Carbon Negative Solutions is developing carbon negative concrete and concrete products. Moreover, their concrete is multi-functional enabling heating, energy storage, and EV charging revolutionizing the built environment. Prior to forming Carbon Negative Solutions, Keith founded Immerse Underwater Safari and became the first black submersible pilot. He owns a real estate company, worked 11 years in banking, and has a Master's Degree in Sustainable Development & Finance from New York University.
Kel Moody
Founder | Alluvium Gatherings
Kellen (Kel) Moody is a community cultivator and placemaker. As the founder of Alluvium Gatherings, they create and uplift movements through the design, planning, and implementation of gatherings. They have a passion for convening communities and leading teams to create meaningful experiences. Through their deep networks of relationships and trust, they have led dozens of small- and large-scale summits, festivals, retreats and conferences.
They have worked in and around the Certified B Corp community, using business as a force for good, since 2016 and co-founded Place to B, a purpose driven co-working space in 2023. Kel deeply believes that developing a strong sense of place is one of the most meaningful pathways to purpose and that gatherings have the power to motivate collective impact to drive real and meaningful change. They currently live in the traditional homelands of the Cowlitz and Chinook Nations, or what is now called Vancouver, WA.
Pat Crowley
CEO | Chapul Farms
Pat Crowley is founder and CEO of Chapul Farms, building and scaling modular insect farms. His diverse career path has had a singular focus of ensuring the food and water availability to future generations, with previous positions as a climate modeler, hydrologist, and agronomist in public and private sectors, and has more than 10 years working in the field of sustainable food and agriculture.
Martin Cenek
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science | University of Portland
Dr. Martin Cenek is a computer science researcher and educator working in the fields of complex systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning and human centered design. His intelligent cyber-physical research projects include modeling reliability of renewable power under changing climate conditions, analyzing brain waves to understand how we process different stimuli, understanding the composition and contamination in residential recyclable materials and solid waste, modeling athletic performance from wearable bio-sensors, and analyzing residential water use patterns.
Recently, his passion for human centered design led him to Malawi, Africa with the University of Portland’s Engineering for Common Good program.
Mona Pearson
Director | The Lucky Cow
Mona was born back east in Massachusetts the daughter of a Racehorse trainer she lived on the race tracks for the first few years of her life until being moved to southern California, where the love of riding horses grew and was introduced to cattle farming at her uncle's ranch in Bakersfield. Once the largest cattle ranch in California, The Rocking R ranch gave her her first taste of how a real cowboy’s life is led.
After high school Mona served in the US Army, serving our country as a combat photographer for a part of that career. Upon leaving the Army she began her college journey, studying Anthropology and Social Science. Her dream is to get her doctorate in the field of Environmental Design as it applies to Anthropology. This decision to continue her education led her to participate in the Portland State University CleanTech Challenge where she and TheLuckyCow.org teamed up to present the vertical closed loop system.
Tanya Barham
Founder and CEO | Community Energy Labs
Tanya is a CEO and entrepreneur with a long history in energy technology. Her current company, CEL, applies machine learning to building operations as a way to help building operators in frontline communities navigate stringent building performance codes and changes energy prices.
Special Main Stage Guests
Karin Power
Natural Resources and Climate Policy Advisor | Office of Governor Kotek
Karin Power serves as Governor Kotek’s Natural Resources and Climate Policy Advisor. Prior to joining Governor Kotek’s administration, she has ’s held roles that bridge environmental sustainability and business, including positions as interim Executive Director for Business for a Better Portland, Administrative Director for B Local PDX, Oregon’s certified B Corp business association, and Associate General Counsel for The Freshwater Trust. Karin also represented Milwaukie, Oak Grove, and SE Portland for six years as their State Representative, working on some of the state’s most comprehensive climate policies and championing access to affordable child care. She is a graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School and Mount Holyoke College.
Senator Elizabeth Steiner
State Senator and Co-Chair of the Joint Ways and Means Committee in Senate District 17
Elizabeth Steiner is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Family Medicine at OHSU. She has served as the State Senator for Northwest Portland and Beaverton since 2011. She is the Senate Co-Chair of the Full Ways & Means Committee, which oversees Oregon's state budget. She is also a member of the Capital Construction Sub-Committee and Co-Chair of the Legislative Audits Committee, both of which address portions of the budget. As of the 2023 Legislative Session, Senator Steiner is also serving on the Senate Rules Committee.
In her time in the Oregon Legislature, Senator Steiner has raised the legal age for purchasing tobacco products to 21, increased statewide vaccination rates, passed legislation establishing the nation’s first state-wide universally-offered nurse home visiting program for families with new babies, and addressed the opioid epidemic head-on through behavioral health treatment programs and increasing access to medication-assisted treatment. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, hiking, photography, and cooking.
Ajay Malhotra
On Stage Host - Wings Conference
Ajay Malhotra is a commercial real estate broker at CBRE. The son of a career diplomat, Ajay is fluent in the language and culture of technology, global business and commercial real estate, and has been dubbed a globetrotting “universal translator.” After 20 years in the semiconductor and cleantech industries—from microprocessor design to enterprise software, predictive analytics and renewables —he has spent the last decade helping companies address their real estate needs. Ajay, a “geek who can speak”, is active with the venture capital community, helped bring TiE to Oregon, and has served on a diverse spectrum of boards including The Technology Association of Oregon, The Japan America Society of Oregon and Oregon Ballet Theater.