BOARD OF DIRECTORS
The Institute is served by a diverse Board of Directors, who represent disciplines ranging from physics, corporate finance, investment management and public policy. All share a deep commitment to protecting our environment and supporting human society through careful stewardship of our precious natural resources.
Jan-Pieter Oosterom
President of the Board & Co-chairman of the Advisory Board
Jan-Pieter (JP) Oosterom is a board level advisor for energy companies on corporate transformations. He has 18 years of experience at Royal Dutch Shell plc in executive roles across its businesses in Europe, Asia and North America. Most recently as co-head of Downstream transformation, driving thousands of structural efficiency improvement tactics from across Shell’s $300bln Downstream business to implementation. JP is driven by finding ways to sustainably transform large corporations a lot faster and also enhancing investment decision making to better navigate the energy transition.
JP has extensive experience in corporate transformations and corporate investment decision making through roles as finance director on executive leadership teams, transformation leader, head of planning and reporting and as senior manager Mergers & Acquisitions. He is a Fellow with CPA Australia and holds an MSc in Accounting & Finance, studying at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the London School of Economics.
Carey King
Director of the Board
Dr. Carey W King performs interdisciplinary research related to how energy systems interact within the economy and environment as well as how our policy and social systems can make decisions and tradeoffs among these often competing factors. The past performance of our energy systems is no guarantee of future returns, yet we must understand the development of past energy systems. Carey’s research goals center on rigorous interpretations of the past to determine the most probable future energy pathways.
Carey is Research Scientist at The University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Director at the Energy Institute. He also has appointments with the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy within the Jackson School of Geosciences and the McCombs School of Business. He has both a B.S. with high honors and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He has published technical articles in the academic journals Environmental Science and Technology, Environmental Research Letters, Nature Geoscience, Energy Policy, Sustainability, and Ecology and Society. He has also written commentary for American Scientist and Earth magazines as well as major newspapers such as the Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, and Austin American-Statesman. Dr. King has several patents as former Director for Scientific Research of Uni-Pixel Displays, Inc.
Phil Metz
Vice President of the Board
As Vice President of the BioPhysical Economics Institute, Phil Metz is focused on developing and applying scientifically-grounded tools for advancing sustainability and mitigating climate change. Phil is an expert across a range of energy markets including building energy systems, photovoltaics, and other renewables, energy storage, and electric utility / grid-scale energy systems. Phil’s professional experience includes VP-level marketing and sales leadership roles with revenue and P/L responsibility, Director-level management consulting on technological innovation and business strategy, and a stint as a Project Drawdown Research Fellow. Phil holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and MBA in marketing. He is an avid road biker.
What BPEI’s work means to me
BPEI’s mission statement says it all: “Bringing the natural sciences into economic analysis and decision-making.” I am deeply committed to advancing environmental sustainability. Unchecked, our “business-as-usual” fossil-fueled economy will lead to ecological disaster. But not any “green” solutions will change this outcome. We need the right economic models and tools to make the right decisions. Unfortunately, “mainstream” neoclassical economics, which as practiced today violates established laws of biology and physics, cannot provide these tools. And without them we are blind. So, to me, no challenge is more important than accomplishing BPEI’s mission of incorporating the natural sciences into the practice of economic analysis and decision-making for businesses, for governments, and throughout our society.
Linda Guild
Administrative Director of the Board
Linda Guild is CEO of The Guild Associates, Inc., an association management company that handles the day to day activities of the Institute.
Patrick Kent
Director of the Board
Patrick is the lead portfolio manager for the US Opportunistic Equity strategies and head of the Small Mid Cap Equity Research team at Newton Investment Management.
Most recently, Patrick was a portfolio manager at Wellington where he co-managed the firm’s global all-cap impact investing strategy, which paired top-down thematic research with bottom-up stock selection and focused on positive social and environmental impact. Prior to Wellington, Patrick worked as an equity analyst with Alydar Capital, CR Intrinsic Investors and Schroders. He also spent four years with The Boston Company, a predecessor firm of Mellon, on the Opportunistic Value team.
Patrick earned an MBA from Babson College – Franklin W. Olin Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College. He holds the CFA® designation and is a member of the CFA Institute and the CFA Society of Boston. He also holds the Chartered Market Technician designation and is a member of the CMT Association.
Dr. Charles Hall
Director of the Board and Co-Chairman of the Advisory Board
Charles Hall received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina from the great systems ecologist Howard Odum. He has been a research scientist at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge National Laboratories and at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, and professor at Cornell University, University of Montana, and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He is the author of 14 books and more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, many in our “best” journals. In his mid-career, he turned his main interests from systems analysis and modeling of the energetics of natural ecosystems to increasingly, human-dominated “economic” systems. He is especially well known within the scientific community for initiating and developing (with colleagues) the concepts of EROI (Energy Return on Investment) and BioPhysical Economics. He is the recipient of many academic awards including the Hubbert Award from the American Society for the Study of Peak Oil and the Lifetime Achievement award from the International Society of BioPhysical Economics.
ADVISORY BOARD
BPEI’s Advisory board is comprised of experts in science & engineering, economics, corporate finance, accounting & audit, investment management, ESG, and public policy. They guide the Institute’s research agenda, curriculum development and community outreach activities.
Jan-Pieter Oosterom
President of the Board & Co-chairman of the Advisory Board
Jan-Pieter (JP) Oosterom is a board level advisor for energy companies on corporate transformations. He has 18 years of experience at Royal Dutch Shell plc in executive roles across its businesses in Europe, Asia and North America. Most recently as co-head of Downstream transformation, driving thousands of structural efficiency improvement tactics from across Shell’s $300bln Downstream business to implementation. JP is driven by finding ways to sustainably transform large corporations a lot faster and also enhancing investment decision making to better navigate the energy transition.
JP has extensive experience in corporate transformations and corporate investment decision making through roles as finance director on executive leadership teams, transformation leader, head of planning and reporting and as senior manager Mergers & Acquisitions. He is a Fellow with CPA Australia and holds an MSc in Accounting & Finance, studying at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the London School of Economics.
Dr. Charles Hall
Director of the Board and Co-Chairman of the Advisory Board
Charles Hall received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina from the great systems ecologist Howard Odum. He has been a research scientist at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge National Laboratories and at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, and professor at Cornell University, University of Montana, and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He is the author of 14 books and more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, many in our “best” journals. In his mid-career, he turned his main interests from systems analysis and modeling of the energetics of natural ecosystems to increasingly, human-dominated “economic” systems. He is especially well known within the scientific community for initiating and developing (with colleagues) the concepts of EROI (Energy Return on Investment) and BioPhysical Economics. He is the recipient of many academic awards including the Hubbert Award from the American Society for the Study of Peak Oil and the Lifetime Achievement award from the International Society of BioPhysical Economics.
Prof. Steven Keen
Co-chairman of the Advisory Board
Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security at University College London (https://www.isrs.org.uk/).
Specialist in complex systems modelling in economics, especially of Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis. Publications on nonequilibrium macroeconomics, environmental economics, the role of energy in production, critiques of Neoclassical and Marxian economics, monetary dynamics, empirical data on causes of financial crises, and economic methodology (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hbcdga0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra).
Crowdfunded via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen.
Author of Debunking Economics (https://www.zedbooks.net/shop/book/debunking-economics/) and Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Can+We+Avoid+Another+Financial+Crisis%3F-p-9781509513727).
Developer of the Open Source system dynamics program Minsky (https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/).
Winner of the Revere Award (https://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/keen-roubini-and-baker-win-revere-award-for-economics-2/) from the Real World Economics Review (https://rwer.wordpress.com/) for being the economist “who first and most clearly anticipated and gave public warning of the Global Financial Collapse and whose work is most likely to prevent another GFC in the future.”
Previously Professor of Economics at Kingston University London UK (2014-2018) and University of Western Sydney, Australia (2007-2013).
Jed Dorsheimer
Co-chairman of the Advisory Board
Jonathan (Jed) Dorsheimer is a founding member of BPEI. His focus on systems analysis, combined with applying the Laws of Natural Science has resulted in a truly differentiated and often contrarian view of value creation on Wall Street. This unique approach has led to identification of several secular trends including smartphones and LEDs. Jed is driven by the application of science to decipher between what is sustainable investing strategies and just “green washing,” as a way to improve resource allocation. Jed has advised the United States Department of Energy, under the 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama, and held Executive Leadership roles in at Acuity Brands, a fortune 500 Company.
