Phil De Luna
Board Chair
Expert, Sustainability
McKinsey & Company
Phil De Luna advises executive leaders in corporations, governments, and non-profits on how to decarbonize their business to enable sustainable inclusive growth. Leads engagement teams of associates, business analysts, and specialists to deliver the highest impact to clients.
De Luna is an entrepreneurial technologist having raised $2M in non-dilutive funding as a carbontech co-founder and Carbon XPRIZE Finalist (1 of 10 globally). He is also serving as a founding Mentor of the Matter and Climate Streams in Creative Destruction Lab, helping science-based startups bring advanced technology to market. He sits on the OECD Advanced Materials Steering Committee where he contributes to public policy recommendations around international collaborative research platforms.
Phil earned his PhD in Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Toronto under supervision of Prof. Ted Sargent. He has held competitive research internships at the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre and Toyota Research Institute, as well as visiting scholarships at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and Stanford. He has published 40 scientific papers in world-leading journals like Science and Nature and his work has been covered by mainstream media outlets like CBC, Forbes, Vice, the Independent, etc.
Phil is a 2019 Forbes Top 30 Under 30, a 2020/21 Mission Innovation Champion – Canada, a 2020/21 Action Canada Fellow, a 2019 GreenBiz Top 30 Under 30, a Governor General’s Gold Medalist, an NSERC Canada Graduate Scholar, and a Massey College Junior Fellow.
Dan Zilnik
Partner, EY
Dan Zilnik is Partner – Environment Social, Governance for EY. He has extensive experience in helping make distinctive, lasting, and substantial improvements in sustainability performance, which strengthen the entire business, including working with the world’s largest consumer packaged goods company, federal and municipal governments, global oil and gas producers, and working with the largest technology companies in the world. Dan is a recognized sustainability expert, receiving CSR Daily’s “Best Sustainability” and “Best Report” awards, and the Responsible Canadian Energy Awards for environment. He was one of Calgary’s Top 40 under 40 and was named part of Canada’s Clean16. Dan has a breadth of international experience including working in Canada, the United States, Norway, Russia and the Middle East. Dan has an MSc in Environment and Economics from the London School of Economics and is a Harvard trained negotiator.
Kate Chisholm
Senior Vice President, Planning, Stakeholder Relations and Chief Sustainability Officer
Capital Power
Kate Chisholm has been a member of Capital Power’s senior executive team since July 2009 and played an instrumental role in Capital Power’s restructuring and Initial Public Offering that led to the company’s creation. Kate leads Capital Power’s legal, regulatory and compliance, environmental policy, government relations and external affairs teams, risk management and internal audit, and sustainability efforts. She has personally led significant and successful commercial negotiations, managed high stakes litigation and overseen important public policy influence strategies for Capital Power.
Prior to Capital Power, Kate served as EPCOR’s Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary from 2004 to 2009, and Vice President, Legal and Commercial for Alberta’s Transmission Administrator (now the Alberta Electric System Operator) from 1999 to 2003.
Kate has provided counsel and expert witness testimony in numerous electric utility hearings, including those arising from the restructuring of the Alberta electricity industry. She was awarded the prestigious “Robert V.A. Jones” Lifetime Achievement Award by the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association in 2008, appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2010, named one of Canada’s Top 50 Diversity Champions by Women of Influence Magazine in 2013, named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women and given a Leadership in the Profession Award by WILL/Counsel Network/Association of Women Lawyers in 2014, and named one of Canada’s Top 50 General Counsels in 2016.
Kate currently serves on a number of boards and governing bodies, including Chair of the University of Alberta Board of Governors, and Lead Independent Member of the Alberta Securities Commission. She created the MORE mentoring program for high potential young professional women in Edmonton and was one of the founding members of Legal Leaders for Diversity, an association of Canadian general counsel who support and promote diversity and inclusion within the legal profession.
Martin Davies
Managing Partner
Corporate Capital Solutions
Martin Davies is a Managing Director of Corporate Capital Solutions – a Calgary-based partnership providing non-traditional debt financing to organizations. Davies is also Managing Director with Brickburn Asset Management Inc. Prior to joining Brickburn in 2004, Davies was a Senior Partner, Institutional Sales with Peters & Co. Limited for 22 years and specialized in Canadian capital markets; specifically oil and natural gas exploration and production, midstream, and oilfield service industries. Davies has served 12 years at the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) as a judicial panel member. From 1997 to 2004, he served as a member and Chairman (2002-2004) of the Alberta District Council of the Investment Dealers Association (IIROC processor). Davies holds a BA (Honours) in Economics from the University of Calgary and is a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute.
Nishka Gupta
Vice President
ARC Financial Corp.
Nishka Gupta is a Vice President at ARC Financial Corp., Canada’s largest energy-focused private equity firm. Her responsibilities include deal evaluation, structuring, and execution as well as portfolio management. Nishka represents ARC as observer or director on the boards of a few ARC portfolio companies and works with them on company corporate strategy, risk management, and financial matters.
Nishka is a Professional Engineer and has prior experience as a field operations engineer at a major multinational energy company. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from the Ivey Business School and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the Faculty of Applied Science at Western University.
Darlene Halwas
Chartered Financial Analyst
Canada Development Investment Corporation
Darlene Halwas currently serves on the boards of Canada Development Investment Corporation, the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services, and Alberta WaterPortal Society. She has almost 30 years of work experience, with 15 years focused on leading risk management functions for companies. In the past, she has served on a number of boards, including the Safety Codes Council, Aquatera Utilities Inc, CKUA Radio Foundation, the Management Employees Pension Board and the Calgary Police Commission.
Darlene holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons.) from the University of Manitoba, and the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), Financial Risk Manager (FRM) and Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD.D) designations as well as certification in tribunal administrative justice. Since 1995, she has been an active volunteer with the CFA Institute, and she completed a four-year term on the global Disciplinary Review Committee. She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to Canada. She is a member of Diversity 50, and was awarded an Exemplar from the Director and Chief Risk Officers Group in 2019.
Dr. Steve Larter
Canada Research Chair and Professor of Petroleum Geology
University of Calgary
Dr. Steve Larter is the Associate Vice President (research innovation) at the University of Calgary and a research professor in geochemistry. Educated in the UK (Cambridge and Newcastle), and with a background in industrial R&D (petroleum industry), he has had/has positions at the Universities of Oslo, Newcastle, CUPB, Tsinghua and Calgary, where he worked on a range of topics including studies of the deep subsurface biosphere and topics related to carbon management at scale. Former Scientific director of Carbon Management Canada, he has also worked on CCS, transition technologies for zero-emission energy recovery from oil and gas fields and currently, negative emission technologies. Cofounder of multiple startups in the energy, environment and IP space, his current focus is on developing realistic innovation systems that actually work for researchers. Larter is Chief Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab Rockies and CDL West, and a member of the National Academies of the UK, Canada, and Norway.
Dr. John Loughhead
From 2014 to 2020 John Loughhead served as Chief Scientific Adviser to UK Government Departments, firstly for Energy & Climate Change and subsequently for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy. In these roles he was responsible for assuring the quality and completeness of technical and scientific evidence underpinning policy development, and for advising Ministers on technical issues. He was previously Executive Director of the UK Energy Research Centre, a large university-based research consortium working on sustainable energy system futures which provided much of the knowledge and analytical capacity used to validate low-carbon scenarios to implement the UK’s policies under its climate change commitments. Until 2004 he was Vice-President Technology & Intellectual Property for the Alstom group, based in its Paris head office, following various research positions in its predecessor companies GEC and GEC ALSTHOM. He is a graduate in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College, London where he also spent 5 years in computational fluid dynamics research. His professional career in industrial research and development for the electronics and electrical power industries included work on advanced, high power industrial gas turbines, new energy conversion systems, spacecraft thermal management, electrical and materials development for electricity generation and transmission equipment, and electronic control systems. He also led activities on fuel cell development and superconducting devices, and is recognised as an expert in energy systems and technologies.
For many years he has been extensively involved in national and European public sector technology programmes, as a member of various advisory committees and chair of policy reviews in the area of future electric power systems. He was a member of the UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council and Chair of its User Panel, member of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council Technology Board, Assessor for UK Government technology development support programmes, involved in developing Foresight programmes, an advisor to the European Commission Directorate-General Research, and an invited expert to the French national fuel cell programme.
John is Governing Council member at the University of York, member of the Investment Committee of Low Carbon Innovation Fund, a Trustee of Royal Academy of Engineering, Adviser to the Parliamentary Science & Technology Committee, Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and of the Chinese Society of Electrical Engineers. He is Past-President of the UK Institution of Engineering & Technology, Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the City & Guilds of London Institute and of the Royal Society of Arts, and Freeman of the City of London.