Leadership & Faculty
Brian Steel is the Director of The Strauch Cleantech to Market Program to which he brings 35 years of business innovation and leadership experience. He is a repeat member of the Haas “Club of 6” for teaching excellence. Brian is a member of the investment advisory board of the Commonwealth Energy Fund and was a founding member of the external advisory board of the Innovation Incubator (a Wells Fargo/NREL joint venture).
Brian has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, working on both renewable energy financing and solar initiatives and was Senior Advisor to the Renewable Energy Trust and an advisor to the Berkeley Startup Cluster. Prior to joining the UC Berkeley faculty, Brian was Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Development for PG&E Corporation, where he led the energy industry’s first tax-equity solar project financing by an investor-owned utility, investing $400 million in nearly $1 billion of photovoltaic assets from 2010-2011.
Brian is also a co-founder of Hypatia Project, a software engineering firm that builds advanced technologies for public benefit missions around the globe, including the U.S. Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Prior roles include Chairman, International, Pandora Media – the world’s leading Internet radio company; President, International, Overture Services – building a billion-dollar division of Yahoo! with operations in 20 countries; President and CEO, Idealab Silicon Valley and Managing Director of Idealab; and President and COO, On Command. Previously, Brian was Senior Vice President and co-head of the Real Estate Merchant Banking Group at Shearson Lehman Brothers. He has served on the boards of more than 20 early-stage technology companies, several of which went public, and many of which had successful acquisition exits. His separate private investments include Back to the Roots (Haas-founded startup), Bay Area Panera restaurants, Birdies, LiveOps, and Powerset (sold to Microsoft). Brian holds a BA magna cum laude in
Economics from Duke University, where he was an Angier B. Duke Scholar.
Send an email to [email protected]
Ana Torres (Martinez) is the Associate Director of the Cleantech to Market program, part of the Energy Institute at Haas School of Business. C2M connects cutting-edge climate tech startups with teams of 4-6 UC Berkeley graduate students, empowering them to accelerate commercialization through in-depth analysis of market opportunities, strategies, and pathways to scale. She previously served as Chief Innovation Officer of the Open Innovation Squad at UC Berkeley’s Garwood Center, guiding interdisciplinary student teams on corporate innovation projects.
Ana is an accomplished leader with extensive experience in corporate innovation. Throughout her career, she has been instrumental in helping Global Fortune 500 corporations from diverse industries develop new business strategies leveraging cutting-edge technologies. As Co-Founder of Xploration Partners, an innovation consulting firm, Ana has worked with startups and corporations across energy, agriculture, food, consumer goods, and other industries to bring innovative technology solutions to market. Over her career, she has worked with more than 1,000 startups and 100 corporates, facilitating over 200 partnerships. Notable clients include Nestle, P&G, BP, PepsiCo, Volkswagen, Mizuho, Mitsubishi, TOTO, JETRO, ENEOS, and many more.
During her time at RocketSpace, Ana guided corporations in innovation strategies, from establishing corporate venture capital arms for companies like JetBlue and De Beers to launching and managing accelerators. She also led corporations on startup scouting, investment, and acquisitions initiatives to drive strategic growth. During her tenure at Rabobank, Ana became one of the founding members of Rabobank’s innovation team where she played a pivotal role in launching Foodbytes and TERRA. Foodbytes is a startup pitch competition and networking platform connecting top food & agriculture startups, corporates, and investors. TERRA is a renowned food & agriculture accelerator.
Ana holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from the Haas School of Business.
Send an email to [email protected]
Bill Shelander joined the C2M faculty in 2016 after serving as an advisor and mentor to the program since 2010. Bill brings hands-on proficiency at the earliest stages of emerging technologies and venture funding. He is also teaching the Environmental Entrepreneurship and Innovation program at Stanford University’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Bill was a commercialization expert for Berkeley Lab (2010-2015), working with researchers in fundamental energy science to utilize discoveries in new business activities. He helped create and obtain external funding for dozens of startups involving diverse technologies (from industrial-scale microbiology and DNA diagnostics to thin film oxides and high-performance supercomputers).
Previously, Bill served on a White House Office of Science & Technology Policy panel to improve technology transfer of basic research. Between 1986 and 2007, he was a managing director of venture capital funds from the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and China. He has served on the boards of several NASDAQ-listed companies. Bill is an active entrepreneur who has co-founded several successful “hard” technology companies, including Mango Materials, whose process converts methane into polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) a multi-application biodegradable polymer, which is recognized as one of the “Global Cleantech 100” for 2021, and Anven Biosciences, which has created a fundamentally new approach to rapidly developing novel and more effective therapeutics involving the creation of highly specific bio-functional molecules. Bill holds an MBA from Stanford University, an MS Engineering from West Virginia College of Graduate Studies, and a BS Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Send an email to [email protected]
Alex Luce joined the C2M faculty in 2024, and brings extensive experience launching and investing in bold entrepreneurial ventures enabled by revolutionary science. Alex is a General Partner at Creative Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm where he leads the firm’s climate focus area.
His work and investments have covered a range of “deep technology” categories across the energy transition, advanced materials, health tech, semiconductors, robotics, and advanced computing.
Previously, Alex led CalCharge, the energy storage subsidiary of the California Clean Energy Fund. He was also a co-founder of SuperCharge US, a nationwide battery manufacturing consortium, and a solar energy startup. He also spent time with Prelude Ventures and ARPA-E. He currently serves on the Strategic Leadership Council for the Lab Embedded Entrepreneur Program at Los Alamos National Lab.
Alex holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Material Science and Engineering from University of California, Berkeley and was a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
Strauchs & The Mosse Foundation
Roger Strauch is chair of The Roda Group, an early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded with Dan Miller in 1997. Roda invests in people, technologies, and companies that address the consequences of climate change, natural resource contamination or scarcity, and the transition to low-carbon energy. Notable investments include Svante (carbon capture), Gridtential Energy (advanced silicon batteries) and Axine Water Technologies (PFAS eradication). Roger is on the board of Chart Industries (NYSE: GTLS), was formerly chair of Cool Systems (gameready.com)(sold to Avanos), was CEO and Chair of Ask Jeeves (sold to NASDAQ: IAC), and CEO and a board member of Symmetricom (sold to NASDAQ:MSCC). Other tech companies Roger and Dan helped develop were sold to HP, Logitech, and American Greetings. He co-founded TCSI Corp with Dan Miller in 1983 and was its CEO, leading it from start-up to IPO and a public secondary offering. Prior to TCSI, he was a communications system engineer and project manager for Hughes Aircraft’s (now Boeing) Space and Communications Group.
In addition to his business achievements, Roger is deeply involved in supporting academic, artistic, and philanthropic institutions and initiatives. He was an executive board member of the Tony Award winning Berkeley Repertory Theater for over 20 years, including service as board president, and received the Helen C. Barber Award for serving the theater with unique distinction. For 25 years, Roger was an executive board member of The Mathematics Sciences Research Institute (now SLMath), a premier collaborative and privately funded research institution supported by the National Science Foundation, including service as board chair. He currently serves on the board of trustees of the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering Advisory Board. Roger is the recipient of the Wheeler Oak Meritorious Award from the University of California, Berkeley, and he and his wife Dr. Julie Kulhanjian were named and honored as “Builders of Berkeley.” He is also the leader of the Mosse Art Restitution Project, a global search for his step-family’s Nazi-looted artifacts, the largest and most successful project of its kind. With his brother Hans, Roger is co-president of the Mosse Foundation, which supports humanitarian, educational, and cultural enhancement initiatives worldwide. He is a licensed amateur radio operator who holds two patents in wireless communications and earned degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell (BS) and Stanford (MS).
Talks:
- UC Berkeley College of Engineering Commencement 2011
- Distinguished Innovator Lecture, UC Berkeley
- The Mosse Art Restitution Project: A Personal Perspective
Articles:
Hans D. Strauch is an international architect based in Boston. As founder, principal, and creative director of HDS Architecture, he has spent his professional life designing distinctive buildings and creating new communities worldwide. Today, he leads a distinguished team that crafts sophisticated and highly acclaimed buildings, including large scale residential, commercial, retail destination, and medical facilities, and has completed over $1.5 billion of construction over the last 36 years. Hans designed a 155-unit apartment complex in Boston that won “Best New Construction Community of the Year” from the Massachusetts Apartment Association (MAA) in 2022 and a co-living development in Allston that the MAA named “Best Apartment Project of the Year” in 2024.
In addition to his business activities Hans is actively involved in supporting academic, artistic, and philanthropic institutions and initiatives. For over 25 years, Hans has served on the board of trustees at Lesley University, an institution focused on teacher education, counseling, and the visual arts. He most recently completed his eighth and final year as chair of Lesley’s board of trustees. He also supports several Boston social justice programs, including Habitat for Humanity and The Jewish Coalition for Literacy. Alongside his brother Roger, he endowed the Strauch Visiting Critic in Sustainable Design in 2013 at Cornell’s College of Architecture Art & Planning, their alma mater, to advance research and innovative design solutions associated with consequences of global climate change. In 2023, they endowed the Strauch Early Career Follow at Cornell to identify, attract, and support diverse, talented, early-career educators who contribute fresh ideas and perspectives. Hans was also named and honored as a “Builder of Berkeley” by the University of California, Berkeley. With Roger, Hans is co-president of the Mosse Foundation, which supports humanitarian, educational, and cultural enhancement initiatives worldwide.
Talks:
- Rebuilding a Family Name and Place in Berlin
- Citybiz interviews Hans Strauch, President of HDS Architecture
- Rising from the Ashes: Building on Restituted Family Property in Post-Nazi Berlin, Germany
Articles:
The Mosse Foundation is led by the Strauch brothers, Roger and Hans, the step-great grandchildren of Rudolf Mosse, a Jewish media mogul during Germany’s Weimar Republic a century ago. One of the wealthiest men in the country, Mosse was a distinguished philanthropist for Berlin’s economically disadvantaged and a patron of arts and educational institutions. His son-in-law, Hans Lachmann-Mosse, took over Rudolf’s publications in 1920 and the Berliner Tageblatt, their flagship newspaper known as the “New York Times of Germany,” strongly opposed the rise of National Socialism. When Hitler came to power, the Nazis seized the family’s assets and exiled the Mosse family from their homeland. Hans’ children fled to America, where his daughter, Hilde Mosse, became a noted child psychiatrist in Harlem and his son, George Mosse, became a beloved professor at the University of Wisconsin. Hans later remarried, and his stepson, Professor Karl Strauch, the former chair of Harvard’s physics department, and Karl’s wife, Maria Gerson Strauch, a commercial artist in Boston, are Roger and Hans’ parents.
The Strauch brothers honor the family’s legacy with the Mosse Foundation’s philanthropic initiatives. They partner with people and institutions who embrace a vision of society that champions individual liberty and expression while also nurturing and implementing innovations to provide collective security for all. Taking risks to do so is a comfortable path for the brothers.
The Mosse Foundation supports academic positions at universities across America, including the Strauch Visiting Critic in Sustainable Design and the Strauch Early Career Fellow at Cornell University, the Roger A. Strauch Chair in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley Engineering, and the Strauch Postdoctoral Fellows at the Simon Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute at Berkeley. The Mosse Global Lectures, an interdisciplinary and international lecture series, presents cutting edge research in history, politics, economics, art, literature, and more at notable universities around the world. The Mosse Foundation is also a proud supporter of Protect Democracy, the Roda Theater, and the public broadcasting stations WGBH and WCAI.
The Mosse Art Restitution Project is the Mosse Foundation’s most wide ranging initiative, an international project that finds and recovers artwork stolen from the Mosse family by the Nazis. Rudolf Mosse was a famed patron of the German arts, and his estate boasted a breathtaking array of paintings, sculptures, artifacts, and more. The Mosse Art Restitution Project has discovered dozens of pieces from the plundered Mosse collection and continues to search for more in what has been the world’s largest and most successful recovery project of stolen Nazi artifacts.
Most recently, the Mosse Foundation has partnered with the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley for the Strauch Cleantech to Market Program, continuing the school’s dedication to pioneering cleantech development and the foundation’s commitment to nurturing talent that aspire to make the world a better place while creating economic value for all. This collaboration between graduate students, startups, and industry professionals helps accelerate the commercialization of leading cleantech solutions and develop a next generation of innovative cleantech leaders.
