Noël Bakhtian

Dr. Noël Bakhtian serves as Director of Tech Acceleration at the Bezos Earth Fund. Previously, she spent a decade serving in the federal government in energy and climate roles including as a senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in critical roles at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and in the DOE national laboratory system at Idaho National Laboratory and Berkeley Lab, where she was inaugural director of the science & technology research center focused on energy storage. She is a member of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Science Committee, the National Academies’ Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) Board, and an inaugural Board Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s foundation – the Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation (FESI). A first-generation American, Dr. Bakhtian earned her engineering doctorate in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University; holds master’s degrees from Stanford University and the University of Cambridge where she was a Churchill Scholar; and completed her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and physics at Duke University.