Noel Bakhtian

Dr. Noël Bakhtian serves as Director of Tech Acceleration at the Bezos Earth Fund. Previously, for decades, Dr. Bakhtian served the federal government in energy and climate roles including: a senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She also played critical roles at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), 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 is also a Board Member for the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE). A first-generation American, Dr. Bakhtian earned her engineering doctorate in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University. She 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. 

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38 North: News and Analysis on North Korea