Meet the Faculty

Scott Sklar

President, The Stella Group, Ltd.
Adjunct Professor, George Washington University

Distributed Energy and Community Resilience

Scott Sklar has spent 25 years guiding governments, infrastructure owners, and commercial clients through the deployment of clean distributed energy — efficiency, renewables, and storage working together. As former policy director of the Solar Energy Industries Association, he helped shape the federal policy framework underpinning today’s distributed energy markets. He pioneered the first U.S. course on Renewable Energy and Critical Infrastructure and teaches at The George Washington University.

Matthew Haupt, PE, CEM, CPP

President, All Threats Considered
Former Energy Director, Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC)

Understanding Electricity Markets: Wholesale, Retail, and What Comes Next

Matt Haupt spent more than 30 years leading installation energy resilience across the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. As Energy Director at the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, he shaped energy security policy for the entire Department of the Navy and deployed the DoD’s only enterprise-wide Smart Grid system. He holds Master’s degrees from the Naval War College and the University of South Florida.

Joseph Fiksel, Ph.D.

Emeritus Professor, The Ohio State University B.Sc. Electrical Engineering, MIT. Ph.D. Management Science, Stanford

TEACHES: ENERGY SYSTEMS AND ENTERPRISE RESILIENCE

Joseph Fiksel is a pragmatic expert who has helped companies translate resilience ideas into business logic — showing that investing in resilience yields real performance gains, not just risk reduction. As Vice President for Life Cycle Management at Battelle, he led major projects for corporations, government agencies, and international consortia. He then co-founded both the Center for Resilience and the Sustainability Institute at Ohio State and authored the seminal text, "Resilient by Design." He also served a term as Special Assistant for Sustainability at U.S. EPA, advocating systems thinking.

Stratos Tavoulareas

Global Energy Consultant, IMF Former Global Power Lead, IFC Advisory Services, World Bank Group

TEACHES: RENEWABLE ENERGY FINANCE AND GRID INTEGRATION

Stratos Tavoulareas brings more than 45 years of experience in the power sector, with deep expertise across technologies, regulations, policies, economics, and financing. For three decades, he worked globally through the World Bank Group, including as Global Power Lead of IFC Advisory Services, leading projects across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America with a focus on renewables and new technologies. Following retirement, he was retained by the IMF as a global energy consultant — a role that reflects the depth of expertise he brings to this course.

Smita Chandra Thomas

Principal, Energy Shrink

Buildings, Climate, and the Economics of Decarbonization

Smita Chandra Thomas is founder and principal of Energy Shrink, a consulting firm focused on decarbonizing the global built environment. She provides advisory services and techno-economic analyses for policy and market transformation programs, with clients including the Maryland and DC governments, IFC World Bank EDGE green buildings program, and the U.S. DOE. She also provides whole-building consulting and energy modeling for passive design and net-zero buildings.

Jimmy Jia

Managing Partner, Inquisitive Capital
Venture Partner for ESG, PiLabs  ·  Board Chair, Center for Sustainable Energy

Energy as Corporate Strategy

Jimmy Jia advises corporations, governments, and nonprofits on the question most of them get wrong: how to ensure sustainability strategies survive a change in leadership. He has spent two decades in the rooms where energy decisions either become real strategy or quietly disappear into the next budget cycle. He developed the Energy-as-Strategy methodology and authored The Corporate Energy Strategist Handbook. B.S., MIT; Ph.D., University of Oxford.