Founder, The Meridian House and Permian Energy Development Lab (PEDL)
Marilu Hastings is the founder of The Meridian House, a strategic advisory platform focused on infrastructure governance, regional development, and institutional strategy. For more than three decades, her work has centered on the societal, political, and institutional dynamics that increasingly shape large-scale infrastructure systems across energy, water, industrial development, and emerging technology sectors.
She previously served for eighteen years as Executive Vice President of the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, where she led the Mitchell Innovation Lab and developed cross-sector initiatives involving philanthropy, sustainability science, regional systems, energy transition, land conservation, and infrastructure innovation. She is also the founder of the Permian Energy Development Lab (PEDL), a regional initiative exploring integrated approaches to energy systems, workforce development, water management, and long-term regional resilience in the Permian Basin.
Hastings has helped shape national conversations surrounding philanthropy, infrastructure governance, stakeholder engagement, sustainability science, and institutional adaptation through work with the Aspen Institute, the National Academies, the National Petroleum Council, and multiple regional and cross-sector initiatives. Her work is grounded in the belief that economic development, technological innovation, public legitimacy, and long-term regional resilience are not inherently opposing goals, and that durable infrastructure systems increasingly depend on the ability to align them.