Meet the Mentors

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  Atilla Akarsu

  Head of Operations at Sabanci Renewables Inc.

  Atilla Akarsu is the Head of Operations at Sabancı Renewables Inc., where he oversees operational power plants, insurance procurement, and end-to-end project management across the company’s U.S. renewable energy portfolio. In this role, he is responsible for driving operational efficiency, strengthening risk management practices, and ensuring the successful delivery of complex projects.

   

  Prior to his current position, Mr. Akarsu served as Business Development and M&A Manager at Sabancı Renewables Inc., leading strategic growth initiatives, including renewable energy acquisitions and key commercial agreements. Before relocating to the United States, he held roles at Sabancı Holding, Enerjisa Üretim, and Enerjisa Enerji in Türkiye. As Energy Group Manager at Sabancı Holding, he contributed to strategic investment planning, performance analysis, and senior management decision-making, and supported major transactions such as the IPO of Enerjisa Enerji and asset divestments.

   

  Mr. Akarsu holds a dual Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the State University of New York and Istanbul Technical University. He is fluent in English and Turkish and brings international experience across operations, project management, M&A, and energy strategy.
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  Amy Atchley

  EV Equity Development Manager, Austin Energy

  Amy Atchley is a social impact leader with over 20 years of experience serving vulnerable communities. She bridges Fortune 500 companies and mission-driven community organizations, drawing on a diverse skill set to drive meaningful change. At Austin Energy, she leads efforts in transportation electrification and climate resilience, centering equity and inclusion. Her work is grounded in innovative, human-centered program design that ensures emerging technologies benefit all communities. She has a strong focus on youth empowerment, developing initiatives that build leadership and amplify the voices of the next generation. Amy is regularly invited to share her insights at national and international forums on climate equity, decarbonization, inclusive community engagement, and more. Her nonprofit work includes high impact roles with Meals on Wheels Central Texas and VH1 Save the Music. She currently serves on the Board of Directors at EcoRise and is also a professional Austin-based singer/songwriter.

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  Molly Bales

  Director of Origination, Wood Clean Energy; Lecturer, UT Austin

  Molly Bales is a Lecturer at UT Austin, where she teaches energy entrepreneurship on behalf of Texas Venture Labs and the UT Energy Institute. She is also Wood Clean Energy's Director of Origination, leading strategic consulting and advisory services for project conceptualization and development. She has over 14 years of experience in energy project development, enterprise sales, and entrepreneurship. In her career, she has helped scale multiple high-growth cleantech startups and developed hundreds of megawatts of utility-scale assets in multiple ISO territories. She holds an MBA from MIT and a BA from Harvard University.

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  Etienne Cadestin

  Founder, ReVolt Energy Corporation

  Etienne Cadestin is the founder of ReVolt Energy Corporation. He also founded Longevity Power, a subsidiary of the Longevity Partners Group focusing on the deployment of rooftop solar and energy storage. Prior to that, Etienne worked at Knight Frank, and the United Nations Environment Programme. He has more than fifteen years of expertise in sustainability and responsible investment. Over that period, Etienne has been advising some of the largest institutional investors on their future proofing and value creation strategies and Longevity Partners was one of the fastest growing privately owned sustainability advisory businesses in the world. Etienne stepped down as the group global CEO in October 2025 and is focusing on  senior advisory and high impact innovative initiatives. 

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  Alexander Girau

  Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Group1

  Alexander Girau is an Energy Transition Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin's Energy Institute and Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Group1, the company commercializing potassium-ion battery technology from the UT Austin laboratory of Nobel Laureate John B. Goodenough. 

  Goodenough, co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery and a UT-Austin professor for more than three decades, devoted his final body of research to potassium-ion as a safer and more scalable alternative to lithium. Girau licensed the initial material technology, improved upon that foundational work and built the path to full-stack battery systems product around it. Group1's full-stack platform—from its proprietary Kristonite™ cathode material through K-Pack and K-Cabinet systems—is engineered without lithium, cobalt, or nickel and is entering the market in AI data center power, defense, and mission-critical infrastructure. It is a direct continuation of Goodenough's research, carried from his UT laboratory into American manufacturing. 

  As a fellow, Girau works at the point where the Energy Institute's research meets commercial deployment. He brings an operating view of two of the institute's active research areas—powering data centers and battery production and critical minerals—informed by building the supply chains, intellectual property, and capital structures those technologies require to reach the market. He contributes to TEX-E, the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy, and mentors UT Austin students building energy ventures, working alongside the institute to advance UT Austin's standing as America's preeminent energy university. 

  Girau has made this translation from research to industry twice. The first was Advano, built from his graduate research at Tulane University on nanomaterial processing and silicon quantum dots, which he redirected into silicon anodes for lithium-ion batteries. Both fields he has worked in—quantum dots and lithium-ion batteries—were later recognized with Nobel Prizes. 

  He has raised more than $40 million to commercialize energy storage and advanced materials technologies, including a National Science Foundation SBIR Phase II award. He is a named inventor on 17 granted patents and holds exclusive rights for his companies to more than 25 patents licensed from UT Austin, Tulane University, and Sharp Corporation. Earlier in his career, as a chemical process engineer for several of the world's largest oil and gas companies including Shell, he designed and improved more than $2 billion in downstream refineries and upstream production facilities—experience that informs how he approaches industrial-scale deployment today. 

  Girau holds an M.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Tulane University, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. before leaving to commercialize his research, and a B.S. in Chemistry (Honors) and Mathematics from Loyola University New Orleans. He is an alumnus of Y Combinator (S17), the Silicon Valley accelerator. 

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  Rafael Guzman

  Rafael Guzman is the Head of Engineering for Sabanci Renewables in the United States,  where he leads all engineering activities across utility-scale solar and battery energy storage system (BESS) projects—from development through commissioning and operations.

   

  Mr. Guzman is a results-driven engineering and project management leader with over 30 years of experience in the energy sector. His expertise spans utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, battery energy storage systems (BESS), power transmission, and power delivery infrastructure. Throughout his career, he has led engineering efforts from earlystage development through commissioning for projects totaling approximately 10 GW of solar PV and 2.43 GWh of BESS capacity, as well as managed power and renewable infrastructure projects valued at around $1.5 billion.

   

  Mr. Guzman began his professional career in 1994 with General Electric International in Colombia, serving as an Operations and Maintenance Manager at a combined-cycle power plant. He later relocated to Canada, where he held engineering and project management roles with companies including Atalink, Siemens, and Barrick Gold. Over the last 12 years,  he has held senior engineering and project management positions in the United States with organizations such as Nextera Energy Resources, Fluence, Vesper Energy, and Origis Energy.

  He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Del Norte University in Colombia, a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Curtin University in Australia, and an MBA from Florida Atlantic University in the United States.

   

  Mr. Guzman is married with two children and known for his ability to bridge technical depth with strategic decision-making, Mr. Guzman focuses on building reliable, high-performance energy assets that maximize long-term operational value. His leadership emphasizes engineering excellence, risk management,  and strong collaboration across development, construction, and operations teams—driving team performance and stakeholder alignment.

  
   

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  Donny Holaschutz

  Managing Partner and Co-founder of Inodú

  Donny has more than 18 years of experience in the energy and aerospace industry. Mr. Holaschutz is a Managing Partner and a co-founder of inodú.  Mr Holaschutz has consulted for companies and government agencies around the world to help them execute innovative energy and sustainability projects.

  As part of inodú, Mr. Holaschutz been involved in helping companies, investors, banks, regulating bodies, governments and industry associations navigate the transformation of North, Central and South American energy and power sectors.  He has been involved in evaluating business cases green hydrogen production, hydrogen derivatives (ammonia and methanol), for energy storage, renewable energy generation, the transformations of existing thermal assets and other projects to make the energy system more sustainable.

  Additionally, he has led business development, worked on energy policy, market analysis and energy/operational efficiency studies. Donny has participated and led market assessments in the US, Canada, Peru and Chile which include short, medium and long term market forecasts; capacity expansion analysis; adequacy and reliability analysis; transmission planning; and asset and portfolio market analysis.

  Donny received his Master’s in Management and Engineering from the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Engineering Systems Division at MIT. While at MIT he specialized on energy systems, sustainability, product strategy and innovation. He received both a bachelor’s and Master’s in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

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  Philipp Hoffman

  Research & Venture Scout at Gigascale

  As Research & Venture Scout at Gigascale, Philipp uses his recruiting expertise to identify high-potential technical innovations and the people behind them by fostering relationships across universities, labs, and accelerators.

  Philipp believes the mindset of researchers—deep curiosity, comfort with complexity, and persistence through ambiguity—is essential to scaling deep-tech solutions that drive climate impact. Knowing that graduate-level innovation rarely comes with a ready-made playbook for commercialization, he works closely with Evaline Tsai to help researchers navigate the path to entrepreneurship.

  Before Gigascale, Philipp spent almost nine years at Meta, where he built recruiting teams for emerging research disciplines. He led research recruiting for Augmented and Virtual Reality for Meta Reality Labs (Oculus) and created an Expert Talent Map to enable data-rich pipeline planning.

  Earlier in his 15-year recruiting career, he joined Microsoft, where he focused on university talent—closing more than 200 hires from top-tier universities, restructuring recruiting practices for efficiency, and helping launch a first-in-class engineering internship program in Europe.
  Philipp’s curiosity and interest in people have taken him from studying theology to leading specialized recruiting for the world’s most technical teams. He holds a BA in Biblical Languages from Moody Bible Institute and studied Business Administration at Universität Klagenfurt in his home country of Austria.

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  Ryan Kudva

  Unconventional Technology Integrator, ExxonMobil

  Ryan Kudva received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from NC State University in 1994, and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from UT Austin in 1998. After graduating from UT, Ryan joined Exxon in 1999, shortly before the Exxon and Mobil merger. He has held a variety of technical and leadership roles including research & technology development, capital projects, acquisitions & divestments, and supervisory responsibility for assets. During his time at ExxonMobil, he has continued to remain active in the UT community. His prior roles include recruiting at the Cockrell School of Engineering for 8 years and serving on the UT Chemical Engineering External Advisory Council, with stints as vice chair and chair. Ryan now serves as ExxonMobil’s primary contact for the UT Energy Institute. 

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  Brandon Mulder

  Energy Journalism Fellow

  Brandon Mulder is an Energy Journalism Fellow at the University of Texas’ Energy Institute in Austin. Brandon started his journalism career in Texas’ Permian Basin, where he reported on the local boom-bust economy and the environmental impacts of oil and gas drilling. He later reported for the Austin American-Statesman, where he was covering state politics when Winter Storm Uri caused widespread blackouts across Texas. Looking to further root his journalism career in energy and environmental topics, Brandon wrote for a series of business publications covering various energy transition themes, including clean tech, carbon markets, and global climate policy.

  Brandon is a 2024 graduate of the LBJ School of Public Affairs, where his studies concentrated on energy and climate policies. This included a summer research fellowship in Monterrey, Mexico, helping the state of Nuevo León establish a carbon tax policy.

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  Vitaly Sergeev

  Founder, Nanoborne

  Vitaly is a founder of several deep tech startups in upstream oil and gas, including Nanoborne, launched during his master’s studies at UT Austin. He holds a Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering, along with master's degrees in Economics, Entrepreneurial Law, and Technology Commercialization. Since starting his career in oil and gas, Vitaly has founded multiple successful ventures and continues to drive innovation through ongoing collaborations with leading global corporations.

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  Andy Ulher

  Energy Reporter in Residence with The Energy Institute

  Andy Uhler is an award-winning public radio correspondent and host of Phases and Stages: The Texas Energy Story. He is Energy Reporter in Residence at The University of Texas at Austin, hosted by the Energy Institute. He started his journalism career as an undergraduate at KUT, The University of Texas at Austin NPR affiliate. He transitioned to music journalism in 2006, becoming the senior producer of Texas Music Matters. After completing a Master’s degree in global policy studies at the LBJ School of Public Affairs in 2014, he returned to KUT to help launch the Texas Standard. The following year, he took a job as a sustainability reporter at American Public Media’s Marketplace, where he remained until accepting his current role as a fellow. Andy continues to report for the radio and other media outlets. His reporting and guest appearances have made him a regular presence on NPR, BBC, and The Texas Standard.