Michel Gelobter, Founder & Chairman
Michel Gelobter is one of the country’s leading climate strategists, having worked for more than 25 years as a regulator, policy-maker, researcher, and thought leader on environmental and social policy. Michel co-founded BuildingEnergy.com, designing the world’s largest platform for building energy data and applications . Prior, Michel was Chief Green Officer of Hara Software, a Kleiner-Perkins portfolio company and the leading enterprise energy and environmental management startup.
Until founding Cooler in early 2007, Michel was President/CEO of Redefining Progress, the U.S.’s leading domestic sustainability policy institute. During Michel’s tenure, Redefining Progress helped design the world’s most aggressive climate legislation which was signed into California law in August of 2006, formed the Climate Justice Corps to train thousands of U.S. youth in climate activism, became the worldwide home of the Ecological Footprint (the world’s best known measure of sustainability), and created MyFootprint.org, a website serving over 2 million unique visitors a month.
Michel also founded and directed the Environmental Policy Program at Columbia University and the Environment and Energy Track at Singularity University. He worked as a Congressional Black Caucus Fellow and for the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, was Director of Environmental Quality for the City of New York, and served as an Assistant Commissioner for its Department of Environmental Protection (with over 6,000 employees and a combined budget of over $2 billion/year).
Michel earned his B.S., M.S. and a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in Energy and Resources. He has served as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, the Advisory Board of Vice-President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, and is presently on the Boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Race, Poverty, and the Environment, and CERES, among others.
Paul Dixon, Director of Software Development
Paul is one of the world's leading authorities on database search and retrieval. For the past decade, Paul managed the development of Oracle's database search component (Oracle Text) and initiated the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search product. Oracle Text is the world's most widely implemented enterprise information retrieval software, with thousands of customers in mission-critical applications. He also created the "Benri" internal search engine, which served Oracle's corporate search and compliance needs for the first time, and inspired the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search product. He also directed the effort to repackage UltraSearch into SES, resulting in drastically increased simplicity, stability, and scalability, multi-order performance improvements, and security certification. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked as a developer at Nippon VenturCom in Tokyo, and as a statistical analyst at the New York City Board of Education. He holds a M.A. in Linguistics from NYU, and a B.A. from Penn.
Jeff Doran, Senior Software Developer
Jeff has over 10 years of experience building services and solutions from Open Source platforms with a strong emphasis on service architecture, database design, and service optimization. He has built a range of photo-sharing, management
consoles and other online tools for consumers for companies like Adobe, Xippix, and others.
Dr. Klaas Jan Kramer, Director of Life Cycle Services
Klaas is an expert in input-output analysis, process life cycle analysis and Cooler's hybrid model. Dr. Kramer is a skilled scientist with almost 20 years experience in energy and environmental research. He has been conducting Lifecycle Assessments for almost 15 years and was project manager for the Dutch Environmental Quality Label. He has also been a Senior Environmental Researcher, Agricultural Economic Research Institute (LEI) in The Netherlands where he led several international assessment projects. Since moving to the U.S., Dr Kramer has also worked with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Olivier Marie, Vice President for Business Services
Olivier was Senior Energy Partner at Accenture and Senior Vice President of the Energy Practice of Booz, Allen & Hamilton based in San Francisco and Paris, focusing on strategic and operational issues across many functions of oil & gas, chemicals and utilities companies. Mr. Marie was also a Commercial Attaché of the French Embassy in Washington D.C., focusing on bio-fuels (ethanol) matters and a Visiting Scientist at the Chemical Engineering Department of University of Delaware, focusing on the development of alternative fuels. Olivier holds an MS in Chemical Engineering from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Cooler's Associates include:
Jennifer Louie
Jennifer received a M.E. and a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT. Her interests include NLP, multimedia classification, network security, and web application system design, and she has extensive experience in the field of secure search, query processing and user interface design. Her interests include multimedia classification, network security, and web application system design.
Brett Newbold, Research and Development
Brett is a seasoned executive with global experience in developing advanced, natural language software applications. Brett was President and COO of OpenText, Vice President of R&D at Oracle for almost a decade, and founded several software companies in Europe in the 1980s. Brett did his undergraduate work in Physics at the University of Washington and later Business Law at Roanoke College. He put himself through college selling renewable energy systems. Brett speaks several languages and is well-respected in the computational linguistics community.
Seth Bauer, East Coast Operations
Seth was most recently the founding editor of The Green Guide and a VP at National Geographic. He's been editor in chief of Body + Soul magazine, and a longtime journalist at the forefront of social trends. He's also a former Olympic medalist and world champion as a coxswain in the sport of rowing. He lives outside Boston .
Norm Dean, Strategic Partnerships
Norm was most recently Executive Director of Friend of the Earth, US and serves as the Board Chair for Ceres, the nation’s leading advocate for corporate sustainability. Norm has a 25+ year career in environmental advocacy, commerce, and policy. He was CEO and President of Green Seal, one of the earliest green certification programs in the US, and is a former Senior Vice-President of the National Wildlife Federation. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Energy Efficiency in Industry, and holds a BA from Yale University and a JD from Georgetown
Phyllis Anderson, Chief Financial Officer
Phyllis has more than twenty years of finance and administrative experience in both public and venture backed private companies, most recently as the head of finance and administration at Teja Technologies, Inc. Phyllis has a MBA from Yale University and previous worked as a Diplomat with the US Department of State.
Steve Reinhardt, Marketing and Business Development
Steve Reinhardt has a twenty-plus year career across virtually every discipline of marketing including Brand Strategy, Consumer Marketing and Advertising & Direct Marketing. Over the course of his career he’s specialized in working on brands in fast moving, rapidly changing categories including Compaq, BMW, AT&T and The North Face in both consulting and corporate management roles. While at eBay, Steve was part of a management team that helped to build eBay Motors from $2 billion to over $5 billion dollars in sales over a four year period. Steve earned his BS from The University of Texas at Austin and has completed Executive Management programs at Kellogg and most recently The Business Strategies for Environmental Sustainability Program at The Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Because of our licenses and close technical ties to Stanford and U.C. Berkeley Cooler draws regularly on faculty and graduate students at those universities as technical consultants and researchers.