Noel Bakhtian serves as the founding Executive Director of the Berkeley Lab Energy Storage Center – a lab-wide center accelerating the translation of basic and applied research into real-world energy storage solutions – at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

She is also a Board Member for QSIDE – the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity – which leverages quantitative methods to reveal and analyze big data in support of grassroots organizations to catalyze systemic change.

Formerly, Dr. Bakhtian served on the Senior Leadership Team at Idaho National Laboratory as director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES), where she led a refresh of the mission, vision, and strategy of this research, education, and innovation consortium bringing together INL with the four public research universities of Idaho and Wyoming. She provided Congressional testimony to the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development on “Energy Workforce Opportunities and Challenges” in 2018.

Before moving to the National labs, Dr. Bakhtian served as a senior policy adviser for environment and energy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), as the inaugural Energy-Water Nexus lead at the DOE Office of International Affairs. She worked as technical lead on numerous innovative grant programs for DOE’s Wind and Water Power Technologies Office including the Wave Energy Prize. She also consulted on energy R&D and investment for DARPA and served as an energy and environment Fellow in the U.S. Senate.

Dr. Bakhtian earned her engineering doctorate at Stanford University’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She holds master’s degrees from Stanford University and the University of Cambridge, where she was a Churchill Scholar; and she completed her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and physics at Duke University.

Dr. Bakhtian serves as a member of the National Academies Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy; a member of the founding cohort of the Loomis Innovation Council at the Stimson Center; and is a Professor of the Practice at Boise State University.