CleanTech Alliance Board Member Leah B. Guzowski, Director, Industry Research and Development, Idaho National Laboratory

Leah Guzowski is the director of Industry Research and Development at Idaho National Laboratory and serves in a joint role at the Center for Advanced Energy Studies. In her role, Leah is responsible for industry engagements, and sponsored research and development, with an emphasis on meeting challenging industrial needs uniquely solved by the scientists, engineers, and facilities of the Idaho National Laboratory.  This includes work with established industrial partners, and entrepreneurial ventures driven by research and development outcomes.

Leah was formerly an energy systems principal investigator at Argonne National Laboratory, and concurrently a fellow at the University of Chicago. In addition to her research roles, she also served Argonne in a leadership capacity as director of Strategy and Research Programs, with a focus on programmatic advancement, innovation, and strategy development of energy and global security research portfolios.

She creates, develops and executes ideas by building cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional teams to solve pressing challenges associated with a range of energy and global security issues. Her personal research interests include the development of methods, technologies, and computational tools to inform energy security issues, with an emphasis on economic, policy, climate and geopolitical considerations. She was the principal investigator on the research and development of a city-scale computational model, designed to improve systems integration modeling and visualization for near real-time decision-making with increasing data complexity, risk and uncertainty. She is a co-inventor of a patented advanced VO2 nanocomposite thermochromic materials for high-performance windows, with a team composed of researchers from multiple directorates and institutions. Leah has also conceptualized, built and executed unique contractual mechanisms to more effectively enable lab-to-industry research.

Prior to joining Argonne, her work spanned private industry and international trade development and policy, with particular interest in the research, development and commercialization of energy technologies. She maintains a proactive interest in entrepreneurial ventures in the energy sector. Leah graduated from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also studied economics and policy at the University of Oxford, England. She has been recognized by the White House as a national leader in climate and energy, and was honored as one of “40 under 40” by Crain’s Chicago Business. She has authored or co-authored dozens of related articles, and is a frequently invited speaker at technical conferences and public events.