Dr. Chris Haase joins as Director of the Critical Materials Institute from GE Ventures, where he was Senior Director, leading new business creation and investment activities in the areas of oil & gas, power and renewables. With background in defense and natural resources, Chris has served as early-stage technology manager and investor in several corporate venture capital organizations, including Shell Technology Ventures Fund 1, BTG Ventures, Shell GameChanger and GE Ventures. In upstream energy, Chris served as the head business advisor to the Chief Technology Officer of Royal Dutch / Shell, managing alignment of R&D funding with the company’s long-term corporate strategy and value chains and also launching Shell’s latest venture fund, Shell Ventures. Additionally, Chris was Shell’s manager for external research, where he helped Shell close many innovative partnership agreements with universities and small enterprises in North America. With a background in numerical modeling, petrophysics and quantitative seismic interpretation, Chris has worked on oil & gas exploration and development projects, new upstream joint ventures and divestments involving assets in the Gulf of Mexico, South Atlantic, North Sea, Middle East and Australia.
A former US Department of Defense Fellow and adjunct professor at the United States Naval Academy, Chris held R&D positions with the Naval Ocean Systems Center (now SPAWAR) and Department of Defense and also served as a 10-year volunteer commercialization advisor for the National Technology Transfer Center and US Missile Defense Agency. An inventor with several patents, Chris received his Ph.D. and MS degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago, his MBA from Erasmus University in Rotterdam and his Bachelor of Science degree, Summa Cum Laude, from Ohio State University. Chris is married to Ineke and has two sons, Mark and Peter, both studying mechanical engineering in university.
Starting at Sandia National Laboratories in August 2001, he is currently a principal member of the technical staff in Sandia’s Geochemistry organization. His primary role is project manager and overall technical lead on the Crude Oil Characterization Research Study, a 3-year, $10-million project investigating how crude oil properties affect potential combustion hazards during transportation and handling. In that role, he has extensive contact with a broad set of internal Sandia personnel and support organizations, as well as extensive external contact with federal sponsoring agencies in the United States and Canada and industry representatives in midstream oil and gas and associated service companies.
Prior to taking project manager responsibility on the crude oil research work in 2016, he served as a technical lead on the Sandia contract for geotechnical support of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in 2004 and focused on understanding and improving methods for sampling, measuring, and modeling crude oil properties and phase behavior in storage and handling applications. He led the technical scope development and aligned customer needs with Sandia capabilities for the $3-million annual project from 2010-2016. He was also principal investigator on numerous analyses and technical reports within the SPR scope during that period.
His first assignment at Sandia from 2001-2004 was as a principal investigator for developing and qualifying a wellbore stability model, which was a component of a larger performance assessment model of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
He is a human factors engineer in the Human Factors, Controls, and Statistics Department with 37 years of experience in various human factors engineering roles in heavy industry, defense, nuclear, and commercial organizations. His primary focus is on making work more effective, efficient, and satisfying through the design of human-centered tools, methods, and work environments. He has worked at Idaho National Laboratory since 2010. His current work includes researching and developing methods and procedures to integrate human factors principles in the systems engineering process for advanced and modernized nuclear power stations with an emphasis on human-system interfaces and control room design and information visualization. He has a master’s degree in human computer interaction from the University of South Africa and associate degrees in human computer interaction and industrial engineering.
She focuses her research on areas of computer-based procedures and automated work packages, control room modernization, and human-automation collaboration, and also leads research on digital architectures and data analytics at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). This research helps leverage advanced technologies, increase overall efficiency, and improve human performance by informing the design of the interaction between the worker and the system. In 2016, she led the industry-wide Nuclear Electronic Work Packages – Enterprise Requirements (NEWPER) initiative where domestic and international nuclear utilities, research organizations, and vendors came together to define functional requirements for anything from smart PDFs to computer-based procedures. Before joining INL, she worked at Ringhals Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden leading the Human Factors Engineering research and development and human reliability analysis activities. She has 10 years of research and practical experience with human reliability analysis.
He has more than 10 years of industrial and research experience in automation, instrumentation, and control. He holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University, a master’s degree in information technology and automation systems from Esslingen University of Applied Science in Germany, and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology in Jordan. In 2015, he joined Idaho National Laboratory as a research and development scientist with special focus on nuclear automation, instrumentation, and control. Before earning his doctorate, he worked at Asea Brown Boveri for 6 years and was a lead distributed control systems engineer by 2010. While pursuing his degree, he researched various nuclear engineering topics at Texas A&M University and worked for a year at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He also worked for Daimler Chrysler-Mercedes Group and Fraunhofer Institute for Production and Automation in Germany. He is a senior Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) member and author of several publications and technical reports. He is also a reviewer of nuclear energy and IEEE journals and U.S. Department of Energy grants.
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