Management
Shah Karim, Chief Executive Officer, SafeRock
Shah is the Chief Executive Officer of SafeRock. He guides thought leadership and strategy for corporate, academic, and policy organizations.
Shah serves as an advisor to Fortune 500 enterprises and investment groups in North America, Europe, and Asia on strategy and digital transformation for consumer, industrial, and energy sectors, including the US State Department. Shah is an Innovation Fellow at Columbia Business School and a judge for the MacArthur Foundation’s $100 million competition for bold solutions to critical social problems.
He is a Co-Founder of the non-profit ‘Friends of Yale from Industry’, and has served at Yale University on the Alumni Board of Governors and the Yale Graduate School Advisory board. He serves on Industry committees at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Penn State University, and the University of North Texas. He is on the Board of Directors of Chemical Marketing and Economics (CME) that accelerates diverse STEM talent leadership for business, science and technology.
Shah was selected in 2021 as a Digital Transformation Thought Leader by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) with 10,000+ corporate members. Shah speaks at global conferences in North America, Europe, Middle East, and Asia. He has been invited as a Keynote or Guest Speaker at the International Energy Forum (IEF), Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association (GPCA), and World Petrochemical Conference (WPC) on Energy Transition, Artificial Intelligence, and Climate Change.
Shah received his B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees from Yale University. He served as 2022, 2023, and 2024 co-chair with NASA, the American Chemical Society, and CME on material science, sustainability, and space exploration.
Cristi Stiers, Strategic Executive Advisor, SafeRock
Cristi Stiers is a Strategic Executive Advisor with Saferock and was previously President and CEO of ANGUS, Inc., formerly a DOW subsidiary (NYSE: DOW), now co-owned by private equity firms Ardian Partners ($110B AUM) and Golden Gate Capital ($14B AUM). She has worked in commodity chemicals, running the global Chlor-alkali business ($1.3B) for Dow Chemical and in specialty chemicals running the Home Care, I & I, and Personal Care Solutions business ($1.4B) for Dow. She has experience in the fine chemicals and custom manufacturing space for the pharmaceutical industry while working for FMC Lithium now Livent. Cristi advises private equity, investment firms, and chemicals companies in areas including M&A, the chemicals industry, business turnarounds, global operations, purchasing, supply chain, innovation, customer relationships and has spent 25 years in the chemical industry leading global businesses.
Board of Advisors
Imran Ahmed, Managing Director, Amantea Investments Limited
Imran oversees SafeRock’s international activity in Middle East & Asia. Based in Dubai, he began his working career in the UAE in 1991, having spent nearly a decade as an institutional buy-side analyst for a prestigious sovereign family office in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Since 2001, he has held key senior level positions in a number of international firms including Union Bancaire Privee, Jefferies, Banque Syz. Currently he sits on the board of Osiris Impact Asia Fund a Hong Kong based private equity fund and serves as a senior advisor to Montague Advisory Partners, a Middle East, Africa & Asia focused corporate advisory firm. Imran is the founder of AMANTEA INVESTMENTS LTD, a firm dedicated to helping asset managers to implement their go-to-market strategy in the Gulf Cooperation Council region.
Felipe Bayon, Leading global energy expert, board member, experienced CEO
Felipe is a seasoned C suite executive with more than 32 years of experience in the energy industry. During the last five and half years, until March 2023, he acted as CEO of Ecopetrol, the leading diversified energy group in Colombia and one of the most important in Latin America, where he led the transformation of the Group from an integrated oil & gas company to a diversified energy group, positioning Ecopetrol as a leader in the energy transition.
Some of the main achievements as CEO include the lowest injury frequency rate in the company’s history (0.33), positioning Ecopetrol with a direct workforce of 18,000 and some 130,000 contractors, as one of the safest companies of the industry in the world, the all-time high, record financial results (2022), reported revenues of COP 159.5 trillion (ca US$ 40 billion) and a net income of COP 33.4 trillion (ca US$ 8 bn) and investment Capex of US$ 5,5 billion. Prior to working for Ecopetrol, Felipe worked for BP and Shell.
Furthermore, Bayon has been a leading voice in promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, through several initiatives and projects that have been awarded by different organizations at both local and international level.
He has been a member of different platforms of the World Economic Forum like the Oil and Gas Governor’s community, in topics such as energy transition, sustainability, technology, amongst others. Also, he has been keynoting speaker in the most renowned energy global conferences like CERAWeek® and Reuters Global Energy Transition in the United States, APPEC in Singapore, and ADIPEC in the United Arab Emirates.
Brian Devine, Chairman Emeritus at Petco
Brian is a highly respected business leader in retail. He is Chairman Emeritus at PETCO Holdings, Inc. Under his leadership, the company grew from $80 million to several billion dollars in annual sales. Earlier, he served as SVP of Stores at Toys R Us, responsible for overall planning and strategy for the enterprise. The company grew from $20 million to $4.5 billion in sales during his tenure. Brian has served on the Board of the Retail Industry Leaders Association and the Board of the National Retail Federation.
James Green, Chief Executive Officer, Space Science Endeavors LLC
Jim Green has worked at NASA for 42 years before retiring in December 2023. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Iowa in 1979 and worked at Marshall Space Flight Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, and NASA Headquarters. During Jim’s long career at NASA, he has been NASA’s Chief Scientist and was the longest serving director of the Planetary Science Division with the overall programmatic responsibility for the New Horizons spacecraft flyby of Pluto, the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter, and the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, just to name a few. Jim was awarded Japan’s Kotani Prize in 1996 in recognition of his international science data management activities, and he has received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for the New Horizons flyby of the Pluto system and NASA’s highest honor, the Distinguish Service Medal. He has written over 125 scientific articles in refereed journals and over 80 technical and popular articles. In 2015, Jim coordinated NASA’s involvement with the film The Martian. In 2017 Asteroid 25913 was renamed Jamesgreen in his honor.
Craig Levra, Chief Operating Officer, Goodwill Southern California
Craig serves as COO and Executive Vice President at Goodwill Southern California. He is a recognized industry leader on corporate transformation, restructuring and growth. He served previously as Chairman and CEO of Sport Chalet, Inc., and the company’s shares traded on NASDAQ. It operated 55 full-service sporting goods stores in addition to a substantial online presence generating over $400 million in annual revenue. The company was twice named one of America’s 200 Best Small Companies by Forbes. Craig has also served on the Board of Directors of the National Retail Federation.
Chad Mirkin, Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the Rathmann Professor of Chemistry and Medicine at Northwestern University
Chad is known for his invention and development of spherical nucleic acids and Dip-Pen Nanolithography and related cantilever-free nanopatterning and materials discovery methodologies. He has authored >880 papers and >1,200 patents worldwide (>430 issued) and founded ten companies. Prof. Mirkin has been recognized with over 250 national and international awards including the Wilhelm Exner Medal, the Dan David Prize, the National Academy of Sciences Sackler Prize in Convergence Research, the Kavli Prize, and the King Faisal Prize from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He served for eight years on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, and he is one of very few scientists to be elected to all three US National Academies. Mirkin has served on the Editorial Advisory Boards of over 30 scholarly journals, is the founding editor of the journal Small, and is a Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Editorial Board Member. He has given >900 invited lectures and educated >340 graduate students and postdocs.