Dr. Leslie Field, Bright Ice Initiative. As an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Leslie Field studied Chemical Engineering and did an optional Bachelor’s thesis on “Superheat Limits of Non-Ideal Binary Liquid Mixtures” with Prof. Robert C Reid, one of the world’s premier thermodynamicists, as her advisor. She went on to earn a PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley. There she specialized in Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) at the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center and was the first woman to earn a PhD from BSAC. She has years of teaching experience at Stanford University as well as industrial experience with Hewlett-Packard Labs, where she worked on MEMS and Microfluidics. She has founded and run two successful consulting companies, MEMS Insight and SmallTech Consulting.

Her work’s main focus in recent years is on solving urgent challenges in climate. She started and ran the non-profit Ice911 Research/Arctic Ice Project for 16 years, and has  taught a seminar class on Engineering and Climate Change at Stanford University for over a decade. Last year she founded a nonprofit, Bright Ice Initiative, to address climate change.

She is also an inventor with over 60 patents and has spoken at venues worldwide including the United Nations, International Maritime Organization, a World Economic Forum-affiliated event in Davos, an exhibit at COP26, and talks and sessions at the Arctic Circle Assembly and Cryosphere 2022 in Reykjavik.