Guest Speakers

Ian A. Bowles

Secretary, Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs

Ian oversees the Commonwealth’s six environmental, natural resource and energy regulatory agencies. He also serves as Chairman of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and Chairman of the Energy Facilities Sitting Board.

He was a Director or Advisor to three early stage clean energy technology companies and has broad leadership experience in environmental policy. Bowles served in the Clinton Administration as Associate Director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and as Senior Director of the Global Environmental Affairs directorate at the National Security Council. Following his service in the Clinton Administration, Bowles held appointments as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and as Senior Advisor at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a multibillion dollar charitable foundation established by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore. Bowles also served as President & CEO of MassINC, a Boston-based research institute, and as Publisher of CommonWealth magazine. Earlier in his career, Bowles was Vice President of Conservation International, a leading national conservation organization. Bowles played a key role in the creation of one of the world's largest tropical forest national parks: the four million acre Central Suriname Nature Reserve.

A Cape Codder, Bowles grew up in Woods Hole, and holds an A.B. in economics cum laude from Harvard College and a Masters degree from Oxford University, where he remains an adjunct member of the teaching faculty at the graduate school of the Environment and Geography.