Alisa Ferguson helps organizations design and implement innovative energy and environment programs
Alisa works with clients to accelerate action on energy and environment issues. She has developed innovative programs, strategic communications, policy analysis, and relationships with partners and stakeholders. She was born in South Florida and spent nearly two decades in Washington, DC before moving west to Southern California. She has authored a variety of articles, blogs, and white papers on energy innovation and curates a weekly newsletter on literary writing and design, marginalia.
Alisa has advised a wide variety of organizations, including: Fortune 500 companies such as Google, GE, Applied Materials, JP Morgan Chase, The Boeing Company, and Honeywell International; the venture capital community and early-stage cleantech companies; trade associations; Federal agencies and national laboratories; and non-profit organizations. She currently works with NASA Centennial Challenges, managing the Watts on the Moon Challenge, a competition focused on developing power transmission and energy storage solutions for future NASA missions to the Moon.
From 2018 to 2022, she worked with Co2efficient on research and communications projects related to electricity sector competition, industrial emissions management, and methane emissions quantification while also serving as a Senior Advisor to the Energy Consumer Market Alignment Project (EC-MAP), a nonprofit think tank focused on how digital technologies can drive greater transparency, fair competition, and consumer choice in the energy sector.
From 2013 to 2018, Alisa led multiple projects for the XPRIZE Foundation, including the design and launch of the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE and the $7M Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE. She was also the 2016 Bold Innovator for the National Research Foundation Singapore Desalination XPRIZE Visioneers team and has worked with the XPRIZE-spinoff HeroX to design prize competitions for energy and environment technologies.
In Washington, DC, Alisa co-led the cleantech practice at McBee Strategic Consulting (now Signal Group). Prior to working in the private sector, she spent nearly a decade on Capitol Hill, guiding strategy and policy for the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology and playing a lead role in the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), clean energy programs in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and Department of Energy R&D programs focused on advanced vehicles, biofuels, carbon capture, renewable energy, and smart grid technologies.
Alisa holds a B.S.F.S., cum laude, from the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.