Lara Pierpoint
Managing Director, Trellis Climate
Lara is passionate about technologies that meaningfully reduce emissions and contribute to a cleaner environment. As the Managing Director for Trellis Climate at Prime, she is demonstrating systems innovation and catalytic investment approaches that will speed commercialization, deployment, and scale-up of climate change mitigation infrastructure.
Before joining Prime, as co-CEO and a founding member of Actuate, Lara built the Actuate Climate program to design interventions that get emissions-reducing technologies on the ground faster. In December of 2022, Actuate Climate and the Prime team joyfully decided to join forces, and Lara’s team and programs became Trellis Climate.
Prior to Actuate, Lara worked on energy technology innovation at Exelon. As Director of Technology Strategy for the company, she advised on energy technology trends, invested in early- and mid-stage energy storage companies, and ran Exelon’s partnership R&D program.
Before her time at Exelon, she directed the Office of Energy Supply Security in the U.S. DOE Office of Policy and Systems Analysis, where she was responsible for policy and analysis related to coal, gas, and nuclear power and energy cyber and physical security. She served as AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, focusing on nuclear power and waste issues, energy finance, and electricity storage.
She received her PhD from MIT in Engineering Systems, studying deployment of advanced technologies for nuclear waste recycling, and she holds dual masters degrees from MIT in nuclear engineering and technology policy. She completed her B.S. in physics at UCLA.