Upcoming Events, Courses, and Talks

While visiting Chicago for a reunion with his fellow MacArthur Genius Award recipients, Lovins generously decided to meet with the mHUB community and speak about his advocacy for energy efficiency, renewable energy, and integrative design.

On the heels of announcing its next Climate & EnergyTech accelerator cohort and the release of its Investor Report, mHUB is thrilled to host its first fireside conversation in the newly opened 1623 W. Fulton Street location. During the event, Lovins will give a brief presentation on integrative design followed by a fireside chat moderated by writer and consultant Janet Ginsburg.

Event attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in thoughtful conversations about clean energy innovation with members of the mHUB ecosystem.

Physicist Amory Lovins is Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute); author of 31 books and over 850 papers; a designer of superefficient buildings, vehicles, and factories; and a half-century advisor to major firms and governments worldwide on advanced energy efficiency and strategy. He received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, 12 honorary doctorates, the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood, National Design, and World Technology Awards, and Germany’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit. A Harvard and Oxford dropout, former Oxford don, honorary US architect, Swedish engineering academician, and 2011–18 member of the National Petroleum Council, he has taught at ten universities and is currently Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. In 2009, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers.  

Janet Ginsburg is a writer and consultant focused on science, technology, and business. Her first energy story—on microgrids for BusinessWeek—was based on an interview with Amory Lovins. She returned to RMI to film a National Geographic segment on the “Hypercar,” a project to design the world’s most energy efficient vehicle. The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) recognized her special report on zoonotic diseases, which predicted the inevitability of a pandemic such as Covid, as one of the first to tackle this important topic. In Chicago, she has spelunked through the Deep Tunnel for the Discovery Channel and ridden the rails of the “Chicago Terminal,” the six-county region through which a quarter of the nation’s freight travels each day, for Union Pacific. For COLLINS, a top branding / business transformation consultancy, Ginsburg has worked closely with strategy and design teams to identify the “adjacent possible” for a broad range of companies, laying the foundation for a “Resilient Futures” practice.  

Event Program:

• 5 PM – 5:30 PM: Arrivals & Networking
• 5:30 PM – 5:35 PM: Remarks from mHUB Co-Founder and Accelerator Executive Director Bill Fienup
• 5:35 PM – 5:50 PM: Presentation on Integrative Design by Amory Lovins
• 5:50 PM – 6:20 PM: Fireside Chat with Amory Lovins; Moderated by Janet Ginsburg
• 6:20 PM – 6:30 PM: Q&A
• 6:30 PM – 7 PM: Networking