Leading the Transition

Anamika Mukherjee is a recognized decarbonization and energy transition thought leader in Canada. She’s a Partner at BDC Capital’s Industrial Clean Energy Technology Fund, where she enables Canadian entrepreneurs with bold ideas around sustainability to build global companies. Before this, she was the head of technology & innovation at Cenovus Energy and chaired the Net-Zero Planning Committee at the Oil sands Pathways to Net Zero Alliance.

Anamika has a uniquely diverse career background. In 2018-2019, Anamika was seconded to the Canadian Federal Government where she worked as Chief of Staff to the Resources of the Future Economic Strategy Table, where she coordinated governments and resource sectors CEOs across Canada to land on policy recommendations to the federal government to boost Canada’s economic competitiveness. In 2016, Anamika operationalized a Cenovus-Suncor-BC Cleantech CEO Alliance cleantech venture partnership, Evok Innovations, and subsequently became part of the fund’s investment committee.

She’s led the Canadian oil and gas industry in various multi-stakeholder, provincial and federal environmental policy negotiations. She has significant experience in process engineering design, commissioning & start-up activities, and operational troubleshooting from her years at Jacobs Engineering and Suncor Energy. In 2015, Anamika was recognized by the Young Women in Energy Award for climate change innovation. In 2016, she was recognized by the Alberta Oil Magazine for her efforts to enable oil to be a part of a clean energy future. In 2017,  she was featured by Natural Resources Canada’s Generation Energy for forging the path to clean energy. In 2018, Anamika received two Deputy Minister’s Awards from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada for her outstanding contribution to the Economic Strategy Tables.

Most recently, in 2022, she was featured by the Canada West Foundation as being a thought leader in decarbonization and energy transition. Anamika has been a keynote speaker and has participated on several panels on technology, energy transition, sustainability, and women in leadership.

Dr. Bala-Miller is a respected senior executive and strategic planner, with over twenty years of experience working on natural resource governance, sustainable finance and human rights.

She began her career with the United Nations Environment Program (Division of Technology, Industry and Economics) in France working to advance sustainable lifestyles among youth. Following that, she spent five years based in the UK advocacting for better corporate sustainability performance across multiple industry sectors. This included highly successful policy advocacy at the OECD, UN Agencies, and the European Commission on behalf of Consumers International – the global voice for 250 consumer rights organisations in 120 countries.

Since her return to Canada in 2008, Dr. Bala-Miller has been a champion for mainstreaming responsible investment and sustainable finance in Canada and globally. In this capacity, she spent five years at the Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE) supporting trade union pension trustees to serve as effective advocates for ESG issues such as Wage Equity, Board Diversity, A Just Transition and respect for Core Labour Standards. She also actively contributed to research and convening activities as part of the Responsible Investing Initiative at Carleton University and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), and served as an advisory member of the Coalition of Universities for Responsible Investing (CURI).

Next, as Director of Partnerships and Program Development at the Canadian International Resources and Development Institute, Dr. Bala-Miller led on a number of strategic initiatives and program design for technical assistance programs that supported resource-sectors to align with the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS), and stewarded institutional partnerships with 40+ universities and over 120 government, civil society, and industry organisations. She launched her own consulting practice Palmyra Partners in 2020 which focuses on projects that bridge sustainability and social justice. Dr. Bala-Miller is also currently an advisory committee member at Diversity in Sustainability.

She holds an MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia and an MA in Conflict Analysis and Management from Royal Roads University. She joins ASI’s Board in an independent capacity.

Jess Lax is a nature-inspired leadership coach who supports changemakers in doing the inner work that leads to outer change.

She is the Founder of the Ember Circle where she brings together changemakers who want to feel more connected, aligned, and resilient as they build a world where all beings can thrive. She has twenty years of experience as a social impact leader and has spent her career focused on preparing changemakers to lead in a time of complexity.

She trained as an ecologist in her undergraduate education, and completed her MBA as a Skoll Scholar at Oxford University.

Matt is the Director of ESG and Decarbonization for Norda Stelo where he provides technology and investment decision making support to clients from all sectors, guides the engineering of industry and business to net zero as quickly as possible while helping understand their ESG impacts, and informs the development of infrastructure to be resilient against climate impacts while also enabling the energy transition.

Prior to Norda, Matt held several roles including as Vice President New Energy Technologies at Exergy Solutions where led a corporate technology strategy group and advanced low carbon technologies through the combination of agile engineering and additive manufacturing. He was the Director of the Greenhouse Gas Priority Area at COSIA supporting the oil sands industry alliance members in accelerating the pace of greenhouse gas technology innovation and deployment through collaboration. Prior to joining COSIA Matt helped build and lead the consulting arm of the Pembina Institute, a Canadian non-profit environmental organization, working with Canadian businesses of all sizes and sectors to improve their environmental and financial performance by integrating sustainability solutions, innovation, and clean energy technology into their strategies and operations.

Matt is a team member of the Low Carbon Value Added Products theme for the Clean Resource Innovation Network, board member of Foresight, and chair of the board for the Academy for Sustainable Innovation.

Vanessa Coqueiro is a partner at Deloitte working with clients to optimize their finance function through automation, and helping them navigate technology decisions and implementations. With an engineering background, she started her career at Accenture and spent 10 years delivering large scale transformation projects in telecommunications and automotive industries in Brazil and Australia. After moving to Canada in 2013, Vanessa joined a boutique firm implementing financial applications in the cloud, and bringing operational efficiencies to medium sized companies across industries. With that experience, she moved to Deloitte in 2015 to start a national practice offering advisory services to finance leaders looking to embark on a transformation journey. She also spent a year running the professional services business of a software implementation partner, managing over 30 accounts.

Vanessa has worked with public and private companies globally, including government and nonprofit organizations, in both sales and delivery roles. She has over 21 years of experience providing consulting services around Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Payroll, Human Capital Management (HCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence (BI) and Sustainability systems. Diversity & Inclusion is another cornerstone of Vanessa’s career, stemming from being a female engineer working in technology and having lived in four different countries.