Adria Wilson

My Greatest Accomplishment: As leader of a cleantech incubator at Argonne National Laboratory, I believe that to address climate change we need policies that internalize environmental damage as a cost of doing business, and also deployment of tough-to-build, but highly impactful, technologies. My greatest accomplishment so far has been my work with Beam Project, a nonprofit we started in 2019 to connect people to startups building high-impact solutions for climate change. Beam’s mission is to teach people about the innovations we need to decarbonize major sectors of the economy, and then give people a way to crowdfund the startups building those innovations. We announced our first startup in mid-November 2019, which is building electric aircraft. I’m excited about what we’re doing because I spent such a long time personally wanting to do everything I could to limit climate change but feeling helpless to do enough. I know millions of people feel like this and by participating in Beam, individual people can now help unlock game-changing technologies.

How Drexel Helped: I learned about climate change in a symposium on global warming during my pre-junior year as a chemistry major. I had never realized that a challenge could be so truly global in scale. I was inspired to focus in graduate school on research that was directly applicable to renewable energy technologies and I have been involved in clean energy innovation ever since. My co-ops while at Drexel and the opportunity to do a minor in political science all laid additional, key groundwork for my non-traditional path. It helped me translate my scientific knowledge into a policy setting as a special legislative assistant to Senator Bernie Sanders, in diving deep into electrochemistry in my work managing programs at the Department of Energy, and into my current role running a cleantech incubator.

Where I’ll Be in Five Years: In five years I will still be doing all that I can to help address the climate crisis, and to help others move the needle. I hope that the Beam Project will have grown to become a global effort — how cool would it be to say you helped electric airplanes become commonplace by 2030? And because good policy is so important, I’ve also thought about running for office…we’ll see!