Team

Leadership Team

Gaurav N. Sant

Founder

Gaurav founded Equatic Inc. and leads it with the executive team. He is the Pritzker Professor of Sustainability in UCLA's Samueli School of Engineering, where he is also the Founder and Director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management. Gaurav’s research has led to the creation of multiple decarbonization-related spinout companies including CarbonBuilt Inc., Concrete-AI Inc., Specifx Lithium Inc., x/44 Inc., and Nextli Technologies Inc.

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Lorenzo Corsini

Principal Advisor

Lorenzo is an entrepreneur and scientist. He co-founded and built PhagoMed, a biotech startup developing precision antimicrobials, which was exited to BioNTech in 2021. Prior to that, he spent nine years at BCG in roles of increasing seniority. He has degrees in biochemistry and business administration and a Ph.D. in molecular biology.

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Edward Sanders

Chief Operating Officer

Edward was on the executive team at one of the world’s fastest growing airlines. He executed the launch and scale-up of commercial and network operations across Asia Pacific. Prior to joining Equatic, he was a senior leader at BCG. Edward received an MBA from Stanford University and an economics degree from Melbourne University.

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Erika La Plante

Head of MRV & Environmental Impact Assessment, Co-Founder

Erika is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Davis. She has a B.S. in Geology and a Ph.D. in Geochemistry (University of Illinois at Chicago), and previously held positions at UCLA and the University of Texas at Arlington. Erika applies her expertise in mineral dissolution and precipitation to discover new cements, extract critical metals, and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide.

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Dante Simonetti

Head of Technology, Co-Founder

Dante Simonetti is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education in UCLA Samueli’s Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department. He is also the Associate Director for Technology Translation in the Institute for Carbon Management at UCLA. Dante received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, respectively. He joined UCLA in 2014 after working as an R&D Project Leader at Honeywell’s UOP.

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Thomas Traynor

Head of Engineering

Tom is an Applied Chemist. As the Translation Leader at UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, Tom was responsible for the translation of new technology from bench- to commercial-scale. Previously Tom worked on process development at Honeywell in roles of increasing seniority. Tom has a degree in Chemistry from Illinois Wesleyan University.

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Xin Chen

Senior Scientist, Co-Founder

Xin Chen is an electrochemist with expertise in electrochemical reactions, materials, and devices. Prior to Equatic, Xin worked at UCLA as a postdoctoral scholar and then as a research engineer developing advanced electrochemical processes with applications in carbon management, nuclear energy, and biomedical systems. Xin holds a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in materials science and engineering.

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David Jassby

Head of Electrode Materials and Systems, Co-Founder

David Jassby is a Professor in UCLA Samueli's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCLA. His research is focused on membrane separations, water treatment, and resource recovery. He holds multiple patents on membrane material and process development, and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts and book chapters.

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Advisory Board

Lord John Browne

Chair, Advisory Board

Lord John Browne serves as the Chairman of BeyondNetZero and Managing Director at General Atlantic, providing strategic support and advice to the firm’s investment teams and portfolio companies. In both roles, he advises the firm on ESG considerations, with a particular focus on climate solutions and the path to Net Zero emissions.

Lord Browne served as Group Chief Executive of international energy company BP from 1995 to 2007, after having joined the company in 1966 as a university apprentice. He led the company through a period of significant growth and transformation, including BP’s merger with Amoco in 1998. His landmark speech at Stanford University in 1997 established BP as a global leader in the way it thought about and sought to address climate change. In 2007, Lord Browne joined Riverstone, where he was co-head of the world’s largest renewable energy private equity fund until 2015. He is also a former Chairman of Wintershall Dea, Europe’s largest independent oil and gas company. Lord Browne is Co-Chair of the Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology. From 2010 to 2015, he was the UK Government’s Lead Non-Executive Board Member. In addition to his Chairmanship of Equatic's Advisory Board, Lord Browne is the Chairman of the Francis Crick Institute, Chairman of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow and Past President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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Peter Relan

Member, Advisory Board

Peter Relan is the founder and mentor at YouWeb. After completing his graduate work from Stanford in 1992, Peter has spent the last 30 years as a serial founder himself in different fields of technology. His current focus is AI and the climate crisis.

Peter started his career working as a research engineer with one of the co-founders of TCP/IP and co-authored a seminal paper on Network Management published in ACM Sigcomm in 1988. Peter next worked at Hewlett-Packard on HP Openview, now a multi-billion dollar enterprise at HPE. In 1994, Peter was recruited by Oracle to their Media Server division, Larry Ellision's pet project, and helped pivot the division to internet based video streaming servers, before leaving Oracle to be the founding CTO of Webvan. In September 2001 Peter teamed up with his ex-Oracle colleagues to co-found a company focused on online fraud in banking based on a unique stream querying technology. The company was acquired in 2006 by Entrust. He created YouWeb Incubator to provide small select groups of promising entrepreneurs with long-term mentorship and funding. Over the years, Peter has kept a finger on the pulse of society and helped build technologies that will create the most impact and benefit for all people. His methodology has been extremely successful, helping found and scale up huge companies in social & mobile gaming, IoT, and software.

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