CO-PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR
FIRST GREEN PARTNERS

Doug’s career has spanned business, finance, and academia, including positions at Khosla Ventures, Piper Jaffray, Cargill, Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  In 2009, Doug was the recipient of the prestigious Raphael Katzen Award for his contributions in furthering the deployment and commercialization of biotechnology to produce fuels and chemicals from renewable resources.

Doug launched Alberti Advisors in 2010 as a venture advisory firm with expertise in the business, science, and engineering of clean technology and sustainable agriculture. Prior to founding Alberti Advisors, Doug was managing director and chief science advisor at Piper Jaffray, a global investment firm with a leading practice in the area of cleantech.

From 2006 to 2008, Doug was the chief scientific officer at Khosla Ventures, where he was involved in sourcing deals and leading technical due diligence for many of the firm’s clean technology investments.  While at Khosla, he served on the board of directors for Gevo, LS9, Mascoma, Segetis, Lanzatech and Kior and also held senior management roles in several of these companies, serving as acting CEO of Gevo, LS9 and Segetis.  Doug continues to serve on the scientific advisory boards of Mascoma and Segetis.

Doug worked at Cargill from 1998 through mid-2006, where he built and led Cargill’s corporate biotechnology research group and spearheaded the company’s biotech activities in China.  While at Cargill, Doug worked closely with NatureWorks, Cargill’s bioplastics joint venture, helped form the industrial bioproducts business unit, and was principle investigator on a Department of Energy grant for the production of 3-hydroxypropionic acid, a precursor to acrylic acid, from renewable resources.

Doug was a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1986 through 2000, where he taught biochemical engineering and established a leading research laboratory in the areas of metabolic engineering and bioprocess technology.  While at Wisconsin, he consulted for several leading companies, including Cargill, DuPont and Genencor, and was a guest professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.  His research group did pioneering research on the production of bio-based chemicals, including 1,3-propanediol and 3-hydroxypropionic acid.

Doug graduated from Duke University with a bachelor of science in engineering degree in biomedical engineering.  He earned a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he did research on the microbial production of fuels and chemicals and discovered a novel fermentation route to 1,2-propanediol.  Prior to attending MIT, he was the fourth employee of Advanced Harvesting Systems, an agriculture start-up company backed by International Harvester.

He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Microbiology (SIM) and a Fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  Doug is also a consulting professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University.