chemical-engineer
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Candy Schibli Put an Engineer’s Ear to the Coffee Roaster
She left international development for a one-kilo roaster in her great-grandmother’s Virginia house. A decade later, Candy Schibli is still treating every batch as an experiment in flavor, fairness and human connection.
Erin Gore Built a Cannabis Company From a Kitchen Table and an Engineer’s Mind
A Wisconsin-trained chemical engineer turned informal baking gatherings into Garden Society - then learned to manufacture, finance and expand a consumer brand inside an industry whose rules were still being written.
Michelle Peterson
Michelle Peterson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Kendra Scott, the Austin-based fashion and fine jewelry brand. A chemical engineer turned marketer, she spent 18 years at General Mills before leading marketing at Life Time, Holiday Inn Express, and the juice brand Pressed. At Kendra Scott she unified the brand and performance teams into a single 'brand builder' organization, driving record direct-to-consumer traffic, customer growth and loyalty around a 'connection before transaction' philosophy. She was named a 2023 Adweek Marketing Vanguard.
Tracy MacNeal
Tracy MacNeal is a chemical engineer turned healthcare executive who serves as President and CEO of Materna Medical, a women's health technology company in Mountain View, California. With more than 25 years across pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, digital health and medical devices, and six transactions to her name, she has built a career on commercializing hard-to-define products and opening markets that others overlook. She sits on the board of AdvaMed and chairs its Women's Executive Network, and she is known for pairing engineering rigor with a storyteller's instinct for building trust with clinicians, investors and customers.
Vicki Knott
Vicki Knott is the CEO and co-founder of CruxOCM, a Calgary-based industrial autonomy software company building AI-powered automation for oil and gas control rooms. A chemical engineer (P.Eng.) who started on the plant floor and trained as a pipeline control room operator at TransCanada, she left in 2017 to co-found CruxOCM with Roger Shirt. Her company's RIPA (Robotic Industrial Process Automation) technology automates the manual, high-stakes work of pipeline operators, and raised a $17M Series A led by Microsoft's M12 venture fund in 2024.
Jay Bhatia
Jay Bhatia is the founder and CEO of Agilis Commerce (Agilis Chemicals), a Newark, New Jersey software company that builds cloud-based, branded e-commerce and AI-enabled customer engagement platforms purpose-built for the chemical industry. A chemical engineer and MBA with more than two decades at global players like BASF and Shell Chemicals, he launched Agilis in 2016-2017 to bring the digital tools of modern commerce to an industry long defined by manual, relationship-heavy processes. Under his leadership, Agilis has raised roughly $3.65M and rolled out its Alchemist AI solutions with pilot customers including Evonik.
Mikael Svensson
Mikael Svensson is Chief Executive Officer of SaNOtize Research and Development Corp., the Vancouver-based company commercializing nitric oxide as an antimicrobial platform, most recently through its NOWONDER consumer nasal cleanser. A chemical engineer by training with more than two decades in medical device and pharmaceutical commercialization, he previously led the global launch of INOmax inhaled nitric oxide therapy and worldwide expansion work on Restylane, Naftin, Mederma and VagiVital.
Nicole Richards
Nicole Richards is the founding CEO of Allonnia, a Boston-based synthetic biology company that engineers microbes to destroy forever chemicals like PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, and to pull critical minerals out of ore and waste streams. A chemical engineer with nearly three decades in water, mining and specialty chemicals, she spun Allonnia out of Ginkgo Bioworks' Ferment Consortium in 2020 with a $40M Series A and has since raised more than $109M in total funding.
Michael Alexander
Michael Alexander is the co-founder and CEO of Addis Energy, a Somerville, Massachusetts startup turning the Earth's crust into a chemical reactor to make clean ammonia. A chemical engineer who spent more than eight years refining oil at Shell and Marathon Petroleum, he discovered geologic hydrogen at Harvard Business School and teamed up with classmate Charlie Mitchell and MIT professors Iwnetim Abate and Yet-Ming Chiang to commercialize a process that stimulates ammonia production from iron-rich rock underground. In December 2025 Addis raised an oversubscribed $8.3M seed round, bringing total funding to $17.3M.
Terry Kennon
Terry Kennon is a chemical engineer turned investment banker turned clean-energy builder who serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Proteum Energy in Phoenix, Arizona. He took on the President role in March 2019 after roughly four years as CTO. With more than 30 years across chemical engineering, biofuels investment banking at J.P. Morgan, and renewable-energy entrepreneurship, Kennon now leads Proteum's patented technology that reforms renewable ethanol into low-cost, low-carbon hydrogen and 'designer fuels' - and turns wasted flare gas into usable product. He is a named inventor on the company's core patents and directs both its technology roadmap and its intellectual-property strategy.
Walt Weyler
Walt Weyler is a Portland, Oregon entrepreneur and chemical engineer who turned a career running factories into a second act buying, fixing, and building industrial companies. He is President and CEO of SequenceUSA, a private holding and lending company that backs Pacific Northwest manufacturing and technology firms, and President and Managing Director of Clarus LLC (Clarus Water Solutions), a water-filtration and stormwater venture spun from his work at Crystal Clear Technologies. Before founding his own companies he co-owned Kinetics, a metal-injection-molding shop he grew from a struggling $3M operation to roughly 100 employees and sold to mining giant Phelps Dodge. He sits on the Supply Chain & Logistics Management Advisory Council at Oregon State University's College of Business.
Samuel Ethiopia
Samuel Ethiopia is the CEO and co-founder of DocSpera, a Silicon Valley surgical coordination platform used by thousands of surgeons and 300-plus health systems to synchronize the messy stretch between a surgical decision and a patient's recovery. A chemical engineer turned strategy consultant turned operator, he carried a Kellogg MMM dual degree and stints at Dow, Eli Lilly, PwC's Strategy&, and Yahoo into the operating room's back office, where he now bets that real-time, AI-driven data can make surgery run on time. He also co-founded The Par Fund to back underrepresented entrepreneurs.
Ricardo Alba
Ricardo Garcia de Alba is the President and CEO of Meiogenix, an agriculture biotech company whose chromosome-editing platform speeds up the way crops naturally reshuffle their own DNA. A chemical engineer from Mexico City turned global ag executive, he spent 15 years at Corteva Agriscience helping build and launch the Enlist weed-control system before taking the helm at Meiogenix in 2024. He pairs hard science and commercial scale with a long habit of community and STEM service - and keeps bees on the side.
Michelle Gass
Michelle Gass is the president and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., the first woman to lead the 172-year-old denim company. A chemical engineer by training, she built Starbucks' Frappuccino into a $2 billion brand, ran Kohl's for five years, and is now reshaping Levi's into a direct-to-consumer denim lifestyle retailer.
Sarah Franklin
Sarah Franklin is the CEO of Lattice, the people-management platform headquartered in San Francisco. A Virginia Tech-trained chemical engineer and biochemist, she spent 15+ years at Salesforce, where she built Trailhead into a movement and later served as President and Chief Marketing Officer before stepping into Lattice's top job in January 2024 to rewire HR for the AI era.
Rebecca Lynn
Rebecca Lynn is a veteran venture capitalist and the managing director of Canvas Prime, a solo-GP early-stage fund she launched in August 2025 after co-founding Canvas Ventures in 2013. A chemical engineer turned nuclear reactor researcher turned Procter & Gamble marketer turned JD/MBA turned VC, Lynn has backed Lending Club, Doximity, and Luminar and appeared on the Forbes Midas List for five consecutive years - earning recognition in 2022 as the top female investor in the history of the list. She focuses on fintech, digital health, and AI, and describes herself simply as 'energized by chaos.'