John Lemmon joined Breakthrough Energy as Senior Director of Innovation on the Fellows team.

John Lemmon received his doctoral degree in Chemistry with a focus on energy storage materials and completed post-doctoral studies with Nobel Laureate Professor Stanley Whittingham. Dr. Lemmon began his career as a Senior Scientist at GE Global Research Center in 1996 innovating new energy technologies for commercialization. In 2009 he joined the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as Chief Scientist Energy Materials and was detailed to the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy from 2012 to 2015 as program director focused on enabling next generation materials and systems for applications in distributed energy and grid storage.

From 2015 to 2020 Dr. Lemmon was appointed Director of New Energy for the National Institute of Clean and Low Carbon Energy in Beijing China where he led research on intelligent grid, hydrogen, and advanced data analysis for low emission energy systems orchestration.  Prior to joining Breakthrough Energy, he held the position of Global Power and Utilities Leader at Microsoft Engineering. Here he was responsible for creating a digitization strategy and building an industry ecosystem that leveraged cloud computing to implement advanced analytics, data models and predictive algorithms to enable a sustainable and reliable grid.

In addition to his leadership roles, Dr. Lemmon authored nearly 100 original papers in several high-impact journals and is highly cited. Over his career John has been a prolific inventor with 120 patent applications and over 70 US granted patents related to energy materials and systems. His outside interests include reading, playing guitar and he is passionate about any sport that involves two-wheels.