Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed Dr. Valerie Sarisky-Reed is the Director of the Bioenergy Technologies Office in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). In this role, she manages efforts to improve performance, lower costs and accelerate market entry of bioenergy technologies. She assists in overseeing strategic planning to meet aggressive goals covered by the BETO R&D budget of approximately $250M annually, working with DOE’s national laboratories, academia, and industry.
She has more than 29 years of experience in addressing energy and environmental issues faced by the United States and globally. In addition to her programmatic activities, she is a founding member of the Metabolic Engineering Working Group (1995-2005), leads the Operations Committee of the Interagency Biomass Research and Development Board, and is a government subject matter expert within the USDRIVE partnership. In addition, she spent two years serving under the Chief Scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helping to build bridges between DOE and USDA in support of the Bioeconomy.
Dr. Sarisky-Reed also served as the Acting Director for the Wind Energy Technologies Office (2016-2018) within EERE where she enabled the development of the most recent Multi-Year Program Plan with a heavy focus on bringing Offshore Wind to the US.
The Bioenergy Technologies Office current focus areas include scaling up renewable hydrocarbon fuel technologies with an emphasis on Sustainable Aviation Fuels and on the development of technologies to support the recycle and upcycle of plastics as well as create biobased plastics that are recyclable by demand significantly reducing waste plastics that are making their way into the Oceans.
Dr. Sarisky-Reed holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Georgetown University, and is a graduate of the Department of Commerce’s Senior Executive Service Career Development Program.