WISCONSIN ENERGY INSTITUTE (WEI) - Key Persons

Allison Bender

Job Titles:

WEI Outreach Coordinator

Allison Bender joined the Wisconsin Energy Institute as Outreach and Events Coordinator in 2018. She has a background in environmental education and has worked as a naturalist in state parks across Wisconsin and Minnesota. After completing a B.A. in environmental studies at St. Olaf College, she served as an AmeriCorps Member conducting watershed outreach at Whitewater State Park in Minnesota's Driftless Region. At WEI, Allison coordinates a wide variety of educational programming and works with scientists and researchers to translate their work into hands-on activities, lessons, and events for learners of all ages.

Chris Todd Hittinger

Job Titles:

Member of the Executive Committee
Professor of Genetics for the J.F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution

Chris Hittinger studies the diversity and evolution of yeast carbon metabolism, which is controlled by a complex system of interacting genes that respond to different carbon sources and determine the organism's energy-use strategy. By understanding how evolution has sculpted and rewired yeast gene networks to meet their different ecological needs, Hittinger hopes to better understand how to engineer complex biological systems to meet our energy needs.

Christine Preston

Job Titles:

Administrative Director

Christine Preston joined WEI in March of 2023 as the Administrative Director. She brings efficient and creative professional skills to leadership, fundraising and grant management. Preston has an extensive history working in higher education, including years of experience at other schools and departments at UW-Madison. Christine is originally from Wyoming, but has adopted Wisconsin as her beloved home. She misses the Rocky Mountains but a trip or two out west each year help satisfy that calling. She has two grown sons; Cody and his wife Claudia live in rural Marshfield, WI with a goal of boarding horses, and her younger son Ben is enjoying exploring the hiking and biking trails of northern WI. Christine and her husband, Kevin, love to travel, watch Badger sports, try new foods, and check out local breweries!

Dirk Norman

di..@wisc.edu

Job Titles:

Information Services Director
Member of the Executive Committee

Norman joined Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) in 2010 and leads application development, infrastructure and operations teams in support of GLBRC's research missions. He and his team are charged with designing, implementing, and supporting a broad array of technologies utilized by staff and researchers, including storage and compute resources, custom-built applications, data management and sharing tools, and informatics/data analysis pipelines. He brings over 16 years of experience in technology leadership to GLBRC, having worked at multiple world-renowned research centers within the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Josh Arnold

jo..@wisc.edu

Job Titles:

Energy Advisor

Josh Arnold is the Campus Energy Advisor with the Office of Sustainability, where he is responsible for coordinating energy conservation, renewable energy and strategic planning efforts at the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Working with campus and community stakeholders, he coordinates and implements energy efficiency and renewable energy projects that advance clean energy for people, planet and shared prosperity. Josh has 20 years of experience in the sustainability industry, including energy efficiency program implementation with the Wisconsin Focus on Energy program, stakeholder engagement and market development with the U.S. Green Building Council, and management consulting with Navigant Consulting (now Guidehouse), where he developed the 100% Renewable Madison report for the City of Madison, WI. Josh started his career in Portland, Oregon with the City of Portland Office of Sustainable Development. His education includes a J.D. in environmental law from Lewis & Clark Law School and an M.B.A. from Portland State University. He has a B.A. from Tufts University in Boston, MA and certificate in Ocean Resources Policy from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu, Hawai'i.

Katherine (Trina) McMahon

Job Titles:

Member of the Executive Committee
Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering

The broad objective of Trina McMahon's research program is to improve our capacity to predict and model microbial behavior, while searching for novel biologically mediated transformations that can be harnessed for engineering applications, including energy production. McMahon studies the microbial ecology of both natural and engineered systems using molecular tools to investigate microbial community structure and function in lakes and activated sludge. She also uses high-frequency environmental sensor networks to measure important variables that we know influence bacterial communities and is particularly interested in phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbon cycling in lakes and how this relates to eutrophication and water quality. McMahon and her team use highly resolved time series sampling of multiple lakes, combined with metagenomics and meta-trascriptomics to explore how different lineages of freshwater bacteria contribute to this cycling. She is also engaged in metagenomic and post-genomic approaches to dissecting the metabolism of bacteria specialized in the sequestration of phosphorus in activated sludge. This information will ultimately lead to the construction of more predictive mechanistic and ecosystem-scale models to describe such processes as wastewater treatment and freshwater nutrient cycling.