Program Topics and Content

PTA Clean Energy Speaker Biographies

Daniel Kaffine 

Daniel Kaffine was a 2023 PERC Lone Mountain fellow and a professor in the Department of Economics and an Institute Fellow in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Management from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2007, and received his B.S. in Physics and B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Saint Thomas in 2002. He is an associate editor at Resource and Energy Economics and European Economic Review and serves on the Editorial Council for the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Recent and ongoing research projects examine the impacts of the rapidly increasing role of renewable energy in the electricity sector, the environmental effects of transportation policy, the intersection of energy and environmental policy, and the role of property rights and institutions on natural resource use and conservation. 

Bryan Leonard 

Bryan Leonard is an associate professor in the School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming. He is also a senior fellow at PERC, and PERC fellowship director. His research focuses on the design of institutions to resolve collective action problems associated with natural resource and environmental management. He studies the?historical context of policies that are crafted to solve resource challenges at a particular point in time and assess their long-run sustainability, with a particular focus on the conditions under which property rights perform better or worse than other policies.?His research examines: i) tradeoffs between economic efficiency and other goals (such as equity) when assigning property rights; ii) the relationship between property rights and collective action problems; and iii) the modern challenges and historical foundations of public resource management in the American West.?Dr. Leonard holds a Ph.D. in Economics from UC Santa Barbara and a master’s in applied economics from Montana State University. 

Grace Wu 

Grace Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara. Before joining UCSB, Grace was a?Smith Conservation Fellow?at The Nature Conservancy and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. She was also a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Muir Institute of the Environment at UC Davis. She was trained in systems thinking and interdisciplinary approaches in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. Grace’s research focuses on the dynamics and drivers of land use change, climate change mitigation, and advancing the ability to plan for sustainable, multi-use landscapes that protect biodiversity and advance climate goals.  

Holly Krustka 

Holly Krutka is the Executive Director of the School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming. She came to the university after serving as the Vice President for coal generation and emissions technologies at Peabody, the world’s largest private-sector coal producer. Dr. Krutka has spent much of her career focusing on technology and policy pathways to advance carbon capture as well as identifying nontraditional coal-consumption opportunities. Before joining Peabody, she worked as a senior research and development analyst for Tri-State Generation and Transmission, an electric generation and transmission cooperative based in Westminster, Colo.; as executive editor of?Cornerstone, The Official Journal of the World Coal Industry, employed by the Chinese state-owned energy company Shenhua Group; and as a research scientist and senior research engineer with ADA Environmental Solutions in Highlands Ranch, Colo., where she was tasked with launching a carbon capture research program. In her various roles, Dr. Krutka holds three patents, has served in leadership positions in the National Coal Council and the Carbon Utilization Research Council, has participated in the Carbon Capture Coalition and as a judge on the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition. 

Dr. Krutka holds a bachelor’s degree, graduating magna cum laude, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, both in chemical engineering. She is originally from Tahlequah, Oklahoma.