BOARD OF DIRECTORS
EMILIE BODOIN
Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Emilie Bodoin is the Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Pure Lithium, a company she founded in 2020. She is a businesswoman, entrepreneur, board director and inventor, who has five granted patents and 13 pending applications. She has over 13 years of experience in lithium metal anode and next-generation battery development. From 2015 to 2018, she worked with Argonne National Laboratory as a Principal Investigator on a lithium metal production project. She also served as an Entrepreneur in Residence for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Prior to that, Emilie worked in several finance roles in New York City, serving latterly as the Chief Technology Officer for G.C. Andersen Partners, a boutique investment bank. Emilie currently serves as a founding Director of the Sadoway Labs Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on deep decarbonization using extreme electrochemistry, which secured its initial funding from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Emilie is a frequent speaker at international lithium and battery conferences and a sought-after expert in the space.
PRof. DONALD SADOWAY
Co-Founder, Director & Chief Scientific Officer
Donald R. Sadoway is the Emeritus Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is Pure Lithium’s full-time CSO. He has authored over 180 scientific papers and is listed as an inventor on more than 50 patents.
Donald’s accomplishments include the invention of the liquid metal battery for large-scale stationary storage and the invention of molten oxide electrolysis for carbon-free metals production, which launched the companies Ambri and Boston Metal, respectively. He is also the founder of Sadoway Labs foundation, a non-profit organization.
He was named as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine in 2012. In 2022, The European Patent Office awarded him one of Europe’s most prestigious innovation prizes, The European Inventor Award, for his work on liquid metal batteries.
His chemistry lectures hosted by MIT OpenCourseWare extend Donald’s impact on engineering education far beyond the lecture hall. His TED talk, viewed almost 2.5 million times, is as much about inventing inventors as it is about inventing technology. Donald received his B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and Ph.D. in Chemical Metallurgy from the University of Toronto. He joined the MIT faculty in 1978.
Derek Willis
DIRECTOR
Derek Willis is currently the VP of Commercialization at Oxy Low Carbon Ventures. He brings a wealth of experience and expertise in driving innovation and facilitating strategic partnerships within the energy sector.
Derek previously served as the VP of Legal at OLCV, where he started and grew the legal function within OLCV. He also has experience as the SVP of Corporate Development and General Counsel at Volusion LLC where he orchestrated corporate development initiatives including strategic alliances and acquisitions, while overseeing legal affairs on a global scale.
Derek has additional experience as a corporate and securities partner at Wilson Sonsini, cultivating extensive experience in venture capital, private equity, mergers and acquisitions, and capital market transactions. Their practice spanned various industries including semiconductor, clean-tech, and renewable energy.
Governor William F. Weld
DIRECTOR
Governor William F. Weld is a distinguished American politician and attorney whose career has spanned decades, marked by a commitment to public service.
He gained recognition as U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts during the Reagan administration. During the 1990s, he served two terms as Governor of Massachusetts and was credited with improving the business climate in Massachusetts by reducing taxes and state regulations on business. Prior to his election as Governor, Mr. Weld was a federal prosecutor for seven years, serving as the Assistant U.S. Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. In 2016, he received four and a half million votes as the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party.
He serves as a Member and Principal with the Mintz law firm’s government relations subsidiary ML Strategies.
Robert Friedland
DIRECTOR
For more than 30 years, international financier Robert Friedland has been recognized by leaders of the international financial sector and mineral resource industries as an entrepreneurial explorer, technology innovator and company builder. He successfully developed a series of companies at the forefront of the world’s most notable mineral discoveries and mine developments including Fort Knox in Alaska, Voisey’s Bay in Canada, Oyu Tolgoi in Mongolia, Platreef in South Africa, and Kamoa-Kakula in the DRC. In January 2016, he was inducted into the prestigious Canadian Mining Hall of Fame and in 2021 the US Mining Hall of Fame.
Under Mr. Friedland’s leadership, the Ivanhoe group and associated companies have raised more than $30 billion through a diverse range of financing vehicles on world capital markets since 1993. This capital has been invested in more than 30 nations, directed primarily at the minerals, energy and technology sectors.
WORLD-CLASS INVESTORS
