Dr. Christine Gulbranson is an entrepreneur, investor, and innovator who has built new markets and transformed a breadth of industries including cleantech/renewables, mobility, big data/IT, materials, agriculture, and healthcare while mitigating financial risks throughout her career as CEO, chief innovation officer, VC investor, board director and adviser for large & small, public and private corporations, family offices, and nonprofit organizations. She highlights the need for innovation and its key drivers to transform markets and society in her book Transformative Innovation: Today’s Capital Drives Tomorrow’s Exponential Growth & Profits to Advance the World.

Christine is the CEO of U+Nova and CIO of Treehouse Studios. She previously served as CEO and director of a Silicon Valley private family (Sergey Brin) foundation/office, chief innovation officer of the University of California System overseeing a $100B+ technology investment portfolio and $37B operations budget, general partner at VC firm GCP, senior investment advisor to a $4B European family office, television personality for Discovery Channel and scientist at LLNL.

Dr. Gulbranson has served as a director on more than twenty private and public service boards and has been recognized by Silicon Valley Business Journal as one of the top 40 Under 40 business leaders in Silicon Valley, as innovator for the twenty-first century by MIT’s Technology Review and as UC Davis’ distinguished engineering alumni in business.

Christine grew up in rural Northern California and Germany and is a first-generation college graduate. By age twenty-five, she earned five degrees from UC Davis – BS in physics, a BS, MS, and PhD in materials science and engineering, and an MBA. She holds patents in the fields of of nanotechnology and lighting.