GREENTECH FESTIVAL SPEAKERS

Megan Thudium is an American B2B content strategist and climate communicator working in Berlin, founder of Content For Good & Co. She works primarily with innovative climate brands and B Corps in Germany and Europe. She also actively brings awareness to the ‘marketing as a force for good’ movement through workshops and speaking engagements. She openly advocates for sustainable marketing and encourages creatives and marketers to step into the ‘ecomarketer’ role with enthusiasm and confidence.

Claudia Hügel has been responsible for group-wide ESG rating and reporting at Lufthansa Group for more than 6 years. She deals with the national and international ESG regulation and rating landscape such as the non-financial declaration, the EU Taxonomy and the CSRD as well as the Sustainable Development Goals. In this capacity Claudia addresses the overall strategic aspects of ESG and future impacts for the airline industry and acts also as interface to the finance community. Since 2001 Claudia has been working at Lufthansa Group in various senior management positions. Before joining Lufthansa Group Claudia worked as a project manager at Roland Berger, International consultants. Claudia studied business administration focussing on corporate strategy at Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich.

Books: Forecasting government budgets and Megadeals (2020) Investor in 15 companies, lead investor in 8 of them (scale-ups in cleantech and SaaS) Founder of Mine storage, Retain24, Taxisystem, Vendemore, and Megadeals. Prosales Chief Commercial Officer of the year 2018. Climeon order intake 3-90 MUSD in two years. Mission, Expertise & Accomplishments: Help companies, their great innovations and most important people (Rainmakers) go to market and scale faster with less resources than traditionally tactics.

Sophia is CMO at 1KOMMA5°, platform for carbon neutral energy, heat and mobility. She is business psychologist, author and has been shaping innovation in the digital energy and mobility environment for 15 yrs. As CEO, she founded & managed the blockchain company bloXmove, which was created following a management buy-out with Mercedes-Benz. Here, at the car manufacturer, Sophia’s career began in management positions around startup investment, EV charging and digital transformation. Sophia was a bitkom board member & advised politicians on blockchain issues & is involved as an international keynote speaker, podcast host and moderator at events such as TEDx, slush, websummit, OMR.

I have been working in the cement industry for over 20 years. Originally from a process chemistry background, I have been interacting with cement customers and developing new solutions with and for them – initially the focus was on minimizing the cost of operations, but recently the discussions have shifted to reducing emissions as well.

Julie Kitcher is Chief Sustainability Officer and Communications at Airbus and is a member of the Airbus Executive Committe. In her position, she oversees the Company’s sustainability roadmap, driving Airbus’ contribution to current environmental, societal, regulatory and technological challenges. She also leads Communications company-wide, promoting the Airbus brand internally and externally in support of Airbus’ strategic objectives. Under Julie’s leadership, Airbus received approval from the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) for its near-term greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

Managing Director at Allianz Capital Partners (ACP) in the direct infrastructure investment team in Munich, Germany. Joined ACP in 2012 and has worked on multiple infrastructure transactions in different sectors across various geographies. ​Current focus is on development of infrastructure investment opportunities in the area of energy transition. Led and is responsible for ACP’s first two direct investment in the sector: Finnish green power-to-gas developer Ren-Gas in 2022 and Norwegian green ammonia project developer FUELLA in 2023.​

Maikel has been developing impact tech for datacenters & digital infrastructure for over 15 years. His expertise covers innovation, product and growth management, with strategic partnerships at the core. Since 2017 at the Dutch scale up Asperitas, thermal management for datacenters and compute infrastructure since 2017.He has been involved and lead more than 15 public-private innovation projects both national and EU, currently one of the leaders of the Modular Integrated Sustainable Datacenter Project in the 8ra (IPCEI-CIS) program.

Jessica Hyman is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Atlassian. She’s responsible for Atlassian’s Climate, Human Rights, Responsible Technology, and Sustainability Governance programs, as well as the Atlassian Foundation, which drives the company’s philanthropic efforts.Since joining Atlassian, Jessica built the company’s climate strategy from the ground up—securing 100% renewable electricity for operations, setting a Science-Based Target to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040, and introducing the “Don’t #@!% the Planet” guide. She also led the development of Atlassian’s Human Rights program.

Valerie Hutterer is the Head of Market for the DACH region and the Netherlands at AXA Climate, where she works with organisations to build climate resilience through education and strategic partnerships. With a background in strategy and corporate transformation, she helps companies future-proof their workforce and embed sustainability into their core business. Before joining AXA Climate, Valerie gained international experience at the European Parliament, in global NGOs and international organisations, where she focused on policy, stakeholder engagement, and impact-driven initiatives.

Member of Alliance 90/The Greens since 2009; 2010 to 2011 member of the state board of the Green Youth Berlin; 2011 to 2014 member of the federal board of the Green Youth, most recently as federal spokesperson; 2016 to 2018 spokesperson for the Duisburg district association of Alliance 90/The Greens; from 2018 to 2022: state chairman of Alliance 90/The Greens North Rhine-Westphalia. Federal chairman of Alliance 90/The Greens since November 2024.

Jochen Ahlswede heads the Research/International Affairs Department at BASE. He studied physics and political science and is particularly interested in issues of nuclear arms control and non-proliferation. From 2012 to 2016, he worked at the Federal Office for Radiation protection to deep geological Final storage radioactive waste. Starting in 2016, he helped establish BASE, initially in the presidential office, and in 2020 he took over as head of the research department.

Studied Technical Chemistry 1995-2000 (Nuremberg University of Applied Sciences, Massachussetts Institute of Technology). Joined BASF SE in 2001 (process development biotechnology), since 2007 various tasks in the field of sustainability: life cycle analysis, energy management, carbon steering / corporate sustainability. Currently responsible for BASF’s strategy on the voluntary CO2 market

Vuk Trifkovic drives BCG’s Green Growth Acceleration offer in Europe. He joined BCG in 2016 as part of BCG Digital Ventures. In 2020, Vuk co-founded the BCG Green Ventures offering with a mission to bring the business-building approach to urgent climate tech projects. Since then, he has led the BCG sustainability agenda across a range of topics including CDR, large-scale renewables, industrial decarbonization, energy efficiency, heating electrification, circularity models in fashion, and shipping decarbonization.