Catherine Williams of Massachusetts Clean Energy Center

From solar energy development to the advancement of CleanTech, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has been one of the first U.S. state agencies to focus strictly on clean energy investment. Listen to Catherine Williams, the Director of Communications for MCEC, discuss how they are boosting sustainable energy development through trusts and policy partnerships — and what’s up with their flagship initiative, offshore wind. She spoke with GCR host Joan Michelson at the 2013 ARPA-E Summit in Washington, DC recently.

To listen to other ARPA-E Summit experts, go to www.greenconnectionsradio.com.

About Joan Michelson

Joan Bryna Michelson, MBA is CEO, Executive Producer and Host of Green Connections Radio™, a news/talk show about the green economy, featuring women experts.

Joan is an award-winning, creative business and communications leader, public speaker and journalist. She has generated millions in revenue and branding for top companies, government agencies and non-profits, and worked with top media organizations, including CBS News' "60 Minutes" and the Huffington Post. She also penned an excerpt on women in government leadership for the non-fiction book If Women Ruled the World, published by Inner Ocean Publishing in 2005.  A specialist in the “green” space and a lifelong advocate for women in leadership, Michelson’s work has included Chrysler’s Global Electric Motorcars, the U.S. Department of Energy-Clean Energy Alliance Small Business Partnership, Earth Day Network, the top “green” private equity firm, Deloitte and the National Council for Science and the Environment.  She has earned positive media coverage on Page One of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and top coverage in Time magazine, Consumer Reports, and The LA Times, on CNN Money, CBS, "The Today Show." 


She has been an Adjunct Professor in the Communications and Journalism Department of Columbia Union College in Maryland, and actively involved in the community. She holds a BA from UCLA and an MBA from Baruch College, CUNY in their executive program. As a fun aside, Michelson is a descendant of three prominent siblings: Albert A. Michelson was the first American scientist to win the Nobel Prize (physics, 1907), Charles Michelson was the first White House Communications Director/Press Secretary (under FDR); and Miriam Michelson literally kept the women’s suffrage movement on the front page, as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer.