Jeff Fitts, Ph.D.
Senior Advisor
Jeff Fitts is a Senior Advisor at Tideline focused on climate and energy solutions. He has over 20 years of research experience quantifying the impacts of fossil energy and developing solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the energy and transportation sectors. He has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications while at Columbia University, Princeton University, and the US Department of Energy.
In 2019, Fitts joined Columbia as the founding Executive Director of the Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center (CEEC)—a multidisciplinary research center focused on addressing the critical need for energy storage and conversion technologies as we transition to intermittent renewable energy sources and non-fossil fuel powered mobility. At the CEEC, Fitts develops industry sponsored research projects with center faculty aimed at accelerating the adoption of batteries, fuel cells, and electrolyzers. Sponsored research projects are under development with eight large and mid-size companies from the materials processing, battery, transportation, and energy industries.
Prior to joining Columbia, Fitts managed the research portfolios for corporate affiliates of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. Affiliates included ExxonMobil, Siemens, American Tower Corp., PSEG, NRG Energy, and American Water. As a Research Scholar in Princeton’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Fitts was co-principal investigator on US Department of Energy grants to study the viability of carbon sequestration strategies and a NASA-funded study of methane emissions from shale gas extraction infrastructure.
After receiving his doctoral degree in geochemistry from Stanford University and serving as the Langmuir Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia, Fitts was a staff scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Lab where he conducted fundamental scientific and engineering research to improve nuclear waste management and derisk geologic carbon dioxide storage.