Marc VON KEITZ

Dr. Marc von Keitz, Ph.D., is the Director for Oceans at the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, a private charitable foundation dedicated to protecting and improving the health of the global environment. In recent years, the Grantham Foundation has funded an extensive portfolio of projects that focus on breakthrough technologies to drastically reduce emissions and remove CO2 and other climate pollutants from the atmosphere. Specifically, he leads the Advancing Marine Carbon Solutions pillar within the Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance (ORCA), a multi-funder philanthropic initiative. This effort supports the development of critical information for decision makers, covering social, regulatory, governance, environmental, economic, and technical aspects of various marine carbon dioxide removal approaches. Before joining the Grantham Foundation, he served as program director at ARPA-E at the U.S. Department of Energy. There, he launched and managed a diverse portfolio of energy and climate-focused funding programs, including the MARINER program, which advanced scalable seaweed cultivation in the open ocean. In addition, Dr. von Keitz has founded and led a clean-tech bioreactor company, focused on the production of renewable fuels. He also managed the central fermentation and bioprocessing facility at the University of Minnesota and worked as a consulting engineer on the remediation of sites contaminated with hazardous waste. He studied biology and chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and INSA Toulouse, France. He obtained an M.S. and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota in the United States, respectively.