Cyrus Wadia

Dr. Cyrus Wadia is Vice President, Sustainable Business & Innovation, NIKE, Inc., where he is responsible for enabling the company’s sustainability strategy with the goal of driving change across Nike and the wider industry. The team he leads focuses on several areas including testing and prototyping of new business models, accelerating partnerships for scaling sustainable innovations, and supporting Nike’s broad innovation agenda through science and analytics.
Cyrus is the former Assistant Director for Clean Energy & Materials R&D with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he advised the White House and Executive Branch leadership in the design of national policy in energy, climate, advanced materials, manufacturing, and critical minerals. In this role, which he held from 2010-2015, Cyrus was responsible for the creation and expansion of more than $1 billion in new budgetary initiatives, including the Materials Genome Initiative, and he led the development of the nation’s first policy framework and strategy on critical minerals.
Prior to joining the White House, Cyrus held a dual appointment with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Haas School of Business where he was the Co-Director of Cleantech to Market and a research scientist. He also spent more than seven years in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur, working with several successful venture backed tech startups.
Cyrus earned his Ph.D in Energy & Resources from U.C. Berkeley and holds both an M.S. and S.B. in Chemical Engineering from MIT.