Our Team

A young man in a dark suit and light shirt, pink tie, smiling in an indoor setting with blurred background.

Dr. Varun Sivaram


CEO and Founder

One of the world's foremost authorities on energy technologies, Dr. Sivaram was formerly the Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Orsted A/S (NASDAQ: DOGEF), a $20 billion Fortune 500 Global energy firm where he led a team of 200, and he previously served as Chief Technology Officer of India's largest clean energy company, ReNew Power (NASDAQ: RNW). He served as a senior U.S. diplomat as the Managing Director for Clean Energy at the U.S. State Department, where he created the First Movers Coalition. Dr. Sivaram is a senior fellow for energy at the Council on Foreign Relations; a senior advisor at the Boston Consulting Group, Aventurine Partners, and Everview Partners; and board member of the Atlantic Council He is the author of three books, including the bestselling "Taming the Sun" on the future of solar energy, and he holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University.

A woman with shoulder-length brown hair smiling, wearing a dark collared shirt and small earrings against a white background.

Professor Ayse Coskun


Chief Scientist

Professor Coskun is a full professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boston University (currently on sabbatical), she leads the Center for Information and Systems Engineering and is the Associate Dean for Research at College of Engineering. She is the leading academic authority on orchestrating data center power demand to meet electricity grid demand response needs, a field in which her research group has published path-breaking research. Prof. Coskun has been widely recognized for her work applying AI and machine learning to enhance cloud and high-performance computing and received the Ernest Kuh Award for contributions to energy-efficient system-level design and an IBM Faculty Award for applying AI-based methods for DevSecOps. Earlier, she worked in industry at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). She serves as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on CAD. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from UCSD.

A man with dark hair, glasses, and a light beard wearing a white shirt standing against a wooden background.

Shayan Sengupta


Head of Engineering

Shayan joins Emerald AI from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he led global engineering teams delivering specialized AI, HPC and Mac compute platforms for cloud customers at massive scale. His work supported infrastructure powering hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue across mission-critical workloads. Prior to AWS, he spent over a decade at Intel driving engineering efforts for machine learning and accelerator technologies spanning data center software and FPGA hardware. With nearly two decades of experience across hyperscale cloud and ML systems, Shayan will now build and lead a world-class engineering team at Emerald AI.

A smiling man with dark curly hair, facial hair, wearing a black shirt, in an indoor setting with a blurred background.

Aroon Vijaykar

SVP Strategy & Commercial

Aroon is Emerald AI’s first commercial hire, primarily focused on collaborating with partners and customers to bring Emerald AI’s novel technology to market. Aroon previously held a series of commercial leadership roles at Sunrun (NASDAQ: RUN), leading and growing Sunrun’s virtual power plant, distribution and manufacturing businesses respectively over a six year period. Prior to his career in renewables, Aroon spent six years in private equity at Partners Group and management consulting at Monitor Deloitte, working across North America, Asia and Europe. Aroon holds an MA/MBA from the Wharton School and Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA from the University of California at Berkeley.

A man with shoulder-length brown hair, smiling, wearing a white shirt, sitting indoors near a window with a view of a parking lot and blue sky.

Dr. Philip Colangelo

Member of Technical Staff

Philip Colangelo brings a decade of machine learning expertise to our technical team. With a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, his work has spanned the full tech stack, from designing high-efficiency FPGA inference accelerators to developing software frameworks for ML model analysis. Philip excels at optimizing ML models through hardware and software co-design, contributing expertise in areas like quantization, sparsity, and compression. He has a proven track record of delivering solutions across diverse hardware platforms, from data centers to client-side NPUs.

A man with long curly hair and glasses reads a book in a cozy cafe with framed pictures and decorative items on the wall.

Chris Williams

Member of Technical Staff

Chris Williams has been building software products since the first dot-com boom. He has a track record as a founding engineer of successful startups, and has worked on everything from currency trading to autonomous medical robots. Chris's areas of technical expertise include deep learning, large-scale real-time data systems, infrastructure automation, and devops/mlops.

Close-up of a smiling man with short, styled hair and a beard, wearing a white shirt, against a neutral background.

Dr. Ciaran Roberts

Member of Technical Staff

Ciaran brings over a decade of specialized expertise in grid optimization and demand response systems. Prior to joining Emerald AI, Ciaran led strategic initiatives at SPAN that enabled residential electrification without costly infrastructure upgrades. Previously, during his time at Berkeley Lab, Ciaran spearheaded projects addressing operational challenges in both transmission and distribution networks caused by supply-side variability and high-capacity demand fluctuations. Ciaran holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley where his doctoral research pioneered the combined use of physics and ML/AI for planning and operation of increasingly complex power systems.

Young man with dark hair and a broad smile, wearing a white collared shirt, in an outdoor setting with blurred background.

Ethan Tiao

Associate Product Manager

A Stanford Master’s graduate in Computer Science, Ethan has developed software for a robotics startup and the U.S. Marine Corps, as well as helped to implement the CHIPS & Science Act at the White House. Ethan earned an M.S. in Computer Science—specializing in machine learning—and B.A. in Economics at Stanford University. As a 2024 Mayfield Fellow, he has applied his skills across public and private sectors to advance technologies that strengthen economic security. 

A man with shoulder-length brown hair, glasses, a beard, and a mustache, smiling in a close-up photo.

Dr. Daniel Wilson

Engineering Consultant

Daniel is an engineering consultant for Emerald’s software power management system. He has been contributing to software power pathfinding in high-performance computing systems since working on performance-aware site-wide datacenter power management for his PhD at Boston University. Daniel has previously worked on operating systems for advanced metering infrastructure and high availability storage.

A young man with light skin, curly light brown hair, wearing a gray suit and white shirt, smiling outdoors with blurred city background and colorful signs.

Jack Megrue

Chief of Staff & Business Operations Associate

Jack Megrue brings experience from his former role in Investment Banking at Barclays’ Global Power, Utilities and Renewables Group in New York, where he contributed to high-impact financial transactions and strategic advisory services. He advised over $1 Billion across M&A and equity markets across the country and internationally. He earned his degree from Cornell University's Dyson School of Applied Economics & Management with a concentration in Energy Economics.