Kent Satterlee
Executive Director
Kent Satterlee is a seasoned civil/structural/environmental engineer and manager with 15 years of experience in government affairs and regulatory policy and 40 years of experience in the offshore industry. Kent is also president of Kent Satterlee & Associates and president of Blue Silo Aquaculture, LLC, both located in Mandeville, LA.
Sara Hamann
Communications Director
Sara Hamann brings an interdisciplinary background in environmental science, conservation governance, research, and education. She has 5 years of experience working in non-for-profit organizations in Mexico, England, and the USA. She holds an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management from the University of Oxford. For her thesis work in the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Oxford, she researched Eastern Orthodox church forests in Ethiopia to measure their ecological value. She also studied the effects of habitat fragmentation and buffer zones on endangered species, conservation heritage, and regenerative agriculture. Sara is particularly interested in sustainable development, human-wildlife conflict, illegal wildlife trade, responsible sourcing, and climate change adaptation.
Alan J Cohen, Ph.D.
Technical Director
Alan J Cohen has 40 years experience in executive leadership, advisory and business development roles in the oil and gas industry and government (DOE and NSF), and in academic administration. His skill sets include: use-inspired R&D, translation and commercialization, workforce development, program management and evaluation. He has published on geothermal energy and real-time monitoring of carbon storage. Alan also runs a consultancy on the energy transition and its intersection with resource management combined with digital sensors used for next-generation agriculture.
Johnathan L. Hills, MBA, PMP, PMI-PBA, LSSGB, CPBI
Operational Excellence Director
Johnathan Hills is an engineer, accountant, and business systems analyst with 20 years of experience in oil and gas, engineering, and business consulting. He is also the co-founder of ExcellingWorks LLC, a coaching and advisory firm providing outsourced accounting, tax planning, and estate analysis services. He specializes in operational excellence of businesses that desire to get the most out of their people and systems. He utilizes evaluation and learning as important tools in operational excellence by realizing that people and systems get better when their performance is evaluated, and learning is set in place to increase knowledge in weak areas and leverage the strong areas.
Neal Hennegan
Senior Engineer
Neal Hennegan earned degrees in Civil Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Computer Science from the University of Illinois, with a focus on numerical methods and structural analysis. He joined Shell’s Head Office Civil Engineering group in 1977, where he specialized in the design of offshore structures. He helped develop software for 3D random-wave loading, seismic loading, and fatigue analysis, which was used to design several major fixed-base deepwater structures, including Bullwinkle (GC 65) and Eureka (P-0301). He went on to serve as Civil Engineering Technical Manager for the Gulf of Mexico and later as Manager of Technical Services for Shell’s Deepwater Division. Neal is now the Senior Engineer at the Gulf Offshore Research Institute (GORI).