Jean Kim Chaix, Founder and Director

Before launching The Charcoal Project in 2009, Kim spent two decades as a television reporter documenting international current events and the intersection between population and the environment.

Most recently, Kim spent seven years as Director of Virunga Fund Inc, a US-based non-profit that exists to protect Africa’s oldest and most biologically diverse protected area, Virunga National Park in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Illegal charcoal production in and around the park is a $40M/year industry that helps fund irregular armed groups that have cost the lives of some 175 park rangers over the past 15 years.

In 2004, Kim joined The Nature Conservancy in New York where he ran the organization’s strategic marketing and communications unit. At the Conservancy he led a working group focused on the integration of Climate Change, conservation science, and public policy.

Kim started The Charcoal Project in response to the lack of energy efficient solutions available for the world’s 3 billion people who depend on wood, charcoal, and animal dung as their primary source of fuel. Kim holds an undergraduate in biology and is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.

Sylvia Herzog, Director

Sylvia joined The Charcoal Project in 2010 because of a strong interest in finding renewable energy solutions to combat global warming and deforestation. She has managed TCP’s on-the-ground projects and the development of new ventures, like the Harvest Fuel Initiative. While at The Charcoal Project, Sylvia has used her deep experience helping entrepreneurs to provide assistance to sustainable biomass energy producers.

In addition to The Charcoal Project, Sylvia works as Program Director at the Women’s Enterprise Development Center, where she works closely with entrepreneurs at all stages to help them with their businesses. Sylvia has worked in various positions in banking and finance, including private placements and relationship management. She has an MBA, a Master of Public Policy and a BA in Economics, all from the University of Michigan. Sylvia is an Alumni Board Member at the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy and she currently resides with her family in Westchester County, New York.

Dr. Tuyeni H. Mwampamba, Ph.D., is a Tanzania native and UC Davis graduate currently doing post-doc research in Mexico. She is the author of an influential study on urban charcoal consumption in Tanzania and its implications to present and future forest availability. Her hands-on research also extends to Tanzania’s forest carbon sequestration capacity and the implication for the carbon market, community, and forest conservation. She is presently researching payment programs for ecosystem services generated by communities in Mexico.

Dr. Priyadarshini Karvecompleted Ph.D. in Physics from University of Pune, in 1998. Her first research project resulted in development of a process for converting agricultural waste into charcoal. The technology won the Ashden Award for Renewable Energy in 2002.

In a career spanning more than 20 years, Dr. Karve invented a number of improved biomass burning cooking devices, to reduce smoke in the kitchen and dependence on firewood for domestic cooking in rural areas. She has also worked on “organic waste to fuel” technologies, specifically focusing on char and biogas. She conceptualized and lead the development of AIREC Cooking Energy Decision Support Tool, which is the world’s first technology neutral methodology that shifts the focus from laboratory performance of specific technologies to cooking energy service delivery in the user’s kitchen, in R&D and promotion of clean cooking energy technologies. From 2015, she has been advocating strongly for carbon negativity through conversion of waste biomass into char, and using the char for a variety or fuel and non-fuel applications.

In 2005, she started Samuchit Enviro Tech, a social enterprise that promotes environmentally sustainable energy and lifestyle products. Dr. Karve, who is the Managing Director of Samuchit, has also invented an easy-to-use Samuchit Carbon Footprint Calculator for Urban Indians, and conducts workshops on climate friendly lifestyle, sustainable urbanization, etc.

Dr. Karve is actively involved in national and international organizations working in the field of renewable energy, equitable sustainable development, climate resilience, etc. Currently she is a Member of the Board of Trustees of Initiatives for New Ecological Community Concerns (INECC), a registered society in India. She is also teaching courses on Sustainable Development, History of the Universe, etc., at Symbiosis International University.

Dan Sweeney, Ph.D., is the lead researcher in the Massachusett Institute of Technology D-Lab Biomass Fuel & Cookstoves Group. Dan provides technical assistance to field partners and performs lab- and field-based research and development on biomass and waste conversion processes. After finishing a PhD at the University of Utah, he moved to Sweden for a Fulbright Fellowship focused on the development of advanced processes for converting biomass residues to energy and fuels (and, while there, sometimes got to cross-country ski over the frozen Baltic Sea to work when the road was impassable by bicycle). Dan is active in the International Standards Organization (ISO) Technical Committee on Clean Cooking Solutions and was the lead instructor for the 2016 International Development Design Summit on Cookstoves, held in Kampala, Uganda and lead organizer for the Advancing Sustainable Charcoal Enterprises at Scale Convening in October 2018 in Kenya. Dan hails from Northern Colorado where his family operates a small farm. He enjoys foraging, folk music, and finding adventures in the outdoors wherever life takes him.