Lauren Greenlee is the Executive Vice President of the Food + Water + Waste Domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. XPRIZE is the world's leader in designing and operating incentive competitions that set audacious goals, drive technology innovation, and aim to solve humanity's grand challenges. Lauren leads the foundation's work across food, water, and waste, and brings 20 years of experience working in national laboratory, academic, and startup environments.

Prior to joining XPRIZE, Lauren served as the Chief Technology Officer for sHYp, an early-stage startup company developing technology to produce green hydrogen from seawater sources. During her time as CTO, she built sHYp's core R&D team, directed technical strategy for the US-UK international team, and oversaw advancement of sHYp's technology from a TRL 3 to TRL 6 and a first operational pilot system. Lauren was also intimately involved in business development, from market analysis and core messaging to non-dilutive and investor-backed fundraising efforts. 

Lauren has been passionate about water and its sustainable supply since visiting Australia and Indonesia more than 25 years ago and realizing how precious, but unequal in availability, water is to the many communities that depend on it every day. Thus, water has been a throughline for her across her professional career, from working with desalination technology, understanding complex water chemistry, and tackling water and nutrient sustainability challenges in agriculture to looking at key energy conversion and waste circularity challenges that we face today. Looking forward, Lauren aims to bring an interdisciplinary and cross-sector view to the Food + Water + Waste grand challenge area. These challenges are interconnected and require bringing together creative and innovative minds from traditionally siloed fields. 

Lauren holds a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in Environmental Engineering and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Certificate in Strategic Leadership from the Pennsylvania State University. She is currently finishing her M.B.A. from the University of Iowa and has a passion for life-long learning across business, technology, and how people work together. Outside of work, Lauren loves to be outside and active during all seasons and enjoys running, biking, hiking, skiing, and the quiet of being in nature.