Marcus Lehman

Marcus Lehman is co-founder and CEO of CalWave, a wave energy startup out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Marcus and his team at CalWave have developed a mat that sits in the near shore zone and generates electricity as waves pass over the mat. Marcus feels that the CalWave solutions is superior because, "we perform at very high efficiency but at the same time we can become invisible to storm conditions".

Marcus was born, raised and educated in his native Germany. When he discovered his calling was working on solutions to global warming through advances in clean energy technology, he decided to move to the San Francisco Bay Area because of its culture of innovation. Marcus feels that "the duty of our generation, especially generation of engineers, [is] that we come up with solutions for a fully sustainable future." The genesis of CalWave came on a Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2012 at University of California Berkeley. He was, "just hanging out with a couple of other students. [We decided] let's just spend a half day of the holiday and see how far we can get it with a prototype. And we just bolted something together with stuff we found in the lab ... that was a junction point for sure".