These are the current members of the Boltzmann Institute Board of Directors:
MICHAEL WIGGIN – After working as a consulting engineer for eight years, Michael served as Director of the federal government’s Community Energy Systems Group, advising on and expediting district heating projects across Canada. Most recently, he was an advisor to the $1-billion steam-to-hot water conversion of the government’s systems in the National Capital Region. He’s now senior advisor to and past chair of the International Energy Agency’s Executive Committee in District Heating and Cooling R&D. He is also a member and deputy chair of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers’ Energy Task Force, with a focus on the affordable decarbonization of electricity systems through synergies between thermal and electricity networks. Since 2016, he has been an adjudicator for the Global District Energy Climate Awards sponsored by EuroHeat & Power, a major European trade association. He’s worked closely with Canada’s municipal sector. He helped establish the evaluation process for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Green Funds program and helped the Greater Vancouver Regional District prepare the 100-year sustainable development plan that won first place in the 2003 international Sustainable Urban Systems Design competition.
STEPHEN TAYLOR worked in the Canadian real estate industry for over 45 years. Prior to his retirement in 2019 he oversaw the $15 billion real estate portfolio of the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP), including assets located across Canada, Europe and the United States. Before joining HOOPP in 2014, Stephen worked for 16 years with the Morguard Group of Companies, where he served as President of Morguard Investments Limited, the Group’s real estate advisory and management arm. Over that time Morguard’s portfolio under management grew from $2 billion to over $15 billion. Before joining Morguard, he was a senior real estate executive in a major Canadian financial institution (Confederation Life) and in two large Canadian real estate development companies.
Stephen remains active in the real estate industry through involvement in a number of corporate boards and advisory committees. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and holds a Master’s Degree in Management Studies from Oxford University. He is the Past Chair of the Board of REALpac (the Real Property Association of Canada), and is also engaged in the Not for Profit sector, having been Board Chair for Covenant House Toronto (providing shelter for homeless youth) and the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto.
CAROLINE MCGRATH is a lawyer and public policy professional based in Toronto. She has experience working in the private and public sector, as a corporate counsel and a policy advisor in the premier’s office. She is proficient in French, holds an LLB from Osgoode Hall Law School, an LLM in Human Rights law and a Mediation Certificate from Harvard’s Program on Negotiation.
MARTIN GREEN is a theoretical physicist with a passion for conceptual understanding. For many years he was a senior research scientist at Ontario Hydro, with projects spanning transmission, distribution, generation, and IT. That was followed by work on information security, operations risk management, governance, and enterprise architecture in financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications. He retired early to return to research on the foundations of space, time, matter, quantum physics, cosmology, and consciousness. Starting in 2020, climate change became Martin’s main concern; he co-founded the Boltzmann Institute with an initial focus on how to most reliably achieve large-scale building decarbonization, in Canada, by 2050. He was a major contributor to the Two Pathways study. That led to expanded interests in strategic, end-to-end integration of energy systems to realize enormous environmental and socioeconomic benefits.
RICHARD GILBERT was for seven years the first CEO of the Toronto District Heating Corporation, now Enwave Energy Corporation, then and now Canada’s largest district energy provider. He was a local and regional councillor for many years, elected six times in the City of Toronto. Richard was much involved in the work of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and served as FCM’s president for its 50th-anniversary year. Later, he was the first president of the Canadian Urban Institute and then worked as a consultant, chiefly on energy issues and on municipal governance, with public- and private-sector clients across four continents. His main client was the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), where he also worked for the International Energy Agency. Richard has taught extensively at several universities, including the three in Toronto and one in British Columbia, as well as at universities in Ireland, Scotland, Mexico, and the U.S.