Sasha Braun - Founder & CEO

Sasha Braun is a committed and passionate entrepreneur dedicated to accelerating the world’s transition to more sustainable methods by accelerating the commercialization of high-impact early stage technologies. Sasha began his career providing evaluation, installation, and management of large-scale solar PV projects at large commercial facilities. Concurrently to his consulting work, Sasha founded Alumina Energy to acquire the ceramic packed bed thermal energy storage technologies under development at CCNY for commercialization.  Since then, Sashas has worked in the areas of thermodynamics, heat transfer, supercritical CO2 power cycles, turbo machinery design and cycle analysis and innovation. Prior to Alumina Energy, Sasha served as the manager of commercialization at RadiaBeam Technologies where he led the commercialization of more than $20M in grant funded SBIR Phase I and Phase II projects from the DOE, DOD, NIH, and NSF. Sasha has also served as an advisor to several start-ups in the medical device and consumer product sectors. 

Richard Dash - Co-founder & President

Richard Dash has created unique and effective methods for building and sustaining organizations that work. Over his career, Richard has worked with several of the top 100 fortune 500 companies, these include GE, Intuit, Ceridian, Royal Bank of Canada among others. Richard has extensive business development experience with the middle east region, having previously lived in Israel for 18 years. During his 18-year period living in Israel, Richard was retained by the chairman of OZ building and Investment Ltd., a public company with a significant market share in commercial development industry in Israel. Richard brings  a unique background in diverse business enterprises, with broad organizational experience from start-ups to large international companies. He has developed a deep understanding of business culture and non-adversarial systems consistent with the company’s organizational development strategies. He has been guest lecturer at Cornell University Graduate School of Business, Regis University, Department of Internal Medicine of Cedar Sinai Hospital and The Anderson Institute in Virginia.

  • B.S. - 1969, Research Microbiology Kansas State University

Dr. Hitesh Bindra - Technology Inventor

Professor at Kansas State University

  • Ph.D. - 2010, Nuclear Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

  • M.S. - 2007, Nuclear Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

  • B.E. -  2002, Chemical Engineering Panjab University  Dr. Ryan Anderson - Technology Inventor

Professor at Montana State University

  • Ph.D. - 2012, Chemical and Biological Engineering University of British Columbia

  • B.S. - 2007, Chemical Engineering and B.A. in History Bucknell University 

Dr. Pablo Bueno - Technology Inventor

Senior Engineer at Southwest Research Institute

  • Ph.D. - 2006, Aerospace Engineering University of Texas at Austin

  • M.S. - 2002, Aerospace Engineering University of Texas at Austin

  • B.S. - 1998, Aeronautical Engineering with minor in Mathematics U.S Air Force Academy

Dr. Jeffery Morris - Technology Inventor

Professor and Acting Chair of Chemical Engineering Department at The City College of New York and Levich Institute

  • Ph.D. - 1996, Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology

  • M.S. - 1991, Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology

  • B.S. - 1989, Chemical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology