Our Team

The driving force behind Geothermal Technologies

Our Mission

The Geothermal Technologies team has been working tirelessly to develop innovative and sustainable solutions to fix the global energy crisis. Our mission is to furnish a means of providing access to a virtually unlimited supply of clean, economically competitive geothermal energy.

J. Gary McDaniel

Chief Executive Officer

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Jim Hollis

Chief Operating Officer

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Dr. Bruce Marsh

Chief Science Officer

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Dr. Stephen Browne

Board of Directors

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Bill Chmela

Program Director

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Dr. Alfred Lacazette

Director, Geology

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John C. Cook

Director, Capital Acquisition

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Dr. Saman Karimi

Geophysicist

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Stephen P. Cumella

Geoscience

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Yakov Regelman

Engineering

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Emmanuel T. Schnetzler

Data Analytics

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Robert Duncan

Regulatory Advisor

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Dr. Roy Kligfield

Business Advisor

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J. Gary McDaniel

J. Gary McDaniel, a chemical engineer with an MBA, has 30+ years of P&L experience and proven success in planning and executing investment funding, rapid growth, global expansion, product/market diversification, and financial turnarounds.

McDaniel’s career has spanned the specialty chemical, petroleum refining, and solar photovoltaic industries with companies such as W.R. Grace, Akzo Nobel, and Honeywell UOP. A “serial CEO”, he has now led 6 start-up/early-stage companies, several to successful exit, that aggressively pursued emerging trends and opportunities in advanced materials, nanotechnology, environmental catalysis, power electronics, fuel cells, renewable energy, water treatment/purification, and other high-tech fields.

Jim Hollis

Jim’s career has focused on introducing and commercializing game-changing exploration technology advancements within the Oil and Gas and Mining industries including innovations in seismic imaging, wireless nodal seismic acquisition, software development and visualization, and machine learning enhanced resource exploration. Before joining the GTI team Jim was the Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of NEOS GeoSolutions, a Silicon Valley based technology company focused on applying ML and AI to facilitate the exploration workflow and reduce uncertainties. Prior to NEOS, Jim was President and Chief Operating Officer of ION Geophysical Corporation where he was responsible for the growth and financial execution of all ION business units, including multi-client data acquisition, data processing (GX Technologies), seabed and cable-less seismic imaging, and integrated seismic solutions. Prior to joining ION, Jim was General Manager of Exploration and Development Solutions for Landmark Graphics, a software solution subsidiary of Halliburton. Jim began his career exploring for oil and gas with Mobil Exploration and holds a BS in Geophysics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MS in Geophysics from the University of Utah.

Dr. Bruce Marsh

Dr. Bruce Marsh, a Professor Emeritus and Academy Professor at Johns Hopkins University (45 yrs.), is a world-renowned expert in the physics and chemistry of planetary magmatic processes including geothermal energy and planetary volcanism. He is the lead and co-author of over 250 peer-reviewed papers and abstracts illuminating the fundamentals of Earth processes and a past/present member of 6 editorial boards, including the “Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research” and “Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors”.

Dr. Marsh is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Geological Society of America, Mineralogical Society of America, and the Royal Astronomical Society. He has served as an advisor to leading universities and institutions including Stanford, Rice, Princeton, Columbia, Smithsonian, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NASA, AGU, and NSF. And, he has led expeditions to Antarctica (9), Aleutian Islands (10), and many other areas across the globe.

Dr. Stephen J. Browne

Dr. Stephen J. Browne is an experienced CEO, business executive, entrepreneur, and economist, with a long career building successful businesses in innovative, high technology disciplines. Dr. Browne has a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT and an AB in Economics from The Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Browne is Chairman, CEO, and President of The Stanton Group, which he founded in 1986 to develop independent (privately owned) power plants and to promote new energy technologies. After developing renewable, waste to energy, and conventional facilities in the USA, culminating in a $250 million combined cycle gas power plant that subsequently was purchased by a major electric utility, in the early 1990’s Stanton moved its focus to developing energy projects in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and then in the 21st Century began working intensively in China and with bringing advanced Chinese technologies to global markets.

Bill Chmela

Bill Chmela is a registered Geophysicist in the State of Texas (License #6558) focused on geothermal as a clean energy solution, and has held a number of technical, business development, and management positions in the energy business over four decades.
Throughout his career, Bill’s expertise has revolved around introducing and supporting new leading-edge technologies. He has presented and published a number of papers related to borehole and multi-component geophysics, real-time monitoring, drilling automation, and symptom detection for the prevention of drilling problems. He has been involved with the founding and growth of four successful technology startups over the past 20 years.

Dr. Alfred Lacazette

Dr. Alfred Lacazette is an internationally recognized expert in structural geology, natural rock fracture systems, the interaction of hydraulic fractures with natural fractures, interpretation of passive seismic/microseismic data, borehole imaging, fracture density and orientation statistics, and the chemical and mechanical interplays of fluid-rock interaction. He is the author of 35 papers on these and other subjects, wrote the technical specifications for the borehole imaging and orientation statistics modules of two major software packages, and holds a patent on passive seismic imaging. He has over 30 years of domestic and international (26 countries) experience with oil & gas operating (Texaco, EQT) and service (Western Atlas, Baker Hughes, Golder Associates, Global Geophysical Services) companies, and as an independent consultant for numerous companies in exploration, production, reservoir characterization, R&D, software development, business development, and core and outcrop-analog studies as well as geothermal and mining experience. Dr. Lacazette’s professional activities have focused on the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), where he served two terms on the Reservoir Development Committee, six terms as an Associate Editor of AAPG Bulletin, is a Charles H. Taylor Fellow of AAPG, and a founding member of AAPG’s Petroleum Structure and Geomechanics Division. He also reviews papers for a number of scientific journals.

Al received his BS and MS degrees in Geology from the University of Kentucky and his PhD in Geoscience from Penn State University.

John Cook

John Cook joined GTI following his 34 year career as Director of the Principal and Major Gift program for the Johns Hopkins University. Earlier in his career he Directed the University and Hospital Annual Giving program. Working with alumni, friends, and Family Offices, John raised over $150,000,000 while building leadership volunteer programs for alumni and the Baltimore community.

Dr. Saman Karimi

Saman Karimi is a geophysicist at Johns Hopkins University with broad interests in Earth and Planetary Sciences. Part of his research is geared toward enhancing the efficiency of geothermal systems in producing clean renewable energy, while other part is focused on better understanding the thermal/structural evolution of planetary bodies. Currently, he is an Assistant Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University, after having graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a doctoral degree in Geophysics/Planetary Sciences..

Stephen P. Cumella

Steve is an exploration and development geologist with extensive domestic and international experience. He has been geologic manager for $400 million development programs and has generated successful oil and gas prospects. Steve also acted as project manager for remedial investigation/feasibility study for the U.S. Army at Jefferson Proving Ground, Indiana. He was awarded the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists’ Outstanding Scientist Award in 2005 and the American Association of Petroleum Geologist’s Robert H. Dott, Sr. Memorial Award for Best Special Publication in 2010. He was an AAPG Distinguished Lecturer in 2011. He is past executive editor of The Mountain Geologist and was president of the Grand Junction Geological Society in 1991. Steve received his bachelors and masters in geology at University of Texas at Austin.

Yakov Regelman

Dr. Regelman, Executive Vice President and Chief Engineer of The Stanton Group, is an experienced engineer specializing in power plant design, system integration, and technology innovation and development.
He has 40 years of experience in the analysis, development, adjustment, and testing of various types of fossil fuel, nuclear, and renewable energy power plants, including their equipment and systems.
He has extensive experience with the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) technology that will be used to convert the heat from GTI’s underground radiators into electric power. He led the team that designed and implemented Stanton’s proprietary and patented technology that is the industry’s highest efficiency ORC technology for exploiting higher temperature geothermal and waste heat, which can be used in those locations where GTI’s technology is used to harvest energy from higher temperature underground reservoirs. He led the design teams for applications of this and of conventional ORC to gas pipeline compressor stations in Eastern Europe and China, to waste heat from gas turbines and diesel engines in small power plants, and to waste heat from cement plants.
He has led teams designing: renovations for large nuclear power plants; interim storage of spent nuclear fuel in the Ukraine; utility scale combined cycle power plants using waste steel mill gases; and international large scale power transmission grids.
He has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and a Master of Science from the Ship Design University, Leningrad, USSR, the Soviet Union’s leading power engineering institute. He has numerous scientific publications and more than thirty patented inventions in the field of propulsion, power plants, and new energy technology.

Emmanuel T. Schnetzler

Emmanuel “Manu” is a geoscientist and subject matter expert in predictive analytics and geostatistics.

After undergraduate studies in mathematics and physics in his hometown of Strasbourg, France, Manu was accepted at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Géologie where he developed a strong interest in computers and programming. This led him to an opportunity to practically apply computer geology as part of the original team developing the reservoir modeling software Gocad.

Early in his career Manu interned at Elf Aquitaine (now Total) in the area of geostatistics. He continued his studies in this specialization at Stanford University where he obtained his Master’s degree.

Since then Manu has worked for Odin (now Roxar) in Norway and has consulted with a variety of oil & gas and mining companies including Shell, Statoil, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BHP Billiton, and Neos in the United States. At the same time, he co-founded Statios to develop and commercialize geostatistical software.

Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan has lived and practiced law in Colorado for many decades, after emigrating from New York. He was an Assistant Attorney General in the early part of his career and represented a variety of executive departments. Since then, he had a law firm in the private sector, where he represented and successfully worked with a wide variety of private and public entities. He was an integral part of a ‘start-up’ public highway authority, which built a beltway around Denver without using any federal funds, unprecedented at the time. His work involves counseling and guiding his clients through a myriad of local, state and federal laws and regulations.

Dr. Roy Kligfield

Roy Kligfield has a background as both an academic research scientist and a successful serial entrepreneur. He was a Research Professor in Geophysics & Geology at the ETH Zurich (1978-1981), a Professor of Geology at the University of Colorado (1981-1992) where he led research, teaching and industrial consortium efforts in petroleum and structural geology and has authored numerous peer-reviewed professional papers and talks on these subjects. He subsequently led business start-ups: Geo-Logic Systems (earth model software sold to oil and gas companies for use in seismic interpretation), SignalSoft (mobile location services for the international wireless telecommunications industry), OpenLogic (management software to facilitate the use of open source software within enterprises), and Wireless Seismic, a company making a wireless network seismograph for use in seismic exploration worldwide and for hydraulic fracture monitoring. Recently, he led a group using non-seismic geophysical methods to help identify locations, and to drill for oil in the Smackover play of southwest Alabama. Roy led or helped lead the successful funding efforts which have collectively brought in approximately $200 million into these companies through a combination of private equity investment, venture capital and IPOs. In his executive management positions, Roy has supervised organizations from start-up through 150 persons and provided strategic direction and tactical leadership in these endeavors.