Lisa Dyson

In 2008 she founded Kiverdi, a technology company that looks to revolutionise agriculture. Instead of concentrating on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, Kiverdi look to reuse CO2 into proteins and oils. She came across the concept when reading NASA papers, where astronauts had used hydrogenotrophs to convert carbon dioxide in exhaled breath into nutrient rich crops. She started to grow the microbes in her lab, working with manufacturers to scale-up their technology. They are also interested in alternative fuels and bio-products. In 2012 she was awarded the Sustainable Biofuels Award for Leader in Bio-based Chemical Industry. In 2014 she was presented a Clean Energy Education & Empowerment Award. The company were awarded grants from the United States Department of Energy. It won a $750,000 grant from the California Energy Commission. She has several patent applications relating to carbon dioxide fixing chemotropic microorganisms.

After completing her PhD, Dyson joined University of California, Berkeley. Dyson worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and Princeton. She worked as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group between 2004 and 2006. She has worked with the chemical and energy industry.

Dyson grew up in Southern California. Dyson completed a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Brandeis University in 1997. After meeting several physics professors, she became more interested in Quantum Field Theory. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Imperial College London, where she received a Masters of Science. Dyson earned her PhD at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics in 2004, working with Leonard Susskind and on quantum gravity. Her thesis, "Three lessons in causality : what string theory has to say about naked singularities, time travel and horizon complementarity", used string theory and General Relativity. She was only the fourth black woman to achieve a PhD in theoretical high energy physics. She worked Matthew Kleban on the Boltzmann Brain problem.