Meet the UC Berkeley Haas 2026 ClimateCAP Fellows

In his MBA application, Tyler Liu, MBA 27, wrote about his dream of being named a ClimateCAP MBA Fellow.

Last month, that dream came true. Liu and fellow Haas student Aurelia Heitz, MBA 27, were named among 15 students from 11 business schools in the U.S. and Europe chosen as this year’s ClimateCAP Fellows. The fellows, who receive a ClimateCAP fellowship, offers MBA students professional development to become the next sustainability leaders. As part of the yearlong program, fellows participate in workshops and dialogues with current leaders and work on a climate-action project of their own. 

The fellows will also represent Haas at the annual ClimateCAP MBA Summit in April at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Heitz said she has known since high school that she wanted to work on climate solutions. That career plan first became real when she became head of user research at Centigrade, an open data platform serving the global carbon market. Now at Haas, Heitz is interested in using her research and business skills to work on a sustainability team at a large company.

Heitz said her ClimateCAP fellowship project, researching methane abatement at small dairy farms, was inspired by a Climate Change and Business Strategy class taught by professional faculty member Andrew Isaacs.

“I learned a lot of the foundational science of climate change and a lot about reducing methane emissions and how that’s hopefully changeable in our lifetime,” she said. 

Livestock are large producers of methane, she notes, and dairy companies and users of dairy products are in a powerful position to make a lasting change.

Dedicating to the business of clean energy

Before coming to Haas, Liu was pursuing a career in finance. But as an associate at a large securities firm in China, he was assigned to an environmental, social, and governance team. There, he partnered with China’s leading new energy manufacturers, helping them raise capital to make the transition to renewable energy. Site visits to solar farms were an eye-opening experience, convincing Liu that renewable energy could not only help stem climate change, but also help local communities—all at a low cost. 

By the time Liu was applying to business schools, he had decided to leave banking behind and dedicate himself to the business of clean energy.

“I don’t want to limit myself to banking or finance,” Liu said. “Energy is not just a consumer product. It requires huge cooperation between entrepreneurs, engineers, and finance people. This year’s cohort has very diverse backgrounds, and I’m looking forward to exploring and learning from each other.”

Liu plans to continue work on a project he started in the fall, a collaboration between students at Haas and the MBA/Master of Climate Solutions program about finding renewable energy solutions for data centers. Their project, which focused on developing “brownfield sites” — such as old power plants and factories — won second place at the Rice Business Energy Case Competition in November.

A home among like-minded students

Both Heitz and Liu are part of the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative (BERC), and have found a home at Haas among like-minded students who care about sustainability and climate change. 

“I feel like I’m surrounded by sustainability,” said Heitz, who’s also on the board of Food@Haas. As the vice president of events for BERC, she was struck by a recent training where she learned that all events had to adhere to a set of sustainability rules. “Not everyone is climate-oriented here, but they’re really pushing this, and I think that’s phenomenal,” she said.

The same isn’t necessarily true around the world, and in the United States, where climate initiatives have been canceled or rolled back.  

Liu admits that the whiplash of policy change on climate in the U.S. is an added challenge, but he remains hopeful for a clean energy transition in the U.S. and the rest of the world. If prices are competitive, the market will push the transition, despite what governments do.

Heitz said she sees this time as an incubation period for more radical change to come. 

“Just because the administration is shutting a lot of things down doesn’t mean that other things aren’t moving forward,” she said. “It’s truly special to be a ClimateCAP fellow right now, to have the time and the resources for this researc