Phil De Luna

Expert, Sustainability, NRC

Phil De Luna (PhD, Materials Science) is a world-leading expert in carbon conversion technologies, artificial photosynthesis, clean energy materials, and machine learning for materials discovery.

Phil is currently an expert in sustainability at McKinsey & Company, where he helps solve the industry’s hardest decarbonization problems. He leads teams and works with executive leaders in corporations, governments, and non-profits to enable sustainable, inclusive growth.

Prior to joining McKinsey, Phil was the youngest-ever director at the National Research Council of Canada where he built and led a $57M collaborative research program on Canada-made transformative technologies to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. He oversaw a portfolio of almost 40 projects across four countries and supervised a team of nearly 40 national lab scientists.

Phil was a finalist in the Carbon XPRIZE, a $20M worldwide competition to capture and convert the most CO2 into something useful. This earned him a spot on the 2019 Forbes Top 30 Under 30 – Energy list. He was in the 2019 Creative Destruction Lab – Rockies Energy Stream, and the Next36 where he raised $2M in non-dilutive funding for the XPRIZE venture.

He earned his bachelor’s in chemistry from the University of Windsor before earning his master’s in chemistry at the University of Ottawa. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the Canadian Light Source. He was a researcher at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center and the Toyota Research Institute where he worked on biosensing and machine learning for batteries and fuel cells respectively. Phil has published over 47 papers in high-impact journals such as Science and Nature and is a Governor General Gold Medalist. His research has been featured in mainstream media such as CBC, Newsweek, The Independent, Vice, and others.