William (Bill) Grieco is the Chief Executive Officer of AIChE’s RAPID (Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment) Manufacturing Institute.
Most recently, William (Bill) Grieco was the Vice President of Energy & Environment at Southern Research, a 501(c)3 nonprofit research institute in the Southeastern U.S. In this role, he defined and implemented strategies to transform and grow the business from one serving only the fossil energy sector to a boutique innovation testing, development, and consulting organization focused on reducing the environmental footprint of energy generation and chemicals production. Among his key accomplishments were building new businesses in photovoltaics and energy storage, growing a sustainable chemistry and process development group and readying multiple technologies for licensing, and developing a public-private partnership to foster innovation-based economic development in Alabama.
Prior to joining Southern Research, Bill spent five years leading innovation and technology for Owens Corning, the building materials and composites company, where he built a Front End of Innovation team and led research and development for the $3 billion Building Materials Group. Among his notable successes were winning $13 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy SunShot program to develop and commercialize a building integrated solar photovoltaic roofing shingle for residential use.
Earlier in his career, Bill was Managing Director and CTO of Gardenia Ventures, an innovation commercialization and consulting firm. In this role, he led investment due diligence, technology strategy development, and opportunity search and selection efforts for clients ranging from private equity investors to new ventures to F500 firms.
For ten years prior to leading Gardenia Ventures, Bill held senior level innovation roles, primarily focused on process development across multiple industries. He was Vice President of Research and Development for the biofuels startup PetroAlgae, where he and his team built the first-of-a-kind intensive biomass production process to grow and convert aquatic plants to purified proteins and energy feedstocks. He was Director of Process Development for the biopharmaceutical firm Alkermes, where he led development and commercialization for the VIVITROL® and RISPERDAL® CONSTA® product lines. He started his career at the specialty chemicals firm Rohm and Haas Company, now part of Dow Chemical, where led both corporate level and business unit initiatives to develop new processes for monomers and chemical intermediates production.
In addition to these roles, Bill serves on the external advisory boards for Florida Solar Energy Center and the Georgia Tech Energy Policy Innovation Center. He has been an active member of AIChE for 25 years, and chaired the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum in the mid 2000s.
He holds a PhD and Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.