Meet The Forum Team: Grace Brach

For Grace Brach SOM ’28, her path from civil engineering to energy innovation began with a simple question: how can infrastructure meet humanity’s most basic needs?

Originally from Buffalo, New York, Brach studied civil engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where she developed an interest in sustainability and infrastructure. Right out of college, she joined Booz Allen Hamilton, a government consulting company, where she was assigned to manage portfolios for the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Through her work, she began to see energy as a natural extension of civil engineering to help meet humanity’s basic needs via infrastructure. For five years, Brach managed portfolios of early-stage clean energy research projects spanning technologies including grid optimization, airplane efficiency, and first wall fusion materials. 

ARPA-E occupies a unique space in the emerging energy technology ecosystem. Its mission is to support high-risk, high-reward technologies that may be too early or uncertain to attract private investment. Brach’s work placed her at the intersection of technical, legal, and financial teams, giving her a diverse perspective on how emerging technologies move from research toward commercialization. 

While Brach loved the mission-oriented nature of government work, she is now thinking about how to play a role in determining how private capital flows within the energy and climate technology landscape. That’s what brought her to SOM. Brach wants to develop the private-sector skill set necessary to evaluate and finance emerging technologies, with the long-term goal of helping direct capital toward energy and climate solutions. “I want to move capital towards energy and climate tech and understand how we make those decisions,” Brach says. 

At SOM, Brach has immersed herself in the energy and venture capital communities. She is involved with the Energy Club, Venture Capital Club, Net Impact Club, and Hockey Club, among others. She is also involved as a writer for the Clean Energy Forum at the Center for Business and Environment at Yale, where she continues to explore the intersections of business, technology, and sustainability. 

Looking ahead, Brach is particularly excited about the potential of grid technologies. While much of the current conversation around AI and energy focuses on the enormous electricity demands of data centers, she sees another side of the relationship between AI and the grid where AI has the potential to also help make existing infrastructure more efficient. She notes that the U.S. electric grid faces aging physical infrastructure and increasingly complex demands for electricity. Brach sees AI-enabled software as one potential tool for optimizing how energy moves through the system and improving the efficiency of existing infrastructure. Rather than viewing AI solely as another source of pressure on the grid, she is interested in how it might help address some of the very problems it is contributing to.