Mark Mills
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute Faculty Fellow, Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering
Strategic Partner, Cottonwood Venture Partners
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science where he co-directs the Institute on Manufacturing Science and Innovation. He is also a strategic partner with Montrose Lane ventures (an energy-tech fund focused on software). He is author of the book Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era (Encounter Books, 2020) and Work In The Age Of Robots (Encounter, 2018), and earlier co-authored the 2005 book The Bottomless Well which rose to #1 in Amazon’s science rankings, and about which Bill Gates said: “This is the only book I’ve ever seen that really explains energy.” Previously, he cofounded Digital Power Capital, which invested in such emerging technologies as LED lighting, power semiconductors for smart grids, and where he served as Chairman and interim CEO of a lithium battery factory. At DPC Mills undertook a year-long global, China-focused, evaluation of and visits to manufacturers of solar, wind and battery technologies. Earlier, Mills was a technology advisor for Bank of America Securities on emerging energy technologies, and coauthor of the Huber-Mills Digital Power Report, a tech investment newsletter that covered such subjects as LEDs, fuel cells, microturbines, batteries, power semiconductors and industrial automation. And, until its sale to HP, Mills served as an independent Director of thepreeminent engineering firm that designed power systems for global datacenters. He has testified numerous times before Congress on energy and technology matters. Early in his career Mills served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan and subsequently provided science and technology policy counsel to numerous private-sector firms, the Department of Energy, and U.S. research laboratories. Prior to that, Mills was an experimental physicist and development engineer in microprocessors and fiber optics, earning several patents for his work at Bell Northern Research (Canada’s Bell Labs) and at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Center. He holds a degree in physics from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.
