As a founding member of McKinsey & Company’s Environmental Practice, he specialized in the commercialization and marketing of environmental technologies. He also worked extensively with the firm’s corporate finance practice, focusing especially on entrepreneurial finance issues.

Mr. Merkl was also Vice President and co-founder of the CH2M HILL Strategy Group, a leading provider of environmental management consulting services worldwide. Most of his work concerned capital planning and the management of complex environmental risks.

Mr. Merkl holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard University, a Master of Regional Planning and Natural Resource Analysis form the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz.