Wing foiling is Jennifer Turliuk’s favorite sport. It’s sort of a cross between kite surfing and sailing. Speeding across the Charles River, Jennifer knows how to harness the power of wind energy.

Jennifer is a Sloan Fellow and a practice leader of climate and energy AI at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, where she develops new AI tools in collaboration with the MIT Climate Policy Center for MIT’s Climate and Energy Ventures course and the MIT Climate Policy Center. To date, the class has helped launch 60-plus spinouts that have raised $5 billion in venture capital. Jennifer’s recent contributions to the impressive outcomes continually generated by this course are just the tip of her wave of her accomplishments. 

As a technologist, climate tech investor, speaker, and author, Jennifer’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Fast Company, and Wired, among others. What’s more, she has delivered numerous speeches and presentations. The list of venues includes events during the World Economic Forum in Davos, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP29), Planet Action/TEDxBoston, New York Climate Week, the Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance symposium, Harvard, MIT, Climate Change AI, Climate Capital, and Terra.do.

At COP29 last November, Jennifer served on a panel about digital innovation for climate solutions. In January, she spoke at several events during Davos 2025 and led a panel on how AI can accelerate energy transition. More recently, Jennifer spoke at ARPA-E Summit as part of the new ACCELERATE game, a simulation about climate and energy entrepreneurship and AI that she developed in collaboration with the US Department of Energy. 

Jennifer says. “At COP-29, I demoed the AI chatbots I built for the En-ROADS climate policy simulator tool. In Davos, I ended up speaking at five events and attending various others. It was an amazing opportunity.” 

Before joining MIT, Jennifer earned an undergraduate business degree from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and completed Singularity University's Global Solutions Program at NASA Ames Research Park. Around that time, she also co-founded the Toronto-based MakerKids, touted as one of the first makerspaces for children in the world. As CEO, she grew the startup into an edtech company offering virtual classes, earned recognition from major media, secured clients like Twitter and Microsoft, bootstrapped to revenue self-sufficiency, raised venture capital, and exited through acquisition. 

Back then, Jennnifer was passionate about technology, but it was one day in the summer of 2023, when she was working with kids at one of the company’s makerspaces, that her desire to harness tech to address the climate crisis was ignited.

“I was at robotics and coding camp with a group of kids who were excited to go outside to the park at lunch. But the smoke from record-setting wildfires across the region was so bad that we couldn’t take them out. .” 

After that ‘a-ha’ moment, Jennifer worked in climate tech venture investing. As partner of Climate Capital Syndicate, one of the most active climate tech funders in the world (350+ portfolio companies), she sourced, performed due diligence on, and led investments into climate tech companies. Following that, she was tapped to run and co-instruct Climate Angels, an educational program on climate tech angel investing. She chose MIT as the best place to combine her passions for teaching, technology, and climate innovation to help innovators address the climate crisis. Looking back, she says she definitely made the right choice. 

Jennifer is clearly the type of person who makes the most of every opportunity—and of her time. When asked if she ever sleeps, she laughs. But her seemingly tireless motivation and drive aren’t purely fuel for achieving her own professional goals and accolades. She cares deeply about making the world a better, more sustainable place.

In addition to completing her own MBA coursework, Jennifer mentored entrepreneurs via the Founder Institute and MIT's Climate & Energy Prize. She also served as managing director of ClimaTech's Great Global Innovation Challenge, a managing director of the MIT Energy and Climate Hackathon, and vice president of climate and AI for MIT’s Climate & Energy Prize. 

In January 2025, in her not-so-spare time, Jennifer offered a hybrid course at MIT called AI for Energy Solutions. She was more than a little surprised when , including applicants across academia and industry, from FERC, NREL, Breakthrough, Mitsubishi, NASA, and more. 

“I like to see the impact of my teaching and to empower people,” Jennifer says. “I enjoy seeing how people can change their mindsets and be able to do more than they expect. 

Jennifer is about to graduate. In addition to everything she accomplished in her short time at MIT, somehow, she also established a wing foiling program at the Institute—the first-ever at any university, she says. Perhaps when she’s out on the water, with the wind in her hair, that’s when Jennifer relaxes. But most likely, that’s when she’s plotting how to achieve her next goal—for herself and the planet.