Jeffrey Kupfer is an adjunct professor of policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College and an advisor to Beacon Global Strategies, a Washington DC based strategic advisory firm. He is also a co-founder of Starling Trust Sciences, an applied behavioral sciences technology company.
Mr. Kupfer has served in a number of senior roles in the U.S. government. From 2006 to 2009, he was Chief of Staff and then Acting Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer at the U.S. Energy Department. He played a central role in the development and implementation of U.S. energy policy. Among other responsibilities, he represented the Department at numerous international meetings, including two U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogues, as well as leading the U.S. delegation to the 2008 International Energy Forum and the London Energy Minister’s meeting.
Before coming to the Department of Energy, Mr. Kupfer worked in the White House as a Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and in the U.S. Treasury Department as the Deputy Chief of Staff. He also served as the Executive Director of President George W. Bush’s Panel on Federal Tax Reform, a bipartisan group that unanimously recommended two different options for overhauling the tax code. In other government service, Mr. Kupfer was a tax counsel for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, an investigative counsel for the Senate Government Affairs Committee, and a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.
In the private sector, Mr. Kupfer was a senior advisor for policy and government affairs at Chevron. In that role, he led the policy, legislative, and regulatory initiatives for Chevron’s Marcellus Shale business unit and helped to steer the engagement and overall policy for the company’s unconventional natural gas operations. He was appointed by the Governors of Pennsylvania and Maryland to participate on their respective commissions to study and recommend policies for natural gas development.
Mr. Kupfer holds degrees from Yale University and Harvard Law School. During 2014, he was the Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society, focusing on U.S.-Asia energy issues.