5/1/2025 3 min read
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Mechanical science and engineering alumnus Jigar Shah (BSME 1996) is one of seven recipients of this year’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Service from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Shah was honored for his tireless, career-long efforts to advance clean energy and his visionary leadership and innovation in the field of sustainable infrastructure.
Shah, who also earned an MBA from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2001, is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and energy strategist. He served as Director of the Loan Programs Office (LPO) at the U.S. Department of Energy from March 2021 to January 2025, where he led the agency’s loan authority to support deployment of innovative clean energy, advanced transportation and Tribal energy projects in the United States.
“I was very lucky early on in life to have a pretty disciplined and religious upbringing, and being able to center oneself is a very difficult thing to do, especially today. That’s the biggest piece of advice I give people is to figure out how to center yourself." - Jigar Shah
Prior to his work at the DOE, Shah was co-founder and president at Generate Capital, where he focused on helping entrepreneurs accelerate decarbonization solutions using low-cost infrastructure-as-a-service financing. Shah served as the founding CEO of the Carbon War Room, a global non-profit founded by Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Unite to help entrepreneurs address climate change. He also founded SunEdison, a company that pioneered “pay as you save” solar financing. In 2024, TIME named Shah to its 100 Most Influential People list. He is also a recipient, in 2012, of the MechSE Distinguished Alumni Award.
“One of the things I find fascinating in this moment is that while we’re building all this extraordinary technology, all of which I love – and I love meeting entrepreneurs – the rest of the sciences that the University of Illinois brings together to allow for some of these other big questions to get answered is hugely inspiring,” said Shah at a recent college-moderated panel with all of this year’s award winners.
The winners of the 2025 Grainger College of Engineering Alumni Award for Distinguished Service are:
- Mun Y. Choi (BS general engineering 1987)
- Jason Cong (MS computer science 1987, PhD computer science 1990)
- David J. Eichhorn (BS electrical engineering 1976)
- Mark Scifres (BS general engineering 1996)
- Jigar H. Shah (BS mechanical engineering 1996)
- Parisa Tabriz (BS computer science 2005, BS computer science 2007)
- David Yeh (BS computer engineering 1983, MS electrical engineering 1985, PhD electrical engineering 1990)