Lauren Greenlee, Ph.D., is the Executive Vice President of the Food + Water + Waste Domain at XPRIZE Foundation, a global leader in incentive competitions that drive innovation to solve major human challenges. With 20 years of experience in national labs, academia, and startups, she now leads XPRIZE’s initiatives in food, water, and waste. Before XPRIZE, Lauren was the Chief Technology Officer at sHYp, a startup developing green hydrogen from seawater. There, she led R\&D, technical strategy, and helped scale the technology while supporting business development and fundraising efforts. Lauren’s passion for sustainable water solutions was sparked over 25 years ago during travels to Australia and Indonesia. Her career has since focused on water, energy, agriculture, and waste circularity, advocating for interdisciplinary approaches to these interconnected global challenges. She holds degrees in Chemical and Environmental Engineering, a Strategic Leadership Certificate, and is currently completing her MBA. Outside work, she enjoys outdoor activities like running, biking, skiing, and hiking. In this interview with Oke Peter, Lauren shares how XPRIZE is driving breakthrough innovation at the intersection of food, water and waste and why integrated cross-sector solutions are the key to a sustainable future. Excepts
Your work at XPRIZE spans food, water, and waste — three deeply interconnected sectors. How do you approach solving challenges that lie at the intersection of these traditionally complex fields?
At XPRIZE, we recognize that food, water, and waste are not separate sectors but an interconnected system that underpins human health, equity, and planetary resilience. A breakthrough in one area, like sustainable water access, inevitably drives progress in food production and waste reduction, and vice versa. It’s important when trying to solve challenges in these areas that we break down the separation that often exists between individual experts and stakeholders that might have a certain background, education, or expertise.
To do this, our approach is intentionally cross-disciplinary. When we first design prize concepts and develop ideas for the next set of competitions, we intentionally convene groups of experts and thinkers who have never been together before – for example, if we are looking at say nutrient cycles in agriculture, we would only have one or two nutrient experts in the room and we would be sure to have many other types of expertise, including artists and creators. In this way, we start our prize ideation funnel with prize concepts that come out of truly interdisciplinary conversations and discussion. We then create prize competitions that get at the heart of a core problem, with goals that are set without sector or disciplinary bias. When we launch and run prizes, we bring together innovators from diverse fields, promote systems-level thinking, and design competitions that encourage bold solutions unconstrained by traditional silos.
One example is our $119M XPRIZE Water Scarcity competition: this initiative works to address increasing threats of climate change, help alleviate water stress worldwide, and overall enable people globally to prosper. We are bringing together interdisciplinary teams, promoting systems-level and component innovation, and have fostered strong collaboration across sectors to bring new solutions to the forefront.
We are equally committed to a long-term vision. By 2040, XPRIZE aims to help achieve sustainable, circular systems that ensure universal access to food and water. These goals include cutting agricultural freshwater use by half, reducing global food loss and waste to under 10%, eliminating plastic pollution, doubling smallholder crop and livestock productivity, and ensuring equitable access to protein for all. We also recognize that these fields are complex and that it is not possible to solve all of the problems all at the same time. Our prizes intentionally focus on key goals that must be achieved first to build momentum and drive innovation and change across the broader sector or industry.
By setting audacious targets and incentivizing solutions at the intersections, XPRIZE is demonstrating that our competition model can catalyze breakthroughs no other organization can and in ways that inherently break down traditional sector barriers and drive interdisciplinary innovation.
At sHYp, you helped advance the company’s technology from TRL 3 to TRL 6. What were the biggest technical and leadership challenges in that process, and how did you overcome them?
The biggest technical challenge was deciding where to focus and how, in terms of solving problems so that the technology could be advanced. I oversaw work by sHYp to bring a technology out of the laboratory environment and achieve an initial scale up to first system pilot, and there were not just one but many technical challenges to be solved in order to achieve this goal. What I saw is that sometimes it’s not possible to solve all of the problems at the same time, so we had to figure out how to prioritize and focus on the most important for scale up and demonstration.
In terms of leadership, I think creating a company culture when there is none and you have to build a brand new team was one of the most difficult challenges to tackle with intention. I have seen or been a part of many teams where culture was left to develop or devolve on its own, and I wanted to be very intentional about the culture we had. With such a new team and a range of personalities and experience levels, it was both an opportunity and a great challenge to think about and then create our team and company culture.
XPRIZE competitions aim to drive bold innovation. What qualities do you believe make an innovation or team truly “XPRIZE-worthy”?
At XPRIZE, an innovation is “XPRIZE-worthy” when it doesn’t just make existing solutions a little better but reimagines what’s possible altogether. We look for bold ideas that can scale globally, transform entire systems, and deliver lasting benefit for both people and the planet. XPRIZE teams blend creativity with feasibility, pairing visionary thinking with the ability to deliver tangible results through rigorous testing. It’s not about prestige or pedigree, it’s about the courage to challenge convention, the ingenuity to design breakthrough methods or systems, and the clarity to chart a path from concept to reality.
Across all of our prizes, the same qualities apply: a commitment to bold thinking, a systems-level perspective, and a drive to create solutions that can scale equitably and sustainably.
In the XPRIZE Water Scarcity competition, that looks like teams developing complete, energy-efficient seawater desalination systems or novel materials that could radically shift the economics of water. The competition is divided into two tracks: Track A includes 93 qualified teams focused on system-level innovation in desalination. Track B consists of 50 teams working on novel materials and methods that aim to transform desalination technology in new and impactful ways.
Across all of our prizes, the same qualities apply: a commitment to bold thinking, a systems-level perspective, and a drive to create solutions that can scale equitably and sustainably. We welcome all types of innovators, including first-time competitors and locally has evolved in the sense that I have a much greater appreciation for how much the availability of fresh water truly underpins every activity that humans undertake in a day, and how many people world-wide are impacted by the lack of available water resources. I think the reality of water challenges affecting all communities, including my own, is much more of a presence in my life rather than it being an issue that happens to other people in other places, and I think that evolution is a product of continued learning in the water space and a better understanding of the broad spectrum of challenges that people face.
You’ve worked across academia, national labs, startups, and now a major foundation. How have these diverse environments shaped your leadership style and decision-making?
Working across different types of organizations and in different environments has given me the opportunity to see how others lead, as well as experience the challenges of working in different types of teams and as an individual contributor within different organizational structures. It’s taught me that it’s important to understand the organization’s direction and the forces at play when making decisions for and with my teams. I have also seen a lack of strong leadership and a lack of understanding that placing people in positions of leadership does not make them automatically skilled – I think leadership is a skill that is learned, and it’s been a topic of learning for me.
One of the biggest components of my leadership style is a focus on understanding people and leading through influence, discussion, and example. I want my team to have autonomy and the space to be leaders of their work, as well as contribute as partners to the team’s direction and success. I aim to provide guardrails and to show directionally where we are going and then to let the team play a major role in how the goals are achieved. I also believe my job is to remove barriers, provide support, and make sure my team has the tools and space they need to accomplish their goals.
Decision-making really comes down to whether my team can make a decision on their own or whether I need to step in. I prefer to see team members making decisions on their own or in collaboration with others but in ways that align with the overall goals and direction. My role as a decision-maker comes early on to help set that direction, or at times of problem-solving, when the team needs help in moving forward.
You’re currently pursuing an MBA while already holding advanced technical degrees. How do you see the combination of technical and business expertise influencing your future work in sustainability and innovation?
I actually recently finished my MBA at the end of 2024. I started it several years ago with a certificate in strategic leadership and then decided to do the full MBA. I had reached a point in my career where I felt that I was ready for new challenges, and I felt that I could use some organized learning in new areas such as leadership, finance, and business strategy to help open up new areas of thinking. I also was interested in expanding my interactions with people beyond my core community of technical and research colleagues.
I think the MBA, combined with the start up experience, really brought into focus the challenges of getting innovations out into the market place and the importance of understanding finance and market influences on how technologies become business successes or not. It’s really shaped my view of early stage finance for start ups and how important it is for technical founders to learn business skills and be willing to realize there is so much they don’t know about making a technology commercially successful. In terms of my future work, it’s made me even more passionate about working in the space of early stage technologies and innovation and helping innovators realize their dreams of seeing a problem solved through their solutions.
Looking ahead five years, how do you envision the future of the XPRIZE Foundation and its impact?
As the challenges we face continue to evolve, I am confident that XPRIZE will remain agile in responding to humanity’s most pressing needs, maintaining a steadfast focus on fostering the breakthrough collaboration required to deliver enduring solutions. Over the next 15 years, XPRIZE aims to catalyze more than $30 billion in social and economic impact, tackling the world’s most urgent challenges. Our mission is to bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be, where everyone has equitable access to clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, quality education, optimal health, sustainable energy, and more. Equally important, I believe we will see an even broader and more diverse array of problem-solvers stepping forward. By continuing to inspire, encourage, and catalyze groundbreaking ideas from every corner of the globe, XPRIZE will help drive equitable abundance for all.
