Deborah MerrilPresidentPresident, Retail, EDF Trading North America, LLCDeb is the President of Retail at EDF, one of the top five suppliers to the large C&I segment. EDF’s knowledgeable teams provide a spectrum of solutions and access to insights that navigate the evolving energy landscape. The platform provides a suite of products including power, gas, renewable energy, demand response, energy efficiency and on-site generation management. It also includes technology solutions for greater transparency including EDGi, a customer portal that provides customer specific data and usage, billing, daily market reports, real time market prices, weather and news. Prior to EDF, Deb led Just Energy for four years as the President and co-CEO where she led the company through a transformation to a consumer-focused retail energy provider delivering real value to consumers. During her time as co-CEO, she improved the business performance and expanded outside North America by adding operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Japan. Deb holds a BA from the College of Wooster, as well as an MBA from Texas A&M University. She is active with various organizations including serving on the advisory board for the Women’s Energy Network and the Hawthorn Club.
Alicia TaylorPresident ElectVice President, Senior Client Specialist, BNY MellonAlicia Taylor has over 17 years of operational and financial experience. Currently, she is Vice President, Senior Client Service Specialist at BNY Mellon. In this role she administers trustee, custodian, collateral administrator services and provides relationship management to portfolio managers, investors and financial institutions. Alicia began her career in Corporate Trust as a Trust Administrator in Global Structured Finance, where she served as a subject matter expert for a variety of processes and products such as reconciliation, accounting services, and cash distributions. Later, she became Relationship Specialist in Corporate & Insurance Business Development, where she established and maintained relationships with fortune 100 companies in the energy, entertainment, technology, and insurance industries. Alicia supported the onboarding of project finance, and debt issuance deals and documents, validation of mandates, know your customer (KYC) and organized several corporate events for client engagement and retention. Alicia is native Houstonian and enjoys being an active member in the community. She joined Women’s Energy Network, Houston Chapter, in 2014 and currently serving as President-Elect. Previously, she has held several roles on the membership committee, partnerships and served as the Co-Director of Membership Programming. Alicia also sits on J.B. Rhodes Prostate Cancer Foundation Board.
Gloria GoffSecretaryDirector of Client Services, FIS GlobalGloria Goff has over 17+ years’ experience working in various fields of finance, sales, and business development. She has 12+ years working with executive leaders of corporations, entrepreneurial companies, municipalities, and school districts. Gloria is a Director at FIS Global working with investors and portfolio managers to provide collateral administration, portfolio analysis, and settlements. She began her career in Treasury Services with JP Morgan Chase then with International Loans managing European portfolios. She moved to Corporate Trust and was part of the asset swap that occurred between JP Morgan and BNY Mellon. She progressed to various roles at BNY Mellon leading up to Vice President and then to the Business Development team where she managed trust and escrow accounts for corporations in energy, healthcare, insurance, technology, and real estate for the Texas and Colorado regions. Through the years, Gloria built trusted relationships and gained valuable experience which provided the opportunity to move to a sales and business development role within Amegy Bank where she continued to improve client service for energy companies, municipalities, and school districts within the Houston, San Antonio, and Austin regions. Gloria enjoys being an active member of her community. She has served as Mentoring Chair for Women’s Energy Network from 2014-2015 and 2015-2016. She was awarded Volunteer of the Year in 2014 then Chair of the Year in 2015 and 2016 for Women’s Energy Network. Gloria is a member of the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo where she volunteers her time on the Ticket Services Committee during the Rodeo Season. She is a member of Junior League, an organization of women committed to promoting voluntarism. She is a founding member of Women on Course formerly known as Events 19, a professional women’s organization created to provide opportunities for women to play golf, network, and participate in various events.
Lily NieTreasurerSenior Associate, Alvarez & MarsalLily Nie is a Senior Associate within the Dispute and Investigation group at Alvarez & Marsal. In her role, she provides financial and accounting analysis regarding lost profit, bankruptcy, international arbitration, and litigation matters. Lily earned her M.S in Accountancy and B.A. in Mathematics Business at Wake Forest University. She is a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Fraud Examiner. Lily is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Lily is passionate about promoting diversity and helping others achieve their full potential. She has two cats: Cash and Grayson. In her spare time, she enjoys art, yoga, and spicy food.
Cheryl CrawfordChief of StaffEDF Energy - Houston SponsorCheryl has over 24 years of experience in professional office management and executive assistant positions in the oil & gas industry. She has a track record of strong performance in high-volume and high-pressure environments. As executive assistant, she ensures the smooth operation of top level executives, Cheryl supports the President, Retail and COO. Cheryl graduated from Lamar University in Beaumont, TX with a Bachelor of Science in Speech Communication. She was a mentor for 3 years with Yellow Stone Academy. She also participated with Just Energy and Volunteer Houston with planning and organizing the building of Sustainable Garden’s at selected HISD campuses.
Sara DeJay WillisMembership DirectorVice President, Alliance Bernstein Private Wealth ManagementSara DeJay Willis is a Property & Casualty risk management professional who specializes in servicing and supporting clients throughout the energy industry. As a Property & Casualty Consultant at USI, a large insurance brokerage firm, Ms. Willis is a team leader responsible for all origination, relationship development, and client support/service. Ms. Willis graduated summa cum laude from The University of Texas at Austin in 2012 and started her career in state politics working in Governor Perry’s office. Immediately following, she served as the Legislative Director and Director of Communications for State Representative Larry Gonzales in the Texas House. Since moving back to Houston in 2015 and starting her career in the insurance brokerage industry at Aon, Ms. Willis has been an active member of the Women’s Energy Network first serving as the Co-Communications Chair from 2016 – 2018, and most recently as the Co-Chair of the Executive Events Committee from 2018 – 2019. In her spare time, Ms. Willis enjoys spending time with her loved ones, close friends and animals John Henry, Lillie, Frank Sinatra, and Socrates. Her utmost passion is promoting women in the workplace to reach their career ambitions and lend those a helping hand along the way.
Katie HouseCommunity Initiatives DirectorProduct Manager, Darcy PartnersKatie House is an Engineer, Connector, Entrepreneur, Motivational Speaker, & HUGE advocate for Women in STEM! She is currently Co-Director of Community Initiatives with WEN Houston. Professionally, Katie is currently the Innovation Projects Lead at Darcy Partners, a technology scouting and consulting firm in Downtown Houston, as well as a certified yoga teacher.
Emma RussellCommunity Initiatives DirectorSr Manager, Global Supply Chain, Hess CorporationEmma Russell is a Senior Manager at Hess Corporation in their Global Supply Chain team. Emma leads and manages a team responsible for the strategic sourcing of the organization's indirect spend and purchases. Prior to moving to Hess, Emma worked for Warm Commerce, a Houston startup, as their Director of Member Success. In this role Emma used her experience within the Energy industry, operations and supply chain to oversee all members on the platform as well as company operations and platform development to support this. Previous to Warm Commerce, Emma worked for BHP over 11 years executing a variety of roles within their Commercial and Supply Chain functions. From managing purchasing teams to category management groups across both onshore and offshore operations, Emma’s most recent role was on the leadership team as Head of Business Partnership for Supply with accountability to provide alignment and wiring between Supply and the Petroleum Conventional business. Emma has a passion for supporting gender equality and empowering women to push forward their careers therefore plays an active role in the Women’s Energy Network – Houston Chapter and is currently serving as Director of Community Initiatives. With a keen interest in supporting the community as well as innovation and technology, Emma is a Fractional Executive, coaching and advocating for Houston Startups, and Investor Member at The Cannon. Emma has an undergraduate Bachelor of Commerce degree, majoring in Marketing and Public Relations, from Curtin University in Perth, Australia as well as a Master of Commerce degree, majoring in Marketing, from the University of Western Australia. Emma and her husband Collin are parents to Ava, a sweet and sassy 18 month old, and in their personal time enjoy playing golf, travelling, spending quality time with friends, family and their two cats.
Lindsey BentonMarketing DirectorCommunications Advisor, ChevronLindsey Benton is currently the Communications Advisor for Chevron’s exploration and production operations throughout North America. Lindsey has more than 15+ years of marketing communications and corporate communications experience in the technology and energy sectors. She began her career in advertising at J. Walter Thompson (JWT) where she led multi-million-dollar national advertising campaigns and large-scale events promoting retail fuels and lubricants products for a major oil and gas company. From 2011-2018, Lindsey held a variety of corporate communications, external affairs and marketing roles at GE Oil & Gas working alongside c-suite executives to protect and enhance the company's reputation, shape the culture, and launch new products to the marketplace. Prior to joining Chevron, she served as a Senior Manager of executive and employee communications to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). She holds an MBA from Syracuse University and a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from The New School University in New York. Lindsey is an active volunteer in the Houston community. She has been a Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo volunteer for 10+ years and is currently an Assistant Captain on the Events and Functions committee. Previously, she served as the Women’s Energy Network Houston Mentoring Chair and STEM Charity Luncheon Chair and received the Chair of the Year award twice for her outstanding leadership. In addition, Lindsey was a former Volunteer Captain on the Houston Super Bowl Host Committee in 2017.
Angela O'PryMarketing DirectorMarketing Manager, Access SciencesAngela O'Pry currently serves The Women’s Energy Network Houston Chapter as the Co-Marketing Director. She is a graduate of Texas A&M University with a B.B.A. in Marketing. Her professional experience includes all things marketing – leading website redesign projects, implementing Account Based Marketing strategies, planning corporate events, managing social media accounts, organizing trade shows, and balancing budgets. She also has experience interviewing, hiring, and training new employees. In addition to WEN Houston and working full-time, she is also serving as the Regional Housing Specialist for Delta Gamma Fraternity Region 6, a big sister for Big Brothers Big Sisters, on the communications committee for the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, and assistant troop leader at a local homeless shelter for Girl Scouts. Angela is passionate about setting goals and exceeding them, continuous learning, and challenging status quo. In her personal time, she enjoys travelling the world, yoga, and supporting young women.
Sandy MaDirector of Membership ProgrammingIB Associate, CitigroupSandy Ma is an investment banking associate at Citi in the Global Energy group in Houston. She completed her MBA at Rice University’s Jones’ School of Business. Prior to Rice, she worked in operations engineering for Sunoco Logistics and Energy Transfer for 5 years. Sandy earned her Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas in Austin. Sandy has been active in the Women’s Energy Network since initially joining the mentoring program as a mentee in 2014. Since then, she has served as an Advisory Council Liason in 2017 and will be serving her third year on the board as the Co-Director of Membership Programming in 2021. She looks forward to continue WEN’s amazing track-record of producing meaningful, educational, and value-enhancing programming for its members.
Lilian WeeDirector of Membership ProgrammingCommercial & Tender Coordinator, BoskalisLilian Wee works for Boskalis, a Royal Dutch dredging and offshore energy company as a Commercial and Tender Coordinator here in the Houston office. Her expertise is in bid preparation and contracts negotiation to secure charters for the company’s fleet of semi-submersible vessels to execute transportation of large and heavy offshore cargoes, from onshore LNG modules to offshore rigs to floating production units. Her attributes of being someone who is highly organized, meticulous and has a strong acumen for business and people relations makes her an invaluable asset to the team. She started involving herself in WEN in January 2019, a short few months after she uprooted her life back home in Singapore to Houston to work and live with her fiancée and their new furbaby, Sadie. She later took on the challenge of Corporate Membership Chair for WENH in 2020/2021 and is currently the Co-Director for Membership Programming for 2021/2022. Traveling, enjoying delectable cuisines, yoga and making meaningful connection through intentional conversations are her favorite activities outside of work.
Jenn BiancoDirector of Educational ProgrammingDeloitteJenn is a Senior Manager with 13 years of experience working across global mobility and expatriate tax, specializing in the oil and gas industry. She is dedicated to the strategic partnerships that she develops with her with clients to anticipate and mitigate the vast technical, talent and business driven issues surrounding mobility. She also leads Deloitte’s Mobility Analytics offering, focused on partnering with organizations for organizations to leverage their data to drive value and support strategic business objectives. To do this, Jenn embarks on a digital journey with her clients, starting with stakeholder engagement across various functions and business lines, to design and development of technical requirements, followed by seamless implementation and change management. The result is to elevate the impact of mobility functions through digitized collation of data and simplified, user centric consumption of information. Jenn has delivered numerous successful digital approaches and solutions to her clients that allow them to offer self-service to their stakeholders and customers, to report on and leverage data for prediction of cost, assignment trending and potential success of an assignment. Jenn brings with her a diversified background, working across technical competencies of mobility tax, compensation, equity, mobility and tax policy and digital transformation. Outside of Deloitte, she led the global expatriate tax program for a top 10 Fortune Global 500 company and the global mobility function for an industry leading multinational mining and metals company. She can quickly navigate corporate and system driven complexities to get to the root of a problem and offer insight into creative and industry leading approaches to solving that problem. Jenn is a graduate of the University of Texas, with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree accounting with an emphasis in Tax. She is a Certified Public Accountant in Texas.
Sabrina KristobakDirector of Educational ProgrammingAir Liquide - Houston SponsorSabrina Kristobak is currently a Business Development Manager for Air Liquide Large Industries. She is responsible for developing large-scale business across the US with chemical, petrochemical, refining, and metals customers to build new Air Liquide facilities. Along with identifying new business and working with prospective customers, this role includes negotiating the contracts and getting the project approved internally. Sabrina is actively involved in developing solutions to support customer’s energy transition goals. Prior to this Sabrina was a Business Analyst for Air Liquide Large Industries where she was responsible for financial reporting and led the five-year strategic planning cycle. She has also held the positions of Energy Product Supply Manager and Operations & Compliance Engineer for the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River pipeline networks. She joined Air Liquide in 2014 as an ALLEX Program participant where she rotated through various positions, including Eastern zone engineer for Industrial Merchants, strategic analyst for Large Industries, digital workplace change manager for Air Liquide University and project engineer for Advanced Business & Technology. Sabrina holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University with a minor in Spanish. She has been a member of the Women’s Energy Network for several years and has held the positions of Chief of Staff and Public Relations Chair. She is thrilled to serve on WEN’s Board of Directors for the Houston Chapter as the Co-Director of Educational Programming.
Sarah MagruderSponsorship DirectorPresident, CEO and Owner, Safire Oil & Gas ConsultingSarah Magruder is the President, CEO and Owner of Safire Oil and Gas Consulting, a Severance tax consulting group based out of Houston, TX. She has a Bachelors in Finance from LSU and her MBA from University of Houston. She has spent almost her entire 19 year career in Severance tax, splitting time between working directly in medium and large oil and gas companies and as an outside consultant. Sarah is currently serving on WEN Houston's Board of Directors as the Co-Director of Sponsorship for 2021-2. She lives on a little farm in Montgomery, TX, with her husband, 5-year-old son, five horses and two dogs.
Alma ShieldsSponsorship DirectorShareholder, Liskow & LewisAlma Shields is a shareholder and business and energy litigator at the law firm of Liskow & Lewis’ Houston office. For her clients in the oil and gas industry, she handles a variety of complex matters, including general contractual disputes, indemnification, royalty disputes, trespass, and personal injury matters. Her experience is concentrated on appeals, as well as trials and alternative dispute resolution. Alma is the Sponsorship Chair for the Women’s Energy Network – Houston Chapter, a recently selected member of the Institute for Energy Law’s 2nd Leadership Class and the President of the Friends of CanCare (a charity providing caregivers and emotional support for cancer patients). She and her husband, Daniel, have a one-year old son, Harris, and in their spare time, enjoy cooking and traveling.
Deanna YoungImmediate Past PresidentManaging Director, Opportune - National SponsorDeanna Young is a Managing Director of Opportune LLP. Deanna has over 15 years of consulting, management, and business strategy experience serving clients in the energy sector. Prior to joining Opportune, Deanna was the Co-Founder and President of AXIA, a professional services firm that focused in financial consulting, SEC research, IPO Advisory and Risk Management. Deanna led diverse teams of consultants in developing business strategies, organizational structures, and achieving financial success. Deanna started her career at Deloitte with a focus in the energy, manufacturing, and construction markets. While at Deloitte, she was selected to perform an international assignment with a major Russian energy company. She then expanded her international experience by accepting a position with Keystone International, where she focused on the operational control structure of various manufacturing plants located in Scotland, China and Mexico. Deanna also spent five years with a boutique consulting firm where she led business development activities and helped clients from throughout the energy sector accomplish their organizational and talent development strategies. A certified public accountant, Deanna received her Bachelors of Business Administration degree with honors in Accounting from Stephen F. Austin University and her MBA from Rice University. In 2013, she was awarded the Jones Citizen Award by the faculty at Rice University Jones School of Business for her commitment to serving others and exemplifying the leadership attributes of the university. Deanna currently serves as board member for WEN (Women’s Energy Network), Junior Achievement, She is a former board member of His Grace Foundation and Discovery Fitness Foundation.