Christopher Wedding

Dr. Chris Wedding is a former private equity investor, award-winning professor, startup founder, investment banker, and executive coach, with over $1 billion of investment experience and 50,000 professional students taught. His focus is climate tech, renewable energy infrastructure, impact/ESG investing, corporate sustainability strategy, and green real estate.

In addition to his work at Kenan-Flagler, he is the Founder of Entrepreneurs for Impact (private peer groups for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors solving climate change); the Managing Director of IronOak Energy Capital (climate tech investment banking); an Executive in Residence at the Fuqua School of Business, an Associate Professor with the Nicholas School of the Environment, and a Gosnell Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics at Duke University; one of the earliest LEED Accredited Professionals with the US Green Building Council; a certified Mastermind Professional; and former Director and Senior Advisor at Cherokee Investment Partners, a private equity firm that raised over $2 billion in private equity funds and, separately, founded or invested in over 150 startups and venture funds.

He brings a global perspective, with experience in 20+ countries, and language abilities in Spanish, Japanese, and Creole. He is a frequent speaker at energy and finance conferences.

Dr. Wedding also writes about climate finance, conscious leadership, personal productivity, and social justice via his newsletter ZERO: Climate Finance. In addition, he hosts a podcast, Climate Torch, which interviews climate CEOs, founders, and investors. He received a BS summa cum laude in Environmental Science from Western Kentucky University, where he was a national Goldwater Scholar in Math and Science. At UNC, he earned an MS and PhD focused on business and strategy in real estate and energy. He lives with his wife and three children in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Education

• Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008)
• M.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2005)

Areas of Expertise

• corporate social responsibility
• finance
• social entrepreneurship
• sustainability
• strategy
• energy
• entrepreneurship