Emerging Transportation Forum

Jill A Tarzian Sorensen

Jill A. Tarzian Sorensen is the founder and Executive Director of BEVI, the Baltimore-Washington Electric Vehicle Initiative, a non-profit established in 2007 to promote electric vehicle education, outreach and use.  Jill also is a senior innovation manager with over twenty years of experience in intellectual asset and technology management, and directs a business consultancy through Bilyan, LLC. Through Bilyan, Jill has supported technology development in the energy, health, agriculture, pharma and nutraceuticals, water treatment and transportation sectors, to name a few.  She is the former director of technology transfer at Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Dave Erb

In a 30 year career as an automotive engineer, Dave Erb has developed vehicles with gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, alcohol, natural gas, electric, and hybrid electric powertrains.  He specializes in electric and hybrid electric vehicle (EV/HEV) design, having first worked with HEVs in 1986 as a test and development engineer in the heavy truck and transit bus industry.  From 1995 through 2004, Dave created and taught a three-day professional development short course on “Design of Hybrid Electric Vehicles” for the Society of Automotive Engineers.  A group of students under his direction won the 1994 Hybrid Electric Vehicle Challenge.  He has won EV races on road courses, dragstrips, and oval tracks.  Dave holds BS and MS degrees in Aerospace and Ocean Engineering from Virginia Tech and an MBA from Queens College.  He teaches Mechatronics Engineering in the NC State Engineering Programs at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.