Jamie Beard is founder and executive director of Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit organization focused on removing the major barriers standing in the way of fast global growth and development of geothermal energy, and principal investigator of a $165 million grant from the US Department of Energy focused on oil and gas technology transfer into geothermal. She also founded the Geothermal Entrepreneurship Organization (GEO), a DOE-funded program aimed at recruiting oil and gas talent to launch geothermal startups, and the PIVOT from Hydrocarbons to Heat conference series, which has grown in its fourth year into the largest geothermal conference in the world. 

A passionate advocate for geothermal energy as the natural and obvious future business model for the oil and gas industry and the missing link to meeting or exceeding 2050 climate goals, Beard has been credited with catalyzing a wave of investment and engagement by oil and gas entities in the geothermal space, and with recruiting and mentoring hundreds of new voices into the geothermal industry. She gave a talk at SXSW in 2019 about the role of the oil and gas industry in building the future of geothermal energy, a TED talk on the same topic in 2021, and was featured in a Wired Magazine cover story in June of 2023.