Nichole Fitzgerald serves as director of the Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office (H2O) at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which supports the research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) of hydropower and marine energy technologies to bring affordable, reliable, and secure energy to the American people. In this role, she oversees strategy, management, and execution of the office’s $220 million annual budget.
Nichole has worked at DOE since 2012, serving in a variety of roles to advance R&D in the energy sector. From 2023 to 2026, she served as the deputy director and acting director of the former Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, leading efforts to advance hydrogen and fuel cell RD&D to enable a strong domestic economy and an affordable and secure energy future. Her team conducted more than $1.6 billion in hydrogen and fuel cell RD&D activities within the office and coordinated more than $9.5 billion in hydrogen activities across DOE. Nichole led development of the 2024 DOE Hydrogen Program Plan, which describes how DOE approaches and coordinates hydrogen and fuel cell RD&D across the Department.
Prior to 2023, Nichole served as the Renewable Carbon Resources Program Manager in the former Bioenergy Technologies Office, where she oversaw publication of the 2023 update to the Billion-Ton Study and launched research collaborations for regional resource hubs. She developed new initiatives, including BOTTLE™, which develops new biobased recycling and upcycling technologies, and ChemCatBio, which focuses on catalysis for bioenergy applications.
Before her employment, Nichole served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at DOE and was a National Institutes of Health post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed highly effective reagents for pharmaceutical applications. Nichole earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University and a B.S. in chemistry from the College of William and Mary.
