Rob García-Gradoville is a sustainability strategist with 15 years of experience assessing innovations across agriculture, water, waste, and energy systems. He brings to the Keeling Curve Methane Prize a combination of technical rigor and on-the-ground implementation experience across the Americas and Africa. As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic, Rob developed water and sanitation infrastructure in rural farming communities — an early foundation in understanding how solutions must adapt to cultural and economic realities to succeed. That perspective shaped his subsequent career at the intersection of sustainability issues and human systems.

At IDEO.org, Rob managed a $7M innovation portfolio across 50 social enterprises in 14 countries, reviewing hundreds of applications and developing evaluation frameworks that balanced quantitative metrics with qualitative adoption factors. One grantee went on to win the 2024 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and the TED Audacious Project Prize.

Most recently at Cargill, Rob led agricultural climate mitigation programs for North America's beef supply chain, launching initiatives with potential to deliver 10M MT in GHG reductions — evaluating carbon project developers, MRV technologies, and rancher adoption barriers in partnerships with food corporations such as Walmart, Nestlé, and Sysco. Rob has also consulted on circular food systems with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, serves on the XPrize Visioneering Brain Trust for food, water, and waste innovations, and as an Expert Advisory Panel member for the Earthshot Prize — applying the same solution evaluation lens he brings to the Keeling Curve Methane analyst role.