Meet the Board

The four member elected board brings a diverse background of public and private sector experience.  

Board members serve for four one year rotations as secretary, treasurer, vice president, and president.

The Board

Auden Kaehler
President

Auden currently leads the Highway/Tolling Project Development and Finance service area at WSP USA - a large global engineering firm. Before joining WSP in Seattle, Auden received his masters degree in transportation economics from the University of Leeds in the UK and prior to that worked for PFC Energy (now part of IHS Market) as a Downstream energy consultant in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Washington DC, and Paris, France.  He brings an interest in econometric forecasting, revenue optimization, transportation policy, and major project financing to the board.

Nina Sidneva
Strategist

Nina Sidneva has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Washington and over 15 years of energy related experience. Dr. Sidneva spend over a decade in the energy industry working for the U.S. DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Avista Utilities, Tacoma Power and Seattle City Light prior to her current position at Starbucks Coffee Company. Dr. Sidneva is responsible for hedging Starbucks price risk exposure to diesel, natural gas, fiber, plastics, sugar, and wheat. She was also a project manager on the first solar farm investment for Starbucks in 2017.
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Bill Anderson
​​Treasurer

Most recently Bill was the Executive Director of the Computational Finance & Risk Management graduate program in the UW Department of Applied Mathematics where he helped launch the MS degree in 2011. He was instrumental in administration, finance, operations, marketing, recruiting, personnel hiring, management, online program rollout, industry relations, and student placement in his tenure at the UW. Since his retirement from the university in 2016, Bill has remained active with the UW, other regional universities, and the CFA through his participation in the Ethics in Finance initiative. He has also been very active with NABE in the planning and development of the Nov 15th-16th, 2017 Tech Economics Conference in Seattle. 
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Samrat Bhattacharya
Secretary

Samrat Bhattacharya is an economist at Amazon with experience in working across various functional areas including marketing, finance / asset Management, logistics analysis, workforce capacity planning, international Finance and labor economics. Prior to joining Amazon in 2017, Samrat worked over 10 years in the financial services industry. He was working as a senior business analytics manager at PNC bank, where he helped to build a framework to optimally allocate marketing budget across products, channels and geographic regions to maximize the return on investment.  Samrat earned a Ph.D. in Economics from The Ohio State University, with concentrations in labor economics and econometrics. He also has a M.A. and M.Phil from the Delhi School of Economics, India."