Bloomington, Ill. (June 8, 2009)—Dan Arvizu, Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, has been elected to the board of directors of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co.
Arvizu succeeds Jerry Porras, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Porras is retiring from the board, which he joined in 1998.
Arvizu has headed NREL, the Energy Department’s primary laboratory for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and development located in Golden, Colo., for four years. He is president of the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, which operates NREL for the DOE. He is also executive vice president of the Midwest Research Institute.
Prior to joining NREL, Arvizu was the chief technology officer with CH2M HILL Companies, and before that, an executive with Sandia National Laboratories. He started his career at the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories.
He serves on a number of boards, panels and advisory committees, including the American Council on Renewable Energy Advisory Board; the Harvard Kennedy School’s Energy Research, Development, and Deployment Policy Project Advisory Committee; the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Alternative Energies; the Singapore Clean Energy International Advisory Panel; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III; the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award Corp.; and the Colorado Renewable Energy Authority Board of Directors.
He has a Bachelor of Science degree from New Mexico State University and a Master of Science and Ph.D. at Stanford University—all in mechanical engineering.
State Farm insures more cars and homes than any other insurer in the U.S., is the leading insurer of watercraft and is also a leading insurer in Canada. State Farm's 17,000 agents and 68,000 employees serve about 80 million policies and accounts: more than 78 million auto, fire, life and health policies in the United States and Canada, and more than 1.9 million bank accounts. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is the parent of the State Farm family of companies. State Farm is ranked No. 32 on the Fortune 500 list of largest companies. For more information, please visit statefarm.com® or in Canada statefarm.ca®.
Steve Vogel, Public Affairs Director at (309) 766-7550.