GM Advanced Technology Vehicle Concepts Director

Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird is Director of Advanced Technology Vehicle Concepts at General Motors. He has led GM’s “Reinvention of the Automobile” program, which include the first vehicles designed from a clean sheet around electrification (AUTOnomy, Hy-wire and Sequel).

Most recently, he has extended this work to include connectivity and urbanization and is leading GM’s Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility (PUMA) initiative. He is also the co-author of the book “Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century” to be published by MIT Press in March 2010 (with MIT Professor William Mitchell and Dr. Larry Burns, former VP of R&D and Strategic Planning at GM).

Prior to joining General Motors, he led the effort at DaimlerChrysler to develop fuel cell vehicles that run on a variety of fuels, including gasoline. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame as a Young Leader in 2000.

A native of Liverpool, England, Chris Borroni-Bird earned a First-Class B.A and an M.A degree in Natural Sciences from King’s College, Cambridge. He began his Ph.D in Surface Science at University of Liverpool and completed it at King’s College Cambridge (with the world’s first single crystal adsorption micro-calorimeter). He continued researching heterogeneous catalysis during a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Solid State Physics.