John J. MacWilliams served as Associate Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy after being appointed in August 2015. He also served as DOE’s Chief Risk Officer. He is currently serving in the Biden-Harris administration. In that capacity he worked to advance Secretarial priorities of enterprise-wide approaches to innovative finance, risk management, project management, nuclear and cyber security. MacWilliams originally joined DOE in May 2013 as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary, serving as his senior finance advisor and a member of his national security team.
Prior to DOE, MacWilliams was a partner of Tremont Energy Partners, LLC, a private investment firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prior to Tremont, he was Vice Chairman, Investment Banking, at JP Morgan Chase and a Partner of JP Morgan Partners. Mr. MacWilliams was a founding partner in 1993 of The Beacon Group, LLC, a private investment firm located in New York, which was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2000. He was also Partner and Co-Head of the Beacon Group Energy Investment Funds, a portfolio of more than 30 global private equity investments throughout the energy industry, ranging from traditional (oil and gas, coal mining, petrochemicals, pipelines), to early-stage venture (micro-turbines, power technology, fuel cells, smart grid, and environmental controls). Prior to the formation of The Beacon Group, Mr. MacWilliams was with Goldman Sachs & Co., where he was head of Goldman Sachs’ international structured finance group based in London. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, he was an attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York.
MacWilliams holds a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
