September 23, 2025
We're proud to announce that David Wright, former Chief Engineer & Chief Risk Officer at National Grid, has joined Rhizome's Board of Advisors.
Wright brings over 30 years of experience and joins an elite advisory group including Booga Gilbertson (Former Chief Operating Officer at Puget Sound Energy), Tremaine Phillips (Former Commissioner at Michigan Public Service Commission), and Jim Kapsis (Founder & CEO of The Ad Hoc Group).
During his distinguished career at National Grid, Wright oversaw engineering excellence and risk management across the utility's entire global portfolio—from electricity and gas to emerging hydrogen and carbon capture technologies spanning the UK and US. As the company's Chief Engineer and Chief Risk Officer, he led National Grid's overall engineering approach and climate adaptation efforts. Wright's expertise in balancing critical infrastructure investments with energy affordability and organizational risk gives him a unique perspective on the engineering challenges utilities face today.
Wright's appointment represents a major strategic addition as we scale our mission-critical solutions. Founded in 2023, Rhizome enables utilities to model extreme weather impacts against their infrastructure using AI, climate models, and comprehensive asset data. Our Aspen platform identifies and prioritizes critical resilience investments as utilities face unprecedented climate threats.
"David brings exactly the caliber of strategic thinking we need as we scale our platform," said Mishal Thadani, Co-founder and CEO of Rhizome. "Having someone who spent 30 years on grid modernization and climate challenges at National Grid's scale is invaluable as we work with utilities to strengthen their systems against extreme weather."
Wright emphasized the critical nature of the challenge: "Climate resilience and mitigating wildfires is a real risk all countries and utilities face. It is also an engineering challenge we can solve. Rhizome is tackling this challenge head-on, and has quite frankly the best software and capabilities I have seen. I am proud to be working with Rhizome on this immense challenge, to reduce societal impact and save lives."
Since launch, we've established utility partnerships across North America, with mission-specific tools including gridFIRM, gridCAVA, and gridADAPT enabling precise climate risk modeling.
