Clara has spent her career seeking out creative engineering problems being worked on by scrappy, driven, and intelligent people. As the founder and CEO of Special Teams, Clara is putting over a decade of experience doing just that and aiming it at complex, system-level problems across industries where solutions have a significant impact on the people and the world around us.

Clara has honed her ability to navigate multifaceted technical challenges and identify innovative solutions by being a jack of all trades, master of some. As one of the earliest employees at First Mode, she designed a physics-based simulation platform to predict the performance of various decarbonization solutions in mobile applications on land, sea, and space applications. The tool’s predictive capabilities paved the way for the development of the world's first and largest hydrogen-electric retrofit kit for ultra-class haul trucks. In her role as Director, Clara successfully built and managed high-performing global teams and established the ecosystem for product development.

Previously, Clara’s foundational academic experience spanned a double B.S. in Physics & Mathematics, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering. Her theses on autonomous optical navigation and quantum optical coherence resulted in several publications before joining an asteroid mining company where she constructed multibody physics simulations, launched a first-of-its-kind mid-wave imager into low earth orbit, and remotely operated hardware on the International Space Station (ISS).

Beyond Special Teams, Clara is an avid weightlifter and fan of Formula 1. With her two dogs and her Subaru, she fulfills the remaining requirements of a Seattleite representative – hiking, paddleboarding, snowboarding, and surfing until the sun goes down.