About ICF

Karen Germain

Director, Energy Marketing
Chicago
Karen Germain is a marketing, strategic communications, and customer experience expert with 20 years of experience in the energy industry.

Based in Chicago, Karen’s career focus has been on customer centricity, improving the customer experience, and achieving customer goals. Karen is currently leading initiatives focused on customer decision making and energy transition, energy resiliency, post-disaster energy rebuilding for residential customers, elderly citizens and energy efficiency, and mapping DEI-specific language in successful energy marketing.

Karen has extensive experience in stakeholder engagement, working with professional bodies, trade associations, trade unions, and various formal and informal influencer models. She has worked across both public and private sectors in the United States and Europe, having been based in London for more than a decade.

With 20 years spent working in energy, climate change, and sustainability in the UK and the U.S., Karen has an extensive background in market acceleration, stakeholder engagement, and community solutions.

Karen regularly sits on various national committees with the Association of Energy Services Professionals, and she is a published author and frequent speaker at industry conferences. She has co-chaired the AESP Marketing Topic Committee, was named the AESP Volunteer of the Year (2023), and acts as an advisor to several clean energy educational foundations dedicated to developing future leaders.

Education
  • MBA in International Strategy and Management
  • BS in Organizational Communications
  • Certificate, Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership, University of Cambridge
  • Certificate, INSEAD Leadership in Digitalization