Dr. Miles Palmer is the co-founder of 8 Rivers. He grew up in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas. He attended MIT as an undergraduate, receiving a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Chemistry. After graduation from MIT, he went to graduate school at UC San Diego, receiving a PhD in Chemistry and interviewing as a NASA finalist for astronaut selections. To pursue becoming an astronaut, Dr. Palmer joined the US Air Force, serving as a flight test engineer on the Airborne Laser Laboratory, and was the only Lieutenant ever nominated for astronaut duty by the Air Force.
After leaving the Air Force, he joined a military contractor, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). While there he managed the US national hypervelocity programs for the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) headquarters, including railguns, light gas guns, and the projectile program that eventually became the current Navy SM-3 interceptor. After SDI, Dr. Palmer worked on hypervelocity projectiles and on advanced drone systems, at one point winning over 40% of the US Navy budget foradvanced technology development one year.
After 9/11, one of his drone projects was accelerated by executive order of President Bush for rapid deployment into the Afghan war. His project was later selected by the Senate Armed Services Committee for transition to production in a special $183M line item addition to the President's budget.
In 2005, Dr. Palmer decided to transition from defense related work to energy within SAIC. In 2007, he successfully proposed a $25M DARPA program to convert algae into jet fuel. In 2008 Dr. Palmer decided to leave government funded work for commercial energy development and founded 8 Rivers Capital. In 2010, he coinvented a new thermodynamic cycle with Rodney Allam based on supercritical CO2 instead of steam as the working fluid. 8 Rivers recruited industrial giants such as Toshiba, Exelon, McDermott, Oxy, ADM, Baker Hughes, and others to demonstrate this technology at pilot scale to the grid in 2021 and to construct many commercial power plants worldwide with first units commissioning in 2025.
Dr. Palmer is the author of approximately 500 papers and patents and is on the Board of Directors of TROSA, the most successful drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in the US. Reuters selected 8 Rivers in the top 30 of their top 100 energy transition innovators list. See page 5 of the attached.