Who we are
Marcy Lowe
Principal
Marcy Lowe is a qualitative and quantitative researcher who focuses on technologies and best practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while coping with climate changes already underway.
She is founder and principal of Datu Research, a company that gathers value chain insights to inform the efforts of clients who are working to spread climate solutions across whole economic segments, such as oil and gas, transportation, and agriculture. Her teams have analyzed the supply chains of dozens of industries to find leverage points for widely adopting emissions-reducing technologies and best practices.
In addition, she facilitates working meetings of the key players seeking to move these solutions forward. Before establishing Datu, she was a senior analyst at Duke University’s Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness, where she mapped out the supply chains of low-carbon technologies and convened working meetings with industry leaders. As a senior researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute, she analyzed carbon impacts of transportation and land use to help define a vision of climate-smart cities. She received her M.S. in Energy Management and Policy from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lisa Rist
Senior Consultant
Lisa Rist has devoted her career as a researcher to amplifying the voice of the customer to inform product development, service design and operational improvements.
Her passion for the customer point of view comes from the conviction that deeply understanding the ultimate user or beneficiary is the best way to ensure success. Lisa has a wide range of experience with qualitative marketing research methods, such as IDIs (in-depth interviews), focus groups, online bulletin boards, digital diaries, in-home ethnographies and shop-alongs. These methods can inform a needs assessment or reveal insights into purchase decision making, consumer preferences, user experience, and beyond.
Her empathetic and engaging style of connecting with respondents can help reveal truths and insights that even they were unaware of. Lisa has also leveraged many of these same skills as a facilitator to engage business leaders in brainstorming solutions to emerging challenges. While Lisa has extensive experience in the healthcare sector, she has also applied her research to consumer goods, retail, and the food and beverage industries, and these research methods can be applied to all fields and industries.
Lisa has worked at private marketing research firms (The Link Group and Smarty Pants), as well as leading academic health systems (Duke Health), and internationally renowned policy research organizations (Research Triangle Institute). She received her B.A. in Psychology from Duke University and M.S. in Health Planning/Administration from the University of Cincinnati.