Graduation / Networking Event

Gregory S. Sills is vice president of Upstream Developments for Marathon Oil Corporation. He joined Marathon in August 2009.

Marathon's Upstream Developments organization is responsible for creating and sustaining the capability to deliver world-class projects that are safe, competitive and predictive. To achieve this, Developments stewards the organizational capabilities, processes and technologies required for managing and executing the asset developments that will fuel Marathon's production growth. Specific focus areas include project management and controls, facility engineering, technology commercialization and reliability.

Prior to joining Marathon, Mr. Sills was vice president of Projects for BP's Exploration and Production segment. In this role, he was responsible for enabling and ensuring that the 70+ major projects in BP's global portfolio were delivered in a superior way. This included assuring project health and risk at each critical approval milestone, providing project teams with codified best practices and ensuring that senior project leadership positions were staffed with the right people at the right time. Mr. Sills provided coaching to project teams and sustained BP's learning platforms (such as Projects Academy at MIT) for the projects community by participating in session leadership and providing curriculum content guidance.

Since beginning his career, Mr. Sills has led oil and gas project teams in the Gulf of Mexico, North Sea, China, Algeria, Latin America and Alaska. As project general manager for BP's Atlantis asset, a multi-billion dollar record setting development in the ultra-deep Gulf of Mexico, he took the project from appraisal in 2000 through concept selection and engineering to the final stages of construction, development drilling, commissioning and operation in early 2008.

Mr. Sills earned a bachelor of science degree in construction engineering from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo in 1979.

John Stautner is CEO of ETSZONE, based in The Woodlands, Texas. ETSZONE architects, builds and manages web strategies and business technologies.  ETSZONE's market focus includes technology solutions and public advocacy for sustainable workforce development. Prior to founding ETSZONE, Mr. Stautner served as VP and CTO at Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer Corporation, where he focused on new markets, technology and business development. John earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at MIT.