Mark Bartosik started his career as a software engineer for nuclear submarines in the UK, and has spent more than two decades working in Fin-Tech (Finance Technology sector). He now lives in New York. He has always had a passion for the energy sector and understands many of the challenges of moving to clean energy both from a theoretical aspect and from first-hand experience. In 2006, he was the first to install on the east coast of North America, a residential building-integrated solar tile system on his home, which was a precursor to Tesla’s solar roof that even now only has limited availability.
Swati Srivastava started her career as a software engineer in India, and is now a bi-coastal film-maker and voice-over artist living between NY and LA. Her work straddles both narrative and documentary genre, and her films have been shown at numerous film festivals and won many awards. Whether it is the issue of legal immigration faced by the South Asian community in the US or the epidemic of farmer suicides in India or the grave threat that climate change poses to the world, Swati Srivastava aims to bring these issues to the audience through her camera and her microphone.
Mark and Swati have together retrofitted & renovated their 1960s suburban house in Long Island to be Net Zero Energy (we will talk more about what that means), and more resilient in the face of climate change – to put this in context as of 2019 data, only 0.006% of houses in the US are Net-Zero Energy and they did it in early 2010s – making them way ahead of the curve. They are both passionate about climate change, have appeared in various Radio and TV interviews including on NBC, recently wrote an article on the urgency of this vast challenge and appeared on a podcast called “Let’s Talk Climate Change”. They are currently working on a docuseries on this topic.