Award-winning journalist and author of the acclaimed bestseller, Oil On The Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to your Tank, Lisa Margonelli, spent more than three years on a 100,000 mile journey tracing the path of gasoline from her local gas station back to the oil fields it comes from overseas. Along the way, she pieced together the great Oil Economy as it is lived around the world and offers a striking vision of America’s energy future.
 
In her engaging and informative lecture, Margonelli provides vivid account of how gasoline gets to our cars, and all of its implications, Margonelli relates the numerous harrowing, eye-opening, and often funny stories from her travels and debunks Americans’ favorite myths about oil and energy policy.  
 
She rode in tanker trucks, witnessed an accident in a refinery, pulled the night shift on a drilling rig, and chatted her way into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. She experienced a kaleidoscopic tour of the geopolitics of energy, interviewing the former leftist guerrilla in charge of Venezuela’s massive oil company, the Nigerian warlord who made the price of crude oil rise $2 with a single cellphone call, and the Shanghai bureaucrats who plan to build the next Detroit.
 
The more time Margonelli spent reporting on Oil, the more convinced she became that we have to change the policies, cars and habits that cause us to use so much of it.  In the Oil on the Brain lecture, Margonelli provides detailed analysis of the problems we face, and maps out real solutions.
 
The New York Times Book Review called Oil on the Brain  "...kaleidoscopic, accessible and focused on our present quandary… timely.”  

Margonelli is an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation, and was the recipient of a Sundance Institute Fellowship and an excellence in journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists.  She has been published in the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Business 2.0, Discover, and Jane.