Nadia Bollinger

An ardent champion for women’s rights in the industry—and in general—Nadia Bollinger is devoted to helping shape an industry culture that will allow for the advancement of women, hoping to create a world where her young daughters can professionally succeed.

Why did you enter the oil and gas industry?

“I have tangentially been involved in oil and gas since the day I was born in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. My father worked at Suncor as an executive when we lived there, and he went on to start his own consulting firm in the oil and gas sector. It wasn’t until college when I started a co-op program with Exxon Mobil [Corp.] that I got firsthand experience working in this industry. I learned a lot about the industry from my dad growing up, and after spending three semesters working at Exxon Mobil, I knew it was the place for me. The computational challenges (especially in the upstream sector) were incredibly exciting to me, and Exxon Mobil, being Fortune 1 at the time, had access to an abundance of resources to leverage technology in new ways to solve some of the greatest challenges in the E&P domains.”

Describe a memorable professional experience.

“The first part of my career at ExxonMobil I developed upstream technical workflows, and one of our first challenges was to consolidate a suite of 30-plus data management applications used to share data across geoscience and engineering products. In a short timeline, we built a leading-edge solution that resulted in significant time savings to our data management staff and freed up capacity for engineers and geoscientists to focus on higher value activities. During the rollout, I worked in London and Abu Dhabi. While in Abu Dhabi, I led the implementation of our solution within a joint venture that optimized infrastructure to increase recovery through novel drilling and completion strategies. In a short period of time early in my career, I not only gained deep industry and technical experience in upstream operations across our global operations but also had the opportunity to participate and learn about the local female community in the UAE.”

How have you exercised leadership to help shape your department?

“At Amazon, I launched a new affinity group in partnership with our business development organization supporting women in energy. Through this program I have moderated three panels with executive female leaders from across the industry covering topics such as the future energy organization, transformative technologies to enable the energy transition and the advancement of women within our industry. Since launching the first event in March, we have scaled this program internationally and to other industries. Women and others who participated in these events are excited to see this platform develop and discover new ways to support our collective growth.”

What are your long- and short-term career goals?

“Short term, I am seeking to learn as much about Amazon and its culture as I can and enable my team and organization to be successful. If I can do these two things in the next year, I will consider that a success. Long term, I aspire to continue to drive more value with broader impact through larger leadership roles. I am inspired by the energy transition movement and will be focusing much of my time in the coming years learning as much as I can in this space to drive new thought leadership and solutions on how cloud and new business models can accelerate this transition.”

Which of your professional achievements are you most proud of?

“Completing two master’s degrees while working full time. I am especially proud of completing my MBA at Rice [University] with a child under the age of two and being eight months pregnant with my second child while running a multimillion-dollar digital program at Exxon Mobil to introduce mobility and mobile solutions to our manufacturing business lines worldwide.”

What do you think young industry members as a group have to offer that is unique to them?

“We have been mentored by senior generations who have taught us where we have been but also are young enough to relate to younger generations and understand their perspectives. This will enable us to bridge these two worlds as we navigate through this next phase and bring on a new workforce to drive change.”

What advice would you give other young professionals?

“No matter where you are in your career, take interest in your broader company. This means reading your company’s internal headlines every day, listening and taking time to understand quarterly earnings reports and paying attention to what your company is doing and not doing relative to the market. Dive deep into your own company and become a master of all topics, even if you don’t think they are relevant to your current role.”