“I’m a huge advocate for networking to solve sustainability problems.”

_{From top left, clockwise: Dermot Murray at the Wolf River Conservancy's 'Cycle the Greenway' fundraiser; playing hurling with Memphis GAA club; volunteering with Irish Network Memphis at the Wolf River Conservancy's annual tree planting event; singing Irish ballads with Dermot & The Pints on St Patrick's Day at the Brass Door Irish Pub, Memphis; with his wife Lucille at Wolf River Conservancy tree planting event.}

UCD alumnus Dermot Murray is director of sustainability and climate strategy at Constellation Energy, the largest producer of clean energy in the US.

Like the Wolf River that flows through his adopted home of Memphis, Tennessee, Dermot Murray’s career to date has had some interesting twists and tributaries.

The Westmeath native graduated from University College Dublin in 1992 with a computer science degree, working in the ICT sector before pivoting to sustainability - and becoming familiar with his local river.

“I spent four years on the board of Wolf River Conservancy,” he says, one of his many volunteering roles in service of community and environment. “They do cleanups and trail maintenance, they remove invasive species like privet. It’s great to just get your hands dirty. I have a pseudo-farming background. My father was a part-time farmer, my uncles were farmers. My 'summer camp' was going to my uncle’s farm near Delvin in County Westmeath to make hay and milk cows,” he laughs.

But back when Dermot left UCD, “the Celtic Tiger hadn’t started purring yet”, as he puts it, so he was thrilled to win the green card lottery and travel to the US on the Morrison visa.

“My brother was living in the New York area so I came over to him,” he says. “I worked about six years in different facets of IT: started off in sales, moved into tech support and training and ended up doing data network administration. I had this idea that in order for me to advance my career path, I really needed to develop more business management skill sets. So I took the plunge and got my MBA from Columbia Business School in 2001.”

While on that programme, he first came into contact with Net Impact, a global non-profit organisation that works with students and professionals to drive social and environmental change throughout their careers and lives. 

Meanwhile Dermot got a job as a business analyst with telecommunications giant Verizon until he had what he describes as “a midlife crisis that forced me to reevaluate where I was going with my career”.

He began volunteering with the New York Irish Centre in Queens, helping to set up their internet cafe and managing their website and “really enjoyed the experience of giving back to the community.”

At the same time he did “a lot of soul searching” with a career counsellor who advised Dermot that the area of corporate social responsibility would align well with his values.

“Something that career counsellor told me that sticks with me to this day is the concept of a ‘bridge’ job when you are moving from one field to another. The bridge job might not be the ideal position, but it allows you to make that transition to another potential career path.”

Dermot “took a gamble” and cold-called a colleague who managed employee volunteer and engagement programmes in Verizon’s corporate foundation. 

“Her last name was Sullivan - there’s always an Irish connection,” he smiles. “I just wanted to learn more about what she did. We hit it off and around that time Verizon was moving from Midtown Manhattan to the wilds of New Jersey and there were people who didn’t want to make that move so there were some openings. She said, ‘Are you willing to move to New Jersey?’ and I said, ‘Absolutely!’”

This ‘bridge job’ would see Dermot engaging employees around Verizon’s corporate social responsibility mission and devising a sustainability strategy. He also set about making new connections outside the office, reconnecting with the Net Impact organisation he first encountered at Columbia Business School.

“They had these professional chapters and I used to attend the New York chapter events. But there wasn’t a chapter of Net Impact in New Jersey so I actually helped to create one with a couple of other folks who were interested in sustainability. We organised panel events and meet-ups.”

At the Responsible Business Summit in London in 2007 Dermot first “came face-to-face with this concept of sustainability, because America hadn't really caught on to it yet. It really resonated with me because it was so aspirational. Sustainability was more about how we make this planet a better place. I always use the analogy that environmental compliance is keeping water out of the basement of a house whereas sustainability is putting solar panels on the roof.”

Then at the Net Impact conference in Philadelphia in 2008, he was connected with the chief sustainability officer at FedEx, who offered him a management role in his department.

“It just shows you the power of networking, right?” says Dermot, who moved to Memphis to take up the job. He co-founded Memphis Green Drinks, part of a global network of people who would meet casually in bars to chat about environmental issues. 

“There’s a programme here called Project Green Fork run by a wonderful organisation called Clean Memphis. They help local bars and restaurants to be more sustainable. So we typically had our events at these certified venues.”

Dermot helped launch the Memphis GAA club as chairman in the late 2010s and he also co-founded Irish Network Memphis in 2023, funded by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs through its Emigrant Support Programme. 

“I’m in an Irish folk music group called Dermot and the Pints and if we’re having an event for Irish Network Memphis, we’ll belt out a few songs as well!”

After ten years as sustainability manager at FedEx, Dermot was headhunted by Constellation in 2022.

“Sustainability is core to the business. It’s not just the fact that they're the largest generator of emissions-free energy; we generate about 10% of all clean energy in the United States every year and that's a pretty big number when you think about it,” he says. “In addition to that, we are the nation’s cleanest power generation fleet  among all the major power producers. We also provide sustainable products and services to our large enterprise customers. My role, essentially, is overseeing our sustainability reporting.”

Although he stepped off the board of Wolf River Conservancy when he started at Constellation, Dermot still volunteers in his community.

“In a place where maybe sustainability isn't as front and centre as it is in other parts of the country or other parts of the world, I think it was really important for us to try to build that network of folks who care about the local environment and care about sustainability in general,” he says. “Some great friendships were forged as well through that. It wasn’t all work - it was a lot of fun.”