Marin Gjaja is chief operating officer for Ford Model e, the company’s electric vehicle business unit.  He leads Ford Model e’s market-facing organization, including P&L management, marketing, sales, distribution, customer experience, service, charging and the business unit’s product derivatives plan.

Gjaja was part of the founding team at Ford Model e and works with Ford dealers around the globe to develop and deploy all aspects of the new customer experience for Ford’s electric vehicle portfolio.  He joined Ford from Boston Consulting Group, where he was a senior partner and managing director. During his 25-year career there, he led BCG’s businesses in the U.S Midwest and Global Consumer Products, and served clients in consumer, retail, technology, health care and capital goods businesses, including automotive. In 2019, Consulting News named him one of its “Consultants of the Year.”

Gjaja attended Princeton University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in systems engineering and operations research. He also earned a doctoral degree from Boston University in cognitive and neural systems, studying computational neuroscience and neural network-based AI. Between college and his PhD, Gjaja played on the U.S. National Volleyball Team and was an alternate for the 1992 Olympics.

Gjaja is deeply committed to education, teams and coaching. He serves as co-chair of Advance Illinois, a statewide, research-based, nonpartisan education policy advocacy organization, and as vice-chair and president of the executive committee of the board of the First Point Volleyball Foundation.