News

This month 11 scientists and engineers (pictured) will join the prestigious two-year fellowship program at Cyclotron Road based at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley. Selected from a record pool of 300 applicants, the 11 individuals will make up Cohort 2021 of Cyclotron Road. As part of their two-year fellowship they will work to bring... Read more

Fervo Energy, an advanced geothermal energy development company led by a Cyclotron Road alumni team, has been awarded $28 million in financing to continue the company’s mission of applying transformative geothermal technology to address climate change. In 2015, Fervo Co-Founder Tim Latimer left his career as a Texas drilling engineer in the oil and gas industry. He moved to California, studied... Read more

In a first, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover recently converted carbon dioxide on the Red Planet to oxygen. Christopher Graves, a fellow in Cyclotron Road’s 2018 cohort, helped develop the technology used to achieve this key milestone. Cyclotron Road is a division of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The atmosphere on Mars is 96% carbon dioxide... Read more

European battery manufacturer Northvolt recently acquired the U.S.-based battery technology company Cuberg, Inc., which was co-founded by Richard Wang, a 2016 fellow hosted at Cyclotron Road. Cuberg is one of the earliest companies supported at Cyclotron Road, the first Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP) at Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)... Read more

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has named Rachel Slaybaugh, associate professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, to lead Berkeley Lab’s Cyclotron Road Division. The announcement follows an international search. Until recently, Slaybaugh served as a program director at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), whose mission... Read more

Kristin Persson, a senior faculty scientist in the Energy Storage & Distributed Resources Division within the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and director of the Materials Project, has been named director of the Molecular Foundry. Her new appointment is effective August 15, 2020. She will continue to hold an appointment as a professor of... Read more

Cyclotron Road, the successful entrepreneurial fellowship program founded by Berkeley Lab, will serve as a model for scaling up to reach more science entrepreneurs across the nation. This is made possible through a grant from Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, to Activate (formerly Activation Energy)—the Berkeley-based nonprofit that has co-managed... Read more

While trying to commercialize some new battery materials that she invented, Danielle Applestone experienced firsthand the fundraising hurdles that face entrepreneurial scientists, among them the lack of connections to investors required to build a company. She'll help Cyclotron Road researchers leap some of those hurdles in her new role as Executive-in-Residence.... Read more

Cyclotron Road alumna Kendra Kuhl is one of five “climate change visionaries” advancing world-changing ideas and technologies that were featured recently in the New York Times. Kuhl is the chief technical officer of Opus12, which has developed a device that turns waste CO2 into chemicals and fuels. Read the full New York Times article.... Read more

Cyclotron Road, an entrepreneurial technology fellowship program based in Berkeley, CA, announced its fourth cohort today. Comprising 13 PhD-level scientists and engineers, these fellows will spend the next two years embedded at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), advancing their technology innovations from promising concepts to first products.... Read more

A new finding could advance a type of solid state power generator, with broad potential for clean energy applications. Using Warp software, scientists found that electron reflection may have previously been misidentified in the study of thermionic energy converters, and that a certain type of electron reflection could be leveraged to increase power generation in these devices. Read the full... Read more

Cyclotron Road’s Etosha Cave, co-founder of Opus 12 — a company that recycles CO₂ into cost-competitive chemicals and fuels — is among those featured in an article that highlights women of color who are diversifying entrepreneurship.Read the full article in Vanity Fair.... Read more

Iris PV has changed its name to Tandem PV and is gaining great momentum with recent funding wins, including nearly $1 million in grants. The Cyclotron Road project is now busily pursuing pilot projects based on its perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell. The materials' printability could allow solar cells to be mass-produced cheaply. Read the full article on the Cyclotron News website.... Read more

Cyclotron Road fellow Richard Wang, whose startup Cuberg enables safe, high-performance batteries for critical applications, has closed a second round of seed funding, led by Boeing HorizonX Ventures. This second round brings Cuberg's total funding to $3.3 million in grant funding and investment to date.Battery technology research has intensified in recent years, in a push to improve performance... Read more

Kendra Kuhl, Nicholas Flanders, and Etosha Cave were included in the magazine's list of "25 People Shaping the Future in Tech, Science, Medicine, Activism and More" feature. The researchers — who are part of the Energy Technologies Area's Cyclotron Road Division, which seeks to prepare energy technologies for the market — were recognized for their efforts to build reactors that trap greenhouse... Read more

7×7 Magazine recently recognized Opus 12 Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave of the Lab's Cyclotron Road for her efforts to develop an industrial-scale reactor that has the power of 37,000 trees to upcycle carbon dioxide waste into useful (and profitable) fuels, chemicals, and plastics that are typically generated from petroleum. Read the full article:... Read more

Since 2014, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's startup incubator program, Cyclotron Road, has helped energy researchers survive the "valley of death" that claims many budding ideas in the field. The six projects from the first year collectively raised more than $18 million in additional research funding or private investments. The program will soon welcome its third cohort of innovators. This year's... Read more

Berkeley Lab scientist Jeff Long and students in his research lab had come up with exciting new materials for doing gas separations very efficiently, including materials for removing CO2 from a gas. The discovery had great potential as a technology to reduce energy use by the chemical separation industry, but finding an investor would be next to impossible. So they brought their project to... Read more

In its annual celebration of young innovators in August, 2016, MIT Technology Review recognized Opus 12 co-founder Kendra Kuhl for her work on designing a reactor that will convert the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants into useful chemicals.Opus 12 is a project of Cyclotron Road, an incubator for energy technologies.Read the full article at MIT Technology Review.... Read more

Two Cyclotron Road projects—one on thermionic energy conversion in collaboration with the Materials Sciences Division and one on green buildings in collaboration with two divisions in the Energy Technologies Area—were among 41 “transformational energy technology projects” awarded a total of $125 million by ARPA-E.Dan Riley and Jared Schwede are Cyclotron Road project leads developing a... Read more

The White House recently hosted leadership from some of the nation’s most innovative labs for a forum on “Connecting Regional Innovation Ecosystems with Federal Labs.” The forum highlighted a number of novel models that promote robust relationships between federal labs and industry, such as Cyclotron Road, housed at Berkeley Lab.... Read more

While women make up 48 percent of the workforce in the US, they hold only 24 percent of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs. About 40 percent of men with STEM college degrees work in STEM jobs, whereas only 26 percent of women with STEM degrees work in STEM jobs. STEM jobs pay well. STEM skills are also important for innovation. For America to become more competitive in... Read more

New Berkeley Lab program seeks scientists to commercialize the next breakthrough technology.Steven Kaye got his Ph.D. working on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), one of the most exciting materials in chemistry today and especially effective for separating gases. But nearly a decade after earning his degree, he saw that the science-to-product gap was still gaping: despite the discovery of thousands... Read more