News

Cyclotron Road is an important Berkeley Lab service that offers expertise and capabilities from across the Lab to science entrepreneurs, to help them accelerate the commercialization of their game-changing energy technologies. The first of the DOE’s four Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Programs (LEEP), it has been housed in the Energy Technologies Area (ETA) for the past seven years. Cyclotron... Read more

Multiple innovative technologies developed in the Energy Technologies Area of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have been honored with a 2022 R&D 100 Award. The award, presented by R&D Magazine and selected by an independent panel of judges, recognizes the year’s 100 most innovative and disruptive technology products from... Read more

Etosha Cave, a former Cyclotron Road fellow and scientific entrepreneur now leading her own company, was featured in a recent episode of the Department of Energy (DOE’s) People Powered podcast. DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm led the episode's panel discussion, which focused on the ways Black women entrepreneurs are leading the nation’s clean energy transition. Cave is currently the Chief... Read more

Manufacturing consumes two percent of U.S. energy to produce 300 million metric tons of virgin plastics annually. While packaging represents a very common application, plastics are also ubiquitous in what are called durable consumer goods—things like shoes, clothing, sporting goods, electronics, and eyewear. And while the circular economy, or the practice of designing products and their... Read more

Game-changing technology that leads the United States into a clean energy future is one of the Department of Energy (DOE) goals highlighted in the first-ever LEEP Summit on Tuesday, July 12, 2022. LEEP, or Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program, trains the next generation of clean tech entrepreneurs, providing full-time support for two years along with access to the many unique resources,... Read more

Cyclotron Road Cohort 2018 member Bleximo was recently featured in an article on Physics World, "Bleximo builds its competitive advantage with an application-specific approach." California-based start-up Bleximo is betting that its application-specific approach to quantum computing is more efficient – indeed transformative – in addressing highly complex practical problems across a range of... Read more

A new cohort of 11 scientists and engineers will join the prestigious two-year fellowship program at Cyclotron Road based at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Selected from a pool of more than 200 applicants, the 2022 Cohort fellows will work with Berkeley Lab scientists and facilities to translate innovative research into market-ready... Read more

A highly realistic, plant-based bacon that harnesses the power of sustainable seaweed protein made an appearance on ABC’s Shark Tank, setting a new record during the show for the highest valuation of a pre-revenue company in the show’s history. Co-developed by Cyclotron Road entrepreneur-scientist Amanda Stiles, UMARO™ Bacon marks the first step in establishing ocean-farmed seaweed as a... Read more

On the first Earth Day in 1970, researcher Steve Greenberg was one of 20 million Americans, then 10% of the population, inspired to take time to observe the fragility of the planet and the need to protect it. Over 50 years later, an estimated one billion people around the world—one in eight—are actively participating. In the early '70s, visionaries like Art Rosenfeld applied science and... Read more

A recent episode of A Day in the Half Life, a podcast produced by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), focuses on energy storage: What is it, why do we need it, and what are the latest advances? Host Aliyah Kovner talks with Noël Bakhtian, director of Berkeley Lab's Energy Storage Center, and Mike Gerhardt, research scientist at SINTEF, a research organization based in Norway.... Read more

Berkeley Lab has been awarded more than $13 million for five research projects that will accelerate the development of advanced lithium batteries and smart, connected vehicles, making it easier to switch to electric vehicles. The awards were announced by the Department of Energy and are part of a total of $209 million in battery research projects selected by DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office.... Read more

Exponential energy storage deployment is both expected and needed in the coming decades. To that end, the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is hosting a summit on March 8 and 9, 2022, to discuss harnessing science, technology, and policy to accelerate energy storage solutions for our nation. The virtual public summit will convene and connect national... Read more

A recent story in CERN Courier, which covers the global high-energy physics community, featured Cyclotron Road via a Q&A with Rachel Slaybaugh, the division director. "We’re bringing entrepreneurship and commercial thinking into the lab, helping Berkeley scientists build bridges with these new technology companies – and the innovators driving them," Slaybaugh told the Courier's Joe... Read more

Cyclotron Road Director Rachel Slaybaugh recently appeared on the Innovation Interview Series, a project of the U.S. Intellectual Property Office (IPO). Slaybaugh spoke with IPO's Gregg Scharfstein about her origin story and how Cyclotron Road helps new companies succeed. Check out the interview on the IPO website... Read more

Science innovators are invited to apply for the two-year fellowship program hosted at Cyclotron Road, an opportunity to advance hard technologies that have the potential for broad societal impact from concept to viable first product. Cyclotron Road is a division of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The fellowship program is run in partnership with... Read more

All seventeen U.S. national laboratories and many prominent publishers, journals, and other organizations in scientific publishing announced today the beginning of a partnership to support name change requests from researchers on past published papers. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is coordinating the effort. This agreement will allow researchers who wish to change their... Read more

In our future electrified world, the demand for battery storage is projected to be enormous, reaching to upwards of 2 to 10 terawatt-hours (TWh) of annual battery production by 2030, from less than 0.5 TWh today. However, concerns are growing as to whether key raw materials will be adequate to meet this future demand. The lithium-ion battery – the dominant technology for the foreseeable future... Read more

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