Cyclotron Road Welcomes 12 New Entrepreneurial Fellows

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the 2025 cohort of scientists and engineers selected to join Cyclotron Road – a DOE Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Now in its eleventh year, Cyclotron Road supports innovators as they take the leap from discovery to product development and launch their own companies. Fellows receive two years of research funding, living stipend, entrepreneurial training in collaboration with non-profit partner Activate, and access to the multidisciplinary researchers and resources of Berkeley Lab to refine their technology.

The 2025 fellows are:

• Jacob Roberts and Luis Valencia, AlkaLi Labs, Inc: engineers biosorbents that extract critical minerals from abundant industrial waste streams.
• Jiya Janowitz and Jessica Frick, Astral Materials: manufactures ultra-high-quality semiconductor materials that cannot be made on Earth to serve advanced applications bottlenecked by crystal quality.
• Albert Kumar, Carbide Radio Inc: building the next-generation silicon carbide RF semiconductor chips powering 5G and 6G cellular infrastructure. 
• Menandro Cruz and Nina Cochran Warner, Edulis Labs: using biomimetic surface science to unlock a new category of safe, high-performing permanent hair dye.
• Milad Yavari and Joe Sawa, Membravo: A breakthrough membrane that operates in harsh conditions turning wasted hydrogen into a valuable resource and making it more affordable. It also simplifies and enhances critical materials extraction, separation, and recovery.
• Yasmeen AlFaraj, NextSet Materials: enables the reprocessing of historically unrecyclable thermosets and the recovery of valuable composite materials for reuse.
• Pankaj Ghildiyal, 4th State Energies: produces plasma-created silicon that replaces graphite, boosts capacity, lowers cost, and seamlessly integrates into existing battery production lines.
• Bonnie Maven, Vertility Health, Inc: helping farmers break the rules of genetics—without gene editing.

“Cyclotron Road is extremely pleased to welcome its eleventh cohort of entrepreneurial fellows,” said Todd Pray, Chief Strategic Partnerships Officer at Berkeley Lab. “They are each developing innovative technologies, processes and products that have the potential for incredible impact in the U.S. economy in several important industry sectors.”

Cyclotron Road was the first of the DOE LEEP to be established. In the years since, our fellows have raised more than $3.2 billion in follow-on funding, hired more than 2,800 employees, and brought innovative products and services to market across industries, including agriculture, energy, and manufacturing.

The new cohort brings the total number of companies advanced by Cyclotron Road fellows to 92 and the all-time number of fellows to 121.

The DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) and the Industrial Technologies Office (ITO) in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) are the founding and anchor sponsors of the program. Other partners supporting the program include the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) with the State of California, the California Energy Commission (CEC), the DOE Building Technologies Office (BTO), the DOE Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO), the Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), Office of Electricity (OE), the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and Activate.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.