Cyclotron Road Welcomes 11 New Entrepreneurial Fellows

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the 2026 cohort of scientists and engineers selected to join Cyclotron Road at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Cyclotron Road is one of four nodes in the DOE Office of Technology Commercialization’s Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP).

Now in its twelfth 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, a living stipend, entrepreneurial training in collaboration with non-profit partner Activate, and access to the multidisciplinary researchers and world-class facilities of Berkeley Lab to refine their technology.

This new cohort of 11 fellows adds 9 companies to the program, bringing the total number of companies advanced by Cyclotron Road to 100 and the all-time number of fellows to 131.

The 2026 fellows are:

• Matthew Szarzanowicz, BasidioBio: uses synthetic biology to engineer Agrobacterium for precision, controllable plant transformation.
• Nicolas Herard, Euler Materials: advanced lightweight lattice materials that cut vibration and shock by up to 100x for aerospace, defense, naval, and semiconductor systems.
• Saurabh Malani, Fermeate: uses light to lower the cost of bio-based production across food, materials, and medicine.
• Bo Xu, Gilly: uses fungi to help cattle produce more from less feed.
• Yashee Mathur, Hydrify: AI-driven hydrogen exploration and resource mapping to identify optimal extraction sites, de-risk exploration, and enable low-cost hydrogen and electricity generation.
• Charles Dove, NeoOptics: a fundamentally new form of optics with optical neural networks.
• Elizabeth Hann and Marcus Harland-Dunaway, Nolux: pioneering light-independent agriculture to unlock affordable, resilient food production anywhere.
• Lucy Wu and Edson Perez, PeraWatt: solving the energy efficiency bottleneck for AI data centers and electrification through advanced magnetics.
• Zach Detweiler, Radify Metals: making metal modern with clean, modular, plasma-driven reactors.

“Our program’s newest cohort represents innovation across several important sectors: AI, energy, agriculture, biology, and materials,” said Todd Pray, Chief Strategic Partnerships Officer at Berkeley Lab. “As our alumni continue to make history — from completing an initial public offering [IPO] on the NASDAQ to announcing some of the most promising critical materials projects — we are proud to welcome these fellows and give them the tools, resources, and community to do the same.”  

This milestone follows a recent achievement by Cyclotron Road alumnus Fervo Energy, which raised $1.89 billion, giving the geothermal energy company an initial market valuation exceeding $10 billion. 

Cyclotron Road was the first of the DOE LEEP nodes to be established. In the years since, Cyclotron Road fellows have raised more than $4.9 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.

LEEP was established by DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office and is managed by the Office of Technology Commercialization. Other partners that have supported Cyclotron Road include DOE’s Building Technologies Office, Industrial Technologies Office, Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office, Alternative Fuels and Feedstocks, Office of Electricity, Federal Energy Management Program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as well as the University of California Office of the President with the State of California, the California Energy Commission (CEC), 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 17 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.