Cohort 2026 - Chain Reaction Innovations

Emily Barber

Emily Barber earned a PhD from Purdue University in mechanical engineering. Her research on radiative cooling paints has received a SxSW Sustainability Award and resulted in an international patent application. Her work has been supported by prestigious funding, including the NSF GRFP, the Purdue Ingersoll-Rand Fellowship, and the TRACER Grant. As a key part of her passion for new technology, Barber has taken many leadership and mentorship roles while at Purdue University as well as at the National Laboratory of the Rockies, where she spent 10 months as a visiting student to perform collaborative work.

NanoChill Technologies

Jacob Bhoi

Jacob Bhoi is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Aura Life Science. He has nearly a decade of experience studying and manipulating molecular circadian clocks. Bhoi is currently completing his PhD at Northwestern University, where his research focuses on understanding the photoreceptors which set the mammalian circadian clock. He was a member of the Energy and Sustainability Cohort of the mPOWER program at mHub, a Chicago hardtech incubator, as well as the inaugural Alchemist Chicago cohort where he has been developing his business and entrepreneurship skills.

Aura Life Science

Daniel Nothaft

Daniel Nothaft obtained a PhD in geology from the University of Colorado, where he studied the carbon geochemistry of magnesium silicate rocks in Oman. He went on to hold postdoctoral and staff researcher positions in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania where his experiments on metals extraction from silicate rocks showed that scarce metal extraction could improve the economics of carbon storage. He founded Uplift Geosystems in 2023 to commercialize electrochemical processes for metals separation with the aim of decreasing carbon dioxide emissions associated with metals production.

Uplift Geosystems

Stephen Rudisill

Stephen Rudisill is a print and ink technology expert and co-founder of Captis Materials. Holding a PhD in materials chemistry from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, he has a decade of experience in industrial R&D and formulation/product design at both large corporations and startups. He is an inventor on over 35 patents in inks, colloids, print technology, composites, optical materials, and energy storage.

Captis Materials

Benjamin Rupert

Benjamin Rupert is a PhD chemist with 13 years of experience in the battery industry. He was the first employee at solid state battery company, Blue Current, where he served as the Director of Electrolyte Development and took sulfide solid-state electrolytes from lab to pilot scale production. He is a co-author on eleven academic papers spanning a range of topics and is an author on over twenty patents (including provisional patents). He co-founded PowerNaP Energy to enable low-cost, domestically produced batteries suitable for a wide range of applications.

PowerNaP Energy