When Michael Kearney accepted his job at Ambri, a Cambridge startup founded by Donald Sadoway, he had a lot on his plate. He hadn’t finished earning his master’s degree from the Technology and Policy Program, and he was about to head off for a year in China as a Luce Scholar. He met Professor Sadoway at a symposium on the electrification of transportation that he had helped to organize for MITEI, and a few months later was mulling over a job offer that would change his life completely.
“There are very few times in life when you have the opportunity to work at a company that could fundamentally change the world,” says Kearney. Ambri is developing a low-cost liquid metal battery for grid-scale energy storage that could create a viable future for the use of wind and solar energy on a large scale.
Kearney accepted the position at Ambri, and a week later he was juggling writing his thesis with the frenzy of working at a startup. Now, his job description falls somewhere between human resources, government relations, marketing, and modeling Ambri’s business proposition – all of the pieces involved in setting up a company.