chemical engineer who really thinks about issues of transforming materials,” Carbeck says, “whether it’s for medical technology or how materials are used for a lot of other things like energy.”
After finishing his postdoctoral research in Whitesides’ lab in 1997, Carbeck spent the next seven years of his career establishing himself in the realm of academia as a faculty member in the departments of chemical engineering and molecular biology at Princeton University. Then he was offered a coveted tenure-track professorship at Tufts University, where he was planning to focus on applying material science discoveries to clinical care. Yet he changed course after talking over the Tufts job with former lab mate Roberts, who had gone directly into private industry after finishing work in Whitesides’ lab in the mid-1990s. (Roberts gave us an overview of his latest entrepreneurial adventures with startups such as 1366 Technologies, Arsenal, and MC10 back in March.)
As Carbeck tells it, Roberts told him he could do more to advance material science discoveries from the lab into clinical use at a company than in an academic setting. Carbeck warmed up to Roberts’ idea enough to pass on the offer from Tufts and become a founder of Arsenal as well as Nano-Terra.
“I don’t right now see any reason why I’d go back to academics,” he says. “I really like the entrepreneurial world, approaching it as a technically sophisticated person who is learning more and more about business all the time.”
In fact, I was talking to Carbeck shortly after he had finished a session of his fellowship program with the New England Clean Energy Council. The council started the program last year to introduce executives with various backgrounds to the unique dynamics of the clean energy sector. Carbeck, for instance, is interested in opportunities to do the engineering required to scale up cleantech discoveries in labs to commercial-sized processes. (We wrote recently about one such discovery, MIT professor Daniel Nocera’s potential breakthrough for converting water into hydrogen gas, which faces technical challenges before his Cambridge startup Sun Catalytix can make hydrogen on a commercial scale.)
My next question for Carbeck was the obvious one: Is he planning to make a career move into the cleantech sector?
“I’m going to be doing something where material science and chemical engineering really play the lead role, but what specific area it’s going to be in is hard to say now,” he says. “But I tell you that the things I’m learning in the clean energy space are really exciting.”
