
For three decades, Yutaka Wakai has worked where promising materials meet unforgiving machinery. His years at Blue Current put him at the quiet hinge of the battery business: turning a silicon-rich, fully dry chemistry into something a factory can repeat.

Mike Zimmerman is the founder and CEO of Z-Polymers, the Lowell, Massachusetts company behind Tullomer, a melt-spun super polymer marketed as stronger than PEEK and stainless steel yet light enough to print on a desktop 3D machine. A career materials scientist with a PhD in mechanical engineering, he spent nearly 15 years at Bell Labs and Saint-Gobain before founding a string of deep-tech ventures including Quantum Leap Packaging and the solid-state battery company Ionic Materials. He has also taught materials science at Tufts University for more than three decades.
Adden Energy is a Harvard spinout building dynamically-stable, self-healing solid-state lithium-metal batteries designed to make electric vehicles charge in minutes, last a million miles, and never catch fire. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company is scaling its lab breakthrough into commercial pouch cells on a roll-to-roll pilot line and shipping samples to automakers for validation.
William Fitzhugh is the co-founder and CEO of Adden Energy, a Harvard spin-out scaling a self-healing, solid-state lithium-metal battery that has charged in as little as three minutes and survived more than 10,000 cycles in lab cells. A Harvard PhD in applied physics, he is trying to turn a coin-cell breakthrough into a roll-to-roll pilot line and, eventually, batteries that let an EV recharge in the time it takes to fill a gas tank.