Bakar Labs for Energy & Materials News
Jeremy Alberga, Bakar Labs and QB3 COO, receives UC Berkeley’s Excellence in Management Award
During a period of rapid growth, Alberga leads with both vision and warmth
News
Latest news34
News
University Hall Demolished For UC Berkeley Innovation Zone, Downtown Berkeley
Phase one will see the completion of Bakar Labs for Energy & Materials, a five-story academic facility designed by Gensler. The structure will contain a mix of wet laboratories and spaces for the purpose of supporting “startups rooted in chemistry, material sciences, and rapid instrument prototyping, propelled by artificial intelligence and machine learning,” according to UC Berkeley Capital Strategies’ press release. Read post
Company News
AIMATX Co-Founder Omar Yaghi Shares 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian-American chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry today, sharing it with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan. The scientists were cited for creating “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.” Yaghi is the 28th UC Berkeley faculty member to win a Nobel Prize and the fifth winner in the past five years. Yesterday, John Clarke shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2021, David Card shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, while in 2020, Jennifer Doudna shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Reinhard Genzel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Read post
Tenant Spotlight
“Better, Faster, Cheaper, Greener”: Tenant Spotlight on AIMATX and Their New Materials to Save the Planet
AIMATX is a materials innovation company that’s using AI to design not only remarkable new materials, but also more practical, efficient paths to synthesize them. Co-founder Jennifer Chayes — who also serves as the Dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley — describes AIMATX as a “materials on demand” type of operation. “It starts with a customer saying, ‘I want a material with this, that, and that property,’” Chayes said. “I want a sneaker with this property. I want a face cream with this property. I want something that can transport a drug that would have been destroyed in the stomach down to the small intestine without being disrupted so it can be absorbed there. I want something to have very, very particular properties, and I’m not really happy with anything I find in online catalogs. So then you’d go to AIMATX to have the material made.” Read post
Tenant Spotlight
Levitree: Lifting Cities out of Flood Danger with Robots
“San Rafael has the Bay Area’s largest flood problem,” Laurence Allen explains. “It’s a city of about 60,000 people facing a $500 to $900 million flood problem. When you run the math on that, the protection is just unaffordable.” Laurence hopes to help San Rafael and other coastal cities lift themselves out of flood danger using technology developed by Levitree, a Bakar Labs company of which he is COO. In short, Levitree uses robots to lift a property, and everything built on it, by injecting wood slurries deep beneath the surface, where it’s prevented from decomposing back into carbon dioxide. “Reshape the World” is their motto. Read post
Tenant Spotlight
GigaCrop’s Chris Eiben wants to improve photosynthesis. Here’s how he’s doing it.
“The thing holding plants back today is the enzyme Rubisco,” Eiben says. “It’s the first enzyme a plant uses to take CO2 and start turning it into a sugar. But the enzyme is slow, and it has a tendency to use oxygen instead of CO2 . Which is incredibly costly for the plant to fix. I don't have a clever way to make Rubisco better; land plants have been trying to improve it for 450 million years, which is a long time. Doing better than that is tough. So GigaCrop is inserting a parallel photosynthesis pathway into plants. “If a plant were an airplane, what we are doing is installing a more efficient engine. The trick is we have to do it while the airplane is flying. Plants must have a working engine at all times” he says. “Rubisco is part of a larger cycle called the Calvin-Benson cycle. Our pathway can exist next to the Calvin-Benson cycle, and they can both operate. But the plants will benefit because our pathway is faster and more energy efficient.” Read post
Event Recap
Recap: Symposium on AI and Climate Technology During SF Climate Week
Climate change is becoming more real with every season. We need to leverage as many tools as possible to solve this global challenge and mitigate the damage in the years to come. Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can advance the discovery, translation, and impact of technologies needed to combat climate change at the speed we need. That’s why this past Wednesday and Thursday (April 23-24, 2025), during SF Climate Week, Bakar Climate Labs partnered with UC Berkeley’s Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) to hold the inaugural “AI and Climate Symposium,” with the important subtitle “From Cutting-Edge Research to Commercialization.” Our goals were to highlight opportunities for AI to advance the discovery and ultimate translation of climate technologies – and to connect researchers, founders, and investors across both AI and climate tech. Read post
