November 9, 2021

During Mobility21 Innovation Fellow Luke Lyle‘s time, he concentrated on developing a novel growth method for gallium oxide, a semiconducting material for high power electronic applications. This material is critical for developing renewable energy technology by increasing the efficiency of power electronics in electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar cells, and batteries.

In addition to developing the growth method, he also participated in dozens of business lectures designed by the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. These lectures included topics varying from licensing intellectual property to budgeting and was also involved in one-on-one business mentoring with the help of an entrepreneur-in-residence.

The largest portion of the fellowship was participation in the I-Corp program, where he spoke to over 30 different researchers, professors, program managers, business analysts, and scientists addressing the viability of gallium oxide-based electronics and common bottlenecks for other wide bandgap semiconductors. This portion was the most crucial to his professional development throughout the program as it gave him comprehensive understanding of the wide bandgap semiconductor market and informed which solutions to scientific problems are most important to commercializing gallium oxide-based devices.