Harvard Students Take on Critical Minerals and Energy Challenges in Inaugural Fellowship

Seventeen Harvard students spent the summer working on challenges in industries from mining to nuclear energy as members of the inaugural cohort of the Q Fellows program.

The 10-week program, funded by the nonprofit Quantum Alliance, aimed to steer students’ technical talent toward capital-intensive infrastructure challenges.

Fellows from Harvard College, Harvard Business School, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences studied critical mineral recycling, nuclear factor financing, electrical grid interconnection delays, and midstream mineral processing.

The program was led by Quantum Alliance founder Ujjwal Kumar and funded by a mix of philanthropic backers. Former Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt and his wife Wendy S. Schmidt agreed to fund five fellows. An HBS alumnus funded five more, according to Kumar.

Kumar said it was difficult to raise money for exploring open-ended problems rather than for startups that would produce equity for investors. His wife, who co-founded Quantum Alliance, contributed additional funding.

Each project group, consisting of one to four fellows, was paired with a mentor from one of the program’s problem sponsors, which included mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, Terra AI, McKinsey & Company, and XPRIZE.

“Ujjwal really wanted to make sure that the sponsors were being mentor figures and not having more transactional roles with us,” Hannah H. Curhan ’27 said.

Fellows were trained in problem-driven, interview-based startup methods. They conducted customer discovery and field testing at the industrial sites behind the problems they were studying.

Petr S. Berlizov ’28 and Curhan flew to Utah to tour Rio Tinto’s Kennecott copper mine and processing facilities.

Berlizov said seeing operations firsthand helped him understand the industry’s complexity and how difficult it is to get a project into production.

“There’s a gigantic disconnect between people who do tech in places like San Francisco, as opposed to operators on the ground,” he said.

Caitlyn S. Gonzalez ’28 said she traveled to the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C. where her team met with India’s finance minister. She also met with Duke Energy and Vulcan Elements in North Carolina.

Fellows were allowed to keep the intellectual property rights to their summer work, another difference from several industry-funded models.

“They gave us intellectual property rights to all the work we were doing over the summer, so even though we were kind of hired by Quantum Alliance because they were paying us, they let us keep any products we had built, networking we had done,” Curhan said.

The program was open to students with no background in startups, and for some, it was their first taste of entrepreneurship.

“I never considered being a startup founder. I thought it was terrifying and something that people only did if they had a really cool idea,” Curhan said. “This program taught me that I actually was capable of being a startup founder and gave me the skills to do that.”

Several fellows said the program’s most valuable offering was its introductions to companies in the industries they hoped to work in.

“If we hadn’t had that initial connection to Rio Tinto, I don’t think we would have been able to get it as three college students,” Berlizov said. “So for me, it was an exceedingly beneficial program that gave me a lot of things and has enabled us to actually start a business.”

But after the initial introductions, he added, Q Fellows took a more hands-off approach, and fellows were “mostly on our own.”

“They gave us exposure to these people, but it wasn’t the case that they were connecting us to all of the companies after that,” Berlizov said.

Kumar said he would strive to keep supporting fellows after the program ends, including with financial backing for their future ventures.

“Our mission is to create that ecosystem of founders and people and researchers to work in the modern industries on which the modern world depends,” Kumar said.

In the coming years, Kumar added, he plans to expand the program to other campuses and build partnerships with venture capital firms.

“We will be connecting the industries with those people,” he said. “The people who are working in these industries come to us because we have become a feeder for the world about these problems.”

For Kumar, though, success is not solely based on the number of startups a cohort launches or the “next billion dollar idea.”

“The idea is not to just create a company. The idea is to actually solve problems, and that’s why Quantum Alliance exists,” Kumar said.

—Staff writer Francesco Palma can be reached at [email protected].

—Staff writer Andrew Park can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @AndrewParkNews.