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Stuart Garfield
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
2010 Women to Watch
Bandgap Engineering's Marcie Black takes solar to the nanolevel
By Jackie Noblett, Special to Mass High Tech
New England prepared to leverage smart grid expertise
MHT's Jackie Noblett: Charging station plans await surge in electric vehicle sales
Following the Clean Energy Council Fellows
Marcie Black
Chief Technology Officer, Bandgap Engineering Inc.
Education: Bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D, MIT. Post-doctoral work at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Noteworthy: As the chief technology officer of a 2-year-old startup, Black leads the effort of nanoengineering silicon to boost its energy-trapping efficiency without making the solar cell more expensive to produce. Bandgap has garnered $6 million worth of venture capital funding and will put it to work over the next year tweaking the cell’s design and finding ways to partner with other solar cell makers.
On wanting to become a scientist
“For me, my strengths have always been math and science. … I knew I wasn’t going to be a writer. My father is an engineer, so that may be a part of it. When I was younger, I was an Explorer (a co-ed branch of the Boy Scouts of America) and our branch did electrical engineering and computer science at Lucent. We got a chance to tinker in the labs.”
Her passion for solar
“For me, it’s definitely the environmental aspects. Clean energy definitely has economic impacts, and I recognize all that, but my strengths are best suited to help the world solve the energy problem. Solar is unique among renewable-energy resources because it can be the primary source of energy moving forward. Not only does it fit in with what I’m good at, but it can help change the world.”
One thing you’ve learned from starting your own company
“It’s a lot of work but it’s been fun. You have to believe (the technology) is going to work before it works … but I’ve been lucky to have a very good co-founder. We kind of joke that he’s getting a lesson in Photovoltaics 101 and I’m getting a lesson in Business 101.”
Where will your company be two years from now?
“We have eight people right now, and we plan on keeping it there until the technology is ready. We have a prototype and we’re optimizing that prototype, then we will have to make it marketable.”
Favorite pastimes
“I have two kids — that’s pretty much what I do. Once in a while, I get a chance to sneak to the gym.”
Is there still a barrier to women pursuing hard sciences?
“The women before us have gotten rid of many of the barriers, but there is still very subtle discouragement of women. There are so many challenges in the world that I don’t think we can afford to limit the talent pool.”
Thoughts on Black, from James Maxwell, team leader and scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory
“We were very sad to see her go. She was a real asset to our team, bringing a strong background in solid-state science, particularly photovoltaics. We generally don’t hire two people with the same backgrounds, and she proved to be one of the best employees we had at Los Alamos.
Sometimes you can get so specialized that you render yourself useless. Not only did Marcie have strong specialized experience, but she also had a broad enough background to work on new projects. She was a great person to work with.”
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