R&D Engineer, Advanced Development at 24M Technologies

At 24M I worked on advanced battery development and was technical lead on the ARPA-E IONICS project, a $3.5 million Department of Energy grant focused on high-energy-density batteries. It was a continuation of the battery work I had started at Princeton, but now with commercial constraints turned all the way up.

The work covered active and inactive material evaluation, electrode and electrolyte specification, cell design testing, root-cause failure analysis, and cost optimization. It was the first time I had to carry technical judgment through manufacturability, budget, and schedule instead of stopping at the lab result.

That changed how I thought about science: not just whether something works, but whether it can survive contact with reality.

The work centered on advanced battery development inside a next-generation battery company. In practice that meant evaluating materials, specifying electrodes and electrolytes, testing cell designs, diagnosing failures, and thinking constantly about how electrochemical performance interacted with manufacturability and cost.

This was the first environment where technical decisions could not stay technical for long. Every promising direction had to survive budget, schedule, scale-up risk, and the question of whether it was robust enough for a real product roadmap rather than a lab result.

24M sharpened a habit that has stayed with me since: technical work is only half-done until it can survive real operating constraints. That instinct later translated directly into how I think about software and AI products.