After Brandon Sorbom graduated from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 2010, he decided to take the ‘couple of thousand dollars’ he had saved and his credit card and fly to Boston.
Sorbom wanted to get his Ph.D. in nuclear fusion but had been rejected from all five programs he applied to, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sorbom then, headed there to try to get a job at the school’s fusion energy lab.
He is now the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a rapidly growing company spun out of Sorbom and his co-founders’ research. CFS aims to commercialize, fusion, a safe and virtually limitless source of “clean energy,” to combat climate change. The company is funded by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates by way of energy innovation investment fund Breakthrough Energy.