Dr. Kevin Peter Hickerson
NUCLEAR PHYSICIST, PRESIDENT & CEO
Dr. Kevin Hickerson is a California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Los Alamos trained Nuclear Physicist and the founder of The Earthineering Company. He has worked with deep tech startups since 1998, starting with his first company, Invector Technologies. After Caltech, he joined the robotics startup, Evolution Robotics. He went on to join Idealab, Evolution’s incubator in Pasadena, California, to work on prototyping new technology in machine vision, optics, and solar power. There he helped start and grow many nascent startups at Idealab in the robotics, additive manufacturing, and solar power industries.
25 years in renewable energy, optics, machine learning and robotics
20 years on flagship nuclear collaborations at Los Alamos, Caltech, UCLA, INFN
Caltech BS in Physics, MS, PhD in Experimental Nuclear Physics
14 patents, owned/licensed by Caltech, GE, iRobot, Amazon, 3D Systems
8 startups in solar, 3DP, NLP, machine vision, robotics and mobile computing
In 1999, Dr. Hickerson founded Invector Technologies to develop a Large Language Model (LLM) hardware accelerator (named the Extropy chip) for tablet computers. The technology was licensed to Notepad Computing where he continued work as Lead Developer.
He received his Bachelors of Science in Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy from Caltech in 2002.
As an intern at Evolution Robotics, Dr. Hickerson invented and built a laser system that uses high speed image processing to avoid very small obstacles in low-cost robotic vacuums. Hickerson’s patents were sold to iRobot, maker of the Rumba.
Next, Dr. Hickerson invented the world’s first rooftop photovoltaic concentrator (PVC) to get Underwriters Laboratories (UL) listing, prototyped at Idealab and developed as a rooftop solution for the startup Energy Innovations. This unique design is enabled by a novel mathematically-exact linkage. Energy Innovations manufactured thousands of units for plant-scale deployment of their flagship product, the Sunflower.
Dr. Hickerson helped launch eSolar, a solar energy plant company that used his work to use machine vision and AI to calibrate and steer low-cost heliostat fields. Praised by Governor Schwarzenegger, the company's first power plant, the Sierra SunTower, and the company won several awards including Renewable Energy World's "Renewable Project of the Year” and MIT Technology Review’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World in 2010.
For Desktop Factory he developed a novel additive manufacturing process for using heat lamp optics to build ultra-strong nylon 3D printed (3DP) parts. The company and patents were acquired by the world’s largest 3DP company (3D Systems) and the design was deployed as a product. The first patent is now cited in over 300 other related inventions.
In 2005, he went back to Caltech to study fundamental nuclear physics under the Advisorship of Prof. Bradley Filippone. For his doctoral thesis, Dr. Hickerson built the UCNb experiment from-the-ground-up. Using ultracold neutrons, he was the first to measure the Gamow-Teller Fierz interference term of free neutron decay, an important probe into new physics beyond the standard model. He was also the first graduate student to join the team that now holds the world record for the most precise measurement of the neutron lifetime.
As a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA, he led the team building the Slow Control System and neutron background modeling for the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), another record-breaking nuclear experiment boasting the coldest cubic meter in the universe, at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy.
As Chief Scientist at Sun Vapor, Dr. Hickerson guided the effort to decarbonize California’s largest bioethanol plant using solar concentrators in early 2020.
Dr. Hickerson saw through decades of experience that traditional solutions to energy including solar and fossil fuels simply could not keep up with the ever increasing demand for cleaner and cheaper transportation fuels. In April of 2020, he started The Earthineering Company to finally solve the challenge head-on using advanced high-temperature nuclear energy.