In Forbes '30 Under 30,' Stanford affiliates nab seven of energy category’s 30 spots

Forbes' annual “30 Under 30” U.S. feature for 2026 includes eight Stanford University affiliates working in sustainability: five alumni and three students. Seven are in the “Energy & Green Tech” category, and one is in “Manufacturing & Industry.” Seven have cleantech startups. Women outweigh men this year five to three. 

Four alumni recognized in the Energy & Green Tech category are: Gabriella Dweck, MS ’23, (names link to Forbes pages); Alex Fuster, BS/MS ’20; Ali Sarilgan, BS/MS ’19; and Meghan Wood, MS ’23. In the same category, Forbes also honored PhD students Rebecca Grekin and Jade Marcus, and master’s degree student Laurence Allen. The Manufacturing & Industry Category applauds the progress alum Fern Morrison, MS ’24, has made with her research-backed venture.

Over the past eight years, the magazine has recognized the contributions of 68 Stanford alumni, students, and scholars working in sustainability. For the 2026 cohort, as in previous years, most of the Stanford honorees received critical assistance from the many cleantech entrepreneurship courses and programs at Stanford and, more broadly, in the Bay Area. Three won Innovation Transfer Program grants from the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. Two took the Precourt Institute for Energy’s course Stanford Climate Ventures. Both the Precourt Institute and the TomKat Center are part of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. The Ecopreneurship program, a partnership of the Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, helped train three of the honorees. Crucial entities that train and invest in cleantech entrepreneurs in the Bay Area include the U.S. Department of Energy-supported Cyclotron Road, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, and the YCombinator accelerator.

30 Under 30 in Energy & Green Tech

Gabriella Dweck, (names link to LinkedIn profiles), is co-founder and co-CEO of Oleo with classmate Kelly Redmond, MS ’23, (who was not eligible for direct recognition based on age). The duo, who met in the School of Engineering's Design Impact program, transform biomass waste into low-carbon feedstocks for ethanol, renewable diesel, and sustainable aviation fuel. Use of their technology has the very important side benefit of reducing deforestation. They got their start in 2022 with an Innovation Transfer grant. Oleo is advancing their technology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory thanks to an Activate fellowship. The pre-pilot plant they are building in California uses primarily almond and soy hulls, but they say their technology can work with some 30 different biowaste sources. Oleo has raised more $1.6 million from venture capital and grants, according to Forbes. A recent TomKat Center profile describes Oleo’s journey. 

Alex Fuster is co-founder of Astro Energy, which uses artificial intelligence to identify and acquire land for renewable energy projects where grid connection costs are minimal. This, the company says, helps eliminate the surprise costs that kill 80-90% of renewable projects. The team members, who have significant experience in wholesale energy markets, secure grid interconnection agreements, then sell these de-risked, shovel-ready opportunities to larger energy companies. At Stanford, Fuster earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in computer science. He then traded electricity at Citadel for four years before cofounding Astro Energy.

Ali Sarilgan cofounded another AI-based venture, TrueMeter with Ozge Islegen-Wojdyla, GSB PhD '11. The company reduces corporate electricity bills by up to 15%. Its software does this in part by finding the cheapest power providers available to each client, and auditing and correcting bills. With the aim of lowering U.S. carbon emissions, the venture can also help companies use energy more efficiently and transition to getting more electricity from renewable sources. Sarilgan, who grew up in Turkey, installed solar panels to power his family farm. Both of his Stanford degrees are in management science and engineering. Sarilgan also studied entrepreneurship and leadership in the School of Engineering’s Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Sarilgan began working on TrueMeter at Stanford’s StartX philanthropic accelerator. The startup has raised $5.5 million, according to Forbes.

Meghan Wood earned two master’s degrees at Stanford: one from the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources (E-IPER), with a focus in sustainable energy systems, and an MBA from the GSB. Wood and Nicole Gonzalez, MS ’22, co-founded Raya Power to deliver permit-free solar power to apartment renters as well as home owners. Their system requires low or no upfront costs and pays for itself in just a few years through lower utility bills, they say. “Our goal is to make residential solar accessible and affordable for everyone by turning what was once a construction job into a project as simple as assembling an Ikea bookshelf,” Wood said in a recent GSB profile. The duo’s startup first emerged from the Stanford Climate Ventures course. Before that, Wood was selected for an Stanford Impact Founder Fellow in Stanford’s Ecopreneurship program. Wood also credits the mentorship of Jane Woodward, MS ’82/MBA ’87, an adjunct professor in energy and environment and a cleantech investor, with contributing to Raya’s development. Gonzalez earned her degree in design from Stanford’s School of Engineering. E-IPER is part of the Doerr School of Sustainability. 

Rebecca Grekin, PhD candidate with Prof. Sally Benson in the Department of Energy Science & Engineering in the Doerr School of Sustainability, researches tools that use real-world data to quantify and mitigate carbon dioxide emissions from the food industry. Grekin studied Stanford’s dining hall purchases and built software to help trace the emissions impact of more than 150,000 items and ingredients. Today, more than 50 universities and other institutions serving 3.5 billion meals per year have used her tool, TASTE Food, to track Scope 3 emissions. Scope 3 covers indirect upstream and downstream supply chain emissions not directly controlled by the central entity. Despite the great difficulty in counting such emissions accurately, Grekin has helped universities do so, and they have made many data-driven changes in their food purchases.

Jade Marcus is a chemical engineering PhD candidate working in the lab of chemistry professor Matthew Kanan in the School of Humanities & Sciences. Marcus is commercializing a fertilizer that removes up to one ton of CO₂ per ton of fertilizer used, as demonstrated in her greenhouse trials. It also does the normal fertilizer thing of boosting crop yields, demonstrated at up to 50%, which is on par with commercially available fertilizers. Marcus is running a dozen field studies to corroborate these outcomes. The fertilizer is also cheaper and much faster-acting than any carbon removal solution on the market, according to the startup she founded, Mafix. The venture, which can now produce a ton of product annually, got its first boost from the Innovation Transfer program. Mafix has raised $1.3 million from philanthropic sources. Marcus worked for McKinsey & Co. for three years on green business building and climate investing.

Laurence Allen’s robots inject wood chips underground to raise low-lying land facing flood danger by several feet per year inexpensively and quickly, even with buildings and roads on the land. His startup, Terranova, uses wood slurries as the feedstock, so each project also sequesters CO₂. The company can also restore wetlands – Earth’s largest natural CO₂ sink – generating carbon sequestration credits in the process. Allen, a Stanford management science student, will take a leave of absence from his master’s program after the fall 2025 quarter to scale Terranova full-time. He said he received strong support from STVP on patent strategy. In September, Terranova raised $7 million in seed funding with participation from two Stanford-affiliated funds: GoAhead Ventures and Ponderosa, the early-stage climate fund of Galvanize, which was started by Tom Steyer, MBA ’83. The company will use this capital to build 10 more of its robots and is hiring to do so.

30 Under 30 in Manufacturing & Industry

Growing up on a Maine dairy farm, Fern Morisson saw climate change threaten her family’s livelihood. After developing expertise in climate hardware at Stanford and Apple, Morrison cofounded IronGrid with Gabriele Pozzato to tackle a missing piece of the climate puzzle: insurance. The startup uses a physics-based model and AI prediction to create insurance plans tailored to the unique problems faced by manufacturers of new technology hardware, with a focus on climate-related equipment like grid-scale batteries and vehicles for transporting hydrogen. Morrison's master's degree is in chemical engineering. Pozzato primarily studied battery aging as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford in the lab of  Simona Onori. Their goal: package insurance with new technology hardware to greatly lower financial risks for potential buyers. Morrison is a Stanford Impact Founder Prizewinner. IronGrid emerged from the Stanford Climate Ventures course and, earlier this year, won an Innovation Transfer grant. Irongrid recently closed a $4 million seed round, according to Forbes.