Kyle Matthews wouldn’t be where he is today if he hadn’t come to Drexel. That’s true for many alumni, but it’s especially true for Matthews, the co-founder and chief technology officer of MXene Inc., because without studying at Drexel he never would have begun working with MXenes in the first place. In the lab of Yury Gogotsi, distinguished university professor and the Charles T. and Ruth M. Bach Endowed Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Matthews was exposed to the endless possibilities presented by MXenes, a groundbreaking class of two-dimensional materials Gogotsi co-invented in 2011 with Michel Barsoum, a distinguished professor in the College of Engineering. And just a few short years later, he’s now playing a pivotal role in commercializing their enormous potential. Matthews and his colleagues were steadily improving the stability, batch size and quality of the MXenes when venture capital firms began asking why they hadn’t yet started a company to move the materials into mainstream industry. “Well,” he often told them, “I haven’t finished school.” Ultimately, he realized that wasn’t the right answer.

He and Gogotsi co-founded MXene Inc. and have begun scaling up production in Philadelphia. They’re building a customer base that includes Fortune 500 companies, defense contractors and advanced electronics developers, all of whom see potential for highly conductive and tunable MXenes to improve their products. Matthews, meanwhile, secured through the Department of Energy a two-year fellowship at Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory, which will help him and the company build toward large-scale production. “MXenes have the potential to be ubiquitous and prolific in technology,” he says, citing uses such as printed and wearable electronics or internet-ready devices. Already, though, he thinks his experience shows the value of translational research that links the lab and industry. “The only way to bridge that gap is to just try to do it,” he says. “It’s trial by fire.”