Share Alexandra Pantry, an electronics technician at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), joined PPPL’s Energy I-Corps workshop to learn entrepreneurial skills. Within a few weeks, she and other members of her team were talking to company executives all over the United States, the United Kingdom and South Korea. Pantry worked with engineer Andrei Khodak and physicist Rajesh Maingi to discover commercial uses for a technology invented by Khodak that uses liquid metal lithium to absorb heat from the super-hot plasma in fusion experiments. “It was very cool. I really enjoyed it,” said Pantry, who has been at PPPL for about six months. “Because we were all from different fields, we have no problem playing to our strengths, so I have no problem talking to strangers and emailing them and asking them to come to our meetings … I could just reach out to someone and say ‘Hi. I’m interested in your research,’ all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”