As Ronan McGovern was finishing up his Ph.D., he was eager to commercialize the energy-efficient seawater desalination process he had developed. He had already done some legwork to find a market and had found an interesting lead—but he had also hit some roadblocks. Like most on the verge of completing a Ph.D., he didn’t have the financial resources to get an endeavor like this off the ground. He also knew that he would be hard-pressed to find a flexible industry job that would pay the bills while he worked on developing his business idea.
Luckily for McGovern, his graduate adviser, John Lienhard, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, supported McGovern’s entrepreneurial interests. They agreed that McGovern could stay on as a postdoc in the lab, earning his keep by continuing to contribute to Lienhard’s research program while also working toward his own entrepreneurial dream.
That was in 2014. By the time McGovern completed his postdoctoral stint in 2016, he was CEO and president of Sandymount Technologies in Somerville, Massachusetts. The secret? Commitment, perseverance—and a pioneering MIT program that helps postdocs explore commercializing their research.
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