In corporate America, Stanley Anderson ’79 says, executives often assume that their peers grew up in privileged circumstances. 

He did not.

“I spent my early years trying not to get recruited into gangs, getting shot at, watching my friends get murdered, and thinking that if I don’t leave, I will die,” says Anderson, who was raised in Chicago. “I was fortunate to survive.”

But he thrived, building an impressive career at the likes of HP, Intel, and the Palo Alto Research Center. Now he is applying his management expertise as CEO of Costa Pickleball, a Las Vegas–based startup that sells high-performance paddles in decorative designs. Beyond giving customers a way to, as he says, “bring their identity to the court,” he is also betting on technology: He’s developing a quieter type of paddle he expects will provide a competitive advantage. 

Succeeding in today’s pickleball market will be tough, but Anderson thinks he has what it takes, partly thanks to an important lesson he learned at MIT: “There’s nothing you can’t accomplish if you are willing to put effort into it.”

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue ’85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library. Today, she is learning how the wider universe works by studying galaxy clusters.

Donahue discovered her passion for physics in that library at age 12 and started her path into astronomy thanks to “a providential interaction.” Through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, she got introduced to cutting-edge x-ray imaging—work she found “really cool.”

Now a professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University, she researches galaxy clusters and baryonic matter (matter made of protons and neutrons, as opposed to dark matter) in an effort to learn more about the composition of the universe and its evolution.

“Clusters of galaxies are very large scoops of the universe,” says Donahue, who served as president of the American Astronomical Society from 2018 to 2020. “It’s like taking a sample from the ocean. If you’re trying to find out the average composition of the ocean’s water, you’d want to study as big a scoop as possible.”  

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Tomás Villalón Jr. ’14 was raised in San Antonio, Texas, but vividly remembers smog hanging over the city his family came from—Monterrey, Mexico, a steel manufacturing and metal fabrication hub. Even as a child, he realized it was problematic to breathe that air. 

“I’m motivated because I’ve seen what metal-making does,” says Villalón, who majored in materials science and engineering. He started thinking about sustainable metallurgy senior year while working at Boston Metal, an MIT spinoff focused on decarbonizing steelmaking. In 2019 he cofounded Phoenix Tailings, which has developed an efficient process for extracting rare earth metals from mining waste.

“The mining ecosystem by itself makes over several billion tons of waste,” says Villalón, who serves as chief technology officer. (Others on the founding team are Michelle Chao ’17, Nick Myers, and Anthony Balladon.) “We have to get rid of this pollution.”

The company asserts that its proprietary electrochemical technique for processing rare earths generates no toxins and is carbon-free when fueled by renewables. 

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

As a first-generation student from a small town, Gohar Khan ’21 had to navigate the college admissions process largely on his own. He founded his YouTube channel, Gohar’s Guide, to make things easier for other young people.

Today, more than 10 million people follow Khan on social media for college application advice, study tips, and life hacks. He is also the CEO and cofounder of Next Admit, a consulting business that provides help with college essays, applications, and test preparation. “I’m on a mission to help students worldwide succeed inside and outside of school,” he says.

Born in Pakistan, Khan moved to the United States when he was six months old and grew up in Connecticut, attending a public high school that rarely sent students to top colleges. “That, coupled with the fact that my parents hadn’t gone through the process themselves, made [applying to colleges] a little bit difficult,” he says. “I wanted to demystify the admissions process for a lot of people in the position I was once in.”

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Even as a teenager, Laurie Stach ’06 says, she had a “crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems.” At MIT, she realized she wasn’t the only one.

“Adults always see these youth who are good at math and science and say, ‘You’re going to do great things—someday,’” says Stach. “Meanwhile, traditional education isn’t preparing them.”

That’s why in 2012 Stach founded LaunchX, a for-profit entrepreneurship program that helps high school students build practical skills through an intensive summer program in which they start real companies. Stach says that students form teams, identify a problem, and build an actual product or service that they then take to market—often generating preorders or even revenue before the four-week program ends.

Raised in Texas and the Carolinas, Stach majored in mechanical engineering at MIT and earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011. She ran her first summer program on MIT’s campus with 30 students in 2013 and says “it kind of snowballed.” LaunchX now serves about 500 students per year across both in-person and online programs.

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.