Vice President, Deep Science Fund and Enterprise Science Fund
Given a longer time horizon to pursue ideas, the team is able to operate with greater patience and risk tolerance, says Brian, who earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, with a minor in materials science, from Stanford. But the extra latitude also means they’re constantly weighing investment now against worthwhile economic return later—in some cases, potentially much later.
From the moment he finished graduate school in 1997, Brian Holloway has never felt limited or defined by a single career track or interest area. He’s ventured through a multitude of industries and roles, from a toe-dip into politics as part of a fellowship with Senator Jay Rockefeller; to earning a tenured professorship in materials science at the College of William and Mary; to building a nanomaterials lab for a startup company; to a civilian gig managing international research projects with the U.S. Navy in London; to getting recruited to manage several programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); to serving as chief technology officer for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Lab.
That career carousel, it turns out, was unique preparation for Brian’s role at Intellectual Ventures (IV), where he is responsible for vetting and advancing a daunting range of technologies as vice president of the Deep Science Fund and the Enterprise Science Fund.
“Our team has been chartered to take on the really high-risk, high-reward, long-time-frame initiatives,” says Brian, who joined IV in August 2017. “We cover the waterfront from peptide synthesis, to fluid dynamics, to thermodynamics, to engine design, to solid state physics, to superconductivity. I get to touch on an amazingly diverse set of topics and areas of science. There has never been a day here where I have spent the entire day dwelling on one single scientific topic, and I love that.”
I get to touch on an amazingly diverse set of topics and areas of science, literally on a daily basis. There has never been a day here where I have spent the entire day dwelling on one single scientific topic, and I love that.
- Brian Holloway
IV launched the Deep Science Fund in 2015 to harness advanced concepts across physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, and translate bold ideas into commercial reality. The Deep Science Fund forms and foster teams of accomplished technologists and entrepreneurs, and together with a broad network of global experts, transforms scientific innovations to scalable solutions that address today’s most daunting challenges.
The Enterprise Science Fund was launched in 2023 to investigate applications for even more ambitious scientific concepts. Given a longer time horizon to pursue ideas, the team is able to operate with greater patience and risk tolerance, says Brian, who earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, with a minor in materials science, from Stanford. But the extra latitude also means they’re constantly weighing investment now against worthwhile economic return later—in some cases, potentially much later.
Navigating that creative tension between theoretical and applied science, a dream and a dead end, is at the core of both funds’ mission. Their charter, says Brian, is to identify key opportunities in the science and technology ecosystem and then determine the critical questions that need to be answered before deciding to take on, advance or abandon a project. In making these calculations, they rigorously test and de-risk the science; fine-tune the business analysis and market potential; and then repeat and reassess until they get the finest resolution for the best-possible decision. “We keep circling through these iterative processes,” says Brian, “trying to get to the point where something is possible, practical, feasible and profitable. You can’t just go, ‘Well, I’ve got this IP or concept or dataset and what should I do with it?’ You’ve got to get to the point of asking the right scientific or business questions, and then vetting them. That’s our job.”
Brian and his team contract with an extensive network of consultants and subject experts—people who know the science at an “excruciating level,” he says. “Finding the right people who can give us the answers that we need, understanding where we are trying to go next, that’s our skill set.”
While some projects in the Enterprise Science pipeline are still early in the exploratory phase, others are closer to fruition, says Brian, including one—involving a dynamic skin technology—that has the team particularly excited.
The patent behind this technology concerns perturbing the flow of a fluid, such as air passing over a plane’s wing, at precisely the right point and frequency in order to reduce drag. This invention would have clear applications for aircraft, but also anything else that has air or liquid flowing over or through it, especially at greater speeds or volumes. “There are a variety of potential industries,” says Brian, including high-speed rail, long-distance trucking, pipeline flow, possibly even ships.
As the Enterprise Science team started digging into the dynamic skin idea, they found some work in peer-reviewed literature that supported the concept, but not yet at commercially viable speeds. They estimated maybe a 5 percent reduction in drag at higher velocities, which didn’t immediately wow them. Then they connected with consultants who specialize in commercial aircraft, and they pointed out that those new winglets—the vertical protrusions you often see on the ends of wings—can yield a 3 to 6 percent reduction in drag and have saved billions of gallons of fuel. Five percent suddenly sounded a whole lot more compelling.
“Okay, now we’re excited,” says Brian. “There’s good impact to be had here, if the assumption is true.”
That “if,” of course, is whether they can prove the same drag reduction at commercial flow speeds. To answer that essential question—after they learned a computer model could take years to generate the results they need—they partnered with the University of Melbourne in Australia to use their wind tunnel. Those experiments led to some compelling results, including clarity on economic opportunities for IV and some prestigious peer-reviewed publications for the academic collaborators. “Unlike a lot of for-profit sources of research funding, we value the validation that comes from peer-reviewed publications. Most of our science is so new that we like to be able to say, ‘look the scientific community believes us and agrees with us’.” Now the team is further developing the concepts computationally and in the lab and exploring links between the magnitude of drag reduction and several application spaces for early stage commercialization analysis.
The team is anxious to see how these trials go. Yet with any moonshot, says Brian, they need to stay cool-headed and rational. “We are all realistic, and we know the resolution we need to see. What we’re looking for is enough of an impact—economic and environmental impact—to move forward.”
