Pilanda Watkins-Curry keeps a chessboard on her coffee table at home. She started playing with her father and grandfather when she was 5 years old. Now, playing with her family gives her a chance to focus her analytical mind on an orderly puzzle and block out the chaos that comes with founding a chemistry start-up.

In 2021, Watkins-Curry cofounded Olokun Minerals, where she serves as chief technology officer and leads R&D. The firm is commercializing a technology developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to simultaneously clean salty wastewater and extract the valuable minerals it contains.

Olokun cofounder and CEO Lacey Reddix says that Watkins-Curry leads the start-up much like she plays chess. While Reddix is inclined to move quickly and focus on urgent problems, Watkins-Curry is strategic and maps out how her decisions will affect the company down the road. She excels at absorbing huge amounts of information and at zeroing in on the data that will illuminate her next move.

“We just balance each other out,” Reddix says. “I’m definitely a starter, and I think she’s somebody that can keep the fire going.”

Before Olokun, Watkins-Curry earned a PhD focused on synthesizing materials with rare earth elements for applications like superconductivity, refrigeration, and batteries. She then spent about 6 years developing lubricant and wax products for ExxonMobil. She also did a short stint at the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing designing new inks to make dollar bills harder to counterfeit.

Her time at Exxon gave Watkins-Curry an insider’s perspective on the oil and gas industry and helped her understand the challenge of shepherding a technology from demonstration to industrial-scale application at a large company. That experience has proved invaluable at Olokun.

After initially planning to extract minerals from salty brine produced by desalination plants, Olokun has shifted to targeting wastewater generated by oil and gas extraction. Oil firms usually pump wastewater back underground, a difficult and expensive process that Watkins-Curry says can also contaminate groundwater. Reinjecting the water also wastes valuable minerals that it contains, such as lithium, magnesium, and potassium. Olokun’s technology could address both concerns.

In a recent paper, a team including Watkins-Curry and NREL scientists detailed a process for using a zwitterionic adsorbent to extract lithium from brine. Zwitterionic materials have a positive group that can grab anions like chlorine and a negative group that can snag cations like lithium. The team argues that such a process consumes less water and avoids the use of harsh chemicals, problems that have emerged for other lithium extraction technologies, such as ion-exchange resins.

Lithium was a useful initial example, but Watkins-Curry says that Olokun aims to eventually treat a wider variety of wastewater sources and produce multiple minerals, including some of the rare earth elements that she studied as a PhD student.

“Rare earths are heavily needed now,” she says. “That’s the hot topic.”

Olokun has a 140 m² lab in Chesterfield, Virginia, where Watkins-Curry continues testing its technology. After a $1.1 million funding round in 2023, the firm is seeking additional money to move beyond the lab and build a pilot project with its first set of oil and gas customers.

As CTO, Watkins-Curry is Olokun’s technology expert, but Reddix says she has also grown into a savvy business leader, always keeping customers in mind during the R&D process.

Several prestigious training programs have accelerated that process. In 2023, Reddix and Watkins-Curry were named Breakthrough Energy Fellows, a program that offers funding and business training to technical founders of early-stage start-ups in clean technology. That same year, Watkins-Curry joined NREL’s West Gate program, which offers similar support for scientists who have founded companies.

Watkins-Curry says this kind of training has helped her further broaden her skills and deepen her understanding of start-up operations. But as a veteran of one of the world’s biggest companies, she doesn’t always buy into Silicon Valley’s conventional wisdom that faster is better. Like chess players, start-up founders have to balance speed and careful deliberation to make the best moves.

“In a start-up you're prompted to move fast, to learn fast, to fail fast, but you can also fail fast and make very, very big mistakes,” she says. “Some decisions don’t have to be made fast. Some decisions can take time.”