Kenny Higa is a research scientist in the Energy Storage Group within the Energy Technologies and Systems Division of the Energy Technologies Area. This group specializes in battery electrode production and evaluation, and he has built tools to bridge the gap between lab and pilot scales. In 2022, Kenny, former postdoc Daniel Collins-Wildman, and Vince Battaglia invented a novel flow-assisted battery design for low-cost stationary storage, which eventually led them to explore entrepreneurship through offerings by the Intellectual Property Office and the Cradle to Commerce program. In 2024, Kenny and group member Vivian Tran, who performed some of the validation experiments, started a public benefit company to pursue commercialization.
Kenny is also an active member of the Asian Pacific Islander Employee Resource Group (API ERG) and the Early Career Employee Resource Group (ECERG). This month, which is API Culture Month, he and Vivian are offering a “Falling Safely” workshop at the Lab
How is the experience of being an entrepreneur different from being a researcher or inventor?
I’m very grateful to have had the chance to learn first-hand about the business world, which feels quite distinct from what I’ve seen in research. Most of my education was in science and engineering, so this experience has encouraged me to think from different perspectives. There are some similarities between these two broad areas in attracting interest, but we have different audiences, are operating with different constraints, and are pursuing different goals, and these can be quite fluid when starting a business.
You’ve held workshops at the Lab for the API ERG on “Falling Safely” that leverage martial arts techniques. Can you tell me about the workshop and also why that skill is important?
To provide some background, I met API ERG co-founder Tina Clarke at a joint ERG event in 2023 and learned from her that API ERG was founded in response to the sharp increase in violence against members of the Asian community during the pandemic. I had followed these incidents in the news and had guessed that head impacts due to falling to the ground caused the most severe injuries. Since I had been practicing judo (which involves safely throwing people to the ground) for years, I wanted to train people to have better chances of surviving falls.
I wasn’t able to create a training program at the height of the pandemic, but after talking with Tina, I found that API ERG was interested in sponsoring these trainings at the Lab. While pandemic-related violence had become less prominent by that time, lots of people still get seriously injured from falling in ordinary life. For seniors, this is the leading cause of trauma deaths, according to the CDC. Vivian, who has a background in aikido, joined our research group at around that time, and we hosted the first falling workshop for the API ERG in 2024. We plan to host a workshop during API Culture Month each year (the next workshop is on May 13, register here), and at other times during the year. I’ve also held a few publicly-accessible classes on campus (see https://recwell.berkeley.edu/wellness-offerings/health-safety/) with my friends from the UC Berkeley yongmudo club, where we’re able to host more comprehensive sessions, although these are fee-based to cover facility use.
How do martial arts skills, strategies, or techniques translate to being a researcher or an entrepreneur?
Different people see different meanings in their practices, and for me, I mostly needed exercise and liked the connections between judo and some aspects of science and engineering. But what I later came to appreciate more is that judo was specifically created as an educational system, and our practices create opportunities to learn to work with other people of a variety of ages, experiences, and skills. These opportunities remind me that there can be many ways to accomplish something and that there are things to learn in just about any situation. I’ve tried to keep these lessons in mind in my professional life as well.
Sign up for the Falling Safely Workshop on May 13.
Read about the API Culture Month events planned by the API ERG.
