Northwestern graduate student, 8 alumni named to Forbes '30 Under 30'

A Northwestern graduate student and eight NU alumni were among 360 young entrepreneurs named to the 2012 edition of Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list.

The magazine’s annual look at 30 up-and-coming individuals in each of 12 fields was published Dec. 17. Chris Wilmer, a Ph.D. candidate in Chemical & Biological Engineering and a member of NU’s Snurr research group, was recognized, along with Nikhil Sethi (McCormick ’10), Keith Goldner (Weinberg ’11), Garrett Ullom (McCormick ’11), Peter Luckow (Weinberg ’10), Alex White (SESP ’08), Ben Parr (Weinberg ’08), Daniel Fletcher (Medill ’09) and Robby Stein (Medill ’07).

NU had two nominees each in the Marketing and Advertising and Games and Apps sections, and one each in Sports, Social Entrepreneurs, Media and Music. The two honored for Marketing and Advertising, Ullom and Sethi, are the co-founders of Adaptly, which offers companies a unified platform for advertising across different social networks.

Wilmer is a co-founder of NuMat Technologies, an NU-based student startup focusing on clean energy solutions. In June, NuMat traveled to Washington, D.C. as part of a Department of Energy competition honoring student groups exploring the intersection of business and clean energy.

“With his colleagues from Northwestern University, Chris Wilmer has invented an algorithm that has already been used to discover and synthesize new porous materials that have been shown to store more natural gas in small spaces than any other material,” Forbes reporter Christopher Helman wrote in the Energy section, titled, “The Future Of Energy Is Nuclear.”

— Joseph Diebold