Two SEAS alums named to Forbes 30 Under 30

Two alumni from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have been named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30.

Ben Schafer, Ph.D. '24, has been recognized in the Energy & Green Tech category. He was recognized for his startup Rarefied, which is developing ultralight, solar-powered drone aircraft that can stay in the upper atmosphere indefinitely. Schafer began developing this technology as an applied physics Ph.D. student working in the lab of Joost Vlassak, Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Materials Engineering at the SEAS.

“There’s a lot of climate data waiting to be collected in the upper atmosphere that would dramatically improve the accuracy of our current climate models, and could also help better our weather predictive capabilities,” Schafer said. “You could put a network of our devices in the upper atmosphere, and they’d act like relay points for different telecommunications.”

Rarefied has so far raised $1.6 million in grant funding and a partnership with Cubic Corp to develop the next generation of telecom antennas. Rarefied also won a $2,700 Ingenuity Award for early-stage start-ups at the 2024 Harvard Innovation Labs President’s Innovation Challenge.

Akshaya Annapragada, A.B./S.M. '20, was recognized in the Healthcare category. Annapragada studied applied math and bioengineering at SEAS and is now an MD/Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University, where she developed blood tests to screen for liver and ovarian cancers by analyzing fragments of DNA. She also invented ARTEMIS, an artificial intelligence program that identified more than 800 new genomic characteristics with roles in cancer and has been licensed by DELFI Diagnostics.