A nuclear energy startup founded by two University of Chicago Booth School of Business students has done something no Executive MBA team has done before: cracked the finalist round of one of the country’s most selective science and deep-tech accelerators.
Zachary Hynek, an Executive MBA student at Chicago Booth, and his co-founder Hamilton Parrish, a part-time MBA student at the same school, were named 2026 finalists for the George Shultz Innovation Fund (GSIF) for their venture, Morton Labs. The selection makes them the first EMBA-led group to advance to the finalist stage in the Fund’s history, and one of just four teams nationally to reach the round this year.
The team will pitch the Innovation Fund Advisory Committee for up to $250,000 in funding, with the outcome shaping the company’s next phase as it scales work in one of the most technically demanding and globally consequential sectors in modern energy.
Bridging Scientific Discovery and Industrial Development
Morton Labs is a deep-tech software company designed to close a longstanding gap between scientific research and real-world industrial deployment in the nuclear energy sector. Its platform runs the kinds of simulations that engineers and operators need in order to test critical components of nuclear power plants, work that has historically been slow, expensive, and accessible only to a narrow set of national laboratories and large-scale utilities.
Hynek and Parrish identified the problem from inside the industry. Both were working at private fusion companies when they entered Booth’s MBA programs, and both encountered the same operational bottleneck: there was no streamlined platform to run the simulations needed to validate the components their teams were developing. Each was building workarounds. Neither was satisfied with the status quo.
The two combined forces and built a platform that addressed the problem they had been running into independently. As more nuclear energy companies expressed interest in the tool, the founders moved from side project to full venture, and Morton Labs was born.
A Platform Built with Argonne and Booth in Its DNA
Morton Labs is, in many ways, a product of the broader UChicago research ecosystem. The platform was developed with support from the University of Chicago’s computer science department and benefits from the University’s deep connections to Argonne National Laboratory, one of the country’s leading federally funded research centers.
That ecosystem matters in deep tech. Nuclear energy software is not the kind of product that can be prototyped in a weekend. It requires access to high-performance computing infrastructure, regulatory expertise, and a community of researchers willing to test, break, and refine the tool. Morton Labs has been able to draw on all three through its UChicago footprint.
Booth’s Global Reach Becomes a Commercial Asset
The international dimension of Booth’s Executive MBA program has also become a tangible business asset. Morton Labs landed an early customer in a leading United Kingdom-based fusion company, and the founders used Booth’s London campus residencies to deepen the relationship in person. Between classes during international study weeks, the team made site visits to the company’s headquarters in Oxford, turning what is typically a classroom experience into client development.
That kind of overlap, where coursework and customer visits run on the same calendar, reflects how the EMBA program is structured for working professionals already operating at senior or technical levels in their industries. For Hynek, that structure made it possible to pursue an MBA without stepping away from the technical and operational fluency the venture demanded.
What the GSIF Finalist Slot Means
The George Shultz Innovation Fund is among the more rigorous accelerators of its kind in the country. It draws applications from researchers and founders affiliated with leading institutions, including Argonne National Lab, Fermilab, and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and selects only a handful of teams each year for its finalist round.
For Morton Labs, the recognition validates more than the technology. It signals that the company is far enough along to withstand serious investor scrutiny, including diligence on technical performance, market sizing, regulatory positioning, and team execution. Hynek noted that his previous startup applied to the Fund the year before and was not selected, and described the current selection as a measure of how thoroughly Booth prepares founders for that level of review.
The team being the only student-focused finalist this year, and the only one led from a business school, also speaks to a wider trend: business schools are increasingly producing teams that can compete head-to-head with founders from research universities and national labs, particularly in fields where regulatory navigation and commercial strategy matter as much as raw technical innovation.
A Chicago Story with Global Stakes
Morton Labs sits at an intersection that Chicago has been quietly building for years: rigorous university research, federally funded national lab capacity, and a business school producing founders willing to take on hard problems. Nuclear energy, both fission and fusion, is widely considered one of the central technologies in any credible plan for decarbonized, reliable electricity at global scale. A Chicago-built software platform that helps the industry move faster has implications well beyond the city.
For now, the next milestone is the GSIF pitch. After that, the harder work of scaling a deep-tech company in a regulated industry begins.
