Above: Dorchester’s Jocelyn Foulke, left, and her business partner, Dr. Weile Yan, launched LiPhera last December as a scientific start-up focused on extracting lithium more economically during battery recycling. Courtesy photo
Dorchester’s Jocelyn Foulke is getting a charge out of life with her eight-month-old start-up company, LiPhera, as she and her colleagues work at transforming the landscape of lithium battery technology.
The former school administrator has had to learn many things on the fly, such as coaching a Little League baseball team while serving as a board member at Dorchester Baseball, or finding the quickest route to get her two kids to the Mather School in the mornings.
Now, after leaving the world of education, the 44-year-old Codman Square resident has turned her energy toward finding new ways to recycle lithium for use in batteries of all kinds.
“Battery technology is growing in everything, from ground level utility storage to data centers to vehicles,” she said during an interview in Fields Corner last month. “You can start to realize they are ubiquitous, and we are now using so, so many batteries and it’s a significant change over the last five to 10 years. You don’t see it because you’re not looking at it. It’s just inside things. They predict that there is going to be a five-fold increase for lithium.
“Most of the [lithium] sources, though, are very far away and there’s a potential shortage of lithium on the horizon. We need to get lithium where we have it – batteries that are at the end of their lives and not in service anymore,” she noted.
Most lithium now is gathered from underground liquid brines in Latin America or from Spodumene rock ore mined in Australia. However, both of those raw materials are sent to China for extraction, presenting potential political and geographical challenges in a highly critical supply chain.
To that end, Foulke and Dr. Weile Yan, a noted environmental scientist at UMass Lowell, and the Mass Clean Energy Center, launched LiPhera as a way to promote a scientific product that can remove lithium more economically from old batteries, wastewater, and geothermal power plant brines – and perhaps other things yet to be imagined.
“I wanted to do something that could solve a very meaningful problem in the world,” she said. “We decided to dive in and take a leap and see what we could create. We launched a company and worked intensively to figure things out. We incorporated in December 2025, and I said, ‘Okay, this is my full-time thing and I’m working on it 100 percent.’”
Dorchester’s Jocelyn Foulke. Courtesy photo
All of which is quite a change for the Oregon native who came east to attend Bowdoin College and major in science with a social justice interest. Having met her husband, Dan Hall, in college, she decided to stick around the East Coast and enter the teaching profession.
That led her in 2005 to Excel Charter School, a “tiny hole-in-the-wall” start-up school in East Boston directly under the flight path of Logan Airport where she taught math to eighth graders. She climbed the ranks to principal and head of school, from which position she navigated challenges in getting everyone on the same page, retaining teachers, working with parents, and keeping things going daily.
She and her family moved to Dorchester in 2013. Her last five years at Excel were spent in the central office where she was Director of Operations and oversaw an ambitious expansion and building program for the school until 2022.
“I didn’t come into it with the anticipation I would stay that length of time…but I was very interested in it and like the challenge of working with young people and in an environment that was innovating quickly,” she said. “Essentially it was a start-up, too. I kind of learned to be a business person there, learning to do contracts, negotiations, data interpretation, and we were building new school buildings so that gave me real estate and construction experience.”
In 2022, Foulke returned to her roots in science, hoping to solve big problems related to climate and environment. She enrolled in MIT’s Sloane Management Mid-Career MBA Fellows program, finishing the one-year intensive and working initially at Found Energy in Charlestown.
After meeting Dr. Yan in 2025, she knew the two of them could do something very interesting. And so, the company was born.
Battery recycling already happens, she said, with lithium mostly extracted in China. When batteries are used up, they are shredded. Aluminum, copper, nickel, cobalt and manganese are extracted stateside, and a “black mass” is left.
“Today we stop that process because it’s not economical to recycle it here,” she said. “It goes to China to be processed. The question is whether we want to do that at home and have the supply chain become shorter and more secure. Right now, we get the nickel, cobalt, and manganese out, but not lithium.”
Their primary proprietary product is a new way to extract the lithium at the front end of the recycling process, thus saving money and keeping an increasingly important resource for battery power close to home. But the part that Foulke continues to learn about is the business side of things, where she identifies investors and recycling center operators and talks with them about how their product can save them $3,000 per month.
The effort got a boost recently when LiPhera won a spot in the third cohort of the state’s Founder’s School program, which helps non-traditional start-ups. Operating since 2024, the Founder’s School is a “founder-centered pre-accelerator built for deep tech venture readiness.”
The program combines structured workshops, expert sessions, and milestone checkpoints during weekly and biweekly touchpoints within the program, followed by nine months of ongoing coaching and advisory support, according to Sienna Leis, who runs the program for MassVentures.
“We’re finding we have so much interest in the program and our quality of applicant continues to grow stronger because people are resource starved,” said Leis. “Jocelyn is a great example of that in that.”
She said they love the concept of LiPhera and the fact that Foulke comes out of the education world and not the typical scientific startup pathway. She said it gives added perspective to the company and the current cohort at Founder’s School.
“You might think they’re doing something too big, and you show up with them and hear them and then think, ‘I can do that,’” Foulke said. “Even putting together one federal grant application is a huge lift. Accessing that technlogical assistance to get together a high quality grant application and the strategy involved is so helpful.”
It has also helped them refine their other lithium extraction products for the marketplace and investment community. One of those is using an older technology refined by Dr. Yan that extracts lithium from a hot brine produced at geothermal power plants.
“Today, we don’t extract the lithium even though we pump it to the surface…because there is other stuff in the liquid,” said Foulke. “It may end up we go after one of these other applications as our first application of the product. We have really focused on battery recycling but there has been a cooling of support for that, and we might punt and go to another application to show we can do other things too.”
No matter what product they end up promoting first, it will be the kind of major problem Foulke left the education world to solve – and she’ll have done it right from her base in Codman Square.
“Ninety percent of Lithium is refined in China,” she said. “That’s equally of concern if you’re thinking about how much our energy and power depend on batteries. There is a real supply chain vulnerability there…My job now is to go out and find resources and line up people, initiate growth, and put it all together to make it happen.”
