Biography|RJ Scaringe — The Doctorate Finished in This Automotive Lab

The company story starts in a Florida industrial park.

The research that made investors take him seriously was done here.

Scaringe took an S.M. in mechanical engineering at MIT in 2007 and a Ph.D. in 2009.

MIT's Mechanical Engineering alumni profile dates both degrees and places the work in the Sloan Automotive Laboratory under Professor Wai Cheng.

The lab occupies Building 31, Sloan Labs, at 70 Vassar Street.

He studied how to extend the load limit of homogeneous charge compression ignition engines.

That was still combustion research, not battery packs.

CNBC later reported that he formed the firm that became Rivian the day after the doctorate, in June 2009.

The Orange County Register, citing James Womack, places a February 2009 seminar as the first time Scaringe walked up after class and described a new car company.

Building 31 is a working laboratory, not a museum floor.

The Great Dome on Killian Court is what visitors photograph.

The doctorate was earned a few hundred meters northwest of that lawn.

Business Insider later summarized his reason for choosing MIT over Stanford: the Institute had an automotive-specific program and a lab built around cars.

That is his later account of the choice.

Photo: Killian Court and the Great Dome, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Richard Truesdell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Los Angeles Auto Show, 27 November 2018).