The Sustainability Changemaker Showcase! is a special event highlighting the groundbreaking research of three graduate students selected from the SEDTalks! series. These students have been recognized for their innovative work advancing sustainability in engineering and design.
As part of a TISED initiative, the event will feature TEDTalk-style presentations from our three Changemakers, followed by a live Q&A session, where you'll have the opportunity to engage with them directly.
The event is free to attend, with doors opening at 5:00 pm. After the presentations, join us for a cocktail reception—an excellent chance to connect with the Changemakers and fellow attendees.
Meet our Changemakers
Hoda Ahmed
PhD Candidate, Mining and Material Engineering
Supervisor: Prof. Jinhyuk Lee
Title: A Dash of Salt for more sustainable batteries
Using renewable energy to charge batteries is a great environmental step forward, but the batteries themselves need to be made greener too. Hoda’s work uses manganese-based disordered rock salt (Mn-DRX) cathodes to replace Cobalt ones. This innovative approach synthesizes single-crystal nanoparticles smaller than 500nm, maintaining regular morphology and substantially improving the density and stability of Mn-DRX cathodes.
Steven Walker
PhD Candidate, Chemical Engineering
Supervisors: Prof. Sylvain Coulombe and Prof. Jan Kopyscinski
Title: Making Natural Gas out of Thin Air
If natural gas can be produced by reacting captured carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere with green hydrogen; the process would be carbon neutral. For this process to work an efficient catalyst is needed to increase the conversion of CO2. Steven’s research explores producing carbon neutral natural gas using a unique catalyst that looks like a Twizzler covered in Nerds but 1000 TIMES SMALLER.
Saadia Wasim
PhD Candidate, Civil Engineering
Supervisor: Prof. Stephanie Loeb
Title: A ray of sunshine for cleaner water
Modern water treatment methods are effective, yet they require expensive infrastructure and have high operating costs making them incompatible with rural Africa, the area in the world that needs it most. Saadia’s research is developing a low-energy, low-cost solution via solar powered plasmonic-photocatalytic nanoparticles to remediate contaminated in water. This work helps in developing a sustainable solution for communities in resource limited regions.