Carbon Removal Challenge Winners Showcase
We invite you to join us at the eighth and final webinar in the OpenAir Collective's 2026 Carbon Removal Challenge monthly webinar series. The winning student teams of this year's Challenge will present at the Carbon Unbound East Coast Conference in New York City on May 20th. This webinar will broadcast the recording of their presentations, with the winning teams online to answer questions in the chat.
The 2026 winning teams are from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Rutgers University, University of Michigan, and Cornell University/Princeton University/Columbia University. Each team will give a 9-minute presentation about their winning carbon removal projects.
KAIST's MMML team will present about their “Solvent-Free Manufacturing of Electrified Structured Sorbents for Scalable Direct Air Capture” project, which enables high-density architectures with roll-to-roll scalability for efficient system integration. Their team members are Injun Park, Junseong Kim, Sieun Kim, Karoline L. Hebisch, Mujin Cheon, Inhwan Park, Minhyung Lee, and Juyeon Kang.
Rutgers "C3W" (Carbon Capture with Concrete Waste) team will present a novel mineral separation technology combined with well-established waste management and carbon mineralization methods to enable utilization of concrete waste as a CO2 sorbent. Their team members are Jack Kaszas, Noemie Denis, Ranuri Dissanayaka Mudiyanselage, Yu Zhou, Karna Krishna, Richie Campbell, and Alex Golub.
The "Gigatonne Bio" team from Cornell, Princeton, and Columbia Universities will present their solution that converts mine waste into permanent CO2 removal and critical metals with engineered bio-mining bacteria. Their team members are Joseph Lee, Kyle Dayton, Alia Almansoori, Milosz Majewski, and Evan Moretti.
The University of Michigan Carbon Capture team will present "Project SAPPHIRE," a diffusion-based microbial electrolytic cell runs in urban wastewater systems to mineralize carbon and produce hydrogen. Their team members are Daniel Johnson, Brendan Coffman, Elena Runion, Willow Hwang, Kate Wallace, Sofia Castillo, Reid Zupanc, Min Hollweck, Simon Van Wyk, Swathi Seshadri, Divya Dwarakanath, and Nico Dettling (not pictured).
For more information about the Carbon Removal Challenge and how you can participate as a student, organizer, judge, mentor, partner, donor, or sponsor, visit https://openaircollective.com/CRC.