Mingyang Xu, Heyuan Ni, Michael Gao

Project Description

The young men of SHUI - Mingyang Xu of Cornell, Heyuan Ni of Berkeley, and Michael Gao of Penn - are already looking past their Ivy League educations and aiming to make a positive impact on one of the world’s most precious resources: water. As technologies race ahead, our ability to clean up their unintended effects lags even further behind. These young enterprisers have cultivated a bacterium that can help us screen out the pollutants left behind by the nano-tech industry. These pollutants duck under the radar of most conventional regulations for what disqualifies non-potable water, but studies increasingly show we should be wary of these nano-particles. Ultimately, SHUI hopes to work with a large bottled water manufacturer, who will then be able to compete on water cleaner than any other on the market. Long-term, the YCI expects them to try to introduce their engineered bacterium into government water treatment facilities around the world, simply as a public service.