Students Reimagine a Sustainable Future in Global Innovation Challenge

Seven people stand on a studio set behind a camera, posing in front of a blue backdrop and a banner for the Reimagine Our Future Undergraduate Sustainability Competition. From left are Co-Founder Warren Lavey; Professor Holly Rosencranz, M.D., who sponsored and presented the Sustainable Health Solution prize; Professor Donna Tonini, who presented the Climate Change award; Masters of Ceremony Jenny Zhu and Sandra Voskoboynikova; and competition Co-Founder and Coordinator Leon Liebenberg — The Dec. 6 Reimagine Our Future awards ceremony was streamed online. From left are Co-Founder Warren Lavey; Professor Holly Rosencranz, M.D., who sponsored and presented the Sustainable Health Solution prize; Professor Donna Tonini, who presented the Climate Change award; Masters of Ceremony Jenny Zhu and Sandra Voskoboynikova; and competition Co-Founder and Coordinator Leon Liebenberg.

A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign team that designed a low-cost sensor to detect water contamination took the top prize at the fifth annual Reimagine Our Future sustainability competition.

The 2025 competition engaged 313 students from 12 universities across the globe. Over eight weeks, students developed fact sheets proposing creative solutions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, drawing insights from engineering, health sciences, agriculture, architecture, and more.

The overall winners, announced at the Dec. 6 online awards ceremony, won the $2,000 top prize for developing a low-cost, handheld water-quality sensor that uses engineered bacteriophages to quickly detect contamination. Led by Crystal Zhao, a Biochemistry major at Illinois, the team included Marlo Decapo, Valeria Echavarri, Yashwanth Nagarajan, and Torin Schroeder.

Two second-place teams were awarded $1,000 each. Andrea Jimena Arias-Diaz and Ricardo Robles-Fletes from the National Autonomous University of Mexico designed a water-purification system for Xochimilco in Mexico City. And a U. of I. team was honored for its energy-efficient, solar-boosted data-center cooling concept; team members included Akhil Raizada, Logan Justiniani, Anna Aler, Arush Chatterjee, Arnav Pande, Gianna Niecestro, Sarina Shah, and Jack Visnjevac.

The $500 Climate Change Solution award from the Center for Global Studies went to Ayush Thaker, Vidipta Roy, SaarthakJain, and Marcus Lam of Illinois, for a project on surface tiles using microbially induced calcium carbonate precipitation.

Two Sustainable Health Solution prizes were awarded, for $500 each: one for a project on care for animals in Ukraine, by a team from the International Humanitarian University in Ukraine; and the second for a medication disposal system designed by students from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

In total, $8,500 in awards were distributed across 11 teams spanning climate, health, education, transportation, and multidisciplinary innovation categories.

Team leader Crystal Zhao, a Biochemistry major at Illinois, reacts after learning that her multidisciplinary group won the overall award for their innovative “Phage Integrated Environmental Detector,” while Voskoboynikova looks on.

The contest was co-founded by Professor Leon Liebenberg of the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering and Professor Warren Lavey of the School of Earth, Society, and Environment and the College of Law at Illinois.

Lavey praised the students’ ideas for offering hope amid global environmental and social challenges. He also reflected on the lasting influence of the late Professor Robert McKim, who helped establish the competition and urged students and educators alike to take responsibility for sustainability solutions: “We have all contributed to causing the problems, and we therefore all have an obligation to contribute to finding and pursuing solutions,” Lavey said.

Liebenberg emphasized that the competition encourages students to understand the interconnected nature of sustainability challenges, develop innovative responses, and envision how these ideas could be scaled in real communities.

“Our aim is to empower students to combine creativity with systems thinking and to engage boldly with the world’s most pressing problems,” he noted.

A list of winners and additional information can be found on the competition website.