Alumni spotlights

It’s been a “rollercoaster” for Mina Zarabain, PhD, from her days in a lab at the Schulich School of Engineering to co-founding Carbonova to rebuild CO2, methane and waste energy into carbon nanomaterials for industrial use. 

When Zarabian (PhD’18, Chemical Engineering) first developed the idea to turn waste into strong, light nanomaterials, she was excited about the science, but she wasn’t sure about the business side. 

To dig into potential commercial applications, Zarabian took an entrepreneurship course at the Haskayne School of Business that matched engineering and MBA students. “I started testing the idea, and I saw that people got excited, and that it was making sense from the economic perspective,” she says. “That, on top of the science part, made for my ‘Eureka moment.’”