Alumni spotlight
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Mina Zarabian PhD’18 (Chemical Engineering)
Turning trash into treasure
Mina Zarabian is rebuilding GHG waste into strong, cost-effective carbon nanomaterials for industry
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.’”
Maybe not everybody is an entrepreneur, but everybody in a PhD or master's program doing a thesis is solving some important problem. If they see themselves as a small piece of a big puzzle, then their studies will be more exciting and rewarding.
Mina Zarabian PhD’18 (Chemical Engineering)
She knew she had more than a paper for a journal. She had a commercial enterprise. “Maybe not everybody is an entrepreneur, but everybody in a PhD or master's program doing a thesis is solving some important problem. If they see themselves as a small piece of a big puzzle, then their studies will be more exciting and rewarding.”
Zarabian finished her PhD in 2018 and co-founded Carbonova with her supervisor, Professor Emeritus Dr. Pedro Pereira Almao, PhD. She then participated in GreenSTEM’s emissions-focused entrepreneurial pilot program, spoke at conferences including SXSW, won award after award, and had patents granted in jurisdictions including Canada, Japan and Korea.
“2025 was great because we started getting more focused on working with customers,” she says. “We started having more product and getting faster feedback and iteration from the market, which brought us a lot of traction because we saw that we could get the customers excited.” 2026 is shaping up to be pretty exciting too: Carbonova is planning to design and build a commercial demonstration unit, which will see “a handful of customers use the product on a commercial level.”
Zarabian says innovation in lightweight sustainable materials is growing. “Advanced material is becoming more and more important and strategic for Canada,” she says. “The world needs these materials, and there will be more competition. We solve cost, sustainability and performance all together. We say that we serve the planet and solve the customer’s problem at the same time.”
As her company has grown over the last seven years, so too have Zarabian’s leadership skills. “As a founder, you're wearing a lot of hats. You must do everything from administration to CFO, CTO, investor relations, and research and development. I slowly learned about delegating work, zooming out, and just staying in my lane. I'm still working a lot of hours, but not like before when I had to do everything personally.”
Now, she drives the company strategy and trusts her team, including five young Schulich chemical engineering graduates, to take ownership of their work. Zarabian enjoys being part of their professional development. “We have so much talent in the province and they’re just looking for the intellectual opportunity to grow,” she says. “That's so rewarding for me.”