SpotLESS Materials

State College, PA

Our founding team has long had a passion for addressing global challenges facing humanity. One of our ultimate goals is to transform technology with great potential into technology with great impact. A few years ago, our co-founder, Dr. Tak-Sing Wong, was approached by a group working under the Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge looking for a solution to human waste residue in low-water toilet systems. He found that most hydrophobic and superhydrophobic coatings are excellent at repelling liquid, but fall short in their ability to repel sludge-like material. So we set out to make coatings specifically to repel human waste. The results of this work has been recently published in Nature Sustainability. We quickly learned that “sticky problems” are not unique to sanitation. From automotive application to medical, surfaces get dirty, so they need to be cleaned or replaced. Our aim is to make surfaces that keep themselves clean. Our ultimate goal is to use what we have -- our skills, our technology -- to make the world a better place. The concrete ways we’d like to “make the world a better place” is to help address the Global Grand Challenges [1] laid out by the National Academy of Engineering. [1] http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/