Alyssa Sarvadi ('20) and her mentor Huseyin Bostanci, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, believe they have found a better way to revitalize the air aboard spaceships. And NASA agrees.

The two received a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities grant that will provide up to $160,000 over two years for their research into the design and development of a "microgravity vortex phase separator for liquid amine CO2 removal system." Sarvadi -- who will begin graduate studies at UNT in the fall and will work at NASA during the next two summers as part of the grant -- and Bostanci propose to design and build a system using a microgravity vortex phase separator that could potentially offer a reliable, high-throughput flow and energy-efficient CO2 removal technology for future crewed space exploration missions.