NYU Tandon faculty member, alums named to Forbes 30 Under 30

Each year, Forbes recognizes 30 notable people under 30 years of age in various industries as part of their “30 Under 30” list. For the past several years, alumni and faculty members from Tandon have been included in various categories, from Energy and Healthcare to Art and Style.

Among this year’s honorees are:

Justin Bui, Incoming Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering 

Bui was named to Forbes’ 2025 cohort for using electrochemical technologies to decarbonize the world. He has contributed to the development of a carbon removal plant that now removes 100 tons per year of CO2 from our waters, and his seawater electrolysis research is helping make hydrogen fuel from the ocean. At Tandon, he’ll be joining a group of faculty deeply involved in decarbonization and home to the wide-ranging Sustainable Engineering Initiative. 

Minh Tran (Ph.D. '23)

Tran has been recognized as the Co-founder and CTO of Heliotrope Photonics, a company she launched while still a graduate student to develop a coating that helps solar panels generate more electricity. (Traditional solar panels have trouble using ultraviolet light, so Heliotrope's chemical coating converts ultraviolet light to infrared light, which is better absorbed by solar panels, boosting solar generation by up to 15%.) Tran conducted her research at Tandon under the guidance of Senior Vice Dean and Alstadt Lord Mark Professor Eray Aydil, who helped the team triumph in the EnergyTech University Prize competitions and other hotly contested challenges. 

Valerie Zhang (MS ‘20)

Zhang was included on the 2025 list for founding VX Media, which offers influencer marketing, talent management, social media consulting, and advertising and campaign content production. The startup, where Zhang holds the title of Executive Creative Director, has collaborated with hundreds of high-profile brands, including Kiehls, Maybelline, Dior Beauty, UGG and Tiffany & Co. 

They join a long string of Tandon faculty and alumni who have been honored by Forbes on the “30 Under 30” list.

In 2024, Forbes recognized Industry Assistant Professor Nialah Wilson-Small for her creation of coordination algorithms for human-drone interactions using touch. Touch, the editors explained, has the potential to expand robots' use as assistive devices, and her research looks to apply it in situations like crowd control, search and rescue, emergency evacuation situations, independent exercise or therapy, and workplace human-drone collaboration.

The 2023 cohort included Tanya Gupta (BS ‘19), who interned at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center and obtained a patent for a virtual reality tool that she helped build there, then joined IBM as a developer — all while cultivating her passion for content creation. In 2021 she became the first Indian American Adobe Creative Resident and edited over 100 portrait editorials for Tom Ford Beauty, Disney, and more.

Forbes’ 2023 list also featured Miguel Guerrero (BS ‘19), the Founder & CEO of Otis AI, which helps small businesses navigate the world of digital advertising, an especially important component of success in the wake of the COVID pandemic. (His many previous accomplishments included creating the world's largest Minecraft server.

In 2023 Joe Landolina (BS '14, MS '14) also added recognition from Forbes to his lengthy list of honors, which include being designated as one of Fast Company’s most innovative founders. Landolina launched his company, Cresilon, while still a student, after discovering a way to mimic the extracellular matrix (ECM), which lends structure to tissues and organs in the body, using polymers from the cell walls of algae. His life-saving product, called TRAUMAGEL®, recently won FDA approval for human use and is expected to be a boon to the U.S. military, government health agencies, emergency medical services, and medical professionals who routinely encounter traumatic wounds and need a solution to quickly and effectively stop and control severe bleeding. 

Daniela Blanco (MS '18, PhD '20) and Myriam Sbeiti (BS '18) were jointly named to the 2021 cohort as co-founders of Sunthetics, a company originally aimed at harnessing energy from sunlight to fuel the electrochemical and thermochemical reactions necessary to transform plant waste into precursor materials. It’s now focusing on leveraging AI to help chemists pinpoint and innovate on viable processes quickly and efficiently, accelerating their path to market significantly. 

That year also saw the inclusion of Evan Moskal (BS '16), the co-founder of Courant, now an unrivaled leader in its market category: wireless chargers so finely crafted that they are every bit as much objects of desire as the devices they’re made to support.

Tandon has a strong track record of attracting amazing young researchers, and Forbes is far from the only organization celebrating them for their innovation and thought leadership.

Consider, for example, that well over half of our tenure-track faculty hold National Science Foundation CAREER Awards (aimed at supporting junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through their research and education) or other young-investigator honors, such as the DARPA Young Faculty Award, ACS Rising Star Award, and American Heart Association Early Career Award.