Three alumni of NCSSM have received two-year fellowships from Activate Global, Inc., a Berkeley, California-based nonprofit that works with funders and research institutions throughout the United States to help early-stage scientists bring their research to market. Nikita Khlystov ’10 and Eli Hornstein ’09 were just announced as members of the 2024 cohort of Activate Fellows, while Catie McVey ’11 is a 2023 recipient of the fellowship.

Activate fellowships set up recipients with funding, technical resources, and a system of support that includes scientists, engineers, investors, commercial partners, and fellow entrepreneurs. The fellowship also comes with a living stipend and mentorship opportunities designed to help fellows tailor their marketing and development plan in ways unique to their own work and intentions.

As co-founder and CEO of Huminly, Nikita Khlystov is advancing a technology that will help save millions of tons of mixed-materials textile waste from entering landfills around the world each year. Such mixed-fiber textiles are difficult and expensive to recycle as they contain plastic fibers that must be separated from natural fibers before the materials can be recycled. Due to the high cost, these mixed-fiber materials are often discarded. Khlystov and his company, however, are creating natural enzymes that can break down and separate the plastics within these textiles without doing any damage at all to the natural fibers, thus allowing for the recycling of both materials. The process is cost-efficient at nearly any level, making it easy to scale up or down to meet the need.

Eli Hornstein was recognized for his work at Elysia Creative Biology, a startup he founded in 2021 in Raleigh to help reduce methane emissions from cattle through the use of modified cattle feed crops that produce lower, or even no, methane emissions when digested. Rather than sell the feed directly to cattle farmers, Hornstein plans to sell to feed mills that supply the farmers, thereby streamlining Elysia’s delivery chain while creating a seamless transition to the new feed for cattlemen and women.

“What’s really distinctive about the Activate organization and their fellowship is that they are invested in the person,” he says. “The support they offer is very open-ended. That’s something extraordinary to have behind you when you’re trying to make the right decisions.”

It’s the cattle themselves that are the focus of Catie McVey’s work. Her company, DairyFIT, is blending computer vision and machine learning with cattle farmer wisdom to help dairy farmers better manage their herds and breeding programs. The idea behind DairyFIT is to photograph and scan a cow’s face and head, then use algorithms to break down the complex geometries found in the animals’ physical structure and turn them into useful data about an animal’s health and temperament. This technological approach builds on commonly accepted knowledge among farmers that an animal’s physical features can reveal important details about its disposition and suitability as a milk producer. Having such information at hand will allow farmers to make more informed decisions about how to manage individual animals and their herds as a whole.

Her project, McVey says, has its origins in NCSSM’s Research in Computational Science course. “This is all based on original research I did in the Comp Sci course at NCSSM. I came from a very rural area and had zero exposure to computer science before that. I don’t know if I would have found the same route without the school.”

NCSSM was pivotal for Hornstein as well. “The thing, I think, that underlies the NCSSM experience and the success that so many of its alumni have had is that, when you go to Science and Math, you learn much younger than other people that science is real,” he says. “It’s not just an educational topic to be mastered. But if you learn the science, you can create real things with it that affect the world. And that is the exact thing you have to believe to run a company in this space.”