The George R. Brown School of Engineering and the Rice Engineering Alumni board recently announced Suman Khatiwada ’13 as one of the recipients of the Outstanding Young Alumni Award.
The Rice Engineering Alumni established this award in 1996, with William H. White ’86 as the first recipient. This award recognizes the achievements of Rice engineering alumni under the age of 40.
Khatiwada earned his Ph.D. in materials science and nanoengineering from Rice and is the co-founder, chief technology officer (CTO), and board director at Syzygy Plasmonics, one of the world’s leading tech startup companies.
At Syzygy Plasmonics, Khatiwada leads the technology team in developing, scaling, and integrating the company’s core technologies, namely photocatalysts and fully electrified chemical reactors, to advance global decarbonization efforts.
Since the company launched six years ago, he has built Syzygy’s patent portfolio with more than a dozen patent families and grown the company to more than 100 employees. He helped raise four rounds of venture capital funding and has been awarded three government grants from the Department of Energy (ARPA-E) and the National Science Foundation.
As a Rice doctoral student, Khatiwada co-founded Big Delta Systems, now enPower Inc, to commercialize spray-paintable lithium-ion batteries. He has since served as a startup mentor at the Rice Alliance Clean Tech Accelerator and is a member of the Rice University Alumni CEO Roundtable.
With his impressive record in driving clean energy technologies, Khatiwada was selected as one of the 85 brightest early-career engineers by the National Academy of Engineering for their Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in 2020.
He will be honored along with the rest of the 2024 class of award recipients and the 2023 honorees at the George R. Brown School of Engineering Alumni Awards Celebration on September 12, 2024.