Congratulations to Katrin Sievert on winning the Inflection Award!
Katrin Sievert was named one of the top 30 young scientists working on climate change
Katrin Sievert was selected as one of the winners of the inaugural external page Inflection Award, awarded to the top 30 young scientists in the world working on climate change. The 2025 Inflection Award cohort comprises PhD students and graduates from the world’s top institutions. Each awardee is working on cutting-edge solutions to climate change across diverse sectors, from chemical engineering to geosciences to climate policy, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in climate innovation.
Katrin was selected for this award for her ongoing PhD work on the Cost and Scalability of Direct Air Capture for Hard-to-Abate Emissions. Her PhD research is supervised by ISTP members Prof. Bjarne Steffen and Prof. Tobias Schmidt and supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program (Marie Skłodowska-Curie), the external page RESPONSE program, and ETH's ISTP.
The Inflection Award celebrates outstanding achievement and recognises early-career scientists making significant contributions to climate tech. The award is organised by external page Marble, a climate tech venture studio solving hard climate problems. Their objective of the award is to surface high-potential solutions and identify innovative low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) climate solutions and connect them with opportunities to accelerate their development, alongside promoting and inspiring a more diverse next generation and connecting innovators.
Katrin Sievert is a PhD candidate at ETH Zurich’s Climate Finance and Policy Group and the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy. Katrin's research is part of the Carbon Removal Lab, an ISTP's research project examining financing and governance challenges of large-scale deployment of Carbon Dioxide Removal methods, working on identifying feasible policy mixes to enable the scale-up of permanent Carbon Dioxide Removal.
Even a greater honour for ETH Zurich, among the 30 awardees were two of ETH's own PhD candidates: Katrin Sievert as well as Antonio Gasos, a doctoral student at the Separation Processes Laboratory within the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich. Selected through a rigorous assessment by a panel of 17 judges, Katrin and Antonio are among the 30 winners from over 500 applicants worldwide. Congratulations on this outstanding achievement!
