Sigrid Cottrell is a professional business woman that gained her understanding of sales, marketing, branding, public relations, client care, team building, and business strategy through many successful years of residential and commercial real estate sales in Florida, Colorado, and California. A testament to Ms. Cottrell’s success was her ability to help her clients buy and sell over $100 Million worth of properties.

After seeing the complacency of people’s reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Ms. Cottrell’s desire to leave the world a better place for future generations caused her to look for areas within society that had to change. Ms. Cottrell decided that the energy industry, sustainable agriculture, educational system and human development were areas that needed the most improvement in order to give our children a fighting chance for an abundant lifestyle.

Since energy, in the form of electricity and fuel, touches every aspect of society, Ms. Cottrell chose to become CEO of HyCarb, Inc. to create a company that has the potential to eliminate our “carbon-footprint” on the planet. Ms. Cottrell has a special gift for bringing the most talented people and best resources together to build a successful business from an idea.

Associate professor Lei Zhai gained international attention three years ago when he developed “frozen smoke,” a new material made out of nanoparticles and which belongs to the family of the lightest solids in the world. A spongy substance that could be mistaken for packing material has the nanotechnology world buzzing. University of Central Florida Associate Professor Lei Zhai and postdoctoral associate Jianhua Zou have engineered the world's lightest carbon material in such a way that it could be used to detect pollutants and toxic substances, improve robotic surgery techniques and store energy more efficiently.

When asked, “What is the one thing you want people to know about you or your work?” Dr. Zhai stated, “As we embrace new technologies and appreciate the pleasure, excitement and convenience in the 21st century, unprecedented challenges including excessive consumption of materials and energy, environmental degradation, and global financial crisis call for all aspects of efforts to improve the global sustainability. Improving the material performance during the operation is one of the major endeavors to surmount these challenges. Our research goal is to develop materials that are thousands times smaller than human hair, yet can self-assembly into micron scale building blocks to construct flexible and efficient electronic devices.”

Zhai joined UCF in 2005 after he completed his post-doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a master’s degree in Chemistry from East Tennessee State University and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University. Zhai has written dozens of peer- reviewed articles, has obtained six patents and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences. He is the recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Dr. Zhai is president of American Chemical Society Orlando Section. He focuses a lot on reaching out to children in K-12 because they are our future.