Illinois International News
Illinois International News is a collection of globally-focused blogs and stories from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

  • Multinational collaboration shines in international sustainability competition

    Dec 8, 2025 7:00 pm by Marta Schneider
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    Team leader Crystal Zhao (Biochemistry, Illinois) reacts with joy upon learning that her multidisciplinary group won the overall award for their innovative “Phage Integrated Environmental Detector,” while master of ceremonies Sandra Voskoboynikova looks on during an online ceremony attended by more than 70 people.

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    URBANA, Ill. —Students from around the world gathered online for the fifth annual Reimagine Our Future sustainability competition, an international initiative co-founded at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and now drawing growing participation through global partnerships. This year, 313 students from 12 institutions across nine countries developed innovative solutions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

    The overall winning team came from Illinois for its development of a low-cost handheld water-quality sensor that rapidly detects microbial contamination using engineered bacteriophages. Two runner-up teams were also recognized, including a multidisciplinary group from Illinois that proposed a novel Organic Rankine Cycle for sustainable data-center cooling, and a team from the National Autonomous University of Mexico addressing water pollution in Xochimilco.

    The 2025 participating institutions included:

    • International Humanitarian University (Ukraine)
    • National Autonomous University of Mexico (Mexico)
    • University of Birmingham (United Kingdom)
    • University of Illinois Chicago (USA)
    • University of Illinois Springfield (USA)
    • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA)
    • University of Pretoria (South Africa)
    • Universidad del Quindío (Colombia)
    • University of Turin (Italy)
    • Vienna University of Economics and Business (Austria)
    • Waubonsee Community College (USA)
    • Zhejiang University (China)
    Students from the University of Birmingham also excelled across multiple categories. Birmingham teams earned two of the three third-place awards, including projects aimed at reducing hidden hunger through enhanced nutrient absorption and capturing clean energy from urban transport corridors. Birmingham students also secured several category awards in Sustainable Health, Sustainable Transportation, and Education for Sustainability.

    The Reimagine Our Future sustainability competition was created in the summer of 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing climate change, a looming energy crisis, and social unrest. Professors Robert McKim, Leon Liebenberg, and Warren Lavey sought to create an opportunity that would encourage student understanding and prepare them to tackle major social, economic, and environmental challenges through the lens of sustainability and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

    The competition was launched in fall 2021 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Chmpaign, inviting students to create solution-oriented fact sheets on sustainability issues they cared about. With help from faculty, alumni, and other volunteers as advisors and judges, many students have participated and the competition has expanded to include universities and community colleges from around the world.

    Competition co-founders Professor Warren Lavey and Professor Leon Liebenberg emphasized the competition’s global mission: to bring students together across borders to reimagine a more sustainable future and to consider how their ideas might be deployed in real-world, scalable contexts. Their shared goal, strengthened through international partnerships, is to give more students worldwide the opportunity to collaborate, innovate, and lead on sustainability challenges.

    More information about this year's winning projects, the competition, and past participants are available on the competition website.