Eugene Kapustin is the Chief Technology Officer for WaHa Inc. (WaHa). He oversees development and commercialization of the water capturing technology based on novel sorbents, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
He began his career in chemistry at Novosibirsk State University in Russia completing his bachelor’s degree in 2013 and PhD in 2016. His doctoral work focused on the behavior of amino acids crystals at cryogenic temperatures under extremely high pressures. In 2014, Eugene moved to the United States to pursue his second Ph.D. in Prof. Yaghi’s research program at UC Berkeley. There, he studied structures of aluminum-based MOFs and their water adsorption capabilities. Upon his graduation in 2018, Eugene joined WaHa as a Staff Engineer, where his goal is to advance MOFs from his doctoral studies to market-ready solutions for urgent water scarcity issues.
During his grad school career in Prof. Yaghi’s lab, Eugene published several seminal publications on MOF implementation for WaHa from air. In collaboration with the researchers from MIT, Eugene and Prof. Yaghi reported a first MOF-based passive water harvester (Science, 2017). In next several years Eugene helped to design, develop and test three water capturing prototypes: two passive systems (Nature Comm., 2018; Science Adv. 2018) and one active unit (ACS Centr. Sci. 2019). Eugene is an inventor on 15 patents on MOFs, water from air, dehumidification, and air conditioning technologies. He is a key member of the R&D team that designed and built multiple prototypes and pilot machines at WaHa. Such a development improved a MOF efficiency metric by an order of magnitude: from 0.25 liters of water per kilo of MOF daily to over 40 L/kg/day. In addition, Eugene and his team dramatically enhanced the synthetic process of MOF-303 synthesis – a core ingredient of the WaHa technology, allowing for lowering the cost of MOF sorbent by a factor of 50x.