Photo: University of Colorado Boulder.
Wil Srubar
Wil V. Srubar III holds a BS in Civil Engineering from Texas A&M University (2006), an MS in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin (2008), and a PhD in Civil Engineering from Stanford University (2013). He is Professor of Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, holds the Charles Victor Schelke Endowed Professorship, and serves as Deming Associate Dean for Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
Srubar leads the Living Materials Laboratory at CU Boulder, which develops biologically produced or biologically inspired construction materials. Its best-known output relevant to this publication is a method for cultivating coccolithophores — microalgae that naturally build calcium carbonate shells via photosynthesis — to grow limestone biogenically, as a lower-carbon substitute for the quarried limestone used in Portland cement production. This work is being commercialized through Minus Materials, a company Srubar co-founded. He was named a 2025 Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, received the 2023 Schmidt Science Polymaths Award, was a 2023 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award nominee, and received a 2020 NSF CAREER Award.
Direct link to the Grow capability, extended into a building material's supply chain rather than its repair cycle — a raw ingredient (limestone) cultivated through biological growth instead of extracted through mining, with a secondary, direct connection to Regenerate through the process's carbon-capture potential.