Fajer Mushtaq

Fajer received her Bachelor’s degree in Electrical engineering from Aston University, United Kingdom in 2012. During her bachelor’s degree she was awarded the Dr Edwin Griffith’s memorial prize in 2009, and the Humphrey-Orwin Memorial Prize in 2010 for academic excellence. In 2012 she was awarded the IET H.E. Pulsford Memorial Prize for ‘The Best Bachelor Project’ for her work on electrospinning nanodiamond encrusted polyacrylonitrile nanofibers to fabricate hybrid carbon nanotubes. From August 2011 to August 2012 she worked as an electrical engineer for Visteon Engineering Services, United Kingdom on designing and assembling rear-seat entertainment units for Jaguar Land Rover and Porsche.

In 2012 she enrolled in the Micro- and Nanosystems Master’s program at ETH Zürich, and conducted her master thesis on developing ferromagnetic shape-memory alloys for biomedical applications. In 2014 she joined the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab as a doctoral student, where she developed smart micro- and nanomaterials for environmental applications, including water remediation by degrading toxic micro-pollutants, and eliminating carcinogenic heavy metals. Her doctoral research resulted in several high impact factor publications, and a patent to efficiently treat wastewater in a green and cost-effective manner. In 2019 she was awarded the BRIDGE Proof-of-Concept grant from Swiss National Science Foundation to develop a novel reactor for wastewater treatment based on her invention.

In 2020 she co-founded the ETH Zurich Spin-off, Oxyle AG that aims to provide a game-changing wastewater treatment technology to its diverse portfolio of potential customer segments including chemical and biotech industries, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, municipal treatment plants, and eventually even households. As the CEO and co-founder of Oxyle, she has successfully raised close to 1 MCHF in funding to bring her technology to market by winning several grants and Start-up competitions.