Noya is on a mission to accelerate the world's transition to carbon negativity. We're doing this by radically reducing the upfront capital costs and installation time required to perform direct air capture. In our approach, we're retrofitting existing pieces of industrial equipment like cooling towers and turning them into CO2 capture machines. The United States is currently home to over 2 million cooling towers, and we estimate they collectively have the ability to capture over 7 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.

We've got an incredible lineup of early partners who in commercial real estate who collectively own hundreds of cooling towers, and we have signed carbon removal offtake agreements with leading purchasers. We're quickly charging towards the first commercial pilot of our current carbon capture technology, and we're looking for curious, driven engineers, scientists, and operators to join our team.

Noya is reversing climate change by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. We’re a small, scrappy team of engineers and scientists taking on the biggest problem anybody could be working on. We’ve developed a new process that will use existing industrial equipment to pull CO2 out of thin air, with dramatically lower capital and operating expenses than other carbon capture approaches.

YOUR MISSION IN THIS ROLE

This role is fundamental to the long-term success of our mission. Your materials science and chemistry expertise will help Noya capture even more carbon dioxide in a sustainable, cost-effective way!

As a Scientist at Noya, you will work on a multidisciplinary team. You’ll collaborate with our Mechanical and Chemical Engineers to characterize and optimize our Direct Air Capture approach from a materials science and chemistry perspective. You’ll help us supercharge our adsorbent material and participate in the ideation and development of new materials! In addition to all the research and development you will be involved in, you’ll help implement our first commercial installation.

And on top of all that, you will dive head-first into a sea of future potential full of unimaginable growth opportunities. Ultimately, we are looking for a diligent and driven Scientist who wants to help solidify a bright future for all of humanity.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Synthesize materials through established procedures, including sol-gel, co-precipitation, deposition, hydrothermal carbonization, impregnation and mechanochemistry
• Characterize materials, including surface area, pore properties, active site characteristics and mechanical strength and hardness, including through gas-solid equilibria measurements, dynamic mechanical analyses, electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction techniques
• Participate in cross-disciplinary projects to evaluate and optimize Noya’s processes, acting as subject matter expert and building team knowledge on specific material properties and their influence on Noya’s process goals
• Collaborate with mechanical and chemical engineers to develop large scale synthetic methods for CO2 adsorbents
• Use feedback from characterizations, as well as chemical engineering empirical and modeling results to identify pathways, compile experimental procedures, and execute syntheses and characterizations towards material optimization
• Identify, perform and report on key experiments to further mechanistic understanding of sorbent chemisorption
• Compile and assess data systematically and diligently, and provide clear conclusions and recommendations based on analyses

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• MSc or PhD in Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry or other related disciplines
• Minimum 3-5 years R&D experience with successful catalyst/product development. Preferred experience in gas-solid processes.
• Proven record in materials synthesis, optimization and characterization
• Solid knowledge of structure-property relationships, chemical kinetics and thermodynamics
• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills with ability to navigate multiple priorities
• Experience with SEM, TEM-EDS, DMA, TGA, gas sorption characterization techniques, DSC, IC, GPC and NMR.
• Knowledge of green chemistry and green engineering principles

NICE TO HAVE

• Proven track record of taking ownership and driving mission-focused results
• Ability to deliver initiatives from conception through completion
• Experience in systems thinking and working on complex, multi-variate projects successfully

Noya's technology works by re-directing the air that a cooling tower normally moves into a separate, stand-alone piece of equipment. This equipment contains a solid sorbent material that is reactive with CO2 in the moving stream of air. As the air passes by, the CO2 in that air reacts with the surface of our sorbent, where it stays until we release it from its captured state with heat and pressure.