Seniors earn praise at Craig M. Berge Design Day 2026
CHEE students Rohini Ghosh, Zoe Elizabeth Johnson, Samantha Mikaela Provenzano and Grace Ann Toftner win the Larimore Family Student’s Choice Award and $1,000 at Design Day 2026.
A team of University of Arizona engineering students earned praise and awards at the College of Engineering’s 2026 Craig M. Berge Design Day for a project transforming waste into wearable material. This year, Design Day featured $53,500 in cash prizes and 88 Interdisciplinary Capstone teams made up of 505 seniors presented their industry- and university-sponsored projects.
CHEE students used dried and treated SCOBY, a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast that turns sweet tea into kombucha, to create an alternative to leather.
“Once SCOBY is dried, it can become a leather-like material, but without treatment it’s brittle and not very useful,” said Rohini Ghosh, chemical engineering major and team lead.
Team members produced a series of prototypes until they identified a scalable process that made the material durable enough for items like wallets and purses.
Project sponsors Greg Lorton and the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering encouraged the team to take a practical approach.
“We assume there’s already a factory making kombucha, and we just add onto it,” Ghosh said. “That way, we can recycle what would have been a waste product and turn it into something new.”
Peers selected the team for the Larimore Family Student Choice Award, with a prize of $1,000.