Selene Sari ’18 wants to make clean air easier to capture — but instead of reinventing the air filter, she’s tackling contaminants themselves.
Sari is the founder of Vox Aeris, a Los Angeles hardware and research company developing energy-efficient technology to capture particulate matter, a major contributor to air pollution consisting of tiny solid and liquid particles suspended in the air that can be inhaled deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. She was named to the Forbes 2026 30 Under 30 list in Energy and Green Tech for her work in acoustic agglomeration, a technique that applies sound waves to a stream of dusty air, causing fine particles to collide and cluster. The resulting larger clumps are far easier for common, low-grade air filters to capture, improving filtration performance without modifying existing filters.
While acoustic agglomeration has existed in industrial and research settings, Sari said technical challenges have kept it from widespread commercialization. She is working to engineer the method into a compact form factor compatible with the filtration systems already in use.
“If an engineer can improve the life of even one person, that’s the greatest fulfillment of an engineer’s purpose,” Sari said. “To me, building a product or technology is one of the most concrete ways to make that real.”
