Students’ winning Catalyst Competition entry goes beyond growing beautiful crystals

Crystals have diverse compositions and unique properties, making them valuable to many industries and academic labs.

“Most people don’t know that the ibuprofen that they take for their headaches is actually a needle-like crystalline material,” said Lukas Garcia, a first-year chemistry major at Clemson University. 

The problem is that growing crystals is both difficult and time-consuming because it requires precise control over many factors, including temperature and solution concentration.

“When I worked as a research assistant in the Molecular Structure Center here at Clemson, I was tasked with finding hundreds and hundreds of novel crystals. I found time after time, I would spend weeks trying to grow the same crystal,” Garcia said.

Garcia and Samuel Quan, a junior studying computer engineering, knew there had to be a better way. They created Crystal-XG, an artificial intelligence-aided approach to determine optimal growing conditions for individual crystals.

“AI and machine learning is entirely dependent on its data. The reason our method is effective for something like this is because there’s a lot of data we can gather about crystallography, and we can represent a crystal efficiently in an AI model,” Quan said.

Crystal-XG was the winning idea in this year’s College of Science Catalyst Competition. The entrepreneurial challenge culminated on March 11 with student teams pitching their innovative ideas to a panel of judges in the Brook T. Smith Launchpad in downtown Clemson.

Garcia and Quan won $2,500 and the chance to compete in the university-wide 2025 Launchpad Liftoff Pitch Competition at the Brook T. Smith Launchpad on April 11.

“We are so thankful for the opportunity to be there. I have a lot of friends who attend school elsewhere, and I think Clemson is the only one that has a competition like this where a freshman chemistry major and a computer engineer can pitch a business idea and take a class about entrepreneurship to understand how to actually get the product out,” Garcia said.

Second place went to RevEd, a digital tutoring platform for STEM students developed by Chisom Emetu, a senior microbiology major, and Simon Hughes, a senior majoring in computer science. Their faculty adviser was Alex Feltus, professor in the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry and a member of the Clemson Center for Human Genetics.

ThermaChill won third place for a self-heating and cooling lunchbox. Team members are senior biochemistry major Albash Khan, senior financial management major Karthik Beeraka, junior biochemistry major Maxwell BeGole and junior physics and computer science major Eli Skoglund. They were advised by Sriparna Bhattacharya, a research assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The Catalyst Competition, which launched in 2021, is a two-semester program. Participating student teams receive support from professional consultants and faculty advisers. They may also enroll in “Entrepreneurship in Science,” a Creative Inquiry class.

“Clemson really helps their students to be the best they can be through opportunities like this,” Quan said.