Victor graduated from out MSc in Environmental Engineering with Business Management in 2018. During his time with us he was awarded the Letitia Chitty Centenary Memorial Prize and the Black & Veatch Prize in Environmental Engineering. Outside of Imperial he was named as a Forbes 30 under 30, awarded the Young Inventors Prize by the European Patent Office, and Founded Recycleye, a ground-breaking technology company bringing advanced machine learning, computer vision and robotics to the global waste management industry.
Why did you choose to study at Imperial?
Full disclosure: I was not certain what I wanted to do. This is what led me to environmental engineering. I very much enjoyed its multidisciplinary nature of the course which touches upon chemistry, biology, programming and business management. This department is also one of the world’s best institutions in its field, but given you are reading this my guess is that you knew this already.
What have you done since leaving Imperial?
I first worked for Goldman Sachs. A bank? How does that relate to environmental engineering you may ask? Environmental engineering teaches you how to model environments, understand probabilities of events, the impact of changing a given variable or the risks associated with a given path of action. Finance is the exact same but instead of modelling ecosystems you model markets.
I did then come back to Imperial to start a PhD applying computer vision to waste and that has now led to the creation of a company, Recycleye. We are now a team of 32 people operating across Europe and starting expansion in the US.
What has been your most rewarding project and you have worked on and why?
Turing my MSc research (applying computer vision to waste), into a PhD and then into a company. It has been an incredibly exciting journey, having to break through hard R&D, build and hire an incredible team, raise funding and having a major impact in digitising and automating an industry that does good for the world (increase overall recycling rates).
How has your degree helped?
Had I not studied the course I would have never gotten any exposure to waste management and Recycleye would not exist today. The course gives incredibly strong foundations, and Recycleye has since hired several people from Imperial.
What would be your advice to a student starting out on a career in Civil and Environmental Engineering?
If you like mental stimulation and developing the skills to solve some of the world’s most important and fundamental problems (water sanitation, waste management, etc – and all the other thinks that are the backbone of our civilization) this course is the right fit.