Pittsburgh, November 24, 2025 -- The neurosurgery team of Nitin Agarwal, MD, Shaunak Patil, Janam Patel and Ayesha Waheed was one of three teams selected for runner-up awards at the recent University of Pittsburgh’s Sustainability in Healthcare Challenge competition for their project “Closing the Loop: A Multi-Layer Mask System to Capture, Convert, and Neutralize Anesthetic Gases.”
The Sustainability in Healthcare Challenge is a university-wide initiative that addresses the significant environmental and social impact of the healthcare sector. It involves transforming practices to reduce the healthcare system's carbon footprint, waste, and resource consumption, while also improving social well-being and equity. This includes tackling waste, energy use, supply chain inefficiencies, and promoting sustainable practices through education and policy.
One of the goals of the program is to move promising projects forward and quickly translate innovative research into active practice in the public space.
Runner-up teams each received $25,000 to support their projects with the winner receiving $50,000. Awards were made possible by a collaboration among Pitt’s Office of Multidisciplinary Innovations (MDI), the Office of Sustainability in the Health Sciences (OSHS), and the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation.
Dr. Agarwal is an associate professor with the Department of Neurological Surgery, director of the department's Minimally Invasive Spine and Robotics Surgery program and co-director of the Spine Computational Outcomes Learning Institute (SCOLI). Patel and Waheed are research fellows with SCOLI while Patil is an undergraduate student with SCOLI.
