Back to Her Educational Roots

Katie Kollhoff Mouat (MEM '19) spent the past six years innovating technology that helps congeal dissolved metals in water so they can more easily be removed from what we drink. 

Now she is back at Northwestern's Master of Engineering Management (MEM) program to share what she learned as a business leader with current and future MEM students.

Kollhoff Mouat is the newest executive in residence in the MEM program. This role is meant for senior leaders in the technology community to serve as a resource for students inside and outside the classroom. 

“What excites me the most about this role is the opportunity to bring the real world into the classroom to allow students to interact with problems that are going on in places where they might find jobs,” Kollhoff Mouat said. “I found working on real-world projects to be some of the most exhilarating and useful points along the way of my MEM journey.”

One of Kollhoff Mouat’s real-world MEM projects developed into her profession after graduation. While in the NUvention: Energy course, she and several classmates created NUMiX Materials, a startup focused on accentuating the circular economy and purifying drinking water.

The company’s main product was a sorbent that forced dissolved metals to solidify and clump together for easier extraction. That metal could then be repurposed. 

The company launched while Kollhoff Mouat was in MEM and operated until shutting down in April of this year. The students won the $50,000 Cleantech University Prize from the US Department of Energy at the 2018 Rice Business Plan Competition and took second place at the Cleantech University Prize national competition. They also won Northwestern University’s VentureCat competition, and the company was named a 2019 “Startup to Watch” by Chicago Inno.

Kollhoff Mouat said the entire lifecycle of the company fed off lessons from the MEM program.

“I think of the entrepreneurial experience as the pinnacle of what MEM teaches and a way to integrate the different facets we learn into one living thing,” she said. “As we stepped away from the business we created, one of the most important skills we learned in MEM courses and practiced daily was negotiating agreeable resolutions to thorny subjects.”

Now, Kollhoff Mouat is focused on bringing the lessons she learned from the MEM program and her time as a startup founder to current and future students. She also plans to strengthen connections with alumni. 

One of her tasks is to organize the MEM program’s annual Industry Night, to be held in February. This event, started in 2014, brings alumni, current students, and industry professionals together for networking opportunities and panel discussions.

One new focus of the 2025 Industry Night will be a workshop before the event where students and alumni can meet and provide benefits to each other. The concept is for students to teach alumni participants how they're adopting current technology to engineering management problems, so alumni leave with more than an expanded network of potential future colleagues.

Current students sometimes don’t recognize how groundbreaking their projects are, especially to those who have been out of the MEM program and in the professional world for some time, Kollhoff Mouat said.

“I’ve had the pleasure of learning the backgrounds, projects, and professional aspirations of some of the current MEM students, and I'm so impressed by what seems second nature to them,” she said. “The skills they are gaining, complemented by their engineering backgrounds, sets the stage for immense and immediate impact on the next step of their journeys. They don’t realize how amazing their projects are.”

Kollhoff Mouat said she sees Industry Night as an opportunity to close the gap between what previous generations of MEM students are doing in the professional world and what current MEM students are innovating right now.

She invited alumni to contact her to get involved in the event. 

“Let’s let the students shine where they excel and allow alumni to learn when they come back to Northwestern,” she said. “There’s a huge opportunity to tie these two pieces together.”