Shannon Knee is the co-founder and CEO of Cetos Water, overseeing the commercialization of the TSSE technology.

Shannon brings deep expertise in commercializing products and technologies through her career as a private and public markets investor at Goldman Sachs’s Principal Investment Area, Glenview Capital and Cornell Capital. Through these roles, she was responsible for deploying over $1.5bn of capital across the industrials, healthcare, and media and telecom landscapes, driving significant value creation through active collaboration with management teams. Prior to Cetos, she operated an independent consulting firm helping growth companies commercialize their best-in-class products across the tech, consumer, and health & wellness landscapes. Shannon also worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, advising large institutional clients on mergers and acquisitions, capital raising, and strategic financial planning strategies.

Shannon has a BSE with concentrations in finance and management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania where she held distinctions as a Joseph Wharton Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar.

Dr. Ngai Yin Yip is the inventor of the TSSE technology who continues to push the technology forward at Cetos.

Dr. Ngai Yin Yip received his Ph.D., M.S., and M.Ph. in Chemical and Environmental Engineering from Yale University, and B.Eng. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Minor in Business Administration) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He joined Columbia University in 2015 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering.

Dr. Yip’s research interest is in advancing technologies and innovations to address challenges at the nexus of water, energy, and the environment. Currently, the research in his group is focused on i) desalination of ultrahigh salinity brines, ii) zero-liquid discharge technologies, iii) advancing more sustainable decentralized wastewater management approaches, iv) efficient conversion of low-grade heat to useful work, and v) development of better membranes for environmental applications.

His dissertation work on novel membrane technologies for the sustainable production of energy and water earned the CH2M Hill/AEESP Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Henry Prentiss Becton Graduate Prize in 2015. He has authored over 20 peer-reviewed publications and has won the ES&T Best Papers (second runner-up in 2013).

Dr. Eliza Dach leads Cetos Water’s scientific research, bringing deep expertise in solvent extraction and advanced water treatment.

Eliza earned her PhD under Dr. Ngai Yin Yip at Columbia University, where her work focused on novel approaches to hypersaline brine management and critical mineral recovery. Eliza was recently named a 2025 Inflection Awardee, recognizing the world’s 30 most promising young scientists, for her pioneering research on mineral recovery with switchable solvents.

Before her PhD, Eliza earned a B.S. in chemistry from Yale University and worked at Impossible Foods as a flavor and product innovation scientist, developing plant-based protein alternatives.

Jack Schlueter leads Cetos Water's engineering efforts, bringing nearly a decade of experience designing and scaling first-of-a-kind and mature technologies.

His career spans both industrial process engineering and cutting-edge climate tech. He joins us from the direct air capture startup Zero Carbon Systems where he was scaling a CO2-capture process that utilized temperature swing adsorption. Previously, he spent seven years at Plus Group (a Salas O’Brien company), leading process engineering projects in the food and beverage, specialty chemical, and pharma industries. His experience encompasses the entire project lifecycle: conceptual and detail engineering, construction support, and start-up and commissioning.

Jack is a proud graduate of the University of Dayton (Go Flyers!) where he earned a B.S. in chemical engineering. During his time at UD, he volunteered with the university's engineering service program abroad and participated in solar-thermal adsorption refrigeration research locally. He is also a licensed professional engineer in Ohio.