Julian Sachs

Julian (PhD, MIT; BS, MIT) is a marine organic chemist and climate scientist. His 130 scientific publications in journals including Nature  and Science have been cited 9,000 times. He’s been obsessed with weather and climate since childhood when his family evacuated Martha’s Vineyard in advance of a hurricane and a blizzard closed his New Jersey school for a week. Majoring in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science in college, earning a PhD in Chemical Oceanography with a dissertation on past climate, then researching and teaching climate science for the last 20+ years fueled his passion to understand the earth system. No longer satisfied with studying the global warming threat, Julian is motivated to help avert it. Toward that end Julian is on leave from his faculty position at the University of Washington to advance Banyu Carbon’s carbon removal technology. Outside Banyu, Julian loves to do anything on a bike (inclines & obstacles preferred), snowboard, toss frisbees to his dog, and spend time with his wife and two teenagers.

Julian co-founded Banyu Carbon with fellow UW School of Oceanography faculty member Alex Gagnon in March 2022 to commercialize their innovation that uses sunlight and a proprietary dye molecule to remove carbon dioxide from seawater. They developed the idea while conducting ocean acidification research on coral reefs of Polynesia. With the potential to do carbon dioxide removal with minimal energy inputs and low cost, pre-seed investment of $2M was rapidly acquired in April 2022. A prestigious 2-yr Activate Fellowship followed in June 2022. Julian and Alex began full-time work at Banyu’s CoMotion Labs (Fluke Hall) location in September 2022. Rapid technical progress with a growing team of scientists and engineers led to the closing of a $6.5M seed round in November 2023. Grants from NSF and DOE have helped propel innovation. In June 2024, Sachs and Gagnon were recognized by Bloomberg Business Week as among the “13 Most Influential Climate Leaders to Watch in 2024”.

Climate tech, carbon management, carbon dioxide removal