Alima Yahia

When Alima Yahia talks about the world's problems, she strips them to their simplest form: humans did something, something broke, so let's stop doing it. That clarity has carried a Bronx public-school graduate to Columbia, where she's a junior studying mechanical engineering, and into VentureWell's NOAA-sponsored Ocean Enterprise Accelerator, Stage 0. Her current build uses computer vision and robotics to detect and collect the ghost fishing gear quietly strangling marine life. It's the latest in a string of ambitious swings: published bacteriophage research that earned her meetings with PhDs across three continents, a co-led brain-machine interface aimed at restoring sight, a founder's journal on Substack, and writing on the technology she's building on Medium. What sets Alima apart isn't any single project — it's the moral compass behind all of them, and a refusal to let a problem's difficulty be a reason to look away.