Falling Walls Lab comes to KAUST on 15 September. Come watch.
Date: Tuesday, 15 September 2026
Time: 2:45 –5:30 p.m.
Location: Auditorium, Building 20
Three minutes. One idea. That’s the format that has taken researchers from campus auditoriums to a stage in Berlin, and on 15 September it comes to Building 20.
The Falling Walls Lab is the global pitch competition of the Falling Walls Foundation, which was built around the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and a single recurring question: which are the next walls to fall? The Lab puts that question to the next generation. In three minutes, students and early-career researchers from every discipline present an idea with the potential to break down a wall standing in the way of progress.
The scale is what makes it worth watching. In 2025, more than 2,750 applicants competed across 82 Labs in 60 countries. This season, 100 Lab winners advance to the Global Finale in Berlin in November, where they compete for the title of Breakthrough Winner in the Emerging Talents category at the Falling Walls Science Summit. The winner of the KAUST Lab earns the chance to represent KAUST at that finale.
KAUST has hosted a Lab since 2015, and our finalists have pitched everything from low-cost health monitoring to waste-to-energy systems. This year’s cohort is next.
Applications closed in August. What’s left is the part that matters to the rest of us: showing up. Pitching to an empty room is a different exercise than pitching to a full one, and the people on that stage are your colleagues, your students, and the researchers down the hall.
Come see what they’ve been working on.
