CReAtE Lab Member Shaban Muhammad Founds Khuld Labs; Secures Dachuang Funding for Project S.A.I.R.A.

We are proud to announce that CReAtE Lab member Shaban Muhammad has successfully founded Khuld Labs and secured a spot in the DKU Innovation Incubator (Dii) 2026 Cohort I.

His venture was accepted into the prestigious College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program (Dachuang program), receiving an initial institutional funding award of 10,000 CNY (Project Code: IE177).

The funded project, Project S.A.I.R.A. (Sustainable Agriculture in Regolith Adaptation), is a one-year Innovation Training Project (ITP) focused on space biology and metagenomic analysis. Under the supervision of Professor Eunyu Kim, the team, comprising Shaban Muhammad (Molecular Biosciences, DKU Class of 2027), Wiam Benadder (Data Science, DKU Class of 2027), and Ghulam Muhammad ( DKU Class of 2029), will explore plant growth and microbial adaptation in Mars soil simulants.

Notably, as an institutional-level project, there is a future opportunity for the team to be elevated to provincial or national levels with additional funding based on their mid-term performance.

This achievement highlights the entrepreneurial spirit of our lab members and their commitment to applying synthetic biology to address the challenges of extraterrestrial agriculture. Congratulations to Shaban and the Khuld Labs team!

Dated: December 1, 2025.