Two Indian engineers who created a shoe rack that deodorises smelly shoes won the Engineering Design Prize at the 2025 Ig Nobel Awards.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are quirky science awards that honour research which first makes people laugh, then think. This year's winners included pizza-loving lizards, zebra-striped cows, and UV shoe racks.
Vikash Kumar, 42, assistant professor of design at Shiv Nadar University outside Delhi, taught Sarthak Mittal, 29, during his undergraduate years. It was at the university that the two first hit upon the idea of studying smelly shoes.
They saw smelly shoes as an opportunity to redesign the traditional shoe rack and created a prototype for a UVC-light-equipped shoe rack that doesn't just store shoes but sterilises them.
Mittal said he was inspired by the cluttered line of shoes outside his hostel corridors.
"It wasn't about space or a lack of shoe racks—there was plenty of room. The problem was frequent sweating and the constant use of shoes that made them smelly," said Mittal in an interview with the BBC.
The two researchers found through their experiments that a short blast of ultraviolet light killed the Kytococcus sedentarius microbes, a stink-causing bacterium that thrives in sweaty shoes.
They used shoes worn by university athletes, which had a pronounced odour, for their experiments and found that just 2–3 minutes of UVC treatment was sufficient to kill the bacteria and eliminate the foul smell.
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