Before starting college, where Gabe was set to study industrial design, he spent 7 weeks living in the mountains of Ecuador with an indigenous host family as part of an immersion program of non-profit Amigos de Las Americas. He grew enormously as a person during that time, but also became deeply worried and restless over environmental problems. He and his host siblings -- no older than 7 at the time -- were often forced to inhale toxic fumes from firepits burning plastic garbage that had nowhere else to go. Now determined to avoid petroleum-based materials in his own design practice, Gabe used free time outside of class to research and tinker with more sustainable materials. Over time, he made promising prototypes and attracted team members at his university. Eventually, the project gained international recognition and became the growing company that it is today. Symmetry remains Gabe's primary focus.

Rivers are truly essential to life on Earth and key pillars of biodiversity. Of the 500+ cities with populations numbering over a million people, at least 60% of them exist along a river. However, these same rivers have been subjected to severe pollution and habitat degradation. To help reverse the damage, Gabe created a final project in his graduate studies at IAAC that proposes the installation of biobased wetlands. Essentially, plants are grown in floating mycelium platforms -- formed from organic or construction waste -- and staked with willow branches grafted and weaved underwater to hold freshwater mussels. The floating plants get water and nutrients, the mycelium acts as an effective substrate for algae, and the mussels receive shelter and food that enable them to filter contaminated water. It is a neat example of "symbiotic design", where each component has a positive, interchanging effect on the others.

In October 2022, Gabe helped bring together a group of artists and scientists at ChiTownBio, Chicago's first inner-city community biology lab, to win the non-student category of the 2022 Biodesign Sprint competition. The team's dream: convert neglected city lots into edible food forests teeming with native plants for the local community and ecosystem! Gabe's work focused on creating architectural diagrams of reimagined lots. The whole project continues as part of a decentralized organization called Sylvanhold.

A crowdfunded robot that the public can use to collect floating trash in city waterways. It was essentially an attempt to gamify the experience of environmental cleanup: people could login to a website to remotely control the robot and gather floating debris. More software development is needed to make this kind of project viable in the long-run. In the meantime, however, it is partially open-sourced on Wikifactory. Gabe built much of the hardware, helped demo the robot in Melbourne, Australia, and wrote the description posted on Wikifactory.