Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Critical elements and minerals are key materials with high risk of supply disruption that are essential to modern technologies, including solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, microelectronics, biomedical imaging, energy-efficient lighting, and so on. These elements, especially lithium (Li), cobalt (Co), rare earth elements (REE), and platinum group elements (PGE), have unique electronic, magnetic, and chemical properties that are difficult to replace. Therefore, a sustained, multidisciplinary effort is urgently needed by integrating scientific research and engineering innovation to develop diverse solutions across the critical materials lifecycle, including separation, materials manufacturing, elemental substitution, and end-of-life recycling. This symposium highlights recent research efforts on separation, substituting, recycling, and materials-efficient manufacturing of critical elements and materials by bridging expertise on theoretical modeling/simulation, materials synthesis, functional measurement/control, and advanced characterizations. The symposium will bring together a diverse group of researchers, both from the materials community and other different communities to discuss the challenges and solutions for a circular economy of critical elements and minerals.

Topics will include:

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Paul Braun (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Menachem Elimelech (Yale University, USA)
• Benny Freeman (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
• Yoshiko Fujita (Idaho National Laboratory, USA)
• Jeffrey Grossman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
• Brian Ingram (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
• Santa Jansone-Popova (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)
• De-en Jiang (Vanderbilt University, USA)
• Young-Shin Jun (Washington University in St. Louis, USA)
• Valeria Molinero (The University of Utah, USA)
• Pietro Papa Lopes (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
• Eric Schelter (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Michael Whittaker (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)

Symposium Organizers