MMAE Seminar - What Are Critical Materials?

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Alexander King, Director of Critical Materials Institute at The Ames Laboratory, to campus on Wednesday, April 15th to present his lecture, What Are Critical Materials?

Abstract

In 2010, the prices of neodymium, dysprosium and several other rare earth elements ballooned to levels never seen before, and the attention of the world was drawn to the issue of critical materials – substances for which there are fragile supply chains and no easy substitutes. We will review the underlying causes of materials criticality; describe the impacts of supply disruptions, assess the current state of play; and describe the strategies that can be used to mitigate supply chain problems.

The Critical Materials Institute (CMI) is one of DOE’s four Energy Innovation Hubs. Modeled after the concentration of brainpower and resources that defined the Manhattan Project, the Hubs combine basic and applied research with engineering to accelerate scientific discovery for critical energy needs. CMI brings together the efforts of more than 300 scientists across four national labs, seven universities and seven corporations, to assure the supply of materials needed for clean energy technologies.

Biography

Dr. Alexander King was born and raised in London. He attended the University of Sheffield as an undergraduate and earned his doctorate at Oxford. He was a postdoc at Oxford and then M.I.T. before joining the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also served as the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies (Dean of the Graduate School). He was the Head of the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue in from 1999 to 2007, and the Director of DOE's Ames Laboratory from 2008 until 2013.

Dr. King was a Visiting Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1996 and a US State Department Jefferson Science Fellow for 2005-06. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mining Minerals and Materials; ASM International; and the Materials Research Society.

Dr. King was the President of MRS for 2002, Chair of the University Materials Council, for 2006-07, Co-chair of the Gordon Conference on Physical Metallurgy for 2006, and Chair of the APS Interest Group on Energy Research and Applications for 2010.