Research

The research in our group integrates extractive metallurgy, materials chemistry, electrochemical engineering, process engineering, and AI-assisted experimentation to address fundamental and applied challenges in sustainable energy, resource utilization, and industrial decarbonization. A theme that spans much of our work is understanding how electrified interfaces control chemical transformations across molecular, materials, and device length scales. In critical mineral recovery, we develop hydrometallurgical, pyrometallurgical, and electrochemical strategies to selectively extract, separate, and regenerate valuable materials from complex feedstocks, with the goal of enabling more circular supply chains for mining technologies. In electrochemically mediated small molecule transformations, we study how local reaction environments, well-defined catalysts, and reactor architectures can be designed to directly transform small molecules (e.g., CO₂) into valuable chemicals and fuels. Our research philosophy is to combine fundamental mechanistic insight with practical engineering design; we aim to identify the essential chemistry and transport phenomena that govern performance, and then use those insights to build scalable, energy-efficient, and experimentally validated technologies.