U.S. Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute offers membership program

The Critical Materials Institute, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Innovation Hub, is offering a membership program for organizations with a stake in rare-earth and other critical element research.

The Critical Materials Institute is a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and industry representatives dedicated to finding innovative solutions to supply shortages of rare-earth and other critical materials. These materials are essential in many modern clean-energy technologies – such as wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, and energy-efficient lighting.

The CMI’s research efforts target three goals:

  • Diversifying supply
  • Developing substitute materials
  • Developing tools and processes for recycling materials

The CMI team wishes to strengthen its think-tank approach to technological challenges by creating a network of partnerships through its membership program.

“CMI is most effective when it is connected with critical materials stakeholders, whether they are providers at any point in the supply chain, consumers, recyclers, industry groups, associations or educators,” said Alex King, the Director of CMI.  “The membership program broadens our engagement with all of these stakeholders and extends our expertise to them, too.”

Benefits of the membership program include notification of technologies available for licensing, license options, early access to research results, opportunities to interact with researchers and graduate students, and more. Benefits are based on level of membership.

The Critical Materials Institute, a U.S. DOE Energy Innovation Hub with federal funding of up to $120 million over five years, is a collaboration of leading researchers from universities, four DOE national laboratories, and members of industry. Energy Innovation Hubs are major integrated research centers with researchers from many different institutions and technical backgrounds, combining basic and applied research with engineering to accelerate scientific discovery in critical energy areas.

For more information, please contact Stacy Joiner, program coordinator, Ames Laboratory, 515-294-5932 or [email protected].

 

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