Event

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a EES Seminar Series

Friday, September 15th - 3:00 PM

"Opportunities for Improving the Sustainability of Critical Metals Chemical Processing in Support of Global Electrification"

Metals such as the rare earths, palladium, tellurium, lithium, cobalt, are now pervasive in technology and used regularly in our daily lives. Many are also essential for the global shift underway towards renewable energy. But where do they come from, and how do we get them into pure forms for use in technology? In many cases, mining and purification practices for ‘critical’ metals are extremely harmful for people and the environment. It is therefore attractive to try to improve chemistry associated with mining and to reclaim such metals from spent technologies. In many cases, chemistry and engineering to recycle specific critical metals is lacking, compared to the cost of obtaining them from primary sources. In this talk, efforts to develop new separations chemistry for purifying critical metals will be presented. Among these, efficient, inter-f-element separations, such as within the rare earths, remain a perennial challenge. We have been interested in triggering element-specific changes, for example through highly specific structural differences, to achieve efficient separations through new thermodynamic modes. And in a complementary approach, to express differences in metal complexes through variable rates of some chemical change – a separations chemistry through kinetics. Both methods allow direct connection of coordination chemistry to macroscopic properties for separations. These connections have enabled new modes in solid-liquid extraction to complement solvent extraction for specialized applications. For this talk, our latest results on chelating and redox active ligand frameworks, and supramolecular systems, and their applications in thermodynamic and kinetic separations of critical metals will be presented.

Dr. Eric Schelter

Professor 

Department of Chemistry

The University of Pennsylvania

Eric J. Schelter obtained his B.S. from Michigan Tech in 1999. In 2004, he received his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Texas A&M University working with Prof. Kim Dunbar. He conducted postdoctoral research at Los Alamos National Laboratory between 2004-2009 with Jaqueline Kiplinger. In 2009, Eric was appointed as an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2011, he was awarded a U.S. DOE Early Career Research Program Award. In 2015, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Penn. In 2016, he received the ACS Harry Gray Award for Creative Work in Inorganic Chemistry by a Young Investigator. And in 2017, he received the U.S. EPA Green Chemistry Challenge Award for his efforts in rare earth separations. In 2018, Eric was promoted to Professor. He has also received the Inorganic Chemistry Lectureship from the ACS (2020) and the 2022 Anders Gustaf Ekeberg Tantalum Prize. In 2023 he was elected as American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow. His group’s research interests include synthetic lanthanide and actinide coordination and organometallic chemistry, electronic structure studies, catalysis, and sustainable metals separations methodologies.