Critical Materials Institute (CMI)

The CMI energy Innovation Hub is led by the DOE’s Ames Laboratory and brings together the expertise of four DOE national laboratories, seven universities, and seven industry partners to address critical materials (e.g., neodymium, europium, terbium, dysprosium, and yttrium), whose lack of availability may be an impediment to the commercialization of clean energy technologies for today and tomorrow. As a partner, Purdue contributes its expertise in manufacturing, design, and lifecycle engineering. The Purdue CMI team includes Drs. Carol Handwerker (Reinhardt Schuhmann Jr. Professor of MSE), Ananth Iyer (Susan Bulkeley Butler Chair in Operations Management in Krannert), Fu Zhao (Associate Professor of ME/EEE), and John Sutherland (Fehsenfeld Family Head of EEE).

NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (IGERT)

The IGERT vision is to create a new integrative, collaborative model for graduate research and education to enable meaningful and measurable improvements in the global sustainability of electronics. The Sustainable Electronics IGERT represents a partnership between Purdue and Tuskegee University. The IGERT will be carried out in close collaboration with the global electronics industry. This IGERT project includes three main thrusts: (i) Polymers from nature for construction and disassembly, (ii) sustainable product design and manufacturing, and (iii) system and supply chain issues. The Purdue IGERT team includes Drs. Handwerker, Howarter, Hua, Sutherland, and Zhao.

NSF PIRE: Bioenergy Development across the Americas

The goal of this project is to examine bioenergy development across the Americas. The project is being led by Michigan Technological University and Purdue’s efforts are focused on sustainability system modeling. The scope of the project is the Pan American countries of Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States. The project partners seek to investigate socioecological system changes for those nations experiencing rapid bioenergy development. The complexity of this system enables the development of new approaches to studying and assessing sustainability as it relates to dynamic systems in general, while focusing on bioenergy in particular.