Jesús R. Pérez-Cardona successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on November 20, 2023, and officially will be depositing his dissertation in December.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, Dr. Jesús R. Pérez-Cardona joined the Laboratory of Sustainable Manufacturing (LSM) for his Ph.D. at Purdue under the supervision of Dr. John W. Sutherland. He worked as a research assistant in the Critical Materials Institute (CMI) (2018-2022) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) EMBER (Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource ) SynBREE (Synthetic Biology for Rare Earth Extraction) (2023) programs. He led efforts to advance the development of novel technologies for the production and recovery of rare earth elements and other critical materials by performing techno-economic assessments (TEAs) and life cycle assessments (LCAs). During his Ph.D. program, Dr. Pérez-Cardona has authored and co-authored 7 papers that have appeared in prestigious journals and conference proceedings.

In addition to his contributions in support of the CMI and EMBER/SynBREE projects, Dr. Pérez-Cardona's research has expanded to embrace additional topics related to sustainable design and manufacturing. He has developed a new parametric design and optimization framework for a surface-mounted permanent magnet synchronous motor. A new concept was proposed to reduce the reliance on critical materials in a product with the objective function “supply risk-equivalent”. In addition, he integrated TEA and LCA into the optimization-based design model to consider more objectives than technical/conventional objectives. Finally, Jesús assessed the advantages of applying the circular economy with a new model and by considering supply risk, economic, and environmental performance metrics.

Dr. Pérez-Cardona's dissertation, titled "Optimization Strategies of a Parametric Product Design for a Circular Economy with Application to an Electric Traction Motor," is motivated in proposing design and optimization strategies of discrete products to facilitate decarbonization strategies at a large scale. His work provides new insights and methods for having a more holistic design framework that may be useful at early design stage. His many research contributions are useful to both academic and industrial sectors.