8 Projects Funded in 2nd Year of Scialog: Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials 

Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and The Kavli Foundation have made awards to eight cross-disciplinary teams of early career researchers in the second year of Scialog: Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials, a three-year initiative catalyzing cutting-edge basic science to address how we acquire, use, and recycle the critical materials that sustain our high-tech society.  

The 18 individual awards of $60,000 in direct costs will go to 17 scientists from colleges, universities, and research institutions in the United States. (One researcher is on two teams, while another project includes two as unfunded collaborators.) 

“Critical minerals underpin modern society – from energy to agriculture, from electronics to AI – yet they can harm the environment, and many are vulnerable to supply chain instability,” said RCSA President Eric Isaacs. “Finding alternative materials, rethinking extraction, minimizing waste, and ensuring recyclability from the start of a material’s life cycle to its end are not simple problems. They demand cross-disciplinary collaboration.” 

Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog program aims to spark innovative thinking by building a creative network of scientists in the United States and Canada that crosses disciplinary silos, and by stimulating intensive conversation around a scientific theme of global importance. 

“Scialog’s unique format is designed to help early career researchers imagine ambitious projects, question assumptions, and begin forming collaborations that could shape their fields for decades to come,” Isaacs said. 

The 2025 conference, held September 10-13 in Tucson, Arizona, engaged more than 50 Fellows selected from multiple disciplines, approaches, and methodologies in a series of focused conversations about challenges and gaps in current knowledge and new research directions they might be able to pursue working together. 

By the end of the conference, Fellows formed teams to develop and propose ideas for high-risk, high-reward projects. At the 2025 meeting, 100% of eligible Fellows participated in submitting a project proposal.  

Keynote speaker Eric Schelter, University of Pennsylvania, set the stage for discussions by highlighting the range of problems to address and the current climate for doing fun and fundable basic science in his talk, “Challenges and Opportunities in Critical Metals Separations Chemistry.” 

“There’s a huge space to work in here, and needs for novel and innovative science and engineering across this manifold of separations problems related to metals,” he said. 

He emphasized the importance of the burgeoning clean energy transition as a driver for new critical metal separations chemistry, noting that some renewable energy technologies such as batteries in electric cars and offshore wind farms require significant amounts of materials. 

He said that while current U.S. policies may buck the global trend in commitment to renewables, there is support for re-shoring supply chains for critical materials like cobalt, nickel, and rare earths. 

“We can continue to contribute to the renewable energy transition with this work,” Schelter said. “It’s still a really important goal globally, and this community can be leaders in showing why science and engineering is important and showing how transformative it can be for national security priorities.” 

Schelter, a 2013 Cottrell Scholar and 2024 SEED Award recipient, reflected on the evolution of his group’s work in rare earth separations, from coordination chemistry to magnetic field-induced separation, kinetics-based separation, and excited state quenching separation using ligands to absorb light and transfer energy to rare earth ions, allowing selective reactions. He also discussed the capability of the lanmodulin protein to concentrate rare earth elements, which could inspire the development of separation methods that could selectively extract a single ion from a complex mixture, something current bio-based methods cannot do. 

Along with Schelter, an expert group of scientists served as Facilitators to create a collaborative and inclusive environment and guide discussions at the conference: Kwame Awuah-Offei, Missouri University of Science and Technology; Will Dichtel, Northwestern University; Andrea Hicks, University of Wisconsin – Madison; Amy Landis, Michigan Technical University; Ikenna Nlebedim, Ames Laboratory; and Jonathan Wilker, Purdue University. 

Teams funded at the inaugural conference a year ago gave flash talks on the early progress of their projects, which included research into using seaweed to recover critical elements from seawater, engineering plants to create alternatives to fossil-based textile dyes, extracting critical trace elements from copper ores, and upcycling low-value plastic waste into new products. 

“Scialog-funded projects don’t start out as the kind of ideas that could be funded by the National Science Foundation or the Department of Energy,” said RCSA Senior Program Director Andrew Feig, who leads the initiative. “They reach out beyond Fellows’ comfort zones and take advantage of the remarkable breadth of experience and knowledge available through these meetings.” 

The third and final meeting of Scialog: Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials is scheduled for September 16-19, 2026. 

The following SM3 Fellows will receive 2025 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards for these projects: 

Funded by RCSA ¹ 
Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ² 
Funded by The Kavli Foundation ³ 
Unfunded Collaborator ⁴