Critical Materials

Alex King is a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University. He earned his doctorate from Oxford University and did his post-doc work at both Oxford University and MIT. He went on to join the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also served as the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies (Dean of the Graduate School). He was the Head of the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue from 1999 to 2007. From 2008 until 2013 he was the Director of DOE’s Ames Laboratory and became the Founding Director of the Critical Materials Institute from 2013 through 2018.Dr. King is a Fellow of the Institute of Mining Minerals and Materials; ASM International; and the Materials Research Society. He was also a Visiting Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1996 and a US Department of State Jefferson Science Fellow for 2005-06. He served as the President of MRS in 2002, Chair of the University Materials Council of North America from 2006-07, Co-chair of the Gordon Conference on Physical Metallurgy in 2006, and Chair of the APS Interest Group on Energy Research and Applications for 2010. Dr. King was named the recipient of the 2019 Acta Materialia Hollomon Award for Materials and Society.Alex King delivered a TEDx talk on critical materials in 2013 and was the TMS & ASM Distinguished Lecturer on Materials and Society in 2017. He is currently a scientific adviser for Harvard’s Material Alchemy (described as “translating science into commercial products that use sustainable materials”) and a member of the Advisory Board of CHiMaD (the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design, funded by the Department of Commerce, and led by Northwestern University).

• 1. Why are we worried? The rare earth crisis and its impacts2. This is not new. A short history of supply-chain failures3. Assessing the Risks4. Impacts. What changed when supply crises happened?5. Mitigating Criticality, part I. Technology Substitution6. Mitigating Criticality, part II. Material Substitution7. Mitigating Criticality, part III. Source Diversification8. Mitigating Criticality, part IV. Reuse and Recycling9. Tactical Responses to Crises and Strategies for Avoiding Them