Building the Future of Energy and Critical Mineral Systems — End to End and Back
Physical, digital, and institutional — the three layers of the infrastructure of the future.
I am an assistant professor of Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering and Resource and Energy Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, where I direct the SEAR Lab and the RAID Lab. My work studies energy and critical mineral systems end to end and back — from extraction through manufacturing, deployment, and monitoring to end-of-life recovery and back to materials.
Physical
The systems that move people, energy and materials.
Digital
The records and models that make those flows visible, accountable and optimizable.
Institutional
The law and policy that protect people, enforce agreements and decide who benefits.
Mission. Build the Integrated Infrastructure of the Future: Physical, Digital, Institutional.
Vision. Advance innovation to drive sustainable resource abundance that elevates the human condition; here and among the stars.
Methods. SEAR specializes in mathematical optimization, simulation, AI/ML, and specialized analytics (GIS, LCA, TEA), with bench-scale chemistry for critical-metal recovery and RFID for asset tracking — the experiments calibrate the models, and the models design the experiments.
Start with about me, current research, the lab’s projects, or play with a toy model of the mineral–energy loop.