Erick C. Jones Jr.

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

Rapid prototyping and bench-scale mechanical, electrical, and chemical experiments for critical-metal recovery and material processing.

Digital

Mathematical optimization, simulation, AI/ML, design-of-computer-experiments surrogates, and specialized analytics (GIS, LCA, TEA), with RFID for asset tracking.

Institutional

Policy analysis and community-based deployment — who decides, who benefits, and who is trained.

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, selected publications, or play with a toy model of the mineral–energy loop.