Mentor Search
Dr. Ehsan Vahidi
( University of Nevada, Reno )
- Institution:University of Nevada, Reno
- Departments: Mining And Metallurgical Engineering, Mackay School Of Earth Sciences And Engineering
- Research Fields: Environmental Sustainability, Critcal Materials Production, The Circular Economy, Life Cycle Assessment (lca), Extractive Metallurgy, Environmental Engineering
- Disciplines: Engineering, Environmental/Environmental Health Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, Mining and Mineral Engineering
- Location:Washoe County
- Funding:DoE - Department of Energy, EPSCoR - Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, NSF - National Science Foundation, Private Industry
Mentoring
• Leading a project on the recovery and separation of critical and strategic materials from spent lithium-ion batteries using a sustainable and economic process.
• Managing a team to create an open-source spreadsheet-based Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software tool to quantitatively assess environmental impacts associated with different recycling stages of spent batteries.
• Investigating the separation of REEs from coal by-products and their associated environmental impacts.
• Investigating extraction and separation of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) from Mountain Pass mine in California as the only primary resource for REEs in the US.
• Conducting sustainability assessment of gold mining activities in Nevada.
Biography
Dr. Ehsan Vahidi is an interdisciplinary researcher who has crossed traditional boundaries between metallurgical engineering and sustainability sciences. His research takes fundamental environmental engineering and translates this into applied settings, primarily in the mining and metallurgical industries. Dr. Vahidi received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Materials and Metallurgical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and the University of Tehran, respectively. After earning his second master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of South Florida, he obtained his Ph.D. from Purdue University in Environmental & Ecological Engineering. Prior to joining UNR as an Assistant Professor in 2020, Dr. Vahidi was a Postdoctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.