in Mining (CASERM) is a collaborative venture between Colorado School of Mines and Virginia Tech¹ aimed at transforming the way geoscience data are used in the mineral resources industry. The research at CASERM is supported by government agencies and private-sector members in the exploration, mining, geochemical and mineralogical analysis, and software development industries (CSM, 2024).

Historically, NSF has had seven directorates that fund research: Biological Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Education and Human Resources; Engineering; Geosciences; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. In 2022, NSF underwent a major expansion, adding the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP), which bridges the gap between fundamental research and applications. By March 2024, TIP was funding over 2,700 awards to 901 distinct organizations spanning academia, nonprofits, and start-ups and small businesses (NSF, n.d.c). TIP’s Convergence Accelerator includes a track on sustainable materials for global challenges, Mackwell noted.

Finally, the NSF Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry program awards 3- to-5-year grants of $100,000–$150,000 per year to faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students (NSF, n.d.a). The program is designed to catalyze transformative research and collaborations and build pathways to help universities forge stronger links with industry.

DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES

Jeremy Mehta, Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), shared an overview of DOE’s critical minerals and materials workforce development efforts. He said that with recent legislation, especially the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation

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¹ The formal name of Virginia Tech is Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Reduction Act, DOE is now able to invest in critical material manufacturing across the entire innovation pipeline (Figure 5-2), and with this investment in manufacturing comes an investment in education workforce development.

Within the critical minerals and materials workforce, DOE is analyzing needs and trends in different occupations and specializations and working to identify the barriers to growing them. Mehta discussed several programs that are developing the workforce in different areas. One is the Critical Materials Innovation (CMI) Hub (formerly the Critical Materials Institute), run by the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (EERE, n.d.). This consortium of four national laboratories, over a dozen universities, and about 30 industry partners hosts workforce development programs—including a leadership academy, meetings, internships, and externships—while also engaging at the K–12 level. “The interfacing of the expertise at the national labs, the students from academic space, and the partnerships that we have with industry is a great way to prime the workforce—not just familiarizing them and training them in relevant spaces with respect to critical materials but also in the state-of-the-art and most innovative approaches we have to material processing,” Mehta said.

In another relevant development, DOE’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains recently announced a $40 million investment to expand clean energy workforce training through additional Industrial Assessment Centers (IACs) and a new group of Building Training and Assessment Centers (BTACs) (SCEP, n.d.). IACs are designed to train a workforce to evaluate and improve the efficiency of different manufacturing sites through hands-on learning opportunities. BTACs expand these benefits to commercial and institutional buildings (DOE, 2023).

DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management also has several programs focused on education and workforce development. One is the University Training and Research program, which supports Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions. This program has made 140 research and development awards, totaling more than $47.6 million and supporting 455 under-

graduate- and graduate-level students, to enable early-stage research related to minimizing the environmental impacts of fossil fuels while working toward net-zero emissions (NETL, n.d.). Another program is the Mickey Leland Energy Fellowship, a 10-week summer program focused on engaging STEM students in learning about manufacturing and processing of critical materials.

In April 2023, the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies office hosted an education workforce development workshop focused on critical minerals and materials, which highlighted the importance of strategic collaboration and partnerships between industry, academia, and local governments and identified a need to support the entire supply chain, including upstream, midstream, and downstream industries. Mehta said that it is important for DOE’s investments in these spaces to involve workforce development and include constant communication with those developing new funding opportunities, new activities, and new programs, in order to harmonize efforts aimed at meeting the needs of the industry.

NIOSH MINING HEALTH AND SAFETY RESEARCH PROGRAM

George Luxbacher presented on behalf of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Mining Health and Safety Research Program, whose primary mission is to eliminate mining fatalities, injuries, and illnesses through relevant research and impactful solutions. NIOSH was created under the Occupational Safety and Health Act as the federal agency responsible for research and making recommendations for the prevention of work-related illness and injury. When the U.S. Bureau of Mines closed in 1995, Congress moved the Mining Health and Safety Research Program into NIOSH. Today, the Mining Health and Safety Research Program has a staff of about 200 people spread between two locations. Research areas include miner health, occupational illness and disease, safety, traumatic injuries, fatalities, and disasters, with a dual focus on reducing risk and increasing the chance of survivability. With the passage of the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act of 2006, the program initiated a technology solicitation that has provided over $55 million in funding through 151 multiyear contracts to industry and academia. Luxbacher said that universities have received about $22 million of funding through this, which is about $1.5 million a year, with all funds being dedicated to advancing mining health and safety.

The University Health and Safety Research for the Mining Industry initiative supports university professors, especially in the early stages of their careers, as well as graduate students, Luxbacher explained. These are 5-year contracts worth $250,000 per year; 34 have been awarded. Luxbacher said that NIOSH has invested about $43 million into the program thus far, which has funded 133 master’s students, 106 Ph.D. candidates, and 71 faculty members. The program also awards about $6 million a year in cooperative agreements with universities or other eligible recipients, several of which are limited to programs accredited in mining engineering and offer a degree in explosives engineering.

Finally, Luxbacher said that NIOSH partners with the academic community through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, which allows faculty to work within NIOSH, as well as by offering guest lecturers and subject-matter experts, making its world-class facilities available for research collaborations, and offering opportunities for graduate student internships and many employment opportunities for university graduates in mining and other areas.

ACADEMIC–INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS

Brad Fravel, executive director of LINK: Center for Advancing Partnerships at Virginia Tech, described how his team of business development professionals works with industry and private foundations to support academic–industry partnerships with mutual benefits.

With its strong institutional commitment to mining and minerals engineering, Fravel said, Virginia Tech is a top producer of research and talent within mining engineering. Faculty have also been modernizing the curriculum in that department over the past several years to develop leaders in sustainable mining and mining engineering. While the overall scale of the program remains relatively small—of the approxi-

mately 10,000 undergraduate engineering students at Virginia Tech, about 80 students are in mining engineering—the school accounts for approximately 25 percent of the mining engineering students graduating annually in the United States each year, Fravel said.

Fravel commented that pressures within the mining industry are growing as demand for resources such as cobalt, lithium, and other materials continues to rise, alongside the needs to apply the latest technologies and ensure the environment is cared for. “When we think about what we need to accomplish at Virginia Tech, it’s solving these tough challenges and problems through partnership,” said Fravel. “We can’t do it by ourselves—we need the federal government to help us—and from my team’s perspective, we cannot do it without industry.” Virginia Tech has partnerships with over 1,000 different companies and foundations that have supported the university financially in some way, whether through philanthropy or research expenditures, and Fravel’s group works with the top 100 of these. In doing so, he underscored the need to be strategic about building partnerships that are truly mutually beneficial and move research forward for both students and industry partners.

PANEL DISCUSSION ON RESEARCH AND PARTNERSHIP OPPORTUNITIES

Transitioning into an open discussion, panelists began by discussing gaps in research programs that, if filled, could help grow the mineral resources workforce. They also discussed why other countries, especially China, have more funding in this area compared with the United States.

Mehta said that although there are gaps across the supply chain, the largest gaps, at least from an energy perspective, are in processing. Investments through the Inflation Reduction Act have been historic, but he posited that it is important for them to be spread out across the whole supply chain. “Most of the material flows through places like China that do the processing, and innovation is needed to develop processing that’s competitive, that isn’t detrimental to the environment, to human health, so that we can funnel that supply chain back through the United States,” he said.

Mackwell added that in his view, the United States decreased focus on mining activities because performing them outside of the United States was cheaper and reduced the risk to Americans. He also suggested that a general trend of deemphasizing faculty positions and departments could cause bottlenecks in the ability to reexpand mineral resources programs, even if the problem of student recruitment could be solved. “If you don’t have faculty that are going to teach it, there aren’t going to be students that are taking classes that don’t exist,” he said.

Mackwell added that there can be inherent challenges with identifying appropriate NSF funding mechanisms for this area because it is interdisciplinary and requires different parts of the agency to work together. He also noted that, historically, there has been a gap in support between benchtop and applied research. This gap was what the TIP Directorate was designed to fill. He also suggested a need for strong interagency cooperation between NSF, DOE, and the U.S. Geological Survey to allow these agencies to work more in partnership than in parallel.

Luxbacher said that the Mining Health and Safety Research Program has only a small amount of funding that can be provided for university research. “You can’t hire faculty, you can’t bring in graduate students, unless you know that you have a reliable funding source going forward for research,” he said.

Fravel pointed out that in countries such as Australia, Chile, and China, mining is seen as a significant and strategic contributor to gross domestic product and future success. “I think what we have in the United States is there is too much competition—there are too many other very good industry sectors that people pay attention to,” he said. “Now the U.S. government is waking up to the lost advantage that it once had and is now looking at it as a security issue, and we are now in this position of trying to catch up.” While research funding can help keep academic departments from going under, he noted, it will not necessarily help them grow. Rather, it is the students who are going to help those departments be viable and truly thrive.

Panelists discussed potential ways to ensure that the current increase in funding is sustained. Fravel encouraged the private sector and industry to start thinking long term to keep the workforce from following the boom–bust cycle of commodities. Luxbacher pointed out that there used to be a more strategic, long-

term view for mining in the United States, and said that periodic investments, even large ones, are insufficient on their own to enable long-term programs. He added that mining industry support is a key component and suggested that reestablishing a centralized agency with a focus on mining could help to address the challenges.

Mackwell noted that federal agencies are appropriated funds on a year-by-year basis. “It is not always predictable, and so it is challenging to guarantee sustainment for anything that relies heavily on federal funds,” he said. “That is why we like building our partnerships so that the federal funds aren’t the only ones that are supporting these kinds of activities. Having industry involved and sharing the cost enables sustainment.” Mehta agreed that industry involvement is key and added that vertical integration across the entire supply chain can strengthen the long-term sustainability of these efforts.

Finally, the panelists discussed how different perceptions of the urgency of addressing long-term workforce needs shape the investments that are made. Fravel said he sees the issue as urgent, but expressed uncertainty about whether there were enough partners who share that perspective. Luxbacher pointed out that permits for several mines are currently being postponed and suggested that the lack of a political consensus around priorities in this area could impede long-term investments in the growth of the field.