From rock to battery: a $1 million prize will train the students who can walk the whole journey

Batteries and powerful magnets start as rocks in the ground — and the people who know how to follow that journey, from digging and refining to recycling, are in short supply. Penn State has now won a $1 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy to train more of them. The university's plan, called "PROSPECTing the Future," was a winner of the DOE's PROSPECT Planning Prize, which backs new education pathways for the critical-materials workforce. It joins up two Penn State strengths — earth and mineral sciences, and materials research — into one route through a working life: finding minerals, mining them, separating the valuable parts from the rock, turning them into metals, building products like batteries and magnets, and finally recovering the materials for reuse. Students will get summer programs, hands-on research with laboratory tools that reveal what a material is made of, scholarships to draw them in, and two new qualifications: a "Rock to Resource" certificate and a graduate certificate in critical mineral systems. Industry partners and national laboratories will help with mentoring and routes into jobs. The long-term aim is simple to say and hard to do: significantly more graduates ready for these careers.

SDG 4 · Quality education — Mechanism: funding & finance