Undergrad Mike Jindra wins AIChE Best Poster Award
Mike Jindra was awarded “Best Poster” in the Sustainability section at the fall AICHE 2016 Annual Meeting in San Francisco for his presentation entitled, “Scalable Biorecovery of Critical Materials from Industrial Waste.”
Mike, currently a senior studying chemical engineering at The Ohio State University, was working as a SULI (Science Undergraduate Laboratory) intern at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in the Critical Materials Institute on the FA 3.2.5 project, helping to develop a bioreactor process for continuous production of organic acids for leaching rare earth elements (REE) from recyclable materials.
Rare earth elements are metals that cluster together in the earth in low concentrations, which makes mining extraction and separation difficult. Recycling is an attractive alternative since it reduces the expenditure of energy and other resources by finding a waste stream that is already rich in the materials. Rare earth metals are key ingredients for making hard alloys used in defense technology such as night-vision goggles, armored vehicles, and communications and GPS equipment, as well as in consumer products such as rechargeable batteries used in hybrid and electric vehicles, cell phones and other electronics.
The SULI program is a premier Department of Energy fall, spring and summer internship designed to bring undergraduates in the laboratory research setting to work with scientists who are leaders in their research fields. Students from across the country spend either 16 weeks in the fall and spring semesters or 10 weeks in the summer in the program, which provides housing and a stipend.
Mike is currently external president of the OSU student chapter of AIChE (American Institute for Chemical Engineers), the chemical engineering industry's foremost professional group.
