Eleven new projects have been awarded Global Incubator Seed Grants this month, enabling WashU faculty to kickstart innovative international collaborations.
These projects span a diverse range of cutting-edge research, from developing breakthrough energy devices to advancing malaria research, driving new frontiers in global scholarship and impact. They are part of nearly 100 Global Incubator Seed Grants awarded over the past five years, reflecting the program’s sustained success in fostering early-stage international research partnerships.
Designed to catalyze faculty-led international research, the program provides one-year, non-renewable grants of up to $25,000 to help WashU faculty incubate new projects that involve at least one highly engaged international partner from universities, NGOs, or industry. More than a funding mechanism, the program is a dynamic platform that builds relationships across disciplines and countries—enabling WashU and its global partners to co-create knowledge, advance research, and shape policy with worldwide relevance.
Jeffrey Catalano, a professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences and a fellow of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received one of these awards. His project, "Tunable Clays for Enhanced Lithium Recovery and Contaminant Sequestration" will be conducted in collaboration with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, focusing on environmental research.
Clay minerals display enhanced ability to extract lithium from water and trap inorganic contaminants when structural iron is converted to a chemically reduced form. However, work to date has investigated a small number of natural clays that display barriers to wider application. Cycling of iron in clays between reduced and oxidized forms promotes lithium binding and then release, but irreversibly traps a portion of the lithium. Similarly, reduced clays repel contaminants that occur as anions (negatively charged) and passivate before they fully reactively-trap contaminants. Directly tuning the composition, structure, and charge of clay minerals potentially enables optimizing these solids for reversible lithium recovery and maximizing contaminant sequestration. We propose to apply hydrothermal synthesis of novel clay compositions and mediated electrochemical reduction and oxidation to demonstrate the tunability of clay minerals for the recovery of lithium and the sequestration of metal contaminants in support of a future proposal to NSF.
