CMI Internship Program: 2025 Call for Applications
The Critical Materials Innovation Hub (CMI) invites undergraduate and graduate students to apply for our Summer and Fall internship opportunities.
1. Program description
The program is a 2-part internship combining an initial experience at a national lab, university or company with a follow-on experience at a company. Part 1 is a research internship of approximately 10 – 12 weeks for a summer internship and approximately 12 – 14 weeks for a fall internship at a CMI national lab, university or company actively engaged in CMI research. Part 2 is an immersion experience of at least one week at a company that is a CMI team member or affiliate. The purpose of this immersion experience is for the intern to better understand the broad commercial context in which research occurs. Activities could include touring a production facility, visiting an industrial pilot or demonstration plant, shadowing a company professional, and others. Part 2 activities will help the intern understand what companies seek in new materials and processes and what the ingredients are for successful transition of an idea from laboratory to commercialization.
CMI will provide:
(a) A flat stipend to the intern of $15,000, as well as reimbursement for travel expenses.
(b) Travel funds for both the intern and the mentor to participate in the second part of the internship (the immersion experience at a company).
The CMI project will provide other support for the internship research through its existing funding.
2. Eligibility: Open to both undergraduate and graduate students from any U.S. college or university, as long as they are not currently working on a CMI project. We encourage applications from students from non-CMI institutions, especially those from under-represented groups.
Degrees of interest: chemical engineering, chemistry (inorganic, analytical, physical), chemical science, electrochemistry, material science, physics, metallurgical engineering, social science and environmental science.
3. How to apply:
Apply via Handshake (https://app.
(1) Your CVs,
(2) A 1-page statement of purpose indicating:
a. Your preference for a Summer or Fall internship
b. Your 2 choices of the projects listed in Section 4 and the reasons for choosing those projects
(3) Application deadline: March 12
4. Project descriptions:
10 CMI projects seek interns during Summer or Fall 2025. Information about these projects follows, and is available for download HERE.
| Number | Project title: description | Intern timeframe, location, opportunity |
| 1 | Lithium recovery from diluted sources: This project develops lithium extraction from costless diluted liquid solutions at a high yield and purity through electrochemical and chemical methods. |
Fall 2025, Idaho National Laboratory.
Synthesize membranes and test them in electrodialysis system for lithium purification. |
| 2 | Thin Film Semiconductor Recycling: This project seeks to develop an electrochemical path to effectively substitute or reduce chemically intensive recycling methods currently applied for the recovery of cadmium (Cd) and tellurium (Te) in thin film CdTe-based photovoltaic (PV) panels. The goal is to lower cost and environmental impacts through reduced chemical use, milder/safer operation and lower waste generation. |
Summer 2025 and Fall 2025, Idaho National Laboratory.
Laboratory-based experimental research on electrochemical driven separation technologies, e.g., electrochemical leaching and electrowinning, for the recovery, downstream separation, and purification of tellurium and other valuable metals from photovoltaic solar panels. |
| 3 | Enhancing Criticality Assessment – From Backward Looking to Anticipatory Perspectives: Understanding the historical and predicting the future criticality of minerals in the US economy |
Summer 2025, Colorado School of Mines.
Help with economics and criticality assessment |
| 4 | Energy-efficient metallothermic reduction of recycled rare earths: This project aims to produce anhydrous rare earth fluoride from recycled waste streams without harmful chemicals, demonstrate commercial-grade rare earth metal production, and reduce carbon intensity by 50-80%. The outcome will be kg-scale production supported by Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). |
Summer 2025 and Fall 2025, Ames National Laboratory.
Collecting representative samples from various sources; Techniques such as dissolution, extraction, and purification to prepare samples for analysis |
| 5 | Advanced leaching methods to recover critical materials from mineral sources: This project seeks to design, develop, and implement novel lixiviants to achieve separative leaching of target REEs from mineral feedstocks such as bastnaesite. To achieve this goal, researchers will employ organic and inorganic synthesis, coordination chemistry, automation, and high-throughput techniques. |
Summer 2025 and Fall 2025, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Either synthesize and characterize new lixiviants (leaching agents) or test lixiviants in leaching studies. |
| 6 | Accelerated magnetic development via microstructure design: This project accelerates the synthesis process through rational microstructure design that combines multi-scale and multi-physics simulations, thus reducing the labor- and cost- intensive experimental works. |
Fall 2025, University of Texas-Arlington.
Synthesize and characterize rare-earth-free hard magnetic materials |
| 7 | Accelerated discovery and development of low-cost, low-criticality competitor to the Nd2Fe14B-based magnets: The project aims for discovery and further development of new permanent magnet materials that will compete with the current technologies, i.e., neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) magnets and/or samarium-cobalt (SmCo) magnets, whereas being significantly less expensive and utilizing only minimal amounts (10 - 15 wt.%) of critical metals like neodymium (Nd), dysprosium (Dy), Sm and Co. This is a science-based approach of looking for new, undiscovered, critical rare-earth poor, iron-rich binary, ternary and higher compounds and/or new or unappreciated ferromagnets containing abundant and non-critical elements. |
Summer 2025, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Machine-learning-based discovery of high-performance permanent magnet materials |
| 8 | Capture and fractionation of lanthanide salts with dimethyl ether-driven fractional crystallization (DME-FC) and Electrochemical Membrane Reactor (EMR): In this project, solvent-driven fractional crystallization (FC) and electrochemical membrane reactor (EMR) technology will be advanced to recover mineral salts, including dilute lanthanides from complex wastewater sources, remove impurities and lanthanides from lanthanide containing leach solutions, and drive selective lanthanide-lanthanide separation. |
Summer 2025 and Fall 2025, Idaho National Laboratory.
Fractional crystallization of low concentration REE and lanthanide-lanthanide separations. |
| 9 | Selective separation of platinum group metals, precious metals, and critical elements from selenium crude residue at Kennecott Utah Copperton Concentrator: This project develops improved approaches to sustainably extract PGMs (platinum (Pt) and palladium (Pd)), selenium (Se), tellurium (Te), and precious metals (gold (Au) and silver (Ag)) from Se crude residue ( Se sludge) produced from anode slime processing at Kennecott Utah Copperton Concentrator (KUCC), develop Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) model to assess economic impacts of the proposed processes, and develop comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model to evaluate the environmental impacts of the proposed processes as compared to currently used practices. |
Summer 2025, Missouri S&T.
Hydrometallurgy |
| 10 | Enhancing critical mineral separation for sustainable extraction: This project develops an innovative approach to separate rare earths into individual elements using a two-ligand separation process that combines lipophilic and hydrophilic neutral ligands with contrasting selectivity. |
Fall 2025, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Solvent extraction |