The National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure awarded the University of Oklahoma $320,000 on January 1, 2027, under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070) to develop CIR-REE, a cyberinfrastructure platform for rare earth element recovery data management and open science. The award runs through December 31, 2029, with work performed in Norman, Oklahoma.
CIR-REE unifies fragmented laboratory, industrial process, and materials documentation spanning rare earth recovery research and end-of-life electronics recycling. The platform integrates machine-actionable metadata, semantic data models, persistent identifiers, and polyglot data infrastructure to enable discovery, integration, curation, and reuse of heterogeneous rare earth element recovery data across materials researchers, data scientists, recyclers, libraries, and cyberinfrastructure stakeholders. Technically, the system combines physical preprocessing variables such as shredding granularity with chemical recovery descriptors including leaching kinetics, applying semantic knowledge representation, graph-enabled persistence, and physics-informed machine learning to support analysis and optimization of recovery pathways for neodymium and dysprosium from complex waste streams including hard disk drives. The infrastructure advances capability building through an interoperable data and inference platform, competency building through reusable standards and workflows for the rare earth recycling community, and community coordination across multiple stakeholder groups.