The National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure awarded the University of North Texas Research and Innovation Division $280,000 on January 1, 2027, to develop CIR-REE (Cyberinfrastructure for Rare Earth Element Recovery), a socio-technical cyberinfrastructure platform for fair research data management and open science in rare earth element recovery from end-of-life electronics.
CIR-REE integrates machine-actionable metadata, semantic data models, persistent identifiers, and physics-informed machine learning to unify fragmented laboratory, industrial, and safety data spanning physical preprocessing variables such as shredding granularity with chemical recovery descriptors such as leaching kinetics. The platform enables researchers to discover, integrate, curate, and reuse cross-domain recovery data and supports analysis and optimization of recovery pathways for neodymium and dysprosium from complex waste streams including hard disk drives. The infrastructure couples graph-enabled persistence with open interfaces to transform static, disconnected records into a queryable, reusable decision-support ecosystem. The project advances capability building through an interoperable data and inference platform, competency building through reusable standards and data stewardship practices, and community building by coordinating participation among materials researchers, data scientists, recyclers, libraries, and cyberinfrastructure stakeholders.
The award funds work under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070). Place of performance is Denton, Texas. The period of performance runs from January 1, 2027, through December 31, 2029.