Featured Faculty

A major sustainability challenge of the 21st century is exponentially increasing consumption of materials and the related energy and waste burden. The Gaustad group conducts research quantifying the economic and environmental trade-offs for materials at their end-of-life with a focus on recycling and resource recovery. Methodologies include a variety of systems modeling techniques such as dynamic material flow analysis, optimization, simulation, systems dynamics, economic modeling, process based cost modeling, and life-cycle assessment, as well as traditional material characterization such as TGA, PSD, SEM, XRD, XRF, EDS, and ICP-MS. This unique combination of systems thinking, computational engineering, and fundamental material characterization has resulted in a successful research program resulting in student recognition, significant external funding, and high impact publications.

Specific projects include environmentally benign and economically efficient recycling of lithium ion batteries, particularly those containing nanomaterials, implications of material scarcity and criticality for next generation PV production and rare earth metals, and aluminum recycling technologies and compositional analysis. In 2014, Dr. Gaustad published 9 peer-reviewed high impact publications, all with RIT graduate students as first authors, in journals such as Applied Energy and the Journal of Environmental Management. Dr. Gaustad is active in the promoting the success of under-represented groups in the STEM disciplines. She advised two female students who earned their PhDs in 2014 and has served as a McNair mentor, ACS SEED scholar advisor, and participates in the WE@RIT summer camps for 4-6th grade girls.

Since arriving at RIT, Gaustad has received over $1M in external funding which has been used to support PhD, MS, and undergraduate student education and research. In 2015, Dr. Gaustad was awarded the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation to study supply chain gaps for scarce clean energy materials and develop novel metrics to assess their criticality.