Sarah Slotznick, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, was selected as a recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program Award for 2025.
The prestigious award provides long-term support for the research of outstanding early-career scientists and engineers at universities and national laboratories.
Funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, the five-year, $900,000 grant will support Slotznick’s pioneering research into the magnetic properties of cobalt-bearing minerals—research with implications for the future of electric vehicle battery production and mineral resource exploration.
“Receiving this award is amazing for my research program. In a time of uncertain federal funding, this award will allow me to continue for the next five years, supporting students and early career scientists,” Slotznick says. “This project propels my lab group in a new trajectory, diving deep into mineral magnetism. While it has future applications, this study is in fundamental, basic science—curiosity-driven research that spawned from finding some ‘weird’ magnetic signals a decade ago in 1.5-billion-year-old rocks.”
“This prestigious award recognizes the important trajectory that Professor Slotznik has mapped out,” says Jane Lipson, associate dean for the sciences. “Her research prioritizes fundamental scientific discovery, motivated by a desire to understand the workings of the natural world, while simultaneously advancing extremely practical goals.”
Cobalt is a rare but critical element for the energy transition due to its use in electrical vehicle batteries. “While cobalt is known to be a permanent magnet, the magnetic properties of the more common cobalt minerals, which are mined for this element, are poorly understood,” Slotznick says.
The project will combine experimental and computational approaches to fill this knowledge gap. Slotznick’s team will analyze synthetic and museum specimens of cobalt-sulfide minerals at different grain sizes and across a range of temperatures. Using cutting-edge tools including a quantum diamond microscope, they’ll create detailed compositional and magnetic maps to verify that crystal impurities aren’t skewing results. The experimental data will be combined with computational modeling to reveal how cobalt minerals behave magnetically in natural samples, including complex ore deposits.
The research will extend beyond laboratory analysis to include fieldwork application. Rock samples from drill cores of the Black Butte Deposit in Montana will be studied to demonstrate how magnetic analysis tools can help understand the formation processes of cobalt-bearing minerals and predict resource distribution in ore deposits.
Most mineral magnetism research has focused on iron oxides, making this study of cobalt sulfides an important contribution to the field. By demonstrating the utility of magnetic analysis for understanding ore deposits, Slotznick hopes to stimulate research in mineral magnetism—a field that lags behind synthetic magnetic materials—and expand the use of these techniques in the mining industry beyond basic aeromagnetic surveys.