Lee Wins NSF CAREER Award for Research on Sustainable Recycling of Plastics
June 17, 2025 - Elizabeth M.Y. Lee has been recognized with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. Among NSF’s most prestigious honors, the CAREER award supports young faculty who are academic role models in research and education. Lee, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and a Samueli Faculty Development Chair, will receive $625,000 over five years to support her project to design a more sustainable process for chemical recycling of plastics.
Plastic waste is a pressing environmental challenge, with over 90% ending up in landfills or being incinerated. Lee’s research focuses on a promising approach known as hydrogenolysis, which transforms waste plastics like polyethylene into valuable materials and chemicals by breaking it down into smaller, higher-value chemicals using metal catalysts and hydrogen gas. Unlike conventional chemical recycling methods, hydrogenolysis can operate under milder conditions without using harmful solvents, making it a more sustainable solution. However, adopting this technology for widespread use presents challenges such as low efficiency, undesirable byproducts and difficulties in scaling the process for industry.
Lee and her research group, the Computational Engineering of Materials Interfaces (CeMi) Lab, are working to resolve these limitations. By developing a novel computational framework based on quantum mechanical simulations, machine learning and statistical thermodynamics, the team seeks to understand the fundamental processes governing how plastics decompose at metal surfaces. This research holds promise for revolutionizing the upcycling of polyolefins, the most common class of plastic, into valuable chemical products — a key step toward a more sustainable, circular economy.
“Our aim is to generate high-resolution movies of the interfacial phenomena of how polymeric materials break down when in contact with metals under varying reaction conditions,” Lee explained. “The proposed work will consider the quantum mechanical origins of bond breaking and the multiphase interactions between the polymer, gas and metal, to develop new predictive models for optimizing the efficiency and selectivity of waste-to-fuel conversion.”
Lee says the award also supports her group’s vision to help increase computational literacy across the U.S. by developing a new curriculum on computational materials science and workshops on sustainable materials. These efforts will be done in collaboration with a local nonprofit cognitive-behavioral training program. “We hope to inspire the next generation of scientists to tackle sustainability challenges using the power of simulation and data,” she said.
Lee is the fourth Samueli School of Engineering faculty member to receive an NSF CAREER award this year.
– Lori Brandt
