Spark Award 2024 for Marie Amélie Perrin and Victor Mougel
The prize for the most promising invention of the past year goes to Marie Amélie Perrin and Victor Mougel. They have developed a method that enables rare earth elements to be efficiently recovered from electrical waste.
Rare earth elements are an indispensable part of modern electronics. They can be found, for example, in fluorescent lamps, flat screen monitors and the magnets of hard drives. Moreover, these elements are also essential for the energy transition. For instance, they are used for the manufacture of generators for wind farms.
These elements have until now barely been recycled because they can only be separated with an enormous outlay of energy and chemicals. The problem lies in the chemical similarity of the elements. ETH doctoral student Marie Perrin and her supervisor Victor Mougel have developed a method that enables the elements to be separated efficiently. It has been singled out for the Spark Award 2024 as the most promising invention of the year.
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Marie Amélie Perrin was born in Texas, and grew up in Toulouse, France. After completing a Master’s in Molecular Chemistry at ENS Paris-Saclay and ?cole Polytechnique (and conducting her Master’s thesis at MIT) she pursued a PhD at ETH Zurich under Prof. Mougel. Her doctoral research focused on the coordination chemistry of rare earth elements with bioinspired metallic sulfido ligands, with applications in catalysis, luminescence, magnetism, and, as serendipitously discovered, in the separation of REEs. For her scientific work she was awarded the 2024 European Young Chemist Award. In 2023, she co-founded REEcover, a startup dedicated to rare earth element recovery.
Victor Mougel comes from Pesmes, France. In 2009, he joined Prof. Marinella Mazzanti’s lab in CEA-Grenoble for his PhD to research the synthesis, reactivity and magnetic properties of polynuclear uranium complexes. After being awarded the best PhD thesis prize of the University of Grenoble, he moved to ETH Zürich as an ETH fellow to investigate Surface Organometallic Chemistry and develop new well-defined alkene metathesis catalysts in the group of Prof. Christophe Copéret. After a three-year research interlude in France Mougel returned to ETH Zurich in 2018 as tenure-track Assistant Professor of Inorganic Chemistry focussing now mainly on the electrochemical transformation of environmentally relevant small molecules (N2, CO2, H2O) using renewable sources of electricity.