MEI Young Person's Award for 2022 to Anna Vanderbruggen

On behalf of MEI I am delighted to announce that the winner of the 2022 MEI Young Person's Award is Dr. Anna Vanderbruggen, who was nominated by Dr. Martin Rudolph, the Head of the Department of Processing at the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg (HIF) for Resource Technology, Germany and Dr. Petya Gutzmer, Managing Director of ERZLABOR Advanced Solutions GmbH, Germany.

In early 2018 Anna, a young and highly motivated French student of the Erasmus Program EMerald “Master’s in resource engineering” arrived at HIF to find support in her plans to investigate the recovery of anode graphite in the recycling of lithium-ion batteries. She had identified a crucial gap in the sustainable processing and critical raw materials beneficiation of Black Mass from spent end of life lithium-ion batteries. 

Anna at Process Mineralogy '18 in Cape Town

Anna is certainly not a classical minerals processing engineer. She started her academic development with a BSc in Geosciences but realised soon that one natural science is not enough to make a difference. She thus re-positioned herself for her Masters to also learn an engineering science. Following the very successful completion of the MSc in the Emerald program, an EIT Raw Materials supported and Erasmus Mundus funded program that connects the Universities in Liege, Nancy, Lulea and Freiberg, she decided to do her PhD in battery recycling technology in a collaboration between Aalto University, Finland, and the HIF. For this project she defined her own research focus – the efficient recovery of graphite from black mass by flotation.

Despite being a critical raw material, the recovery of graphite had previously been largely ignored in the battery recycling process. Not only did she fill this knowledge gap successfully during her PhD, but she also very successfully communicated the need for holistic concepts for battery recycling to a large number of audiences, ranging from car manufactures to recycling technology developers and even wider society. Her success as a great science communicator is aptly illustrated by her success as a recipient of the EIT Change Award in 2022. Bernd Schäfer, CEO of EIT RawMaterials said "huge congratulations to Anna Vanderbruggen, our finalist from EIT RawMaterials, on winning the EIT Change Award for her groundbreaking graphite recycling solution. It is exactly this level of innovation that will enable Europe to achieve the goals of the green transition and we are so proud to have supported her journey".

Dr. Gutzmer has closely interacted with Dr. Anna Vanderbruggen for about 5 years, first as postgraduate students at HIF and in the last two years as colleagues in ERZLABOR Advanced Solutions GmbH, a successful start-up company for resource characterisation. In the last two years Anna has been an essential part of the team defining new products and responsible for business development in the battery recycling sector. She advises and supports both large and small companies in the recycling sector in achieving better process efficiency. 

Dr. Gutzmer says that "Anna is a superb example of the importance of combining a broad set of research competences stemming from an interdisciplinary educational fundament with enthusiasm (for research) and great communication skills – not only talking to peers and customers but talking to a much broader part of society. In her work at ERZLABOR and in her research, she is already addressing today the problems of tomorrow, focusing on generating and translating scientific results into practice. She is an outstanding advocate for sustainability and resource efficiency and her conviction is based on a very good and clear understanding of the political, economic strategic as well as environmental importance of raw materials and the need of a global circular economy approach". 

Anna's passion for communicating science and making it accessible to the public is exceptional. She gives lectures, interviews, and wins important European awards to illustrate the importance of research as well as to raise social awareness on the topic of securing raw materials through recycling. She has shown her remarkable skills as a science communicator notably when she made the finals in the International Falling Walls Science Summit in 2021 as an “Emerging Talent” and “Global Call Winner” after having won the national competition. She and her PhD student Aliza Salces also benefit from an exchange program between Germany and Australia bringing them together with Prof. Jacques Eksteen’s labs at Curtin University in Perth with the help of the former director of HIF Prof. Markus Reuter, where they both spend several months researching green recycling paths, trying to avoid the pyrolysis pre-treatment of black mass.

Congratulations from all of us at MEI.