Marek Locmelis: Associate Professor

August 26, 2024

Austin, with its Tesla Gigafactory and Samsung Semiconductor factory, is an increasingly prominent home for electric parts production, making the Jackson School of Geosciences the perfect place for a new wave of professors focused on the critical minerals needed for batteries and semiconductors.

In August, Marek Locmelis joined both the Bureau of Economic Geology and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences as an associate professor. He specializes in critical minerals that are important for the energy transition, such as nickel, cobalt, and the rare earth elements, as well as sustainable and ethical approaches to mining.

“I think right now is the perfect moment in time to make a push to establish Austin as the Silicon Valley for critical minerals research and production,” he said.

Locmelis is an economic geologist working to provide scientific knowledge that the mining industry can put to use. Currently, he is most interested in what is known as “conceptual exploration targeting” for critical minerals.

He studies what geologic key ingredients had to come together in space and time to form critical mineral deposits.

“Mineral exploration is a search space reduction exercise,” he said. “Applying that knowledge to geologic terranes helps identify areas that are most likely to contain yet undiscovered deposits.”

Locmelis’ path to the geosciences was rather unconventional. He grew up across the street from the German equivalent of the U.S. Geological Survey, and as a teenager cleaned the floors of the building. What the geologists were doing looked fun, he said, and he thought he would give it a try when he went to college. Obviously, he stuck with it; he went on to earn his Ph.D. from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Locmelis has been teaching and conducting economic geology research for eight years, most recently at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Now at the Jackson School he said he is looking forward to collaborating with the large and diverse group of researchers who make up the school, and to elevate research in the state of Texas to the next level.

“There are more than 100 [faculty members] working at Jackson School, and every single person is the expert in the things that they’re doing worldwide,” Locmelis said. “And I think that just allows for so much potential for really strong collaborations.”