Craig Snoeyink receives DOE early career award

By Elizabeth Egan 

The DOE selected 91 early career researchers from across the country to receive a combined $138 million in funding for a wide range of research topics, with the goal of developing the next generation of STEM leaders in the United States. Award recipients were chosen based on peer review by outside scientific experts.

Snoeyink is working to resolve the gap between theory and experimental observation of DMS. According to Snoeyink, DMS is driven by electric fields but capable of transporting both charged and uncharged species in a solution. He noted that current models underestimate the separation efficiency, in some cases by two orders of magnitude. With this project, he is planning to fix this discrepancy and develop predictive models of key separation metrics.

"This award is exciting because it will enable us to better understand exactly why strong electric fields are so effective at separations and how we can use them to tackle important energy related separations problems like the purification of rare earth elements,” said Snoeyink. “These elements are a key component of the shift to clean energy as they are key materials in batteries, magnets and electronics."

The work of developing the separation models will be broken down into four objectives: validating the continuum model of dielectrophoretic transport in colloidal particle solutions, extending the validity of the model down to the molecular scale, understanding the relationship between separations throughput and efficiency, and understanding and quantifying the sensitivity of DMS by observing several challenging separations.

The objectives will be completed through a unique experimental approach that will permit real-time measurements of solution composition between and around electrodes while also controlling initial concentrations, field strengths and gradients, and flow rates. The outcome will be a dramatic expansion of the variety and nature of experimental data as well as the first predictive models for dielectrophoretic separations metrics.

The project is funded by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Science.

Snoeyink is also the recipient of a 2024 NSF CAREER Award for his work on harnessing the potential of dielectrophoretic molecular transport. His research interests include microfluids, micro-particle tracking and particle image velocimetry, super resolution imaging, and biomedical imaging.

He earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from Purdue University and his master’s degree and bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Case Western Reserve University.