SMART
A Testbed Merging Biotech & Mining
DARPA’s Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource (EMBER) program is developing a biotechnology-based separation and purification strategy for REEs from under-utilized domestic sources such as phosphate mine waste, acid mine drainage, and electronics recycling processes.
Utah was selected as the home of DARPA’s EMBER Testbed. Funding from DARPA and the University of Utah launched the Strategic Material Accelerator and Research Testbed (SMART) to pioneer, benchmark, and scale biotechnology-based innovations.
SMART will accelerate new technologies to extract and separate REEs from domestic resources to meet and drive market demand for new products. SMART achieves this goal through a unique infrastructure that allows new technologies to rapidly progress from small lab studies (grams) to medium benchmarking tests (kilograms) to facilitate large industry scaling (tons).
Lab Studies
(grams)
Benchmarking
(Kilograms)
Scaling
(Tons)
“Infrastructure drives innovation. SMART positions Utah to
be a global leader in next generation technologies. ”
Jakob Jensen, AVPR
University of Utah
SMART is supported by:
