Xijin Zhang
George Mason University, VA·Engineering
Silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth's crust and the backbone of concrete, glass, ceramics, computer chips and silicones. Making these materials usually takes high heat, a lot of energy and harsh chemicals.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
silicon
silicate dissolution
biomineralization
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2031
What they work on
- Design biomolecules that control how silicate minerals dissolve and re-form, using first-principles and AI-guided computational chemistry, then synthesize and genetically engineer the selected molecules.
- Develop mild-condition processing routes that use biomolecules to recover critical minerals and rare earth elements from silicon-rich wastes such as concrete, slag and glass.
- Create biological and bioinspired methods for making value-added silicon materials, and assess scalability with techno-economic analysis and an AI-enabled knowledge graph.
- Test how oxalate-producing fungi strengthen recycled concrete aggregate by depositing minerals and silica in pores and cracks, varying fungal strain, cell density, calcium source, nutrients, acidity, temperature and vacuum soaking.
- Convert recycled concrete fines into fillers and reactive silica that can partly replace portland cement by dissolving them with biologically produced organic acid, then test the resulting mortar and concrete for strength and durability.
More about the research
Meanwhile, the world throws away more than a billion tons of silicon-rich waste each year, such as demolished concrete, slag and glass. This waste could also be a domestic source of critical minerals and rare earth elements, but there are no gentle, selective and scalable ways to recover them. Living things such as diatoms (single-celled algae with glass shells), sea sponges and some plants build complex silicon structures at ordinary temperatures. These two projects ask how biology, meaning fungi and engineered biomolecules, can turn silicon-rich waste into useful materials.
Why it matters
This work could cut the energy and chemicals used by silicon-based industries such as concrete, glass and electronics. It could turn millions of tons of construction and industrial waste into useful materials and help supply critical minerals and rare earth elements from domestic sources. Fungus-upgraded recycled aggregate and cement substitutes could reduce disposal costs and the need for newly quarried stone, dredged sand and manufactured cement for roads, bridges and buildings.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: GCR: Bioengineered Approaches to Recover Critical Minerals and Produce Sustainable Silicon-Based Materials from Silicon-Rich Wastes
NSF · Sep 2026 – Aug 2031
Collaborative Research: Fungi-Based Biological Upcycling of Waste Concrete into Durable Infrastructure Materials
NSF · Sep 2026 – Aug 2029
Closest labs
Jian Luo
University of California-San Diego, CA·Materials Science
Discover lead-free compositionally complex oxides, which mix several metal ions, with unusually large electrostriction, linking first-principles calculations, tensorial cluster expansion and physics-informed machine learning with experiments.
Robin Bullock
Montana Technological University, MT·Engineering
Develop an AI-based Virtual Assay that predicts which coal refuse and ash feedstocks have high potential for rare earth element recovery.
Amisha Shah
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Measure baseline concentrations of critical metals in leachates from US municipal solid waste landfills, which are currently unknown.
The school
George Mason University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $282M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
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