Bradshaw Research Institute for Minerals and Mining

UBC’s Dean of Science Mark MacLachlan’s research might seem far removed from the traditional terrain of mining. As a professor of chemistry and Canada Research Chair in Supramolecular Materials, his work explores how simple molecular building blocks can be coaxed into sophisticated new materials. His team essentially develops new organic and inorganic materials to solve scientific and engineering problems, often designed to address diverse problems and applications.

As the world moves toward cleaner technologies and the global demand for critical minerals grows, more academic fields are finding their niche in the mining space. “My personal research is in materials chemistry, which is pretty far from most of the activities of BRIMM,” MacLachlan says. “But there’s a lot of science faculty who are involved with BRIMM. We have people in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology looking at solutions for dealing with mining waste and extraction, and we have people in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences who are heavily involved in exploration, geology and geophysics.”

MacLachlan joined the BRIMM board in early 2024 when he stepped in as interim dean of UBC’s Faculty of Science, a position that by tradition includes a seat on the board. He no longer serves as the interim dean and instead has been appointed to a five-year term as the dean. Before that, he had engaged with BRIMM through collaborative research discussions in his previous role as Associate Dean of Research & Graduate Studies. 

His own research addresses one of the most pressing technical barriers in the field: the costly and chemically tricky process of separating lanthanides – a series of 15 rare earth elements – from each other in both mining and in processing waste materials. Lanthanides are used for applications ranging from medical imaging and displays to high-intensity magnets used in hard drives and military applications. But lanthanides have similar chemical properties, which makes separation a major technical hurdle. “We’re pretty far from having good, cheap, efficient ways to extract rare earths,” he says. “So we’re trying to develop molecules that are designed to specifically bind to one lanthanide better than another one.”

To tackle that challenge, MacLachlan’s group is collaborating with fellow UBC chemists who are using machine learning to accelerate the design of these custom molecules. The predictive tools allow researchers to identify promising candidates before they’re ever synthesized. Once designed, the molecules are produced in MacLachlan’s lab and tested for their ability to extract rare earths with greater precision and efficiency.

That blend of fundamental science and applied collaboration is exactly the kind of work MacLachlan hopes to expand through BRIMM. “I think BRIMM is offering a really exciting opportunity for us to build critical mass in research in the critical mineral space at UBC,” he says. “Peter Bradshaw has been extraordinarily generous and is catalyzing a lot of new collaborations across the school that I think can be leveraged to create a new center or institute here at UBC that can partner with other universities across the country.”