William Xu

William Xu (he/him) is a PhD student in Materials Science and Engineering. He works on making sourcing critical minerals for the clean energy transition more secure, sustainable, efficient, and equitable as a member of Mineral-X. Specifically, he is developing a general computational framework for optimizing mineral processing under uncertainty, and is applying this framework to improve the efficiency and reduce waste of phosphate mining in Morocco.

As a RAISE fellow, William is working with communities in the Salton Sea region of southern California where lithium extraction facilities are under construction to ensure that their needs and interests are represented. He hopes to leverage his scientific and technical expertise and academic position to serve as a third-party mediator between companies and communities, and eventually inform state policy decision-making on how benefits derived from lithium extraction can be best distributed amongst the affected communities. On campus, he also serves as the Vice President of the Stanford Science Policy Group and The Dish on Science, a science communication club.

Before Stanford, he received an MPhil in Micro and Nanotechnology Enterprise from the University of Cambridge and a B.S. in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University. His previous research experience was on modeling supercapacitors and imaging fuel cells membranes. He has written for Tech Policy Press and been interviewed for Foreign Policy on the topic of critical minerals.