Yuanzhi Tang

Dr. Yuanzhi Tang is a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is Director of the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions and Co-founder of the Georgia Partnership for Essential Minerals.

The Tang Lab strives to understand the molecular-scale perspectives of interfacial processes in natural and engineered settings, such as the interactions of minerals, microbes, metals, and nutrients at solid-liquid interfaces. By employing advanced microscopic and spectroscopic techniques, their highly interdisciplinary research aims to correlate molecular, nano, and microscopic scale information with macroscopic and field scale observations. The lab's current research efforts are focused on the following topics: contaminant fate and transport, metal and nutrient cycling, microbe-mediated mineral formation and transformation, resource recovery, and application of synchrotron techniques.

The lab's recent projects include: occurrences of rare earth elements in highly weathered sedimentary settings, understanding substrate limitation and lithium and silicon isotope fractionation during secondary clay formation in marine systems, understanding the formation of manganese oxides in low oxygen environments, and redox cycling driven transformation of manganese oxide minerals.

Dr. Tang is also the Associate Co-Director of Interdisciplinary Research for the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems and Initiative Lead on Sustainable Resources in the Strategic Energy Institute. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Chemical Geology.