Geologist Maggie Ellis Curry recently earned the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Also known as the NSF CAREER award, this is considered one of the foundation’s most prestigious awards for early-career faculty.

The award will support Curry’s tectonic systems research and outreach efforts for the next five years.

“It’s an honor to receive this award,” said Curry, assistant professor in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Geologists are critical toward many aspects of our economy and our society, and critical minerals are really bringing that into the spotlight. I’m incredibly excited, and I’m looking for undergraduate and graduate students who may want to get involved.”

Curry’s NSF CAREER project is titled, “An integrated approach to macrogeomorphic reconstruction of tectonic margins: exploring links between landscape evolution and critical mineral provenance.” 

The project will reconstruct how the coastal plains region of North Carolina has changed over time and how that change has led to the development of critical minerals. Her end goal is to establish a framework to better understand why critical mineral deposits exist where they do, where they came from and where more deposits might be. 

Critical minerals are used in the batteries for phones, watches, electric vehicles and more, making them crucial to the American economy and daily life. According to Curry, North Carolina is known to have deposits of critical minerals like lithium and rare earth elements. Even so, most of the country’s critical minerals are not domestically sourced. 

“There’s a real opportunity for North Carolina to become an important player in the domestic production of critical minerals,” Curry said.

Curry and her students will use numerical modeling approaches to reconstruct the landscape of North Carolina between 60 million and 300 million years ago. They will study Cretaceous sediment deposits and older basins to understand what rocks were exposed at the time, how those rocks eroded and how that sediment moved across the state and deposited in the coastal plains. 

Information such as where the coastline used to be or how much the Appalachian Mountains have eroded can all help guide where more economically-viable mineral deposits may exist today, in both North Carolina and beyond.

While Curry’s research will be extensive, it only accounts for half of her NSF CAREER project. The other large component of this project entails community outreach efforts.

For Curry, those efforts will include strengthening the middle school earth sciences curriculum, as well as raising awareness about geology and its growing career prospects in general.

Curry will work with NC State’s Science House and a group of compensated middle school teachers to hold workshops across the state. At these workshops, Curry and the teachers will develop activities and projects about critical minerals, mountains, basins and more, which teachers can then take back to their classrooms. 

Curry will also be partnering with a Wake Technical Community College program to recruit associate degree-seeking students, who will work with Curry for a semester to conduct a full research project. Additionally, Curry is partnering with the North Carolina Geological Survey (NCGS) to create summer internships for NC State geology students, who will carry out a research project with Curry that also aligns with the goals of NCGS.

“There’s projected to be a shortage of geologists going forward,” Curry said. “These three parts of the outreach are all designed to snag some more geologists, get them into our science, get them into the geology career path and get everybody excited about the geology of North Carolina.”

NC State offers a variety of proposal development support for faculty. Curry said one thing that made a strong difference when writing her CAREER proposal was having attended a writing retreat run by Kirsti Cole, professor of English and co-director of NC State’s Campus Writing and Speaking Program. Curry also received guidance from Professor Walt Robinson, who serves as senior research mentor within the MEAS department, and Professor Emeritus Lonnie Leithold. 

Gary Lackmann, professor and department head, said, “Dr. Curry’s proposal is strongly aligned with our institutional goals at every level. By balancing education and research — a unique aspect of NSF CAREER awards — this project helps to address a pressing need in geoscientific workforce development.”

This post was originally published in Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences.