Dr. Shelley Minteer, director of the Kummer Institute Center for Resource Sustainability and a professor of chemistry at Missouri S&T, has been named to the 2024 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), an honorary society that celebrates the excellence of its members. Minteer is the first Missouri S&T faculty member to join this society. The induction ceremony for the 2024 new members will be held in September in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Shelley has been a tremendous colleague since joining us last year,” says Dr. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, vice provost and dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Education at Missouri S&T. “She goes above and beyond for our students and campus, and it is an exciting sign of growth for our college that we now have a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.”

The AAAS is also an independent research center that convenes leaders from across disciplines, professions and perspectives to address various challenges. The organization was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and 60 other scholars to ensure institutions could gather knowledge and advance learning to serve the public good.

Minteer joined Missouri S&T in 2023 as founding director of the Kummer Institute Center for Resource Sustainability. She develops the center’s vision and strategic plan in accordance with its mission to decrease the footprint of mineral and fuel extraction, increase access to clean drinking water, and leverage regional resources for resilient energy, water, and materials use. Those materials include critical minerals like cobalt, lithium and nickel, which play a major role in renewable energy and key clean energy technology. She is also responsible for maximizing the capabilities and expertise of S&T’s faculty to strengthen the collaboration with industrial partners and research centers beyond S&T.

“It is quite an honor to be one of eight American chemists elected this year,” says Minteer. “Looking at the history of AAAS, it is full of individuals who all contributed to their fields in impactful ways. Joining these ranks as the first S&T faculty member is very exciting, and I hope that it is the start to a new tradition for more of our faculty to receive this honor in the very near future.”

Minteer is an expert in energy storage and conversion as well as the electrification of chemical manufacturing, a process known as electrosynthesis. She earned a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Iowa in 2000 and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Western Illinois University in 1995. Minteer has authored more than 450 journal articles and presented at conferences around the world.

She began her teaching and research career in 2000 as an assistant professor of chemistry at Saint Louis University, where she held a joint appointment in biomedical engineering. In 2011 she joined the University of Utah as a Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative (USTAR) Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering to lead the USTAR Alternative Energy Cluster. In 2020 she was named director of the NSF Center for Synthetic Organic Electrochemistry at the University of Utah; she became a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah in 2022.

To see a complete list of newly elected AAAS members, visit the academy’s website, www.amacad.org.

About Missouri University of Science and Technology

Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) is a STEM-focused research university of over 7,000 students located in Rolla, Missouri. Part of the four-campus University of Missouri System, Missouri S&T offers over 100 degrees in 40 areas of study and is among the nation’s top public universities for salary impact, according to the Wall Street Journal. For more information about Missouri S&T, visit www.mst.edu.