Energy, Materials, and Water Use in Semiconductor Manufacturing: Challenges and Opportunities for Supply Chain Resiliency

Semiconductors are essential to today’s digital economy, powering everything from everyday electronics to artificial intelligence. Yet their production depends on complex supply chains and significant amounts of critical materials, water, and energy.

Dr. Sadasivan (Sadas) Shankar, Research Technology Manager at SLAC National Laboratory and Adjunct Professor in Stanford Materials Science and Engineering, will share his research on how a circular approach to materials and resource use—including recycling, reuse, and localized processing—could reduce supply chain dependencies, improve resource efficiency, and create new economic and strategic opportunities for the United States.

Dr. Richard Dasher, Director of the US-ATMC, will moderate the session.

About our speaker:

Sadasivan (Sadas) Shankar is Research Technical Manager at SLAC National Laboratory, adjunct Professor in Stanford Materials Science and Engineering, and Lecturer in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was an Associate in the Department of Physics at Harvard University and was the first Margaret and Will Hearst Visiting Lecturer in Harvard and the first Distinguished Scientist in Residence at the Harvard Institute of Applied Computational Sciences. He has co-instructed classes related to design of materials, computing, sustainability in materials, and has received Excellence in Teaching award from Harvard University.  He is co-instructing a class at Stanford University on Translation for Innovations and a new class on Energy Efficient Computing.  He is a co-founder of and the Chief Scientist at Material Alchemy, a “last mile” translational and independent venture that was founded to accelerate the path from materials discovery to adoption, with environmental sustainability as a key goal.  In addition to research on fundamentals of Materials Design, his current research is on new architectures for specialized AI methods is exploring ways of bringing machine intelligence to system-level challenges in inorganic/biochemistry, materials, physics and new frameworks for computing inspired by nature.

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Our series on “Topics in International Technology Management | Challenges and Solutions for Critical Materials in Energy and Electronics" begins September 24, 2026 and continues until December 3, 2026. Seminars will be held most Thursdays, 4:30 PM – 5:50 PM.  The series is available to Stanford students for credit; register for MATSCI 402A “Topics in International Technology Management,” also cross-listed as EE-402A, EASTASN 402A and EALC-402A, 1 unit S/NC. 

To attend by Zoom, please register here.

To attend in-person, please register over Eventbrite here.