Gisele Azimi

Gisele Azimi is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Urban Mining Innovations. She is jointly appointed by the Departments of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry and Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Toronto. She is also a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario. Her research program is aligned well with the “Sustainability” and “Advanced Materials and Manufacturing” research themes. She received her Ph.D. in 2010 from the department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto. Before returning to the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 2014, she completed two postdoctoral appointments at MIT in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. She has received a number of awards including McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction, TMS EPD Young Leaders Award, Emerging Leaders Award in Chemical Engineering, Dean’s Spark Professorship, Early Researcher Award, TMS Light Metals/Extraction & Processing Subject Award – Recycling, and Connaught New Researcher Award.

Azimi's research program lies at the intersection of process engineering, electrochemistry, and materials Science. She strives to enable sustainability in terms of energy and global warming as well as materials criticality. The research program covers three themes:

• Energy storage with a focus on the development of new generations of rechargeable batteries that are cost-effective, high-performance, safe, and made of earth abundant materials. The focus is on “aluminum batteries”.
• Urban mining with a focus on recycling and recovering strategic materials from secondary resources such as Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) or industrial solid wastes. 
• Advance materials with a focus on innovative materials for scale-resistance and solid–liquid separation.