Brendan Smith

Brendan Smith is the co-founder and CEO of SiTration, an MIT spinout commercializing a tunable silicon membrane that recovers critical metals like copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium from mining waste and spent batteries without the mountains of chemicals the old way demands. A materials scientist who came to MIT from Canada in 2013, he turned a desalination-lab discovery into a venture-backed company that has raised roughly $14.4 million and partnered with mining giant Rio Tinto. He runs the company from a 11,000-square-foot pilot facility in Watertown, Massachusetts.