Nour Abdelrahman - العربية

Her idea stemmed from recognizing the significant gap between the growing global demand for lithium-ion batteries and the need for sustainable extraction methods, coupled with the environmental cost of conventional extraction.

Living in a region reliant on desalination (the UAE), she realized that brine, a wastewater source containing valuable minerals, is rarely recovered.

This connection between water scarcity and resource loss drove her to develop materials capable of selectively capturing lithium from complex brine streams, aligning with both water treatment and clean energy needs.

Her innovation is a materials-based platform that integrates bio-derived compounds with two-dimensional functional frameworks and sustainable extraction media to selectively recover lithium from brine, seawater, and industrial wastewater.

These engineered structures bind to lithium, which has a high affinity even under extreme salinity, and release it under moderate conditions for reuse, acting as a modular recovery system compatible with existing water treatment processes.

This technology, which has been validated across real and simulated aquatic environments, enables the environmentally responsible recovery of lithium and is now moving towards pilot-scale deployment and future integration into large-scale industrial and desalination plants.