Elisa Alonso, assistant chief for the Minerals Intelligence Research Section at the U.S. Geological Survey, will deliver a public talk at 4 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 17, in 112 Walker Building on Penn State's University Park campus.
The free presentation, titled "Increasing Transparency for Critical Mineral Commodity Supply Chains from Deposit to End-use in an Uncertain and Opaque Market," is part of the EarthTalks series held by the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. It will be available via Zoom as well.
Alonso, also acting deputy director at the National Minerals Information Center at USGS, will discuss risks around supply chains of mineral commodities. Mining, processing and refining of many commodities are concentrated in a few countries, with individual countries in some cases accounting for more than 70% of global production, she said.
"Multiple tools and models are needed to systematically examine the risk this poses to the U.S. and to consider options for reducing these risks," Alonso said in an abstract.
Among those instruments, she said, is a model developed to simulate potential economic impacts of various mineral trade disruption scenarios. She will discuss the model, which has assessed 84 mineral commodities.
"Taking the top minerals, further assessments of what-if scenarios are being developed to evaluate potential pipeline projects for reducing future risks," Alonso said.
She joined USGS in 2020. Her work focuses on critical minerals supply chain analysis. Alonso also is deputy program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Open Price Exploration for National Security program, which aims to increase price transparency for mineral commodities with high production concentration.
Before joining USGS, Alonso was a strategic materials analyst supporting Defense Logistics Agency Strategic Materials and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She graduated from McGill University with a bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering and earned a doctoral degree in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Alonso's talk is part of EarthTalks' fall 2025 series, "Critical Minerals - A National Economic and Security Imperative," which focuses on the need for a reliable supply chain of critical minerals and the ongoing research to provide them domestically. For more about the series, visit the EarthTalks website.
