Marc A. Herpfer (SME)
AIME Hal Williams Hardinge Award* in
2020
Dr. Herpfer has over 27 years of "mine to market" leadership experiences in creating value from "sorbent" minerals via technologies linked to a broad spectrum of applied sciences and industrial processes. He works on commercializing products for fluids purification-filtration, animal-health, pet litter, agricultural-horticultural, petrochemical, industrial, and environmental applications worldwide. Also, he is involved with minerals exploration and characterization. He participated in creating the root technology of many innovative product lines and their processes for edible oil bleaching clays, metals adsorbents, biotoxin entero-sorbents, and engineered granular carriers. He is an inventor on patents related to clays for purifying edible oils, ethanol production media, porous ceramics in structural bricks, and nanomaterials for bacterial quorum sensing inhibition. He has published on mining "sustainability", mycotoxin binders, antibacterial clays for quorum-sensing disruption, and gut-health co-edited a book on "Functional Fillers & Nanoscale Minerals", and chaired the 2010 Dreyer Conference on "Specialty Clays". His past meteoritics and cosmochemistry research was on solid-state diffusion in Fe-Ni metals and the physics of melt microstructures formed in metal-silicate aggregates at ultra-high pressures.
Herpfer is active in the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, and served on its Board of Directors, is Past-Chairs of the Strategic Structure & Governance Committee, and the Industrial Minerals Division. He serves numerous strategic Nominating, GPAC, and divisional technical committees/sessions since 1996. He is the recipient of the 2012 SME Program, 2011 IM&AD Distinguished Service, 2003 Piekarz, and 1995 Young Scientist awards among others. He is also active within the Clay Minerals Society.
Herpfer is an honors graduate of Tufts University in Chemistry and Geology, received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Arizona State University related to Geology, Geochemistry, and Materials Science.