Montana Tech appoints director to facilitate critical materials research

BUTTE - A geologist with decades of experience here at Montana Tech in Butte is taking on the new critical role as critical materials director, a new focus of the university that’s bound to keep him very busy.

MTN News

“I mean, frankly, I was thinking of retirement at the end of the calendar year,” said Director of Critical Materials Initiatives John Metesh.

Not so fast. As director of Critical Materials Initiatives at Tech, Metesh will be leading a national push to extract and refine more rare earth minerals within the United States. These critical materials are used in a variety of developments.

“Manufacture of items for defense, or medicine, or energy, green energy, cars, windmills, that sort of thing,” he said.

In recent years, there’s been a need to produce rare earth minerals in