Michael Silver is Chairman & CEO of American Elements, the world’s largest company dedicated exclusively to advanced materials & materials science. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles with laboratories & manufacturing in Salt Lake City, Utah; Monterrey, Mexico; Manchester, England; and Baotou, China and warehousing & sales offices in Japan, Brazil, & Germany. Longstanding customers include Siemens, Philips, GE, Apple, Fiat, Boeing, Space X and Tesla. He is considered a pioneer in the fields of green technology, nanotechnology & robotics. Michael Silver has appeared on many television shows & is often quoted in the New York Times, Financial Times & Wall Street Journal. He received his law degree & MBA from USC.

Global powers have come to recognize the critical importance of materials science to the future of their economies in the 21st century. China continues to find ways to protect their vast rare earth deposits to encourage domestic development of materials technology in spite of WTO action, while America seeks to protect its materials science intellectual property for similar purposes. African countries with critical deposits often find they create economies that support rebellions and war. Japan and Europe are often caught in the middle. What is the future of materials science as it progressively gets pulled into these geopolitical battle grounds? American Elements and its CEO Michael Silver have been at the forefront of these challenges for over two decades establishing with the Chinese government its global rare earth supply chain in the early 1990s, assisting in the writing of the United Nations rules governing Conflict Minerals in Africa and co-developing the basic raw materials for solid oxide fuel cells, LED lights, quick dissolve powders for the pharmaceutical industry among many other now fully commercialized technologies. Mr. Silver will speak on where the future pitfalls and opportunities are for scientists and companies developing the next generation of materials science technologies.