Eric Perreault, a research executive, academic leader and biomedical engineering professor at Northwestern University, has been selected as the third chief executive officer of the Morgridge Institute for Research beginning in early 2027. Over more than two decades with Northwestern, Perreault has taken on increasing responsibilities in research administration, most recently as Northwestern’s Vice President for Research from 2023 to 2026. 

With the continuous advancement of industrialization, high-precision actuators are increasingly being applied in fields requiring high accuracy, such as aerospace, smart vehicles, and robotics. However, the current mainstream actuator materials on the market are lead-containing ceramics primarily composed of lead zirconate titanate (PZT). During the manufacturing process, these ceramics produce lead and lead oxide, both of which are highly harmful to the environment and human health. Therefore, the development of lead-free ceramics capable of serving as high-precision actuator materials is urgently needed. As the most widely studied lead-free system, perovskites have rightfully become the most extensively investigated lead-free material family. Among them, barium titanate (BaTiO₃)-based lead-free ceramics, one of the most promising systems, have attracted widespread research due to their excellent stability and favorable electro-strain properties. However, although phase boundary engineering, the construction of polar nanoregions (PNRs), and defect engineering have partially improved the strain hysteresis of ceramic materials, these advances still fall short of meeting the demands of high-precision actuators.

Plastic waste should not be viewed as a uniform refuse stream, but as a heterogeneous carbon reservoir whose recycling pathway is dictated by polymer composition, contamination level and degradation history. Here, we outline a graded recycling framework that prioritizes carbon retention rather than technology-driven conversion. Clean and separable plastic streams should first undergo physical recycling to preserve polymer backbones and avoid unnecessary bond cleavage. Mixed, aged or contaminated fractions are better suited to selective chemical routes, including solvolysis, hydrogenolysis, catalytic depolymerization, electrified pyrolysis and gasification, which can reconstruct carbon into monomers, hydrocarbons, syngas or platform chemicals. Biological recycling is most effective for oxygenated intermediates generated through pretreatment. Integrating sorting, safety control and life-cycle assessment, this physical–chemical–biological hierarchy matches each plastic carbon stream with its most valuable and sustainable conversion pathway.