MEI Young Person's Award 2013 to Brazilian academic

I had the great honour this morning, after opening Comminution '14, of presenting the 2013 MEI Young Person's Award to Dr. Rodrigo Magalhães de Carvalho, of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil.

Rodrigo Carvalho (centre) with his mentor Prof. Marcelo Tavares

 

Rodrigo, who is presenting two papers at Comminution '14, is a technician by training, having worked for a year or so in a commercial chemical analysis laboratory before joining the UFRJ for his chemical engineering degree. His undergraduate diploma work was on model-based control of closed-circuit ball milling, receiving a perfect 10 by the examining committee. During this time he was already an undergraduate researcher at the Laboratório de Tecnologia Mineral (LTM) of UFRJ.

After graduation in 2007 and with several job offers, he decided to join the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering for his Masters degree in minerals engineering. His work culminated in the development of the UFRJ mechanistic model of the ball mill.

Following his masters degree (2009) he continued, now pursuing a PhD degree, dealing with the challenging application of the mechanistic model to semi-autogenous grinding. He defended his PhD successfully in 2013, and is now a post-doctoral fellow at UFRJ, and has applied for a tenure-track professorial position at the university.

He has published 11 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and 18 papers in conference proceedings. Rodrigo carried out his graduate work part-time, splitting the time between his degree work and his research assistant position at LTM/UFRJ. During that time he was involved in a number of R&D as well as engineering projects. Formally he is operations manager for the Global Comminution Collaborative (GCC) at UFRJ. He is also internal manager under an agreement with DEM Solutions (UK) in the development of  new products and offers of technical support in South America. In this respect he is actively involved with customer training and technical support.

He has developed a number of software packages, two of which have been adopted by industry, and he has already received a number of awards for his work, notably the 2013 Samarco Award, given by the Brazilian Society of Metallurgy, Materials and Mining (ABM) for his work on the design of ball mills grinding itabirite ores. In 2006 he received an honorable mention by the committee for his undergraduate research work at UFRJ, receiving the same award again in 2013, for supervising an undergraduate student. Also in 2013 he received the best paper award at the annual student conference of the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering of UFRJ.

His mentor, Prof. Marcelo Tavares of UFRJ, puts him number 1 of the 30 students or so that he has supervised in graduate work, having proven to be a very bright researcher and a brilliant engineer, driven to results and committed to excellence in everything he does. In Prof. Tavares's opinion, he is one of the brightest representatives of the new generation of researchers in mineral processing and, in particular, comminution.

 

A worthy winner indeed, and maybe another potential future winner in the photo below, taken this morning of those who are presenting a paper for the first time at an international conference.