Liberia joins the international band of minerals engineers

A review of pretreatment of diasporic bauxite ores by flotation separation was submitted to Minerals Engineering in July and was accepted after revision a couple of weeks ago. It is now available on ScienceDirect.

Darius and Borbor

What is so special about this paper is that it is the first to be co-authored by researchers from Liberia, one of the world's poorest countries. Borbor Gibson and Darius Wonyen are in the Department of Geology and Mining Engineering at the University of Liberia, Monrovia. The 3rd author is Saeed Chelgani, an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, a regular and respected author and reviewer for Minerals Engineering. Three years ago he began work on a USAID project, to teach students at the University of Liberia. He was very impressed with the many bright minds, "brilliant students who could show a high level of understanding scientific matters".

Saeed decided to write an article with them. As there were no mineral processing laboratories he taught them how to write a review article. Flotation is Saeed's main interest and Liberia has bauxite mines so a useful option was a review on diasporic bauxite flotation. He says that he was very impressed by the way they undertook this task and now they are delighted that the article has been accepted and published, the first article co-authored by University of Liberia students.

Congratulations Borbor and Darius, I hope this will motivate you and your colleagues to submit further articles, and thanks Saeed for your dedication in motivating these two students in this way.

Twitter @barrywills