MEI Young Person’s Award 2021 to Paulina Quintanilla

We are very pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2021 MEI Young Person's Award is Paulina Quintanilla, at 29 years of age an outstanding early career researcher at Imperial College, UK.

Paulina holds a Chemical Engineering degree from Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (UTFSM) in Chile, where she received several awards for her excellent academic performance, including being the top student in her cohort and the 2017 Award to the Best Chemical Engineering graduate from the Chilean Engineering College. 

After her master’s degree, she was also a researcher and part-time lecturer at UTFSM in 2017-2018. Paulina started her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Pablo Brito-Parada in October 2018, in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London. Her background and research experience on supervisory control have been instrumental in her work towards the development of a holistic model predictive control strategy for froth flotation. 

Her PhD is fully funded by the Chilean government, with a scholarship awarded to the very best students in Chile. During her PhD, she has published a thorough critical review and 2 papers in Minerals Engineering. Her PhD work represents a step change in advanced modelling for flotation control, and Dr. Brito-Parada expects that  she will finish her PhD (by the end of this year) with at least 2, if not 3 additional publications arising from her thesis.

Paulina has presented at a number of local and international conferences, receiving excellent feedback. She has achieved this despite COVID-related delays on experimental work, and in fact made an opportunity of this challenge, establishing a collaboration in Chile to run tests remotely from the UK to implement the control system she developed. She secured funds to carry out further work in Chile and to visit a Chilean mine to gather data to validate her PhD work on site.

At Imperial, Paulina has been a proactive member of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, contributing as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for 4 undergraduate modules and more recently as a GTA coordinator. She has also been involved in multiple outreach and science communication events and has attended summer schools on extremely relevant topics to our discipline: on circular economy and metals processing (Aalto University, 2020) and on optimisation and machine learning (via selection process, ITB, Indonesia, 2021).

The Science and Chemical Industry recognised her research potential by awarding her a prestigious Messel scholarship in 2020 to support both her work and outreach activities and she has actively, and successfully, applied for additional funding for her work. As further indication of her excellence in research, she led a collaboration (independent of her PhD supervisors) to develop an open-source software for bubble size analysis, which has now resulted in a paper submitted for publication. This all while being active in disseminating her PhD outcomes, with 4 conference presentations last year alone, receiving fantastic feedback for her talk at MEI’s Flotation '21.

On a more recent note, and a tremendously exciting one, Paulina was selected among hundreds of applicants to present her work at the 2022 Stem for Britain event, a major scientific poster competition and exhibition by early career researchers that took place on 7th March in the Houses of Parliament. Paulina was one of the 33 finalist selected to represent the field of Engineering, following an extremely competitive process. Her poster was entitled “Towards the optimisation of froth flotation: the transition to green energy will need bubbles!”. Notably, Paulina's work was the only one to focus on mineral resources/processing, which is of course very timely, and even more so as she presented it not only to a panel of experts but to a range of politicians. 

Dr. Brito-Parada says that Paulina is fantastic at science communication and such a great ambassador for our mineral processing community. She is undoubtedly a worthy winner of the MEI Award, which we hope to present to her at Process Mineralogy '22 in Spain in November.

@barrywills