2024 with MEI: awards aplenty

Of significance this year has been the number of prestigious awards given to young and old in our profession.

MEI initiated the Young Person's Award in 2011 due to an awareness that virtually all major awards were made predominantly to men (very few women) nearing the end of their careers, and there was little to recognise the achievements of the younger members in our fraternity. It was a pleasure to present the 2023 award last month to Paulina Vallejos in Cape Town and we were proud to see how much this award is now coveted, as Paulina brought her family all the way from Chile to see her presented with the award. 

Paulina Vallejos and family at Process Mineralogy '24 in Cape Town

A month earlier I presented Nikhil Dhawan with the 2019 Award at the International Mineral Processing Congress (IMPC) in USA, belatedly due to the Covid pandemic.

The first recipient of the MEI Young Person's Award was Peter Amelunxen in 2011, and at the February SME Annual Meeting in Phoenix I was pleased to see our faith in Peter validated when he was awarded the SME's prestigious Antoine Gaudin Award. Peter joins some great mineral processors who have been past recipients of this award, including MEI flotation consultant Prof. Jim Finch (1997) and Prof. Doug Fuerstenau (1977), the only person to have been awarded the International Mineral Processing Council's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Distinguished Service Award.

Peter Amelunxen with his proud father, Roger 

The Phoenix meeting was particularly special for me, as I was presented with the Frank Aplan Award, essentially a Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Institute of Mining. Metallurgical and Petroleum  Engineers.

With John Marsden, chairman of the October IMPC,
and Courtney Young, a former Antoine Gaudin Award winner

A previous winner of this award was my old Camborne School of Mines colleague Dr. Dave Osborne, who really kick-started my career by inspiring the writing of Mineral Processing Technology, which led to Minerals Engineering journal and eventually MEI (an interesting story documented in the posting of 10th August 2015). It was great to catch up with Dave and his wife Hazel at the IMPC in Maryland in October.

With Dave and Hazel Osborne at the IMPC

Three more top awards were made at the IMPC. Robin Batterham, Emeritus Kernot Professor of Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia received the IMPC's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Robin Batterham and his partner Hanne

The Lifetime Achievement Award was also made to Prof. John Herbst, who unfortunately could not attend the congress, nor could Tim Napier-Munn, who was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award. I was particularly pleased with Tim's award, as he was the first co-editor of Mineral Processing Technology, for the 7th edition, and Tim and I are two of the four living recipients of this award.

The 8th edition of the book was co-edited by Jim Finch and I was pleased to see Jim and his wife Lois at the IMPC and for Jim to be presented, belatedly due to Covid, with his 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jim and Lois Finch

It was also great to see the recipients of the 2024 IMPC Young Authors' Awards called up to receive their awards, representing the future of mineral processing. Maybe one of these will be the 2024 MEI Young Person's Award winner?

It was also good to see so many young people at my Victor Phillips Memorial Lecture at the University of Exeter's Penryn campus three weeks after the IMPC. Dr. Victor Phillips, a hydrometallurgist, was one of my closest colleagues at Camborne School of Mines so it was a great privilege for me to present this lecture on my 55 years in mineral processing, celebrated that month.

Four months after the SME Meeting in Phoenix the first of MEI's four 2024 conferences were held in Cape Town in June. Due to increasing travel disruption and visa problems due to Brexit, we made the decision in 2023 to move our Falmouth conferences to Cape Town, and Physical Separation '24, the 8th in the series, was for the first time held outside Cornwall. This was immediately followed by a new conference, Mill Circuits '24, which made a good start, which could probably have been better with a less ambiguous name, as many assumed that this referred to grinding mill circuits rather than the more generic use of the name mill for concentrator. So the next conference has been renamed Mineral Processing Circuits' 26 to avoid any confusion!

We were a little worried about moving these conferences from Falmouth, as June is mid-winter in Cape Town, and the weather can be pretty horrendous, as it was in the week preceding the events, and the week after!  Fortunately we were blessed with wonderful weather during the conference week, with some of the sunniest and warmest sundowners that we have experienced in the Vineyard Hotel Gardens.

Physical Separation '24 sundowner

Following the conferences Jon and I returned home, to Luxembourg and Falmouth respectively, while Amanda took the short flight to Namibia for the SAIMM's Rare Earths conference, making the most of the pre-conference time to explore Namibia's amazing dunes.

We were back in Cape Town in November for Process Mineralogy '24, a welcome return to the Mother City after 6 years, due to the trauma of Covid, for this the 7th in the process mineralogy series. This was followed by the inaugural Critical Minerals '24. Process Mineralogy '22 had been held in Sitges, Spain, due to Covid uncertainties in South Africa, and we will be back there in November 2026 for Process Mineralogy '26 and Critical Minerals '26.

With our conference agent Rene Simpson at the Critical Minerals '24 dinner at Groot Constantia.

It has been an interesting year, and we have much to look forward to in 2025, but in the meantime, on behalf of all of us at MEI we wish you all the very best for Christmas and New Year, and a big thank you to all of you who have sent us Christmas greetings by email and post.

Photo courtesy of Tony Clarke