Awards

George P. Demopoulos is a Professor with the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering of McGill University, where he has been teaching and doing research in the area of hydrometallurgy since 1983. George holds degrees from the National Technical University of Athens and McGill. Over the years, 60 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows were trained under his supervision with 8 of them holding today academic positions and other important positions in industry. His research has led to more than 160 refereed publications and 6 patents. For his contributions to research and education he has been recognized with the 1999 Canadian Metal Chemistry Award and the 2000 Sherritt Hydrometallurgy Award. In 2005, he received the Featured Presenter distinction from TMS. He was Department Chair at McGill from 1994 to 1999 while this year serves as President of MetSoc, the Metallurgical Society of CIM.

Bryn Harris received his Ph.D. in Minerals Engineering from the University of Birmingham, U.K. in 1973. He then spent five years working for ZCCM on the Zambian Copperbelt on a variety of projects, notably the recovery of copper and cobalt from converter slag. After leaving Zambia, he worked for twelve years with Noranda at its Technology Centre in Montreal, where he was involved in the Blackbird Cobalt Project, various projects at the CCR Copper Refinery including the new gold refinery, and where he developed an expertise in the control and disposal of arsenic from metallurgical processes. In 1990, he joined MITEC, the technology arm of the Mining Association of Canada in Ottawa, where he was responsible for assessing the research needs of the Canadian Mining Industry in general. In 1995, he joined Hatch Consulting Engineers in Montreal, where he was involved in many of the world’s laterite projects, the CEZinc Jarofix Project, and finally the Avmin Cosac Project at Chambishi in Zambia, where he was lead process engineer on the commercial plant for the installation of the process to recover copper and cobalt from smelter slag, the project he had first worked on when with ZCCM 25 years previously. Since 2002, he has been a freelance consultant, working on a number of different processes, including the chloride leach processes for base metal oxide and sulphide feeds. Dr. Harris is a past chair of the Hydrometallurgy Section of CIM, and was the recipient of their Sherritt Award for Hydrometallurgy in 1995, and a silver medal for Innovation in the Canada Business Awards in 1987 for the CCR Gold Refinery. He has authored or co-authored over 40 technical publications and is the holder of nine patents.

“It was a dream to remove the dead hand of nitrogen from the Bessemer converter and to inject pure oxygen through the bottom of a furnace to make steel, without destroying the refractory lining. But it was to take over a century until Savard and Lee discovered how to turn the dream into a reality simply by shrouding the discharging oxygen stream with hydrocarbon which, at steelmaking temperatures, cracks and provides local cooling. Their invention of the concentric tuyere, so elegant in concept, transformed the steelmaking landscape spawning new processes, much as did Bessemer’s discovery that pig iron contained sufficient fuel in its dissolved silicon and carbon to be refined autogenously with air. Now the concepts of the concentric tuyere and gas shrouding are being applied in process developments for nonferrous metals production like lead and copper.”

Norbert L. Piret is principal of Piret & Stolberg Partners, Consulting Engineers, Duisburg, Germany. After graduation in 1965 in Metallurgical Engineering from RUG Ghent University, Belgium, he successively worked for ZCCM, Zambia, in copper smelting and refining and cobalt winning, Falconbridge Nickel, Canada, in nickel and copper projects, and Duisburger Kupferhütte, Germany, for zinc, lead and copper recovery from primary and secondary materials. After 12 years of consulting for the MG subsidiary Stolberg Engineers, he set up in 1994 his own company supplying worldwide consulting services to the mineral and metallurgical industry in base and precious metals extraction from primary and secondary sources and related environmental topics. Mr. Piret has over 40 years of industrial experience, of which 25 years have been in the consulting business.