Shafiq Alam

Biography

After graduating with a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering in 1986, I worked as a Process Engineer at Shell Oil Company for over six years. I then received a fellowship from the British Council to pursue an M.Eng. program at Heriot-Watt University, UK. In 1995-1998, I obtained my M.Sc./Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Saga University, Japan. I then joined the hydrometallurgy group at the University of British Columbia as a post doctoral fellow where I was involved in an innovative research project of Falconbridge Ltd. At the University of Toronto as a post-doc research fellow, I carried out state-of-the-art research on nickel ore processing using pressure hydrometallurgy. This was a project of INCO Ltd., during their investigation of different alternative process strategies to recover nickel from the newly discovered deposit of Voisey’s Bay. In 2001, I took a position of hydrometallurgist with Process Research ORTECH Inc. at Mississauga , where I was actively involved with different challenging projects of mining, metallurgical, chemical and recycling industries. I am a recipient of industrial fellowship from Materials and Manufacturing Ontario (MMO). I also received a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) fellowship through NSERC to work as a “Visiting Research Scientist” at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. After spending two years in a highly technologically developed research facilities at AIST, I headed back to Vancouver, taking a position at Fluor Canada Ltd., where I was involved with different projects for the pre-feasibility study, feasibility study and detailed process engineering works to design a commercial copper production plant for Phelps Dodge at Arizona. In November 2006, I moved from the west coast to the east coast to establish my new research base in hydrometallurgy at Memorial University, where I was a tenured Associate Professor until August 2014. I am now an Associate Professor at the University of Saskatchewan. My research interest is Hydrometallurgy. I hold 2 patents and over 80 publications with presentation in different conferences. I am a registered Professional Engineer both in Ontario (PEO) and Newfoundland & Labrador (PEG-NL). I am an Executive Committee Member of the Hydrometallurgy Section of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM) and currently hold the office of "Secretary". I am also the "Vice-Chair" (2013-2015) of the "Hydrometallurgy and Electrometallurgy Committee" of The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), one of the largest professional organizations, headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA. I am actively involved with the committee in organizing different international conferences, such as, the Conference of Metallurgists (COM) in Canada; “Rare Metals Extraction & Processing Symposium" at the TMS 2014 conference in San Diego, California; Ni-Co Symposium at TMS 2013 in Texas, USA; and the Copper 2013 Conference in Chile. I am the Faculty Advisor of the CIM-MetSoc Student Chapter at Memorial University that I founded in 2008. 

Research Interest

My research interest is Hydrometallurgy