After successfully completing his PhD under the supervision of the late Prof R.P. King, at the University of Utah he founded the Laboratory of Mineral Technology at the Univesidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). This would later become the leading Latin American research group in the field of comminution. He has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering of UFRJ for the last 25 years, holding a Full Professor position since 2015. His work is published in over 130 peer-reviewed journal papers, +150 conference proceedings in events in Brazil and overseas, besides several book chapters and a book on gravity concentration technology. He has worked closely with industry, having been principal investigator of over 100 research, development and consulting projects, besides supervising over 50 masters and PhDs.
Marcelo has been deeply involved in bridging the fundamentals of particle breakage to advanced models of comminution, applied to a variety of crushers and mills, besides problemas involving degradation duing handling. His breakage model – called Tavares UFRJ model – is implemented in the leading commercial DEM platforms (Altair EDEM and ESSS Rocky), whereas the mechanistic mill model developed under his guidance – the UFRJ mechanistic mill model – was the first DEM-based mill model ever available in a commercial mineral processing plant simulator (Orica IES). His expertise also includes topics such as ore characterization, comminution, classification, besides physical concentration and iron ore agglomeration, with particular interest in multicomponent modeling and simulation.
