Aubrey Mainza is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Cape Town (UCT). He graduated from UCT with a PhD in 2006. He has 22 years of collective experience in academia, research and industry. He is the Head of the department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town and is a Deputy Director and Head of Comminution and Classification Research in the Centre for Minerals Research, which is a large multi-disciplinary research centre. His area of expertise is in comminution and classification and uses Discrete Element Method (DEM), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and Positron Emission Particle Tracking (PEPT) as tools in his modelling methods. He has participated in many local and international research projects and has worked on numerous comminution circuit design and optimisation projects in various parts of the world. He has supervised many postgraduate students to graduation some of whom hold high positions in industry and is still an active supervisor of postgraduate students and has published widely in the international mineral processing and aligned disciplines literature.
He has held position of Chairman for the Global Comminution Collaborative (GCC) and chairperson for the International Comminution Researchers Association (ICRA) African Chapter and chairperson for the Western Cape Branch of the Southern Africa Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (SAIMM) and is currently a committee member for all of these associations. Aubrey is on many advisory committees for international conferences and is a consultant for the Minerals Engineering International Comminution Conference. He is a founder member of PEPT Cape Town, a facility established in Cape Town for studying flow behaviour in different systems and for medical research.
