Faculty
Prof. Chaouki is full professor from 1995 at Polytechnique, Montréal. He has supervised more than 80 Ph.D. and Master Students and more than 40 post-docs. He published more than 400 reviewed articles in refereed journals and in different reviewed proceedings and more than 450 other scientific articles and edited 6 books. He has more than 17 patents on different processes. He is now editor of the « Chemical Product and Process Modeling ».
He is also director of Biorefinery Center and member of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He has co-chaired 8 International Conferences including the 8th World Congress of Chemical Engineering 2009 where he has acted as technical director , he is also member of the 10th World CChE 2017 and he is the president of the Fluidization 15th Int. Conf. He is now supervising 44 researchers (25 Ph.Ds, , 11 PDFs, 7 research associates and 1 researcher). He is a member of the Board of the Ecole Polytechnique and several companies. He is world-renowned consultant for at least 20 national and international companies. He has created 4 start-ups with his students: Formmat Tech. Inc., Shopmedia Inc., Pyrowave Inc and Ecolomondo. He is Principal Chaire Holder of NSREC-Total Group in hydrodynamic modeling of multiphase processes at extreme conditions. His work is mainly dedicaded to develop processes from waste and biomass to heat & power, fuels andchemicals. At Polytechnique, he has one of the largest laboratories for thermal treatment of waste in the world.
Dr. Mohammad Latifi is a research professor at Chemical Engineering Department of Polytechnique Montreal where he started to work as a postdoctoral fellow in 2012 at Process Engineering Advanced Research Lab (PEARL). .
Currently, Dr. Latifi holds a NSERC-Discovery grant for metals recycling as well as chemical recycling of plastics from Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE or e-waste). Dr. Latifi is also a cleantech entrepreneur. He co-founded NeoCtech Corp. for recycling rare earth elements from waste streams. These metals are critical for advanced clean- and high-technologies such as electric vehicles, renewable energies, electronics and quantum materials.
At PEARL, Dr. Latifi led various cutting-edge and industrial projects such as extraction of rare earth elements, co-combustion of coal and ReEFTM for reduction of emissions from boilers, carbon coating of LFP cathode material by chemical vapor deposition, hydro- and high-temperature potash from potassium feldspar, TOTAL Chair for CO2 capturing and utilization, removal of heavy metals from phosphate ore, smelting of phosphate ore, CO2 reduction in cement industry, metals recycling, and chemical recycling of plastics. Accordingly, he worked with companies such as TOTAL (France), OCP Group (Morocco), Niobec (Canada), Advanced Potash Technologies (USA), Johnson Matthey Battery Materials (Canada), Accordant Energy (USA), and Canmet-MINING (Canada). Moreover, He developed an induction heating fluidized bed reactor (IHFBR) that has been employed in various projects at PEARL.
He received his PhD degree from Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Department of Western University in London, Ontario in 2012. He carried out his PhD research at Institute for Chemical and Fuels from Alternative Resources (ICFAR) on gasification of bio-oils to produce syngas (hydrogen + carbon monoxide) in fluidized bed reactors. During his PhD research, he developed the original Jiggle Bed Reactor (JBR), which was an induction heating assisted microreactor for high temperature reactions (<1000 °C).
Before moving to Canada, he worked for oil and petrochemical companies in Iran such as NIPC, NIOC, and IOEC. Dr. Latifi holds a master’s degree of Chemical Engineering from University of Tehran, Iran. He worked on debottlenecking of heat exchanger networks by process heat integration employing pinch design method during his master’s research.