Prof. M. Ziad Saghir

Prof M. Ziad Saghir is a Professor at Ryerson University and Canada’s most experienced reduced-gravity researcher. He is Canada’s top performer at leveraging departmental and provincial research funds with national (NSERC, CSA) and international funding agencies to pursue Canadian space science objectives onboard the International Space Station (ISS). His talent as a space scientist and university educator is consistently requested by the international space physical science mission community. He leads a group of very strong graduate students and post-docs that come from academia and industry, with interest in and application to deep hydrocarbon reservoirs. His innovation is recognized internationally through consistent invitations from European researchers that identify him as applying the maximum knowledge gained from long-duration gravity-driven phenomena in fluid physics to industrial processes. He has been PI or Co-I of Foton-M2 and M3 SCCO recoverable satellite missions (2007), the ISS SODI-IVIDIL (2009) and DSC (2010) missions, the ISS SODI-DCMIX mission (2011-15), and was the national coordinator of the CSA discipline working group on the role of gravity in metals and alloys. Canada’s contribution to the SODI-DCMIX mission is to clarify the role of gravity on the movement of hydrocarbons across temperature gradients – important knowledge for Canada’s deep oil reservoir sector (Hybernia Oil field and Northern exploration of oil reservoir deposits). Over the past decade, Prof. Saghir has been working in collaboration with TOTAL and researchers in France to apply innovation to benefit Canada’s competitiveness in hydrocarbon extraction from oil reservoirs, a top priority of the Federal Government. Maintaining a good funding for his scientific participation in ISS missions would allow Canada to leverage in ISS hardware and on-orbit resources from our ISS Partners, and directly apply gravity-driven knowledge to benefit Canada’s industry in the energy sector for a priority activity of the Government of Canada. He has published over 200 scientific journal paper related to energy. He is currently the chair of the International conference on Thermal Engineering (www.ictea.ca).

 

Prof. Božidar Šarler 

Professor Božidar Šarler is Chair of Department of Fluid Dynamics and Thermodynamics at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ljubljana. He is also Head of Laboratory for Simulation of Materials and Processes at the Institute of Metals and Technology in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has worked outside Slovenia cumulative for more than four years as a visiting researcher or professor at Centre of Nuclear Studies, Saclay; University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Nuremberg; Argonne National Laboratories, Chicago; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; University of Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris; Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw and University of Parthenope, Naples. He is holding adjunct professor position at University of Southern Queensland, Australia and Taiyuan University of Technology, China. His present research interest is computational modeling of materials and processes, development of meshless numerical methods and physical models for multiphase systems, modeling, simulation, verification and optimization steel and aluminum process routes. He was responsible for modernization and introduction of computational modeling in several steelworks and aluminum plants in Europe and China. He has published 150 scientific papers, 15 book chapters and edited 8 books with selected papers from international conferences and contemporary research. Contributed to 250 technical reports. He has managed several international projects within EU frameworks, NATO, and National Academies, USA. He received the following awards and recognitions: 2009 EMERALD Literati Highly commended and 2014 Best paper award. 2006 Highest Slovenian state recognition for technology. 2016 Highest Slovenian state award for science, 2017 ICCES distinguished fellow award. Best paper selection at 9 international conferences. He presented keynotes at conferences of the prestigious type like PRACE, EUROMAT, EUROSIM (EU), THERMACOMP (UK), ICCES (USA), TMS (USA) and Asian Congress on Computational Mechanics (Singapore). He is currently a member of the editorial boards of several international journals and two book series. He has organized eight international conferences on solid-liquid phase change processes, moving and free boundary problems, and meshless methods. His Ph.D. students received several awards such as two times ECCOMAS best Ph.D. finalist award, Jožef Stefan golden emblem award, best Ph.D. in heat and fluid flow award, etc.