Megan Becker

Associate Professor Megan Becker leads the geometallurgy and process mineralogy research activities in the Centre for Minerals Research, and the Minerals to Metals Initiative in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests focus on understanding the effects of mineralogy on minerals processing, metallurgy and the environment, and how best mineralogy information be articulated and communicated to maximise the value of minerals to society.

Since joining the Centre in 2005, she has successfully integrated process mineralogy into the research activities of the Centre and other research groupings within the Dept of Chemical Engineering. A highlight was her establishment of a state of the art facility for quantitative mineralogical analysis hosting a R15 million FEI 650F FEG QEMSCAN – quantitative evaluation of minerals through scanning electron microscopy. She has conceptualised, designed, developed and run courses in process mineralogy at both the undergraduate student level and industry professional development level. To date, she has supervised 30 postgraduate students. She has 70 peer reviewed publications, and a Y1 NRF rating.

After having recognised the complete non-existence of relevant references texts on process mineralogy in 2011, she initiated a Monograph on Process Mineralogy. She was the lead editor of this Monograph, published in 2016 through the Julius Krutschnitt Mineral Research Centre. The text contains over 30 peer reviewed chapters written by international experts in the field of process mineralogy.

Research Interests

• Process mineralogy
• geometallurgy
• environmental mineralogy