Mohammad Rezaee selected for professorship designed to boost early career

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Mohammad Rezaee, assistant professor of mining engineering in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, was selected to receive the Centennial Career Development Professorship in Mining Engineering in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.

“I am very honored and humbled to receive the Centennial Career Development Professorship, and I appreciate this recognition from the college,” Rezaee said. “I am also thankful for the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, EMS Energy Institute, my colleagues and family members for their wonderful support, and my graduate students for their dedicated work.”

Rezaee’s research focuses on developing sustainable mining waste disposal practices from which valuables such as critical elements can be recovered for commercial use while the remaining materials are processed to generate environmentally benign materials. His work centers around the extraction of critical elements from primary and secondary sources, coal preparation, mineral processing, environmental management, and computational fluid dynamics and scale modeling.

In 2020, Rezaee earned the Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration’s Mineral and Metallurgical Processing Division, in memory of Subhash Chander, and in recognition of significant contributions in the development of methodologies and applications of mineral processing unit operations and circuits to enhance the sustainability of mining operations. He joined Penn State in 2017 and was the former holder of the Thomas V. and Jean C. Falkie Mining Engineering Faculty Fellowship in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.  

“This recognition will establish a great foundation to expand my scientific and professional contributions to the society” Rezaee said. “I am well prepared to further contribute to the three-pronged mission of the University, including research, teaching and service, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion.”

The Centennial Career Development Professorship, which was established by an anonymous donor, is awarded to faculty in the early stages of their career and is designed to help kick-start research projects. It’s given to those who have already made outstanding research accomplishments. Sekhar Bhattacharyya, undergraduate program chair of the Mini­ng Engineering program in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, is the previous recipient.

Rezaee was a postdoctoral research associate in Virginia Tech’s Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering. He also worked for two years as a mining engineer consultant.

Rezaee received his doctorate in 2015 and his master’s degree in 2012, both in mining engineering from the University of Kentucky. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mining engineering in 2008 from the Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.