Personal information
Biography
Michael Daramola is a professor and Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pretoria. He is a global scholar with training, teaching, research and academic administration experiences from The Netherlands, France, United States, South Africa, Singapore, Ghana, India and Nigeria. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng) with Engineering Council of UK, a Fellow of Institution of Chemical Engineers UK (FIChemE), a Fellow of South African Institution of Chemical Engineers (FSAIChE) and a Registered Engineer with the Council for Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN). Prof Daramola is a Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Fellow in Research Leadership and a Dutch Organization for Internationalization in Education (NUFFIC)’s Fellow. He holds BSc Eng. (Hons) & MSc in Chemical Engineering; MSc in Biotechnology (Process Technology option) and PhD in Chemical Engineering. He also holds PGDip in Education (Higher Education), Certificate in Academic Leadership, Certificate in Research Management and Leadership from IREX and George Mason University, USA (with 4 weeks of intensive training at Michigan State University, USA), and Certificate in Postgraduate Supervision from Rhodes University, South Africa. Prof Daramola has more than 18 years of research, teaching and management experience in academia.
Prof Daramola is committed to working in an environment that embraces diversity, equity and inclusion. He likes building and working in a team with variety of backgrounds, races, skills and views because variation in these traits enhances better understanding of complex problems of a changing and increasingly diverse world and generates ideas to solve them. He has built a research team that is truly international and nurture a cooperative spirit within the team to the extent that members consistently produce high quality outputs. Prof Daramola has been among the world's Top 2% of scientists (Stanford and Elsevier’s list) since 2021. Also, he is a rated researcher with a sustained record of research productivity and quality research evaluated and benchmarked by the South African National Research Foundation recognized by peers in my field. In 2022, he was a finalist in the 2021/2022 NSTF-South32 Awards (also known as South African “Oscar Science” award) in TW Kambule-NSTF Award: Researcher category and in Engineering Research Capacity Development Award category.
Prof Daramola’s primary research focuses on sustainable energy and environment, with major activities in development and application of nanomaterials (adsorbents, membranes, etc.) in water/wastewater treatment and in net-zero carbon emission’s strategies. In addition, he develops sustainable & feasible engineering solutions for treatment and valorization of waste and biomass into value-added products. The research, which has a two-fold focus with a good balance between fundamental research and industrial application, provides understanding and develops concepts towards providing solutions in sustainable energy and environment. The research is inherently related to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals & African Agenda 2063 and therefore has clear impacts, if not immediately but in the medium term, on the health and wellbeing of human.
Prof Daramola has produced 64 postgraduate students (28 doctorate and 36 master's) and mentored more than 16 early career researchers and academics (including 12 postdoctoral fellows, one FLAIR Fellow, and three junior lecturers). He has secured in excess of ZAR 25 million to support his research and students. He has served as examiner to more than 20 PhD theses and in excess of 35 MSc dissertations in South Africa and outside South Africa. He is a seasoned reviewer and evaluator for research funding bodies such as the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, Water Research Commission (WRC) of South Africa, and European Research Commission. He has contributed enormously to knowledge creation in engineering with publications in excess of 250 including one granted patent, fifteen book chapters, and three edited books. In excess of sixty-two oral/poster presentations were given at national/international conferences with more than 10 as keynote/plenary/invited addresses. These publications have attracted more than 6000 citations with H-index of 41 (GoogleScholar) and one of them has a field-weighted citation impact that is more than 180.
Prof Daramola serves on editorial board of some reputable journals such as ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering; Materials Today Proceedings, Ground Water for Sustainable Development, Frontiers in Chemical Engineering. He is a national panel member and the Vice chairperson of South African Bureau of Standard’s (SABS) Technical Committee on carbon dioxide capture, transportation and geological storage (SABS/TC 0265 or ISO/TC 265). He is also a national panel member of the SABS technical committee on ISO/TC 323 “Circular economy”.