My Specific Area of Academic Interest

I have never viewed a person to have lived, until he contributes something to this world; be it knowledge, a device, or art. How then will I live? Being a person of intellectual curiosity, I have always been endeared to research. There is a certain joy in unearthing a hidden truth or in discovering a process or product so profound that it can positively change one’s environment. My quest to meet the challenges of research and developments in the emerging petrochemical industry drove me to major in Petrochemical Engineering at the undergraduate level. My undergraduate program was as rewarding as it was joyful, howbeit, the latter stages of it rewrote and remarkably shaped my intellectual interests.

My exposure to technical knowledge of reaction kinetics, mathematical modeling, process design and control mechanism deepened my understanding and made Process Systems Engineering more fascinating to me. Due to my innate passion for process systems engineering, I not only excelled but performed notably better in courses related to it, for instance, Kinetics and Reaction Engineering, Process Design and Economics, Instrumentation, Process Control and Simulation, just to mention but a few.

Moreover, during the summer of 2015, my time at Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) Limited as an intern made me appreciate the efforts of process or design engineers in designing, optimizing and controlling complex chemical, physical or biological processes. I recollect being astounded at the complex network of pipes, tank farm and the size of vessels and towers. A flood of questions flushed through my mind, prime among which were how the engineers came up with the design and an efficient automation of the refining process such that, for every likely fluctuation that could occur, they had remedies in place? With my urge to seek solutions, I then relished that my commitment towards pursuing process systems engineering at the graduate level was taken a notch higher.

To satiate my intellectual curiosity and to fulfill my ambition, I have decided to further my education by acquiring a Master’s degree in Process Systems Engineering (PSEng) from University of Regina. I would like to get involved in research work in this area. The PSEng program includes advanced undergraduate courses that heightened my interest such as Advanced Reaction Engineering, Advanced Mass Transfer, Modeling and Simulation. The research areas on which Professor Raphael Idem focus interest me and I hope to work closely with him on post combustion carbon capture, heterogeneous catalyst development and host of others.