Researcher biography

Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre led by Prof. Evgueni Jak.

He graduated with a Master in Chemistry (chemical thermodynamics) from Lomonosov's Moscow State University, Deparment of Chemistry in 2012. His Master's Thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the NaOH-Al(OH)3-Na2SiO3-H2O system for applications in Bayer's process of bauxite treatment" as part of a bigger project initiated in collaboration with Rusal company aimed at utilisation/valorisation of red mud residues accumulated during the production of aluminium oxide from bauxite ores.

In 2019, he completed a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, Canada within The Centre For Research in Computational Thermodynamics (CRCT), where he acquired expertise in FactSage software, multicomponent database development, and was included in the list of official collaborators of FactSage. His PhD thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the Na2O-K2O-Al2O3-CaO-MgO-B2O3-SiO2 system" sponsored by Glass Consortium including Corning and SCHOTT glass producers. The purpose of the database he developed was to assist the industry in designing new glasses with special properties: chemically hardened glasses (smartphones), technical glasses with high thermal and chemical resilience (boron-containing glasses), chemically inert glasses, etc.

Short after receiving his PhD, Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev accepted a position at The University of Queensland as part of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre's team where he has an official title of Theme Leader in Thermodynamic Computations, combining his broad expertise in metallurgy, chemical engineering, applied mathematics, and programming.

Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev has always been passionate about formalisation and automation of big research tasks. He started working on developing an automated solver for thermodynamic optimisation during his PhD thesis which was improved and finalised using the ideas of Prof. Evgueni Jak about real-time derivative matrix optimization and sensitivity analysis applicable to large multicomponent systems. His contribution to the Centre allowed to make transition to a continuous optimization approach when experimental and modelling streams of work in the Centre are efficiently combined together. It allows to include the most recent experimental datasets into a self-consistent database update with minimal time delays.