João Soares is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Alberta where he holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Advanced Polymer Reaction Engineering. He has received several awards, including the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering (CSChE) R.S. Jane Memorial Award\, the University of Alberta Faculty of Engineering Career Research Award, the McMaster University Top 150 Alumni Award, the CSChE Syncrude Canada Innovation Award, the Dow Chemical Innovation Recognition Award, and the Premier’s Research Excellence Award. He also held the Campus Alberta Innovates Program (CAIP) Chair in Interfacial Polymer Engineering for Oil Sands Processing from 2013 to 2021.
He is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, a Professional Engineer in Alberta, and Director of Publications and Continuing Education of the CSChE. Professor Soares also promotes the dissemination of chemical engineering knowledge as the Editor-in-Chief for the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering. He has worked as a consultant for all major polyolefin manufacturing companies in the world.
Professor Soares is a leader in polymer reaction engineering (PRE), a research area that focuses on how to bring results from the laboratory to industrial production. Since the beginning of his academic career in 1995, Professor Soares has been refining his original methodology to investigate polymerization processes by integrating polymerization kinetics measurements, polymer molecular architecture characterization and testing, and mathematical modeling. His accomplishments in PRE are reflected in his appointments to editorial boards, participation in conference organizations, consulting activities, and industrial short courses. He is a member of the Wiley Polymer Scientific Committee, representing Macromolecular Reaction Engineering, the only scientific journal dedicated to polymer reaction engineering.
Prof. Soares spent most of his early career applying PRE principles to ethylene, propylene, and a-olefin polymerizations with coordination catalysts. This still remains his main area of research and expertise, but since joining the University of Alberta, he extended his research interests to new fields: 1) synthesis of water-soluble polymers for wastewater treatment, particularly for the remediation of oil sands tailings, 2) synthesis of polymer absorbers for oil spill remediation in fresh and seawater, 3) production of thin film composite membranes for wastewater treatment, 4) synthesis of CO2-based polymers for carbon-capture by the oil industry, 5) synthesis of electrical conductive polymers, and 6) design of stimuli-responsive polymers.
Prof. Soares has published over 300 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, authored 13 book chapters and 1 book, given over 300 invited presentations in international events and supervised 27 PhD students, 31 MSc students, 30 post-doctoral fellows and research assistant/associates, and more than 50 visiting scholars.
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