Glen Nwaila (Prof)

Director Wits Mining Institute University of the Witwatersrand

Glen Nwaila is the Director of the Wits Mining Institute and Adjunct Professor at the School of Geosciences, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Prior to joining Wits, he worked in the mining and consulting industries for 12 years, where he led teams of mining professionals and led audits in the mineral resources and extractive metallurgy plants. At Sibanye Stillwater, Glen led the geology functions in the Driefontein operations. He also served as Manager at Deloitte Technical Mining Advisory. Glen is an Erasmus Mundus Scholar at Uppsala University since 2018. Nwaila completed his Ph.D. with Magna Cum Laude at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany, M.Sc. degree in Chemical Engineering (with merit) from the University of Cape Town and an Honours degree in Geology from the University of Johannesburg. He currently serves as one of the 35 IGC Legacy Fund’s Board of Directors. He is a Professional Natural Scientist with the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP) and is a Fellow of the Geological Society of South Africa (FGSSA). Glen’s research focuses on improving ore characterization and modelling to enhance selective mineral resource extraction, minimize environmental impacts, increase profitability, and maximize natural resource utilization. Specifically, Glen and his students work on geometallurgy, machine learning, and spatial data analytics research projects related to multiscale and multivariate data integration, big remote sensing, and geochemical data analysis to enable optimal decision-making in the presence of uncertainty.