Honorary note: Mehmet Sabri Çelik

Professor Mehmet Sabri Çelik was born in 1954 in Van, Türkiye. He graduated from Istanbul Technical University as a mining engineer in 1974 and received a Turkish Ministry of education scholarship to study MS and Ph.D. in the USA. He continued his MS studies on grinding of coals with the advisor L.G. Austin in mineral processing at Pennsylvania State University and graduated in 1977. He developed a great curiosity with the flotation course lectured by the late Dr. Frank F. Aplan and Interfacial Phenomena course given by Dr. Richard Hogg. Through the material covered in these courses, he discovered the true love that will shape his academic career. During the search for a Ph.D. advisor, he came across a young talented scientist Prof. Somasundaran at Columbia University to whom he asked for admission to Henry Krumb School of Mines. He spent four and half years with this fantastic group and learned the beauty of surface and colloid chemistry-based processes. Columbia in this respect was like a great temple for people starving to flotation and adsorption. Adsorption love started with his Ph.D. thesis on adsorption and precipitation mechanisms of anionic surfactants and polymers onto reservoir rocks during Enhanced Oil recovery (EOR). After his Ph.D. degree, he had to decide between staying in the USA or Türkiye or somewhere abroad. Despite a very good job offer by Pall Filter company, he decided to take an Academic job at KF University of Petroleum and Minerals where he continued to conduct research in a line similar to his Ph.D. thesis except on Saudi Arabian reservoirs. He has not had much chance to work on mineral processing problems but mainly on surface and colloid chemistry aspects of EOR until he ended his 5 years of Academic work (1983-1988) with an associate professor degree and a job offer by RH Yoon as a visiting associate professor in Virginia Polytechnic Institute&SU. During 1988-1989 Prof. Çelik in VPI&SU got involved in a variety of problems including selective flotation of pyrite from coal and issues related to the adsorption of nonionic surfactants on coal. He shared the same calorimetry lab with Zhenghe Xu then a brilliant Ph.D. student now at the University of Alberta.