Prof. Ofori-Sarpong delivering her inaugural lecture

The First Female Professor of Minerals Engineering in Ghana and currently the Dean of School of Postgraduate Studies at the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT), Tarkwa, in the Western Region, Prof. Grace Ofori-Sarpong, has delivered her first inaugural lecture which is also the seventh lecture of UMaT.

Her topic was “Mycohydrometallurgy; One-Pot Degradation of Double Refractory Gold Ores by Phanerochaete chrysosporium”.

She said “gold was not like a tree you could take and it would shoot up for you to come back and cut again but the moment gold was taken from the ground or soil that ended it except small particles that might be left or hidden.”

She said that technology needed to be developed in order to retrieve the hidden gold from the soil so her lecture was to get the hidden or leftover gold through the application she had researched into and developed.

Prof. Ofori-Sarpong said she was so honoured as a lady to be given the opportunity to showcase what a woman had gone through and brought to the public domain.

She said it was also a platform to tell her counterparts that they should aim high and be determined to reach the sky and surely they would get there.

She disclosed that she had a platform where she and her colleagues assisted the younger girls to aim high and use the sky as a spring board to get to the next level.

She said the gold in the hard rock needed to be broken into very smaller pieces before the gold could be obtained but some gold would still be hidden after breaking the rock so pretreatment was needed to get the rest of the gold out.

She said one way of getting gold was through burning but that method polluted the environment so microorganisms were used to extract the gold and by this method the environment would not be polluted.

The Dean said about a decade ago ‘mycohydrometallurgy’ was introduced into literature to define the application of fungi in hydrometallurgy and this brought to the fore exploration of a ‘one-pot’ transformation of carbonaceous matter (CM) and sulphidic minerals (SM).

The Chairman of the Inaugural Lecture, Vice Chancellor of UMaT, Prof. Richard Kwasi Amankwah said it was an important day in the UMaT Calendar to celebrate the first female professor to deliver her inaugural lecture.

He said as the first female Professor of UMaT all female students looked up to her as a role model for many to also climb the scaffold to greater heights.

From Peter Gbambila, Tarkwa.