Prof M. Ziad Saghir is a Professor at Ryerson University and Canada's most experienced reduced-gravity researcher. He is Canada's top performer at leveraging departmental and provincial research funds with national (NSERC, CSA) and international funding agencies to pursue Canadian space science objectives onboard the International Space Station (ISS). His talent as a space scientist and university educator is consistently requested by the international space physical science mission community.
He leads a group of very strong graduate students and post-docs that come from academia and industry, with interest in and application to deep hydrocarbon reservoirs. His innovation is recognized internationally through consistent invitations from European researchers that identify him as applying the maximum knowledge gained from long-duration gravity-driven phenomena in fluid physics to industrial processes.
He has been PI or Co-I of Foton-M2 and M3 SCCO recoverable satellite missions (2007), the ISS SODI-IVIDIL (2009) and DSC (2010) missions, the ISS SODI-DCMIX mission (2011-15), and was the national coordinator of the CSA discipline working group on the role of gravity in metals and alloys. Canada's contribution to the SODI-DCMIX mission is to clarify the role of gravity on the movement of hydrocarbons across temperature gradients - important knowledge for Canada's deep oil reservoir sector (Hybernia Oil field and Northern exploration of oil reservoir deposits).
Over the past decade, Prof. Saghir has been working in collaboration with TOTAL and researchers in France to apply innovation to benefit Canada's competitiveness in hydrocarbon extraction from oil reservoirs, a top priority of the Federal Government. Maintaining a good funding for his scientific participation in ISS missions would allow Canada to leverage in ISS hardware and on-orbit resources from our ISS Partners, and directly apply gravity-driven knowledge to benefit Canada's industry in the energy sector for a priority activity of the Government of Canada. He has published over 200 scientific journal paper related to energy. He is currently the chair of the International conference on Thermal Engineering (www.ictea.ca).