Leadership Team
Steve Benson, Ph.D.
President
Dr. Benson is President of Microbeam and has more than 40 years of professional experience on inorganic constituents in fuels, impacts of fuel impurities on combustion and gasification system performance, control of mercury and trace elements in combustion and gasification systems, carbon dioxide capture methods, scanning electron microscopy analysis, rare earth element measurement and recovery and computer modeling.
Dr. Benson has extensive experience in managing complex multi-disciplined projects for industry and for various federal and state departments and agencies. He is a member of several professional organizations and has written or co-written over 200 publications.
Dr. Benson holds a PhD degree from the Pennsylvania State University in Fuel Science.
Alex Benson
Program Manager
Alex Benson oversees the Carbon-Ore Utilization group at Microbeam. He specializes in projects related to the detection, extraction and sorting of critical minerals. He performs the economic analyses and creates commercialization plans for our new technologies, and supports resource evaluation projects for current and new resources.
Prior to joining Microbeam, Alex spent 7 years in the medical device manufacturing industry in Operations Engineering and Management. He designed, developed and commercialized new manufacturing lines as an engineer.
Alex Benson has an B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of St. Thomas.
Shuchita Patwardhan
Program Manager
Ms. Patwardhan manages the Plant and Fuel Optimization projects at Microbeam. She is responsible for identifying business opportunities and conducting data analysis and interpretation. She currently manages and works on projects aimed at minimizing the impact of fuel impurities in combustion and gasification systems, generating mathematical correlations for fuel properties, transport mechanisms, deposit growth and slag flow.
Ms. Patwardhan has extensive experience in the application of on-line full belt analyzers to measure the composition of feed stocks for power systems and other applications. Ms. Patwardhan has experience in the patent disclosure writing and application process.
Shuchita has an M.S. degree in Environmental Engineering from University of North Dakota and a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering from University of Pune, India.
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