Aitber Bizhanov was born on October 6, 1956 in Buinaksk, Russia. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1979. For eleven years, Aitber worked at the Institute of High Temperatures of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1992, he left academia and joined EVRAZ, a large vertically integrated metallurgical and vanadium enterprise with global assets. In 2004, Aitber went to the Kosaya Iron Works as a commercial director, having introduced metallurgical waste briquetting technology. Since 2006, he has been working on agglomeration and briquetting of metallurgical waste as a waste management expert at HARSCO Metals. Today Aitber is an independent representative of J.C. Steele & Sons, Inc., Direxa Engineering and Haendle in Russia and the CIS, Eastern Europe and Turkey. He holds a PhD in agglomeration of natural and anthropogenic materials in metallurgy. Author of over 70 publications (including six books), owner and co-author of 14 Russian patents in this area. Author and owner of the BREX trademark. With his personal participation, projects for briquetting natural and anthropogenic raw materials in ferrous metallurgy have been successfully implemented in a number of countries. Aitber has been a member of the Institute for Briquetting and Agglomeration (IBA) since 2011.