SMI 3 Minute Thesis

Congratulations to Philippa Dodshon (pictured front row centre)  who was the winner of the last week's SMI 3MT competition with her presentation “What’s the definition of insanity?” Philippa will go on to represent SMI at the all UQ institutes competition in August.

Philippa’s project: We are not finding new ways of killing of people in the mining industry. This PhD intends to develop incident investigation processes that promote more effective risk controls and a more effective way for organisations to learn from incidents. It will achieve this by developing a process that incorporates control effectiveness and Human Factors issues into incident investigation processes, and a process that incorporates these learnings into ongoing risk management activities. Neither of which is being extensively undertaken in the mining industry. My intent through the PhD is to deliver a process that enables industry to reach zero fatalities.

The two runners up were Erica Avelar with “The Gold Baker” and Ceit Wilson with “Steering Social Outcomes in Energy Resource Communities”.

Erica’s project: To bake a cake, we need various equipment, such are a mixer, a sieve and a spatula. We also need various ingredients, and a method of when and how we use them. Similarly, to “make” gold we need a “recipe” that will define which equipment and method are required to deliver the gold bars. However, in this case we can’t modify the core ingredient, which is the ore body, so we have to change the recipe. In this context, this work a search for the best recipe.

Ceit’s project: There is increasing interest among resource governance scholarship in the potential of  ‘networks’, composed of public and private actors, to resolve conflicts regarding housing infrastructure in extractive resources communities. In order to ensure such network arrangements are effective, broader governance literature suggests careful meta-governance by government is necessary. There is less of an understanding though of whether the role of the meta-governor may be shared by other non-state entities, particularly private actors. This PhD project aims to address this gap through empirical examination of the potential role of the energy resource companies as meta-governors within networked policy processes

Erica Avelar and Philippa Dodshon tied for the people’s choice winner. A big thanks to Juan Ossa, Yogesh Reja and Anh Nguyen for taking part.