Director's Welcome, February 2026

I hope you had a good break over the December-January period, and have returned refreshed for the year ahead. After a successful 2025, we are back and ready, and as you will see from this newsletter, we already have a very large slate of research, training, research translation and commercial activities planned for the year.

We have continued to be active and successful since the last newsletter in November, but I did want to focus on one important development that rarely gets prominence in our public communications.  In late November last year, the SMI administration team of Melinda Winton, Tracy Discombe and Allana Cooper won UQ's Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology 2025 Staff Excellence Award in the category of service.  There is not enough space in this introduction to detail all the activities and situations where their service allows us to do the work we need to do to make impact in our chosen areas.  They work hard, stay calm, and keep us all in check and on track.  Of course, it goes without saying that alongside them we have a large professional team led by Melissa Glendenning who also provide invaluable support.

That wasn’t the only SMI award in recent months.  Dr Nikky LaBranche received the Faculty's 2025 Early Career Researcher award which capped off a year of many awards for Nikky.  In addition, congratulations are due to Dr Fitsum Weldegiorgis from the Global Centre for Mineral Security, who was awarded a prestigious ARC DECRA  (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) to work on improving food security in sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific Islands.

The December 2025 Graduation saw BRC Adjunct Professor Dan Wood conferred with an Honorary Doctorate from UQ.  This is the University’s highest honour, and in Dan’s case it recognises a long history of support and commitment to the WH Bryan Mining Geology Research Centre and the SMI more broadly in the fields of exploration and deep mining geoscience.  Congratulations are due also to the large group of SMI HDR researchers who graduated in the December ceremony.

SMI researchers have published several thought-provoking and impactful articles over the past few months and I thought it might be interesting to list some of their impacts below, with links for those who would like to have a look at the articles, most of which can be accessed for free.  Some impacts include:

• Examination of the barriers to early reuse of mine sites for community benefit, with potential to improve the outcomes of post-mining transitions
• Description of a new testing apparatus that allows mining companies to more easily implement coarse particle flotation, that in turn allows mining operations to produce concentrates using less energy and producing less tailings
• Real world demonstration of an approach to take material that would have once been made into mine tailings and instead turn it into a product that can replace river sand in construction
• Providing policy guidance to enhance Indigenous co-ownership of renewable energy projects
• Demonstrating the ways in which interdisciplinary science and Indigenous collaboration can guide restoration and environmental justice in the high Andes and more generally.
• Development of an approach for better estimation of unmetered water extraction in areas under water stress, leading to more sustainable regional water management.

Some other examples are also featured in more detail in this newsletter.

The University of Queensland has just updated its strategy and flowing on from that we will also be updating our strategy over the course of 2026. A one-page summary of our path to impact can be accessed here.  If you have any comments or suggestions on this topic we would love to hear from you.

As 2026 unfolds, I wish you all the best and look forward to staying in touch. We would be delighted to hear from you.