UQ’s first ARC ITTC PhD student- Welcome Collins Adoko
MIWATCH are thrilled to welcome Collins Adoko to SMI to start his PhD as an ARC ITTC Critical Resources for the Future (ITTC CRFF) PhD student. Collins will focus on building geospatial resource evaluation models of mine tailings to advance industry standards for the extraction of critical materials. His motivation is to contribute to the revalorization of mine tailings as a source of secondary minerals to drive greener energy solutions while simultaneously remediating them in the process.
Collins holds a Bachelor's degree in Geological Engineering from the University of Mines and Technology (2017) and a Master’s degree in Mining Engineering from Nazarbayev University (2024). The combination of these degrees has equipped him with valuable experience in geostatistics, geometallurgy and mine planning. During his master’s program, Collins worked as a Research Assistant, focusing primarily on developing geostatistical algorithms to improve the modelling of geospatial variables. His master’s thesis titled ‘An Innovative Truncated Gaussian Collocated Co-simulation Approach for Stochastic Modelling of Geological Domains’ sought to tackle the problems of modelling long-range geological features by incorporating a collocated co-kriging algorithm into truncated Gaussian.
Collins earned his Master’s degree with Honors, and was awarded for being the top graduating student of his class. He was also nominated for the prestigious DANQ SKYWALK of FAME for the 2024/2025 academic year, recognizing his academic and research excellence. This nomination is a testament to his efforts in advancing research aimed at solving geoscience and mining-related problems.
After earning his Master’s degree Collins worked as a Graduate Researcher under Dr. Nasser Madani, where his focus was directed to building geospatial models of mine tailings for revalorization and environmental remediation purposes. Collins has also attended various conferences and delivered oral presentations at conferences including the IAMG 2023 and PDAC 2025.
Collins will be part of the MIWATCH group, funded by the ITTC CRFF and supervised by Anita Parbhakar-Fox (SMI), Rosie Blannin (SMI), Mark Noppe (SMI/JKTech), EJ Holden (UWA) and industry supervisors Ilnur Minniakhmetov (BHP) and Kerry Turnock (BHP).