Update from Neville

Welcome to the first internal e-newsletter of 2019.

It’s been a big start to the year for the Institute and I’m delighted to tell you that the first paper from the Complex Orebodies project has just been published in the Cleaner Production Journal. We are currently working on a number of media angles around the paper and you will see coverage of it in the coming days, please remember to share on your social media platforms and help get the message of our work out to as wide an audience as possible!

My congratulations to Rick, Eleonore, Deanna, John and Glenn for all their work on this first paper.

To staffing news and there have been a number of changes in the past few weeks – firstly we said goodbye to Grant Ballantyne, Ryan Breacy and Ben Bonfils who have done some incredible work with us over the years and we wish them luck in their new roles. We welcomed Paul Gow, Anita Parbhakar-Fox and Nathan Fox to BRC, Liza Forbes and Gordon Forbes to JKMRC, and Janet Reark, Joni Parmenter and Anthony Kung to CSRM– we are delighted to have them all on board and are very excited about our future research work.

Congratulations go to Marcin on his recent wedding and I wish him and Mary a very happy future together.

Finally I’d like to welcome Connor Pound, who started with SMI this week as Communication and Engagement officer. Connor joins us from New Hope Mining.

He has certainly picked a busy week to start with the first Advisory Board Meeting of 2019 on this Thursday 7 March, thankfully Anita Whybrow has returned from her secondment at the DVCA’s office and I’m delighted to be working with her again.

The latest QS rankings were released last week and UQ was ranked 5^th in the world for mineral and mining engineering – this is an increase from last year and testament to the great teaching and research work that is happening, not only at SMI, but in the discipline more widely across the University. I’d like to thank you all for your continuing work and look forward to another successful year in 2019.

On a final note, you will see in the e-newsletter that the new intranet has gone live. My thanks to Siobhan Remy who has worked very hard on building this new internal platform for SMI, now we need your input to make it effective. In the interest of launching the site with new functionality, not all of the content has yet been updated. Please review pages relevant to your area and contact Siobhan or Gill with any content updates you require. The old intranet will remain active while we transition content to the new site.