Teaching the Mining Leaders of Tomorrow with Queen’s University

It’s crucial that the mining leaders of tomorrow not only have the technical skills required to understand their position, but also awareness of issues like community impacts, environmental concerns, the economic relevance of the mining industry, and upcoming changes in data science and technology.

OMS recently had the opportunity to speak with Julian Ortiz, department head of the Robert M. Buchan Department of Mining at Queen’s University, to discuss mining leadership and the many programs Queen’s University offers for new and existing mine industry workers.

Learn more about the Queen’s University mining programs at https://mine.queensu.ca/online/

Transcription:

Ryan Thomson:

Today I have a special guest, thanks for joining. I’ve got Julian Ortiz. He is the Head of the Robert M. Buchan Department of Mining at Queen’s University. So Julian, welcome.

Julian Ortiz:

Well, thank you for having me, Ryan. I’m very happy to be here and to have had your experts train our students. All right, so I’m Julian Ortiz. I’m the Head of the Department of Mining here at Queen’s. I’m a mining engineer by background, I studied back in Chile at University of Chile, I did my PhD at University of Alberta. And I’ve been at Queens for six years and I am now the Head of Department trying to lead and steer a group of academics into the future of mining.

And I think my passion for mining comes from the complexity of this industry. I think it’s an industry that has such an interesting combination of backgrounds that are needed to handle the problems, and you get to work with people with very diverse backgrounds, from geoscientists that look at details of the earth, all the way to processing engineers and managers and lawyers, and all kinds of people that make mining projects to move forward in the end. So I think that’s one of the things I like is the kind of difficulties we face. And I think for this, we need, as you said, great mining leaders that can think a little bit outside the box, that can see all the complexities in terms of how a mining project impacts everything around it. So we need to make things better, and I think we need leaders for that.

Ryan Thomson:

Yeah, I could not agree more. It really is this beautiful conglomeration of people that have to come together, that leadership is so critical and you get a big part of helping to educate the up and coming leaders. So what do you see as key attributes for and coming leaders?

Julian Ortiz:

Well, I think that’s the main challenge of educating people, is trying to keep them open-minded. And in addition to teaching them all the mining content that they need, of course, to understand the technical aspects of mining, I think they need to have awareness about other issues, the impacts on communities, the environmental impacts, the economic relevance of this industry as a whole for many countries.

And on the other hand, all the technology change that we see, we are seeing all these new methods of using data that we have and coming up with predictions and models. And as an academic institution, we need to quickly incorporate these new aspects into the curriculum and we’ve done that by starting to address data science aspects in the curriculum and sustainability and lifecycle analysis and critical metals now as well within what we teach in the four years of the undergraduate program. And also, of course, we emphasize those aspects in the graduate programs, in the research, we do try to address those aspects as key aspects of the mining education.

Ryan Thomson:

Yeah, like you said, it’s a lot and it’s quite complex. So I guess in that, where do you see the role for say, an organization like Queen’s collaborating with mining professionals, and not just the academic side, but the practical operations side?

Julian Ortiz:

Well, I know it’s very frequent for academic institutions to be a bit close and not collaborate too much. I think that doesn’t happen as much with mining departments that are very linked to industry, and I think we all look for strengthening collaboration and bringing kind of real life problems to what we do in our everyday work. On the curriculum, so when we teach, we can actually connect our teaching to actual real life problems that help us get the students more engaged in their learning and get them more connected to what comes after school, the real jobs they’re going to get and the kind of problems they will face.

Ryan Thomson:

It really ties that value proposition.

Julian Ortiz:

Sorry.

Ryan Thomson:

Doesn’t it? That’s okay.

Julian Ortiz:

Yes, it does make the connection with the life of the students after school, right?

Ryan Thomson:

Yeah, right. Okay, so how about, you guys have a couple of things that you do that are quite practical. So outside of the standard degree, your graduate studies, your professional development courses and your certificate in mining technologies, wonder if you could give a plug for those.

Julian Ortiz:

Sure. So we offer professional development courses thinking about, I would say the broader community in a sense. We have a course that looks at mining, a mining system as a whole, looking at all the components from the early exploration all the way to the processing and the impacts to the community. So that gives professionals that may not have a mining background, it gives them an opportunity for actually getting an understanding of the whole mining value chain, the whole mining system, and all the positives and negatives that we have as an industry. And that gives them some awareness of the issues that mining faces. So we have one professional development course in that broader area.

On the other hand, we are also developing professional development courses in areas that are more linked to new technologies that are arising. So data science is one aspect, and there are lots of professionals out there that do work every day and where they need to manage data and build models of processes, understand and analyze operation data that may give them some insight about how the operation is going and whether there is space for improvement. So that data science in mining course is providing the background to start with some basic coding and some basic machine learning methods for analyzing data. And that again, is open to geologists, mining engineers and mineral processors and methodologies that need to handle data. They collect operational data and they want to draw some conclusions from them, so these provide some of those tools.

And we’re also working on a professional development course on an introduction to mineral processing. So this is a good way of, on one hand, updating some of the knowledge that people that work in operating plants may want to review and they may want to have a refresher of basic concepts, but on the other hand, it may be a good tool for training new people that are incoming into this area that may have a chemical background or a process background that’s not exactly mineral processing. So that again, covers a relatively broad spectrum of candidates that may be interested in that professional development course and that go to an audience that’s different than our typical undergraduate students and our graduate students that are more interested in research. This is more of a technical hands-on upgrade or update of those areas.

On the other hand, we have the certificate in mining technologies, which is a very particular program because it’s actually undergraduate courses that are offered in an online delivery mode, a synchronous for people that may have a different engineering or science background. So this gives them an opportunity to actually get into the technical details of different aspects of mining, ventilation, resource estimation design, things like that. And they get to choose a number of courses to get their certificate after completing those courses. They can do it at their own pace so they don’t have to commit to a very large amount of courses in one term, they can do one course per term slowly so that they can balance that with their daily work and their life.

But this is an opportunity for additional training on the side of their day-to-day life, their day-to-day work. And it’s been very valued by the students that have taken the certificate because it really gives them that level of depth that you get at the undergraduate level when you’re doing a bachelor’s program fully online for these kind of students that are working full-time maybe in some shifts and remote area so they can take the time they have and dedicate it to improving their skills and their technical background.

Ryan Thomson:

Fantastic. Yeah, I see there’s a few things that you guys really have going for you in these programs. It’s number one world-class material from excellent educators. Very close behind that is now it’s accessible to people and you don’t need to book four years out of your life, because for some people that’s just not an option. This is a way that you can be working while you’re doing this and at an affordable value proposition as well.

Julian Ortiz:

Yeah.

Ryan Thomson:

Well Julian, thanks so much for this. I’d love to speak to you for hours about mining. There’s so much to learn from you, but your passion is so obvious and that goes a long way.

Julian Ortiz:

Thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you as well and I’m happy we’re working together with OMS on collaborating and doing training for professionals in the mining industry.

Ryan Thomson:

Helping the mining industry be a better place, you bet.

Julian Ortiz:

Yep.

Ryan Thomson:

Yeah, thanks so much.

Julian Ortiz:

You’re welcome.