Current students
Sebastian Avalos
Ph.D. student (2018-2021 | Completed)
Post Doctoral Fellow (2021-2022 | Completed)
Research Associate (2023 | Part time)
Sebastian is a Mining Engineer (2013) and M.Sc. in Mining (2015) from Universidad de Chile (Chile). He completed his Ph.D. and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Queen’s University. He is currently the Founder and Principal at Advanced Predictive Modeling Technology (APMT) and is working to support research and development and to mentor the graduate students within the group.
Seyda Nur Yildirim
M.A.Sc. student (2023 | Full time)
Seyda has a B.Sc. in Geological Engineering (2017) from Hacettepe University (Ankara,Turkey). She joined the group in January 2023. She is working towards automating geological model construction with geostatistical methods.
Soheil Kheirparast
M.A.Sc. student (2022 | Full time)
Soheil holds a B.Sc. in mining engineering (2020) from Tehran Polytechnic (Iran). He started his M.A.Sc. degree in May 2022, and is working on the stochastic optimization of sublevel stope sequencing under grade uncertainty using Genetic Algorithms (Co-supervised with Dr. Asli Sari). He has also worked on benchmarking different estimation/simulation methods and mine planning techniques using a synthetic high-resolution block model.
Noble Potakey
M.A.Sc. student (2021 | Full time)
Noble Potakey is a Geological Engineer (2016) from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He joined the group in January 2021. Noble will be working on ore reserve analysis and geostatistics.
Alvaro Mariño
M.A.Sc. student (2021 | Part time)
Alvaro is a Geologist (2006) from EAFIT (Medellin, Colombia). He works in developing geological models and is involved in resource estimation and reporting. He joined the group in September 2021.
Paula Larrondo
Ph.D. student (2020 | Full time)
Paula is a Geologist and M.Sc. from Universidad de Chile (Chile) and an M.Sc. in Mining Engineering (Geostatistics), from University of Alberta (Canada). She worked 15 years as a geostatistician in various international consulting companies. In the past seven years, Paula taught geology and geostatistics at Universidad Mayor (Chile). She is working towards a neural network model to provide automated feedback to open-ended student work in the context of complex problem-solving in Engineering Education (Co-supervised with Dr. Brian Frank from the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering).
David Casson
Ph.D. student (2018 | Part time)
David is a Physics Engineer (2007) from Queen’s University and has completed a M.Sc. in Metals and Energy Finance (2008) from Imperial College London, as well as an M. Eng. in Mining Engineering at Queen’s (2015). He joined the group in September 2018. He is working towards an approach to simulate parametrized random function families based on isofactorial families.
Former students
Tong Li
Visiting Ph.D. student (2022-2023 | Completed)
Tong has a B.Sc. (2017) degree in Exploration Engineering of Mineral Resources and completed his Ph.D. program in China University of Geosciences (Wuhan). He joined the group from May 2022 to May 2023. He worked on the application of geological-knowledge-based deep learning algorithms in mineral prospectivity mapping.
Alvaro Riquelme
Ph.D. student (2018-2022 | Completed)
Alvaro is a Mining Engineer (2016) from Universidad de Chile (Chile). He completed his Ph.D. in September 2022 “Multivariate simulation using a locally varying coregionalization model “. He joined the group in September 2018.
Kasimcan Koruk
M.A.Sc. student (2020-2022 | Completed)
Kasimcan Koruk is a Geological Engineer. He has B.Sc. (2016) and M.Sc. (2019) degrees in Geological Engineering, from Middle East Technical University in Turkey. He joined the group in September 2020. He completed his M.A.Sc. in August 2022 “Definition of geological domains with an ensemble implementation of Support Vector Classification“.
Mehmet Altinpinar
M.A.Sc. student (2019-2021 | Completed)
Mehmet is a Mining Engineer (2004) from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, where he also completed a M.Sc. in Mining Engineering. He completed his M.A.Sc. in October 2021 “Synthetic High Resolution Block Model for Benchmarking Mining Technologies“. He joined the group in September 2019.
Ilkay Cevik
M.A.Sc. student (2018-2020 | Completed)
Ilkay has a B.Sc. in Geological Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He completed his M.A.Sc. in September 2020 “Machine Learning Enhancements for Knowledge Discovery in Mineral Exploration and Improved Mineral Resource Classification”. He joined the group in September 2018. For further information about Ilkay, click Resume Ilkay.
Mauricio Garrido
Visiting Ph.D. student (2020 | Completed)
Mauricio is completing a Ph.D. in Geology at Universidad de Chile under the supervision of Prof. Brian Townley. He visited our research group to work on integrated geometallurgical modeling from March to May 2020.
Fouad Faraj
Summer Graduate Researcher (2020 | Completed)
Fouad is a Geological Engineer from Queen’s University (Canada) where he is currently pursuing his master’s degree. He worked during the summer 2020 on “An unsupervised classification workflow for defining geological domains using multivariate geostatistical data“.
Joshua (Eddie) Kofman
M.A.Sc. student (Part time | on leave)
Eddie is a Mining Engineer (2016) from Queen’s University (Canada). He is working on assessing failures in NI 43-101 reporting of mining projects. He joined the group in September 2017. He became part-time in Aug 2018.
William Midkiff
M.A.Sc. student (2017 | on leave)
Will is a Mining Engineer (2017) from Queen’s University (Canada). His research is about “Predictive Modeling of Rock Failure and Damage using Seismic Wave Velocities”. He joined the group in September 2017.
Maria Bolgkoranou
M.A.Sc. student (2017-2019 | Completed)
Maria is a Mining Engineer (2015) and M.Eng. in Mining (2015) from the Technical University of Crete (Greece). She also holds a M.Sc. in Exploration and Exploitation of Hydrocarbons (2017) from a Consortium of four Hellenic Universities: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Kapodistrian University of Athens, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and Democritus University of Thrace. She completed her M.A.Sc. : “Multivariate geostatistical simulation of compositional data using principal component analysis”. She joined the group in September 2017.
Carlos Moraga
Visiting Ph.D. student (2019 | Completed)
Carlos is doing his Ph.D. in Mining Engineering at Universidad de Chile, under the supervision of Prof. Willy Kracht. He visited our group from September 2019 to January 2020.
He is working on an integrated model to account for residence time distribution in processing stages to characterize blending for geometallurgical characterization.
Amirshahriar Rostami
M.Eng. student (2018 | Completed)
Amir completed his M. Eng. in April 2018. His final project was: “Effect of variogram modeling decisions in economic performance of mining projects”.
Shikhar Sarpal
M.Eng. student (2018 | Completed)
Shikhar completed his M. Eng. in April 2018. His final project was: “Economic viability study of ground support on increasing the slopes of an open pit”.
Felipe Santibañez
Visiting Ph.D. student (2017 | Completed)
Felipe completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Universidad de Chile, under the supervision of Prof. Jorge Silva, in 2020. He visited our group from Nov 2016 to January 2017. He developed a grade control approach using an adaptive sampling strategy based on conditional entropy.