Greetings Mining and Mineral Processing alumni!
For those of you who don’t know, I was appointed as the Chair of Mining Engineering starting August 1, 2023, as our new department head, Luis Ayala, and acting head, Russ Johns, wanted to reorganize. More meetings and a few new responsibilities, including being the caretaker of our scholarship and operational endowments. We are truly grateful to those who, over the many decades of mining and mineral processing at Penn State, have set up endowments to provide some funding to our students to reduce their costs and to allow them to travel to conferences and other events.
With low enrollment, we can really support our students with rather significant scholarships, both need-based and for outstanding academics. But, with low enrollment, we also find the faculty needing to teach courses that have higher student credit hours—the new Penn State budget model. So, we need you to recruit! Talk about mining/mineral processing engineering as a career to your family, your neighbors, your high school classmates at your reunions (yes, this works). We need more students, so the mining industry has more skilled engineers. When we can talk to a potential student, we usually get them to commit.
For outreach, we hosted our first MINING PA conference in August. Some statistics: 157 overall attendees, twelve exhibitors, fourteen sponsors, nine different states, thirty-five from academia, one consultant, twenty-eight from government, nintey-two from Industry, one from media. Our graduate students starred with their poster presentations. We plan to do this biennially. In November, we hosted the PA Drilling and Blasting Conference.
Some other good news: Mohammad Rezaee was promoted to associate professor, and Shimin Lui was promoted to professor this summer. Shimin and his student, Guijie Sang, received the prestigious SPE Rossiter Raymond Award for his paper on Carbonate Caprock-Brine-CO2 Interaction. Professor Emeritus Raj Ramani was accepted into Penn State’s Emeritus Academy—address him as ‘Academy Professor’ when we see him. He’s assisting on a new NIOSH project with Ashish, Sekhar, Bill Groves (ENVSE) and me.
This spring, look for us at the SME MINEXCHANGE in Phoenix. And keep a look out for our first Mining Summer Camp. We’ll be asking for recommendations for students to attend, for your sponsorship of these students, potential activities, and more. We’re trying to pull out all the stops for recruiting!
Barbara Arnold, ’82, ‘85g, ‘89g
Program Chair and Professor of Practice, Mining Engineering