Professor Peter Dowd

Mining Engineering at the University of Adelaide

Dowd is Professor of Mining Engineering at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Prior to his current appointment, he worked at universities in Canada and the UK. He was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Adelaide 2004-12. When he moved to Adelaide in 2004, he established the Mining Engineering degree programme at the University. He is currently Director of the Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Integrated Operations for Complex Resources at the University of Adelaide. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.  His research areas are in mathematical geosciences applied to natural resources and to environmental and climate variables. More recently, in collaboration with European colleagues, he has published widely in hydrology, groundwater, climatography, fractal analysis of karst landscapes, closed depressions on the surfaces of the moon and Mars, and fractal analysis of the Martian landscape. He was awarded the 2016 Krumbein Medal by the International Association for the Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) for his contributions to geostatistics and mathematical geosciences. He was President of the IAMG for the period 2020-2024 and is currently Past-President of the IAMG for 2024-2028.

Professor Peter Dowd's Keynote title and synopsis:

Integrated Operations for Complex Resources

This presentation covers the work conducted in the Australia Research Council (ARC) Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Integrated Operations for Complex Resources. 

The Training Centre was awarded by the ARC in 2020 with funding of $3.75 million. A further $8.05 million in cash and in-kind contributions were provided by 15 industry partners. The ARC award included funding for 16 PhD scholars and three Post-Doctoral Research positions. The Training Centre began in late 2020 and was hampered in appointing PhD scholars by the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the delay in making these appointments, the ARC extended the initial four-year period to six years and it will finish at the end of August 2026.

The Training Centre comprises the University of Adelaide, the University of South Australia and, to a lesser extent, Curtin University. The Governance of the Training Centre comprises an Execitive Management Committee, an Advisory Committee, and a Science Advisory Committee. The latter has an international membership.

Interdisciplinarity is a fundamental component of the Training Centre. Mining operations are complex and integrated systems. Optimising one component of an integrated system does not optimise the system. The focus of the Training Centre is inter-disciplinary projects for integrated systems. 

The presentation will cover a brief summary of the structure and operation of the Training Centre together with the commercialisation process for each of the 16 PhD projects and the estimated Translation Readiness Level (TRL) and the Commercialisation Readiness Level (CRL) on completion of each project.