In my role as Investment and Trade Director, I am supporting the Commissioner to establish meaningful relationships between the United States and Western Australia across industry, academia, and innovative technology developers, including startups.My focus is on the Energy, Critical Minerals, Defence and Space sectors, with a particular interest in energy transition, industrial decarbonisation (CCUS, clean fuels), critical minerals processing technology and the convergence of defence space and mining technologies and operating concepts (robotics, autonomy, remote operations).

“We started First Mode to solve meaningful and difficult problems,” said Chris Voorhees, president and CEO of First Mode. “Climate change and energy security are the paramount challenges of our time, and I am so proud this will be First Mode’s focus as we enter this next phase of growth. Now is the right time, and this is the right team, to build the barely possible for this extraordinary set of problems.”In addition to developing clean energy powerplants to replace diesel engines in 300-ton capacity haul trucks, First Mode will provide critical mine site infrastructure for hydrogen refueling, battery recharging, and hydrogen production.“Our vision is to develop turnkey decarbonization strategies across heavy industries like rail, mining, and maritime, providing the same level of service that operators are used to today,” said Rhae Adams, chief operating officer of First Mode. “While we are starting today with the retrofit of existing customer vehicles, we look forward to working with a wide range of OEM platform makes and models, including new vehicles.”

I'm working with Core Innovation Hub to establish foundation partners and users of 'The Precinct' - engaging with industry and technology startups, scale-ups, established players and facilitators (accelerators, vc's etc) to get the most out of the facility.Our focus is on early adopters over the next 12 to 24 months, who will have the chance to help us 'lean by doing', whilst the $$M permanent world class facilities are being built by DevelopmentWA.www developmentwa.com.au/aarp/The Australian Automation & Robotics Precinct will be a global recognised Common User Facility for the autonomy and robotics - not limited to any one industry. The Precinct will leverage Western Australia’s strengths in the energy and resources sector, cementing our role as a global leader in advanced capabilities in autonomy, remote operations, and robotic technologies, collaborating across sectors such as renewables, defence, agriculture, logistics, construction, and advancedmanufacturing.

We're saving lives on the frontline by putting sensors in harm's way, not people. Mechanics who work on the frontline maintaining heavy earthmoving equipment do some of the hardest and most dangerous work in the entire mining industry. Maintainers make up over 30% of our 'on the tools' workforce - a number which continues to grow.Dash Tools is a modern internet of things based platform, which puts sensors in harm's way, not people. Dash eliminates live work, which is some of the most risky work done by Maintainers at mines around the world.As co-creator and Product Manager for Dash, I've built and now lead a talented team of Maintainers, Hardware, Software and Cloud engineers to scale Dash across BHP's global operations and beyond. In this role I am the servant leader to my team - clearing the way to make sure they can do their best work, and that their best work is directed at the businesses most important problems & opportunities. BHP don't do safety for competitive advantage, so together with our peers and world leading HME OEMs we are working to make Dash Tools available across the entire mining industry. Working with a fantastic cross-functional team, we've developed a tool to use the rich data that comes from BHPs' proprietary sensor gateway, to make maintenance safer and more efficient. This is done by giving our maintainers live equipment diagnostics via a tablet or smartphone. It keeps them away from running equipment which is dangerous, and takes any guess work out of maintenance.The patented Dash solution leverages mesh networking, edge compute and onboard sensor hardware coupled with Azure IoT and other Azure Cloud services to create a platform to leverage data from across BHP's mining equipment fleet.Dash Tools has achieved global acclaim inside BHP through receiving the 2020 Safety Excellence Award as a part of BHP's global HSEC Awards and also received Australian Mining's IIOT Excellence in IIOT Application award for 2020 and many others.

In this role I was accountable for developing the Digital Strategy for BHP's newest and largest open pit mine, the South Flank Iron Ore Mine in the Pilbara Western Australia. This role requires a solid understanding of both the business value drivers and technology strategy, to identify and deliver high value opportunities and solve critical challenges with proven and emerging technologies, to deliver safety and productivity today and long into the future.Given the size and scale of the investment ($4.6 billion over 3 years), this high-profile role requires collaboration with high level management across the BHP organisation and our project delivery partners, as well as motivating and influencing technical resources to actively contribute to delivering value with technology across our operation.

BHP embarked on the Autonomous Haulage Australia program in mid 2017. Working as a part of the Program's leadership team, I worked with a cross-functional team of technology, engineering and operations specialist to establish the Concept of Operations for autonomy for the program.This was an exciting and challenging role, which involved building a cross-functional team of technical experts and collaborating with them to solve some of the unique challenges which face developing and introducing autonomous haulage operations to some of the largest mining operations in the world.

The Strategy & Innovation team was a part of the global Technology function or BHP Billiton. Working in close collaboration with our peers in Technology and Operational leaders, 'S&I' establishes the technology strategy for BHP, and leads the development and acceleration of early phase digital and operational technology to drive long term shareholder value.In my role within Strategy & Innovation, I worked closely with the Vice President of 'S&I' and his peers on BHP's Technology Leadership team to establish the first iteration of BHP's operation-focussed global technology strategy. This required a high degree of leadership without direct authority given the disperse nature of the global leadership team.In addition to the strategy role, I established the Development Services team who's goal was to accelerate technology development through providing practical, analytical and problem solving skills and capability to our development teams, and leading the development of innovative approaches to technology development leveraging agile principles and practices such as Lean Startup thinking. This team led BHP's effort to establish our first Innovation Centre mine in the Pilbara Western Australia.

Responsible for leading the long term planning, budgeting and performance management of the Technology, Geoscience, Projects and Engineering team, and supporting the Head-of function with transformation initiatives and special projects.

As a member of the Group Project Management function, I am accountable for the development of the governance model for major capital projects for BHP Billiton. This role worked closely with BHP's global portfolio and capital management team based in Melbourne to establish our Capital Allocation Framework, which enabled me to collaborate with senior BHP Billiton Leaders who are charged with developing BHP's global strategy and accountable for investment decisions major capital investments (>US$250M).

Accountable for the development and delivery of Selection and Definition phase studies (Pre-Feasibility and Feasibility) for Major Capital projects (>US$250M BHPB Share) for BHP Billiton Iron Ore.

BHP Billiton Owners Team representative for non-process infrastructure on Rapid Growth Project 5 - Mines, managing scope, schedule and budget for >US$100M in scope.

Development of the growth approvals delivery framework and management process for all heritage, environment and land tenure statutory approvals across the mine, rail, port and power capital projects.

I took a 'sabatical' from the world's largest miner, to the world's largest technology company - Microsoft. During my time at Microsoft, I had the unique opportunity to work with and learn from world leading technologists across IoT, Modern Work, Artificial Intelligence, and Cloud Services - and with Microsoft customers across sectors as diverse as retail, food production, agriculture, energy and beyond.Diversity is the mother of innovation, and this experience certainly built my exposure to a diverse range of industries, and applied innovation.

Management Consulting role in the Strategy and Operations team at Deloitte. Deloitte provided an excellent grounding for me, including developing skills in structure problem solving, analytical thinking, influencing and senior executive communications.During my time at Deloitte, I worked with a large scale electricity utilities provider on a case which required strong change management expertise and ability to influence across the organisation.

Manager of an IT reseller in Western Australia, primarily focussed on the pre-owned personal computer market.