Research Interests: Mining Risk: Especially, quantifying conditions and design phases where mining projects are exposed to social, environmental, safety and governmental risk, and developing methods to design mines and mining processes to reduce these risks and increase value for company and community stakeholders.Mine Permitting: Employing environmental and social-science tools to effectively incorporate stakeholder feedback and multi-agency interests into Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) as part of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process.Project Valuation: Especially using options modeling methods and stochastic project simulations to value a property and determine project hurdle rates given investors' risk tolerance.

Managing interdisciplinary, multi-level teams of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and undergraduates in the environmental engineering, civil engineering and social science disciplines. I promote the Humanitarian Engineering Program to companies in the oil and gas and mining industries with the goal of bringing company-supported research and design projects into the program. Humanitarian Engineering (HE) program has the mission to “teach students how engineering can be used in co-creating just and sustainable solutions for communities [by educating] engineers to work in complex techno-socio-natural contexts made of multiple institutions, interactions, different kinds of engineering and non-engineering actors, all of which shape and constrain what is technically possible.”

Recent Projects:Performed audits at two mine sites in the Kivu Regions of the D.R. Congo for compliance with the Certified Trading Chains (CTC) standards. The first location was a collection of cassiterite deposits exploited by two artisanal and small-scale mining cooperatives. The second property was a collection of coltan deposits exploited jointly by an artisanal and small-scale mining cooperative and a small mining company.Represented Gold Fields Ghana at a peer learning meeting organized by the World Gold Council to facilitate greater understanding of artisanal and small-scale mining risks to the large-scale gold mining sector.