New technologies are changing the face of global economies. Australia is not immune to this disruption, and diversification from traditional industry bases is essential for future prosperity. The Future Industries Institute (FII) is a major commitment by UniSA to meet this need head on.FII focuses on creating high value, knowledge intensive alternatives underpinned by unique skill bases, infrastructure technology solutions and collaborative research relationships. It brings together the University’s world-class strengths in advanced manufacturing, nanomedicine, minerals and resource engineering and environmental science, and encourages researchers to blur the boundaries and build new relationships between industry and academia.Our approach to solving research challenges with our partners is solution-driven and collaborative from the outset. We work with partners to define a problem,map out possible approaches, set benchmarks and realistic expectations, and create knowledge and new technology.The Minerals and Resources Engineering strand delivers both high-quality basic science and outcome-driven research and development to a resources sector challenged by decreasing exploration success and draw down of quality in existing resources. Working with industry, we strive to enable mineral discovery, improve process performance, reduce energy and water usage and assist in the assessment and introduction of new technological innovations throughout the minerals industry value chain. Expertise in geological materials characterisation and minerals processing is supported by strengths in physical chemistry, physics and extractive metallurgical engineering.

DET CRC Program 3: Targeting has the objective to ensure that drill holes are placed to maximise their success and the knowledge they produce by developing new seismic and geochemical methods for exploration and integrating such into new exploration workflows in drilling, logging and sensing. Our program lies at the geological end of the spectrum of DET CRC activities - defining the characteristics of mineral systems and how we could more effectively explore for them, given the appropriate set of tools. An exciting aspect of this work is in operating and the interface between natural materials and the technologies that we are designing to sample, sense and analyse those materials.

The State of South Australia Chair of Mineral Exploration was established via a grant from the then Department of Primary Industries and Resources, South Australia (PIRSA), now Department of State Developement, through the Plane for Accelerated Exploration. The brief for the chair was to establish an international research hub for exploration geoscience at the University of Adelaide, bringing together resources from academia, government and the minerals industry. My role at the University of Adelaide has involved a range of undergraduate teaching (in minerals geoscience, tectonics and field geoscience), post graduate supervision and research.