IOM3 Award to MEI Rising Star Anita Parbhakar-Fox

Early last year we identified Dr. Anita Parbhakar-Fox, of the University of Tasmania (UTAS), as a "Rising Star", and since then she has certainly justified our confidence. Due to her diligence as a reviewer she was recently appointed as an Assistant Editor for Minerals Engineering, and this month she has been named as one of the recipients of this year's IOM3 Awards.

Science communication has evolved dramatically over the last decade with the introduction of a whole host of websites providing digestible snapshots of research studies and their key-findings to a much greater audience. When the topic of research involves a range of stakeholders, using these platforms can be particularly advantageous, as Anita found. In recent years, Anita’s research focus has moved beyond characterising mine waste during early life-of-mine phases to looking at historical and legacy mine wastes and exploring innovative methods for their rehabilitation.

Anita with Prof. Barrie Johnson
at an IOM3 conference in Cambridge in 2015

Having attended several European conferences which thematically revolved around sustainable mining, Anita became interested in how the sustainable development goals could be applied to the geoenvironmental research being conducted at the Centre for Ore Deposit and Earth Sciences (CODES) through the Transforming the Mining Value Chain Hub at UTAS. She wrote an article in The Conversation on how we can recover ‘treasure from trash’ which led to her authoring several spin-off articles in other magazines and websites. One was Materials World, the magazine of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3). The article entitled ‘waste is a design flaw’ spoke of how mine waste materials should be geometallurgically characterised, particularly to find critical metals, to support our manufacturing needs as more major companies seek to develop greener technologies. Case study examples from Australia and Europe were provided from several research projects conducted at CODES. This article was nominated by the editor for the IOM3's Materials World Medal which Anita was jointly awarded. The medal will be presented in London later in the year.

Congratulations Anita, and keep up the good work.