Founder and President of the Mineral Footprint Network
Sustainability professional with diverse experience spanning mine engineering, pit operations, reclamation, environmental management, stakeholder engagement and conservation. A “beyond the box thinker” and change agent passionate about fostering collaborative relationships between industry, agencies, communities and conservation interests.
Over the past 24 years, she has served in operations, engineering and management roles across the coal, iron ore, base metals and industrial minerals sectors. Consulting projects have included gold, silver, lead-zinc, titanium, copper, molybdenum, lithium, vanadium, talc and iron ore throughout the Americas, Europe, Russia and Africa. Her expertise includes mine design, enterprise optimization, GIS analysis, and integrated mine and reclamation planning.
As a research assistant for Natural Resources Canada, she participated in a social and environmental performance review of the Canadian Mining Industry, focusing on greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, and legacy mine lands. Working closely with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, her masters thesis explored opportunities for bighorn sheep conservation and adaptive biodiversity management within mine-influenced landscapes. She is currently working on her PhD in operations research at the Colorado School of Mines where she will build upon this work and other best practices in conservation decision science. More specifically, she will be investigating the integration of ecological considerations into the mine optimization workflow to improve biodiversity outcomes over the life of a mine project – from early exploration to post-closure.
She is a Councilor-at-Large with the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America and serves on the organization’s Abandoned Mine Lands Committee. She is also a member of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, the Women’s Mining Coalition, the Society for Ecological Restoration, and the American Society of Reclamation Science.
For nearly two decades she has served with nonprofits focused on youth development in the outdoors, citizen science, environmental education, wildlife conservation and habitat restoration. She is a member of the California Native Plant Society, the Society for the Conservation of Bighorn Sheep, the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society, and serves on the boards of the Southern California Mountains Foundation and the Friends of the Tonto National Forest. She is a certified California Naturalist and Arizona Master Naturalist.