Mining research leadership team formed.

Leadership from the major mining research consortiums and related academic departments like earth sciences and engineering at Laurentian University are joining together in an effort to co-ordinate research and make the Sudbury mining centre for excellence a reality, says the chair of one of the research groups.

"I'm not interested in seeing this in five years, I want to see it happen tomorrow," says Peter Kaiser, president of the Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation, and Applied Research Corp. (MIRARCO), a research institute at Laurentian, in reference to the mining centre for excellence.

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The directors and chairs of major institutes like MIRARCO, the Laurentian University Mining Automation Laboratory (LUMAL) and the Mineral Exploration Research Centre (MERC) have decided to get together and form a "leadership team" and have already selected a board of directors to oversee the team's progress over time.

Kaiser himself is the current rotating chair of the leadership team.

Kaiser says that the driving force behind the formation of the leadership team was the feeling many of the researchers had that Laurentian University was not active enough in co-ordinating mining research towards the goal of a centre for excellence in Sudbury. He also adds that the research institutes themselves also share some of the blame.

"Everyone is interested in their own little hobby horses and they are not seeing the big picture," he says.

The idea also arrives out of a need, Kaiser maintains, to organize the academic research internally before they can be an active lobbying force to government and industry players in getting the centre in Sudbury.

Before they can lobby government, however, the different mining research groups and academic departments need to build relationships with one another, say some members of the team. "The value of this will be even greater than the sum of the individual components," says Paul Dunn, the director of the Centre for Mining Technology, a MIRARCO affiliate.

"The different research together can get a bigger critical mass and avoid duplication of their research," Dunn notes.

Looking at all the research the different groups do, such as mining robotics, virtual reality, environmental issues underground and underground exploration, the interests seem disconnected and disparate, he says.

www.mirarco.org

BY JOSEPH QUESNEL 

Northern Ontario Business