Meet the editors

Dr. Andrew Hammond is a Senior Lecturer in Engineering (Geoscience) at the School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University (CQUniversity), Rockhampton Campus, Australia. He is a key foundation academic member of CQUniversity's mining group and a former Discipline Leader in Mining and Geology. Over the past 12 years, he has been involved in the training of undergraduate and postgraduate engineers, many

of whom have gone on to work in the Bowen Basin coalfields or further afield in Australia's other coal, metalliferous, and non-metalliferous resource industries. Dr. Hammond's research interests include sedimentary basins, stratigraphy, hydrogeology of mine spoil heaps and mine catchments, mine rehabilitation, geohazards, and engineering geology. He is a member of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) and the Central Queensland Mine Rehabilitation Group.

Brendan Donnelly has been a lecturer at Central Queensland University (CQUniversity), Australia, for more than 10 years. His key interest areas include engineering education, mining engineering, the hydrogeology of very high spoil piles, the behavior of groundwater on mine sites, and addressing the gap in engineering qualifications at AQF levels 5 and 6. Mr. Donnelly has worked in training and recruitment, managing shotcrete

operations, drill and blast, and ventilation. More recently, he has been involved in the development of the Resource Systems Engineering Degree at CQUniversity. This degree combines mining engineering, mechatronics, and data science to address automation problems facing the mining industry. He is an associate member of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) and the discipline lead for mining and geoscience at CQUniversity. Mr. Donnelly also developed an online training package for the North Mara Gold mine in Tanzania.

Dr. Nanjappa Ashwath has been researching Australian plants for more than 40 years. He has conducted restoration research on uranium, coal, and nickel mines and on landfills, heavy metal contaminated sites and disturbed mangrove habitats. He was also instrumental in promoting phytocapping technology in Australia for landfill remediation. Dr. Ashwath teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in environmental science and

has supervised more than thirty-five postgraduate students. His passion for research has won him a "Rotary International University Fellowship" and a "Vice Chancellor's Award for Progress in Research." He has published extensively and serves on the editorial boards of about ten journals. He actively participates in science promotion activities and collaborates with researchers at Texas A&M University, USA, Amrita University, India, and Queensland.
