Professor Andre van As
Group Leader – Deep Mining Geoscience
The University of Queensland
Andre is an underground mine geotechnical engineer who has spent most of his 30-year career working on caving operations and caving projects. Andre has worked on, or had significant involvement in, more than 10 major caving operations and projects, sits on several cave mining geotechnical review boards, and has published widely on cave mining and caving geomechanics.
In 1997, he and Dr Rob Jeffrey introduced hydraulic fracturing into the cave mining industry as a means of cave induction and rock mass preconditioning at Northparkes Mines. As a result of their work, they were awarded a CSIRO medal.
After 22 years working for Rio Tinto, Andre formed his own consultancy in 2018, focussed on providing technical expertise to the cave mining industry. Most recently, Andre joined the Bryan Research Centre at The University of Queensland as the group lead for deep mining geoscience research.