Sophia Marmara is the Metallurgy Lead at Northern Star Resources, based at the company’s head office in Perth, Western Australia. Originally from North Queensland, she holds a Bachelor in Chemical Engineering from James Cook University. In her current role she provides technical oversight and strategic guidance across Northern Star’s portfolio of gold operations in Australia and Alaska. Her work spans the full spectrum of processing governance, including metallurgical best practice, hazardous chemical compliance, business-improvement initiatives, and processing efficiency opportunities, demanding a balance in technical depth and cross-site collaboration. Sophia’s career has included a variety of operational and technical roles, giving her a practical understanding of plant operations and the challenges of driving consistency while pursuing continuous improvement across multiple jurisdictions. She is particularly interested in initiatives that integrate sound metallurgical practice with business improvement and sustainability outcomes. She brings both a broad operational perspective and a commitment to strengthening gold-processing performance.

Samuel Oliver is a technical consultant from MathWorks who has dedicated the last 16 years to working closely with customers from the finance, mining, energy, defence, and automotive industries to help execute their most important projects delivering millions of dollars of value. Solutions leverage his broad range of skills in AI, statistics, optimisation, control systems, physical system modelling, big data, large-scale computing, the cloud, and embedded systems. Prior to joining MathWorks, Sam worked in the automotive industry developing advanced dynamic safety-critical control systems. He received an M.Eng.Sc. in mechatronics, a B.Eng. in mechanical and manufacturing engineering, and a B.Sc. in computer science from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Rodolfo Espinosa-Gomez: has over 40 years’ experience in the minerals industry in academic, technical and production roles. He is expert in development and optimization of operations in precious metals, complex base metals, and metal accounting. Rodolfo applies sound mineral processing techniques (mineral characterisation, size by size and liberation, water and surface chemistry), process analysis information, technology and team work to develop solutions. In the last ten years, Rodolfo has spent a great part of his time developing metal accounting projects in Australia and overseas operations / Mining Companies. Rodolfo has mentored young metallurgists by establishing sound standards for circuit evaluation and optimisation, developing their analytical approach, implementing specialist training programs and developing effective working cultures

Kylie Blackwell is the Strategic Program Lead for the Gold Technology Group based at the WA School of Mines in Kalgoorlie. Kylie has worked in production, project and research roles in a range of commodities. Linking plant performance with theory to explain anomalies and extract the most from challenging ores has been a core component of her career. Kylie is completing a PhD at WASM investigating the flotation performance of precious metal tellurides.