Olivia Mejías González

Olivia Mejías is a Research Fellow in Critical Minerals and Mine Waste Geoscience at the W. H. Bryan Mining and Geology Research Centre within the Sustainable Minerals Institute and a member of the ARC Training Centre for Critical Resources for the Future. She is also part of the Mine Waste Transformation through Characterisation (MIWATCH) research group. Olivia holds a Masters degree in geometallurgy and has recently submitted her PhD, which focused on indium mobility and transformation in mine waste environments.

A geologist with more than 10 years of combined industry and research experience, Olivia has worked across a range of deposit types and commodities. She has applied geometallurgical frameworks to copper-molybdenum porphyry ores, advanced geochemical studies in cobalt-rich IOCG systems, and most recently characterised indium-bearing mine wastes from copper-tin granite related and copper-gold VMS deposits.

Her research uses multi-scale characterisation approaches to investigate critical minerals in mine waste materials and acid mine drainage. Through this work, she aims to improve understanding of their biogeochemical cycling and to translate these insights into sustainable mineral extraction and geometallurgical practices. This research is supported by experience with a wide range of analytical techniques, including laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), automated mineralogy using Maps Min, MLA and QEMSCAN, LA-ICP-MS, synchrotron based XFM and XAS, atom probe tomography (APT) and geochemical modelling using PHREEQC.

She is a dedicated and collaborative researcher who is passionate about advancing critical minerals science in ores and mine waste materials and about contributing to a more sustainable future.