Vanessa Salinas is a Master’s student in the Mineral Engineering department. Her interest in mining was raised when she was very young because she was born in a mining town; in Montelibano, Colombia. In high school, she always got good grades. She loved math, which awakened her interest in engineering and helped her get into one of the best schools in her country, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. There, she earned her BS in Mining and Metallurgical Engineering. After that, she mainly worked on artisanal and small-scale gold mining projects for around three years.
During her undergraduate studies, she was very involved in the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME) and the SME student chapter of her school. That motivated her to pursue higher education and come to the US to study a Master’s program.
She started her master’s in the fall of 2020, initially virtual due to COVID-19, and graduated last fall. During her time in NMT, she worked on several projects funded by NIOSH and OSHA related to occupational health and safety. Her main research was about respirable coal mine dust (RCMD) characteristics and toxicity. She investigated RCMD characteristics and toxicity based on different factors: geographic location, particle size, and source of the dust. In her findings, no trends indicated that the geographic location influenced RCMD toxicity. Still, the different dust sources in the mine influenced the toxicity, making the host rock more toxic.
RCMD is a real concern among coal miners in the US. Miners are continuously exposed to these dust particles in workplaces, which may cause severe lung diseases known as Black Lung diseases. These diseases are very hazardous because they are irreversible, have no cure, and may cause death. Only in the U.S., these diseases have taken over 76,000 lives since 1968. The outcomes of her research will help to know RCMD characteristics better, improve current suppression and monitoring systems, develop deposition and toxicity studies, and make mines safer.
Her passion for mining, commitment to her research, and involvement in extracurricular activities made her the winner of several scholarships and awards, including the SME Raja V. and Geetha V. Ramani Thesis Writing Award, the 2nd place in the 2022 SME Graduate Student Poster Competition, two SME WAIMEE scholarships, the SME MPD Division Scholarship, the MMSA-SMEF Presidential scholarship, two SME UCA Young Member Conference Scholarship, the New Mexico Engineering Foundation Scholarship, the SRK Consulting Scholarship, four Pat Miller NMTIC scholarships, and the NMT Gay-Straight Alliance scholarship. Additionally, she presented her research at several conferences and poster presentations, published a journal paper and a conference paper, and is currently working on two more publications.
During the summer of 2022, Vanessa worked for Freeport McMoRan as a mining engineering intern in the Slope Optimization group at the Morenci mine in Arizona. She will start a full-time job there next January.
