Queen’s University Plans Next Mining Course For Oct. 25-26

Ryan Matthiesen, a senior associate at Macquarie Capital Advisors in Toronto, had worked on the finance side of the mining sector for more than five years.

His finance skills were all cutting-edge — but his understanding of geology and the finer points of mineral processing needed some fine-tuning.

So, like many other bankers on Bay Street, he enrolled in an executive course on mining and exploration run by the Department of Mining Engineering at Queen’s University.

The intensive two-day seminar designed for professionals in the investment industry covered everything from the technical aspects of orebody formation to resources and reserves, open-pit and underground mining techniques, mining costs and productivity measurements, and extractive metallurgy and mineral processing.

“I should have taken the course earlier,” Matthiesen says. “It was a great first step to understanding more about geology and mineral processing from the perspective of a geologist or mining engineer.”

“A lot of investors in natural resources are fairly well educated about the business — it’s just the technical stuff and the jargon that they may be missing and perhaps how to put it all together in context and that’s what we’re trying to do,” explains Dave Love, one of the course’s three instructors. Love, a geologist and consultant in geochemistry in mineral exploration and ore deposit geology, got his degree from Queen’s and is an adjunct professor there in the department of geological sciences.

Instructor George McIsaac, a mining engineer who consults on strategic planning and economic evaluation, to producing mines and exploration companies, is an adjunct professor at Queen’s in the department of mining engineering. He spent eight years in Chile as a senior project engineer, chief engineer, and superintendent of technical services for Barrick Gold before returning to Canada to do his PhD at Queen’s. He currently resides in Chile.

The course’s third lecturer is Boyd Davis, a chemical-process metallurgist and president of Kingston Process Metallurgy Inc., a company he co-founded in 2002 that performs bench-scale process development work for clients around the world. Since his company deals with a wide variety of metals and processes, Davis is well placed to provide the section on processing. Like McIsaac, Davis is also an adjunct professor in Queen’s department of mining. Davis completed his post-doctoral degree in chemical metallurgy and has been consulting since 1997.

The next course will be held in Toronto on Oct. 25-26. The course has been granted accreditation from the Investment Dealers Association.

For more information on the upcoming course scheduled at

St. Andrew’s Club and Conference Centre in Toronto, contact Kate Cowperthwaite at 613-533-2230 or at kate.cowperthwaite@mine.queensu.ca.