Heap Leach Innovation Initiative

From Waste to Resources: The Future of Critical Materials

Professor Xinbo Yang’s research centers on extractive metallurgy, with a focus on developing sustainable technologies for the recovery of critical resources. Her group works on innovative processes and functional materials to extract rare earth elements, battery metals, and other critical resources from waste and recycled products such as spent batteries and electronic waste.

Sustainable Tailings Management: From Water Recovery to Safe Storage

The Tailings Laboratory focuses on developing sustainable and practical solutions for tailings management through innovation in dewatering, backfilling, and deposition.

Mining Safety Enhancement with Generative AI

By applying natural language processing techniques like classification, summarization, and recommendation generation to mine safety narratives, this work aims to demonstrate the potential of AI to help identify risks, predict incidents, and enable targeted interventions.