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A University of Nevada, Reno, mining student is the first woman and first student west of the Mississippi to win the national Senior Design Project Competition Award.
Cindy Moore of Reno was chosen for the award sponsored by the Pittsburgh Coal Mining Institute of America and the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration.
The competition is open to all accredited mining engineering departments in the country. Each department can submit their best senior design project for the $1,000 award. At the Mackay School of Mines, seniors are required to do a full mine feasibility study as their senior design project. Students take a prospective mineral resource in the ground and figure out if it is profitable to develop it into a mine that provides a needed raw material.
Moore's adviser and mining engineering professor, Pierre Mousset-Jones, said, "I was told this was the easiest year for the judges. The first vote was unanimous for Cindy."
Moore, who graduated from the Mackay School of Mines last May, is working for Mine Development Associates in Reno. She has worked in mining for 17 years and said she came back to school to "get a degree that would allow me to go beyond what I was doing."
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Dr. Jaak Daemen (left), chair of the Mining Engineering Department, presents the award to Cindy Moore along with Project superviser, Dr. Pierre Mousset-Jones (right), professor in the Mining Engineering Department.
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Cindy Moore, winner of the National Senior Design Project Competition Award, and Geraint Harris, winner of the top master thesis for programs that do not offer a Ph.D.
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"My career has become somewhat stagnated. I needed the mining engineering degree to advance my career," Moore said.
At Mine Development Associates, Moore is a consultant who helps companies design mines. When the Senior Design Award was presented in October, Moore was in Canada doing the job she loves.
"Mining is a different world," she said. "It's a very exciting career. Just the enormity of a mine site is breathtaking, the size of the operation is immense and it's a fast-paced business."
It's also a field wide open to women. "When I started 17 years ago, I was the first woman in the mining department working at U.S. Steel Corp. in Atlantic City, Wyoming," Moore said. "In 1986, I was one of two women surveyors hired by Round Mountain Gold in Nevada, the first time they had women working in surveying. And there still aren't a lot women in mining today."
Said Jaak Daemen, chair of the university's mining engineering department: "Cindy exemplifies what women in mining engineering can achieve and will achieve in the future."
Another mining student, Geraint Harris, has written the university's top master thesis for those programs that do not offer a Ph.D. His thesis on tracking blast movements in surface mines is a finalist in the contest for best master thesis among western region universities.
Harris earned his undergraduate degree from England's University of Nottingham. After graduating from Nevada in May, he is now a mine engineer at Molycorp's Questa, NM, molybdenum mine.
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