Juan L. Yarmuch is an expert in mine planning, he has published several journal articles and invention patents in the field. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne (UoM) in mine planning optimisation. He is currently working as a professor at the Department of Mining Engineering at the University of Chile. He has more than fifteen years of experience working with large mining companies. Before moving to academia, prof Yarmuch worked as a senior mine planning engineer for the world largest copper and gold producer companies at the time. During his PhD, Prof Yarmuch’s research was selected by the UoM research transferring program TRaM. Currently, Prof. Yarmuch is development new technologies in partnering with the mining industry under the AMIRA project P1210: "Optimal Pushback Optimisation".