Curriculum Vitae
David Mulligan is the Director of Environment Centres in the Sustainable Minerals Institute (SMI) at The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia, a university ranked in the top 50 globally. The Environment Centres at SMI include the Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation (CMLR) and the Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry (CWiMI).
David is also currently Acting Director of the SMI and a member of the University’s Senior Management Group.
He has been with the Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation since its inception in 1993 and has more than 25 years of experience providing scientific input into the decisions underpinning the rehabilitation of lands disturbed by mining and mineral processing activities. He has co-ordinated multiple cross-disciplinary research projects with the coal, gold, bauxite, alumina, base metals, heavy mineral sands and oil sectors.
David has a disciplinary background in plant physiology and ecology and contributes extensively to projects and policy discussions relating to the creation and assessment of post-mining landscapes, ecosystems and end-uses. He has taken a prominent role in the development of robust monitoring technologies and closure criteria to ensure that areas potentially challenged by mining impacts have greater certainty about the protection of, and minimisation of future risks to, environmental and social values.
He is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and a Life-Member of the American Society for Mining and Reclamation. He has lectured and taught into training programs both nationally and internationally, has built numerous international partnerships across Asia, Africa and South America, and continues to play a major role in supervising postgraduate students.
David has been a major contributor to training programs and research projects under the auspices of the International Mining for Development Centre, and is the UQ lead for the SMI International Centre of Excellence in Chile.
