Plenary and Keynote Speakers

Dr. Yang Jiao
Arizona State University, USA
Plenary Speaker

Dr. Yang Jiao is currently a Professor and Program Chair of Materials Science and Engineering and an affiliated Professor of Dept. of Physics at Arizona State University. He obtained his B.S. from Peking University and Ph.D. from Princeton University. The main focus of Dr. Jiao’s research is to understand the fundamental physics of “disorder” in a wide range of complex material systems, using analytical and computational techniques devised in statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, statistical field theory, and discrete geometry. Dr. Jiao has published more than 140 research papers in top-tier scientific journals including Nature, Nat. Comm., Science Advances, PNAS, JACS, Angew. Chem., PRL, Adsv. Fun. Mater., Acta Mater., etc, which have been cited about 9000 times with an h-index of 54. Dr. Jiao received many awards, including the Martin Summerfield Fellowship, Ray Grimm Prize in Computational Physics, DARPA Young Faculty Award, ACS New Investigator Award, Fulton Top 5% Faculty Award, and Professor of Impact Award, the Top 2% Scientists Worldwide, etc. He is a Fellow of IAAM and an associate editor for Frontiers of Physics and serves on the editorial board of Scientific Reports, Materials Today, and AIMS Materials Sciences.

Topic of Keynote: Disordered Hyperuniform Materials
Plenary Abstract

Dr. David Kisailus
University of California at Riverside, USA
Plenary Speaker

Topic of Keynote:

Dr. Li Li
Polytechnique Montreal, Canada
Keynote Speaker

Dr. Li is a registered engineer in Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec (OIQ). He obtained a bachelor degree and a Master’s degree both in mining engineering in China, and a doctorate degree in France. He was a professor at École de technologie supérieure between 2010 and 2012. Since 2012, Dr. Li is a professor of mining engineering at Polytechnique Montreal. He was the Head of Mining Program at Polytechnique Montreal from June 2020 to June 2023. Starting from May 2023, he serves the Research Institute on Mines and Environment (RIME) at Polytechnique as Scientific Director (https://irme.ca/en/rime/).
Dr. Li has more than twenty-year experience in geotechnical engineering. His projects of research vary from underground mining with backfills to surface co-disposal of tailings and waste rocks. He is particularly active in research and development on stress and pressure estimation in backfilled stopes and on backfill barricades, sizing barricades made of waste rocks, and assessing the required strength of cemented backfill with exposed faces. Specialized in numerical modeling, he realized that a large portion of people doing numerical modeling does not believe in their own numerical results, a phenomenon particular in geotechnical engineering (https://www.mdpi.com/books/reprint/6156-numerical-modeling-in-civil-and-mining-geotechnical-engineering). He also noted the fact that many researchers mainly focus on the originality and novelty (as researchers), but much less and even ignored the reliability of experimental works by arguing (as practitioners, not researchers) that a factor of safety is anyway needed to take into account the uncertainties. Promoting the reliability of numerical and experimental works in geotechnical engineering as researcher is another struggling mission of Prof. Li since several years.

Topic of Keynote: Some Critical Issues in Underground Mining with Backfill
Keynote Abstract