Saskia Duyvesteyn

Saskia Duyvesteyn is the Chief Advisor Research & Development for the Rio Tinto Copper product group and manages the portfolio of innovation projects across the entire value stream including ore body knowledge, underground & surface mining, mineral processing & metallurgy, tailings and digital projects. Saskia has held operational and technical roles at Rio Tinto and Barrick with experience in a range of commodities including copper, molybdenum, gold, silver borates, nickel, platinum and other PGMs, and numerous critical minerals. Prior to her career in mining, Saskia was a professor at the University of Utah’s Department of Metallurgical Engineering. Saskia has a Bachelor of Science in Materials Science & Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master’s and Ph.D. in Mineral Processing & Extractive Metallurgy from the University of California – Berkeley. She holds 4 patents in process development and machine learning. She is also a Senior Rio Tinto Expert in both Processing and R&D.