Nyree Grimes is a mining engineer.  She was attracted to mining engineering because of its interdisciplinary nature, involving many other elements of engineering like electrical, mechanical, and chemical:  “essentially you’ve got the diaspora of engineering. That multifaceted approach really, really spoke to me.”

Mining engineers focus on the extraction of minerals, metals, oil and gas, from the earth, while minimizing environmental impact. We are surrounded by mined materials to create everyday objects like mobile devices, kitchenware, appliances, cars, medical equipment, synthetic clothing, and more. The list of objects that use mined materials is endless; if something was not grown in the ground, it was mined.

Nyree’s discovery of mining engineering came in her first year at Queen’s University.  She appreciated the foundational first year of the engineering program because it allowed her to learn about many different fields. “I didn’t know too much about mining in particular before I went to university. But I think CAGIS was instrumental in me knowing that engineering was the discipline I wanted to pick. Over the course of my first year, I developed a better understanding of what chemical, mechanical, mining, civil looked like and was able to make a choice then. But the choice of engineering came from my time at CAGIS.”

When Nyree finished her degree, she wanted to gain experience in the field: “It was really important to me to get my boots dirty, get in the field, and make sure that I had an understanding of what operations and planning looked like. I chose to go into an open pit mine for the first ten years of my career.”  Over time, Nyree’s interests shifted to project management and she started managing large scale projects in mining construction.

However, Nyree had a keen interest in renewable energy: “renewable energy was something that really spoke to me.  That’s what’s taken me to now, working in renewable energy storage, where we store energy for the grid, and make the grid as green as possible. It’s important to me to make sure that I’m finding new solutions to concerns and problems for the world that we currently live in.”

Even now, Nyree’s experience at CAGIS permeates her work. “What I really loved about going to CAGIS events was that it was a lot of fun.  Every month I would go to a new location and I could learn from scientists, engineers and technologists at the top of their game. Everything was really new, and I loved the fact that there was this whole world that I was just getting ready to discover. The big thing that CAGIS taught me was about all the different disciplines that exist in science, technology, and engineering, and that’s what I do today: I bring together all the different disciplines to solve big problems.“

Hear more about Nyree’s engineering journey and her experiences with CAGIS in the video below.