Personnel

AAI’s most valuable asset is our staff.  Our dedicated professionals have decades of domestic and worldwide experience and education appropriate to the many facets of mining.  Click here to view synopsis resumes of our technical staff.

MinEXPO 2008: Leo Gilbride, Martin Chenoweth, DeeDee Ross and Tim Ross (left to right)

Officers of AAI:

Michael P. Hardy

Michael P. Hardy, Ph.D., P.E.
Principal/President/Chairman of the Board
(University of Minnesota)

Dr. Hardy has over 39 years experience in rock mechanics and mine design project management. Project manager for mine design in coal, potash, trona, nahcolite, borate, gold, and oil shale. Manages projects involving field geotechnical data gathering, numerical modeling, design of underground mines, solution mining, backfill, and geo-hydrology. Taught advanced rock mechanics and mine plant engineering at the University of Minnesota. Past chairman of the Underground Technical Research Council (UTRC) of the ASCE and SME. Committee member for the National Academy of Science, National Research Council on the Waste Isolation Project (WIPP). Registered professional engineer in Colorado and Texas and the Province of Saskatchewan in Canada.

Terry Massis
Secretary/Treasurer/Director

Timothy A. Ross

Timothy A. Ross, P.E.
Principal/Vice President/Director/Manager
(Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Mr. Ross adds over 34 years experience managing mine operations and mining engineering, specializing in underground, surface, and highwall mining. He has extensive underground experience with longwalls, continuous miners and continuous haulage, conventional mining systems, pillar extraction, and mobile roof supports. Tim’s surface mining experience includes dragline, truck/shovel, and contour mining operations. His capabilities include ground control design and problem resolution, feasibility studies, economic evaluations, study and review of mine design, long- and short-range mine planning; mine evaluation, operating and capital cost estimates, equipment selection recommendations, mine staffing and scheduling, new mine start-up; and utilization of seismic tomography for ground characterization projects. He is a registered professional engineer in Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. He is also a member of the SME Professional Registration Committee.

Gary L. Skaggs

Gary L. Skaggs, P.E., P.Eng.
Principal/Vice President
(Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Mr. Skaggs has over 40 years mining experience in underground domestic and international mining.  He has executive level management experience for large, underground, multi-mine complexes and corporate technical groups.  His strengths are integrating operating, technical, and business functions; productivity, quality, and safety improvements, operational and safety audits; reserve and resource analysis; feasibility studies, and due diligence evaluations of mining enterprises.  His experience includes trona, limestone and conventional, continuous miner, and longwall operations in coal.  He is a licensed professional engineer in the states of Alabama, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming and the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada.  Gary is a Registered Member of the Society for Mining, Exploration, and Metallurgy, Inc. (SME) where he serves on the Professional Licensing Exam Committee and the Resource and Reserve Committee.  He is a past member of  the Council of Education’s Accreditation and Curricular Issues Subcommittee, and the ABET Visitors Selection Committee.  He was presented with the Ivan B. Rahn Education Award in 2009.  Gary served as a commissioner on the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET, Inc. from 2003 to 2008 as SME’s representative for mining engineering.  Gary serves as the vice president of the Colorado Plateau Section of the SME.  He is a member of the SME Foundation Board of Trustees, the Colorado Mining Association, the Rocky Mountain Coal Mining Institute, and the National Society of Professional Engineers.