Dr. Hardy has over 49 years’ experience in application of rock mechanics principles in mine design and consulting. He was a founding partner in Agapito Associates, Inc. in 1979, has been President of AAI for 28 years, and now serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors. Dr. Hardy has managed projects for mine design in coal, potash, trona, nahcolite, gold, oil shale, and nuclear waste disposal. Michael has managed projects involving resource and reserve estimates, field geotechnical data gathering, numerical modeling, design of underground mines, solution mining, backfill, geo-hydrology, and has authored many Preliminary Feasibility Studies and Feasibility Studies for solution mining projects. Since the mid-1980s, Michael has focused on solution mining and pilot testing of potash, trona, and nahcolite deposits. Michael has served as Chairman of the Underground Technical Research Council (UTRC) of the ASCE and SME, and was a committee member for the National Academy of Science, National Research Council on the Waste Isolation Project (WIPP). Michael is a Fellow, and previously served as a director, of ARMA and is a registered professional engineer in Colorado and Texas.