Dr. Rajive Ganguli is the Malcolm McKinnon Endowed Professor of Mining Engineering at the University of Utah, and an Associate Dean (Assessment) in the College of Mines and Earth Sciences.  Prior to July 2019, he was a Professor of Mining Engineering and Director, Mineral Industry Research Laboratory, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). He has three degrees in mining engineering, bachelor’s from Osmania University, India (1991), master’s from Virginia Tech (1995) and doctoral from the University of Kentucky (1999). He has worked as a mining engineer in two countries, in a surface copper mine in India (Hindustan Copper Limited), and an underground coal mine (Jim Walter Resources), in Alabama, USA. He is also a registered mine foreman (Alabama), and a registered professional engineer (mining; Alaska). Dr. Ganguli also consults privately with the mining industry.

Dr. Ganguli has led approximately $13M in projects as primary investigator. He is currently involved in several projects in five different countries, US, Denmark/Greenland, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico, on topics ranging from machine learning to training.  Two of the projects involve major mining companies on mine to mill type problems. His ai.sys group is also assisting an interdisciplinary team with linking air quality and other factors to health and educational outcomes. Another effort involves developing natural language processing (NLP) based machine learning tools to analyze textual mine safety data. In the mine training project, he is leading a $1.2M cooperative agreement with the US Department of State to provide training to KTIR, Greenland.

His research group released their analytics software, UteAnalytics, to the public in 2023.

While at UAF, Dr. Ganguli led multiple projects including assisting Teck Red Dog mine, Alaska, with mineral processing and water related issues, developing training opportunities for mining industry workforce (a $8.1 million US Department of Labor grant), and developing computational techniques for mine monitoring (Sumitomo Metal Mining). His previous research projects involved Erdenet copper mine (Mongolia), Peabody Coal (Colorado) and Ucore’s Bokan Mountain rare earth mine (Alaska).

Dr. Ganguli was the lead architect of the Mining Engineering Research Endowment at UAF, a fund created in 2010 by Kinross Corporation to support graduate students in mining engineering. The fund, supported substantially by Sumitomo Metal Mining and Kinross, now stands at over $4M, and supports several students annually.

Dr. Ganguli is on the editorial board of “Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration”, the flagship journal of the Society of Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, Inc (SME). He has authored two chapters in the 2011 edition of the SME Mining Engineering Handbook (“Systems Engineering”, “Mine Monitoring, Communications and Control”), a massive tome that is published about once every 20-25 years. He led a special issue on computational intelligence that was published in 2022. The second edition of the special issue is now in progress.

Dr. Ganguli was inducted into the Alaska Innovator’s Hall of Fame in 2017 for the development of the mill simulator. His other awards include the 2005 Flame Safety Lamp award (awarded in the State of Alabama to the top mine foreman), 2004 Robert Peele from SME award for his paper and “Rock Star of Alaska Mining” award by Alaska Miners Association (2014).