Board Member - Treasurer
INTRAW Observatory
Marko is a geologist with over 25 years of experience in companies, teams and project management, research, networking, and international cooperation. He possesses excellent organizational, leadership and negotiation skills in international and multicultural environments. He also has experience in external affairs dealing with GOVs, international NGOs, and industry. For 8 years he was the Director of Geological Survey of Slovenia. From 2014 on Marko acts as an independent consultant in GIS and spatial data systems, and has taken on several managerial roles – CEO in a start-up company and Managing Director in the OneGeology global initiative that compliled digital geological maps from around the globe. He was and is currently engaged in several EU funded projects as an in-house consultant of the EFG and INTRAW Observatory, working from project inception to project development and implementation. In the last years he's been involved in several mining/geology projects for the World Bank in Nigeria and DRC. He is the Treasurer of the INTRAW Observatory, the Past- President of the EFG, and Past-President of EuroGeoSurveys. As an associated professor, Marko lectures GIS I & II courses at Uni Nova Gorica. His key personal attributes are integrity, conscientiousness, focus, persistence, positive and active approach to life, adaptability to the needs of projects (analytical or synthetic, according to needs), and has has excellent outreach and communication skills.
Persephone - Autonomous Exploration and Extraction of Deep Mineral Deposits
The continuous effort and increased demand of the raw materials are directing the mining companies to excavate minerals at greater depths. This trend is challenging the current mining operations and the existing traditional technologies towards the objective to retain profitability, while achieving the latest Green Deal environmental vision and securing human workers safety. A key enabler, to address these challenges and to foster a sustainable development of the mining industry, is the development and deployment of innovative technologies for resource efficient extraction of the EU’s raw materials, as well as near mine exploration of critical raw materials in currently non-extracted ore bodies in existing or abandoned ones.
PERSEPHONE is aiming to address these challenges by developing of the pioneering technologies for pushing the limits of EU mining industry and embodiment of autonomous and integrated near mine exploration capability to access deep deposits of critical raw materials through hard-to-reach deep and abandoned mines. The overall concept and vision of PERSEPHONE will be achieved by reducing the size of mining machines currently adapted to the human scale and embedding autonomy for risk-aware navigation and full digitalization of the extraction process by digital twin creation and key enabling technologies validation at TRL 5. Additionally, PERSEPHONE is introducing completely novel approaches in online near mine exploration core analysis and overall integration.
