Workshops

WORKSHOPS - November 29, 2026

Join us for one of two full-day workshops designed to bring fresh perspectives, practical insights, and meaningful conversations to the forefront of tailings management and risk.

Whether you’re looking to expand your knowledge, strengthen your approach to risk, or connect with others shaping the future of responsible mining, these workshops are a great way to get more from your IOSTC 2026 experience.

📅 November 29, 2026

🎓 Full-day learning opportunities: $700 + GST

🤝 Connect. Learn. Strengthen. Lead.

Don’t just attend IOSTC 2026—start the conversation early.

If you have already registered and would like to add a workshop to your registration, please contact Jen Stogowski.

WORKSHOP 1 - Critical State for Tailings: NorSand and Uncertainty-Informed Assessment

November 29, 2026 | Full Day 8 am - 5 pm | Fairmont Hotel MacDonald

Course Description:

Critical State Soil Mechanics (CSSM) is foundational to understanding contractive, potentially liquefiable tailings. Concepts such as the Critical State Line (CSL), state parameter (), and drained and undrained stress paths are essential for tailings characterization, liquefaction susceptibility screening, and numerical stability analysis. NorSand provides a practical way to translate CSSM concepts into a constitutive model for tailings stability and deformation assessment. However, in practice, laboratory data may be limited, CSL interpretation may carry uncertainty, and NorSand calibration is rarely unique. Oil sands tailings present additional complexity due to varying fines content, evolving fabric, and spatial variability across a facility. A single deterministic calibration often does not reflect the full range of plausible material behavior.

This workshop provides a concise overview of the pathway from CSSM concepts to NorSand calibration and tailings assessment while recognizing the associated epistemic uncertainties. The emphasis is on developing a clear overall picture on how laboratory interpretation informs constitutive modelling, how NorSand calibration is done in practice, and how uncertainty in characterization and calibration can influence engineering judgement and risk-informed decision-making.

The workshop is structured around four questions:

What CSSM concepts are essential for understanding contractive tailings behavior and static liquefaction?
How are these concepts translated into NorSand calibration and numerical modelling?
Where do uncertainty and non-uniqueness enter the assessment process?
How can uncertainty analysis be made practically useful for engineering decisions, monitoring, and risk management?

Who should attend?

This workshop is intended for geotechnical engineers, tailings engineers, consultants, researchers, graduate students, and technical reviewers involved in tailings characterization, liquefaction assessment, constitutive modelling, or TSF stability evaluation. The course is designed for a junior-to-intermediate technical audience, while also providing a useful overview for practitioners who review or rely on CSSM/NorSand-based assessments.

Participants should have a basic understanding of soil mechanics, effective stress principles, and laboratory testing. Prior exposure to critical state soil mechanics, triaxial testing, CPTu interpretation, numerical modelling, or NorSand would be helpful.

Presenters:

F. Albert Liu, PhD, P.Eng.

Dr. Liu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at McGill University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta. He holds a PhD in Geosystems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a minor in Remote Sensing and Geophysics, as well as graduate training in Computational Science and Engineering. His research focuses on geotechnical failure mechanisms associated with natural and human-induced hazards, with particular relevance to tailings storage facilities, mine-closure infrastructure, critical state soil mechanics, strain-softening behavior, and flow-failure mechanisms. He has expertise in laboratory testing, field monitoring, and numerical modelling of mine waste structures. Dr. Liu has previously developed and delivered invited workshop and short-course material relevant to tailings and critical state soil mechanics, including an invited workshop presentation at IOSTC 2024 and co-instruction of international short courses on the design and assessment of mine waste structures and critical state soil mechanics.

Ekansh Agarwal, PhD

Dr. Agarwal is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta. He holds a Cotutelle PhD from AcSIR-Central Building Research Institute (India) and RMIT University (Australia) and was a SERB Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellow at Purdue University. His research focuses on computational geomechanics, tailings geotechnics, reliability analysis, and uncertainty quantification. He has presented at national and international conferences and has experience developing and delivering technical presentations to mixed practitioner-researcher audiences.

Workshop 1 - Course Outline

WORKSHOP 2 - Tailings Risk for Mining Operations: Building Awareness. Strengthening Responsibility. Reducing Risk.

November 29, 2026 | Full Day 8 am - 5 pm | Fairmont Hotel MacDonald

An informed workforce is an empowered workforce. Across mining operations, personnel at every level make risk-based decisions daily—often without recognizing their broader implications. With global attention on tailings facilities increasing in the wake of recent failures, and with evolving standards such as the Mining Association of Canada Towards Sustainable Mining and the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM), it is essential that everyone involved in tailings understands the associated risks, regulatory expectations, and responsibilities that come with maintaining a social licence to operate.

Course Overview

This comprehensive course provides industry professionals with a foundational understanding of tailings risk, governance, and management. Participants will learn how to recognize potential risks in the field, apply effective mitigation and management strategies, and engage in responsible communication across operational teams.

Key topics include:

· Understanding tailings facility risk and field-based identification

· Risk mitigation and control strategies across the facility lifecycle

· Risk management frameworks and governance structures

· Regulatory compliance and alignment with international standards

· Innovation and emerging technologies in tailings management

· The critical role of communication across technical, operational, and leadership groups

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

· Identify key tailings risks and early warning indicators in the field

· Apply structured risk management principles to tailings operations

· Understand how governance frameworks and compliance standards apply to their work

· Communicate effectively across disciplines to enhance overall facility safety and performance

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for professionals involved in any aspect of tailings operations or management, including:

· Mining and tailings operators

· Field supervisors and maintenance personnel

· Engineers and geoscientists

· Environmental and health & safety specialists

· Supply chain and logistics personnel

· Managers, superintendents, and operational leaders

· Senior Leadership

Presenters:

Tanys MacGowan, P.Eng.

Tanys has over 30 years of experience in geotechnical engineering, where she has held the roles of Engineer of Record, Geotechnical Engineering Advisor, Director of GeoServices and Director of Digital Innovation. She has led several diverse teams of specialists composed of Hydrologists, Geologists, Geotechnical Engineers and Technicians. She has worked for both Operating Companies and Design Engineering Firms where she successfully managed the design of one of the largest tailings dam structures in oil sands history. Tanys remains at the forefront of dam decommissioning and authored one of the first approved dam decommissioning plans in oilsands history.

She has authored and presented several papers on pitwall stability, tailings dams, emergency response and an overview on geotechnical engineering in the oilsands. She is passionate about advancing risk management through governance, education and digital and data advancements. When spare time permits, you’ll find her learning more about the psychology behind leadership where she has taken courses at Harvard, Oxford and MIT to help her better understand the influence of human nature on how organizations can achieve their goals, including those on risk management.

Craig Simpson, P.Eng.

Craig has over 35 years of experience in mining engineering with 13 years in uranium, coal, industrial minerals and 21 years in oil sands. His experience includes mine planning and design, mine operations, safety system implementation, project management and execution and mine closure planning. For 25 years Craig has held a variety of leadership roles including 17 years of managing technical planning teams in oil sands.

He has held the overall accountability to develop integrated mine plans that showed the impacts of strategic decisions on the life of the mining asset. Craig is passionate about collaborating with other technical teams and business units to achieve a corporate-wide, integrated view of the best result arising from a series of scenarios. Craig excels at communicating integrated mine plan outputs, providing results, risks, opportunities and costs allowing senior management to make informed, data-driven decisions.

Brad Strueby, P.Eng.

Brad has over 35 years of experience in the mining industry and has worked for some of the largest resource companies in Canada including Syncrude Canada Limited, Petro Canada (secondment), Cameco Corporation, Suncor Energy (secondment) and Teck Resources.

Over the span of his career Brad has managed several technical and mine operations teams and has been involved in an array of projects including Geo-environmental, Geotechnical and Mine Engineering, Technology Development, Major Projects and Joint Venture Management. Brad is an active member of the Canadian Institute of Mining and is the current Chair of the Surface Mining Society.

Workshop 2 - Course Outline

Report abuse