Local Organising Committee
28th International Conference on Paste, Thickened and Filtered Tailings
14–16 April 2026 | Lisbon, Portugal
Paste 2026 Local Organising Committee
Santiago Castro
Managing Director
Paterson & Cooke, Spain
Santiago joined P&C in 2021, to initiate the Iberian business and is based in P&C’s Madrid Office. He is a chartered mining engineer with over 19 years’ experience working on mining projects. Santiago has been involved in the design, construction site supervision, and site inspection of tailings management facilities and waste dumps globally. He specialises in designing and installing liner systems and QA/QC programs of liner systems, along with MQA for construction materials.
Santiago focuses on mining processing and mine waste management, being involved in the review, conceptual and basic design, and equipment sizing of paste plant and paste backfill distribution systems. He also has experience in mine closure plans for TMF and mines, as well as experience in due diligence and Phase I & Phase II ESA for manufacturing. Santiago has worked within a multidisciplinary design team on several mining and industrial projects globally for various international clients such as ALCOA, Lundin Mining, First Quantum, Glencore, Trafigura, Sandfire, Orvana, KGHM, and others
Dr Robert Cooke
Director
Paterson & Cooke Ltd., USA
Robert founded Paterson & Cooke with Angus Paterson in 1991. While Robert retired from P&C in 2025, he continues to pursue his passion for improving tailings management systems to reduce the impact of tailings on communities and the environment. He is the chair of the Technical Working Group of BHP and Rio Tinto’s Tailings Management Consortium and serves on several independent tailings review panels for major mines.
Dean Harty
Operations Specialist Paste
Northern Star Resources Limited, Australia
Professor Matilde Horta
Mining Professor
Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal
Matilde is an assistant professor at Instituto Superior Técnico in the Department of Mineral and Energy Resources Engineering at Lisbon University. She is currently the coordinator of the master’s program in geological and mining engineering and is responsible for the Geoscience and Geoengineering Laboratory (GEOLAB) of Research Centre for Natural Resources and Environment (CERENA). In 1985, Matilde graduated in mining engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon. She then obtained her masters in soil mechanics at NOVA FCT (Nova University Lisbon) in 1989 and a PhD in mining engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico in 1995, which focused on the subject of Backfill of Tailings for the Improvement of Post Pillars Behaviour. Her main research topics are rock and soil mechanics, geomechanics applied to mining and mining backfill.
Phil Newman
Lead Tailings Innovation
Anglo American, UK
Phil is vice president tailings innovation at Anglo American and is working on the roll-out and commercialisation of hydraulic dewatered stacking, a new tailings management approach developed and patented by Anglo American. He has been involved in all aspects of innovation and technology development at Anglo American since 2015 and managed their open innovation program from 2015 to 2020.
Phil has over 30 years’ experience in mining, starting with paste technology in the mid-1990’s, when he co-founded Golder PasteTec. Phil was also chair of Paste 2006 in Limerick, Ireland
Mafalda Oliveira
Chief of Dep. Dams and Extractive Waste
Boliden Somincor, Portugal
In 1987 Mafalda graduated in geology – scientific & technological area, from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Porto, Portugal. She has 38 years’ experience, of which 36 are in the mining industry. Mafalda is the head of department of dams, tailings, waste rock and water, at Boliden Somincor, a mine located in the south of Portugal.
Her main areas of activity and responsibilities focus on tailings and waste rock management, slurry tailings, thickened tailings, geochemical and geotechnical characterisation and stabilisation, hydraulic and structural stability of earthfill dams, rockfill dams and heaps, geotechnical monitoring and instrumentation, hydrogeology, hydrogeochemistry and water balances. She has a solid background in geotechnics, geochemistry, hydrogeology, ARD environments, extractive waste management, with a range views on the Portuguese, EU and international level mining sector. She was a member of several European committees and groups, and is the author and co-author of several technical papers and articles.
Dr Ryan Veenstra
Principal Specialist Backfill
Gold Fields Australia, Australia
Ryan is a principal backfill specialist, providing technical and operational expertise and leadership for Gold Fields underground operations and projects. Over the last 20 years, he has been involved in backfill as an academic, consultant, and industry engineer (both in operations and corporate spaces). His expertise and experience cover the entire backfill system with a particular speciality in backfill geomechanics. He has a geological engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and holds a PhD in civil engineering from the University of Toronto.
Trent Weatherwax
Underground Study Manager – Skouries
Eldorado Gold Corporation, Spain
Stephen Wilson (Conference Chair)
Managing Director – Europe
Paterson & Cooke (UK), Ltd.
Stephen is a chartered mining engineer with over 20 years’ consultancy experience in the global minerals industry, with expertise in tailings dewatering and mine backfill. He holds a degree in mining engineering from the Camborne School of Mines and is a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3).
In 2013, Stephen established Paterson & Cooke’s first European engineering office in Cornwall, expanding access to expert services in tailings and backfill across the region. Throughout his career, he has focused on developing practical, technically sound solutions that support safer and more sustainable mining operations.
As Chair of Paste 2026, Stephen looks forward to fostering open dialogue, sharing best practices, and supporting the continued evolution of responsible tailings management worldwide.
Josephine Ruddle
Paste Event Manager
Australian Centre for Geomechanics, Australia