AIM Fellows Complete Summer Experience

September 24, 2026 - A dozen college educators representing schools across the country are back on campus and better positioned to discuss the intricacies of mining with their students.

A group of 12 higher education faculty members recently completed Freeport’s Academic-Industry Mining (AIM) Fellowship, an experiential learning opportunity intended to provide participants firsthand insight into modern mining practices they can bring back into the classroom.

Through the program, educators spent at least six weeks working alongside Freeport employees, contributing to projects aligned with their academic interests. The fellowship is designed not only to provide practical industry experience but also to help those educators better prepare the next generation of mining professionals.

The goal of this program is to help create “a pipeline to our future workforce,” said Angie Harmon, Regional Manager of Social Performance-North America.

This year, the groundwork for that pipeline was laid with the help of 12 educators from universities across the U.S., including Kate Brown Requist, an assistant professor of mining engineering at Tennessee State University, and Azeem Raza, an assistant research professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Other participating universities included Arizona State University, Colorado School of Mines, Michigan Technological University, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, University of Arizona and West Virginia University.

In addition to working on projects related to their own areas of expertise, the fellows also had the opportunity to visit Freeport operations and meet with employees across the business. Those experiences included attending a Reinvent Mining meeting in Phoenix and a visit to Tucson, where they toured the Technology Center and Sierrita mine, getting a closer look at the processes and technology behind the mining industry today.

Brown Requist said the opportunity offered a valuable look at just how much Freeport is helping shape the future of the mining industry.

“It was very eye-opening,” Brown Requist said. “There’s a lot going on at Freeport, and this was an opportunity to see what that leading edge of innovation looks like and how the company is leveraging analytics. It’s a great example to show my students what modernizing and digitizing the mining industry really looks like.”

Raza’s opportunities were more connected to the company’s innovation deployment.

With an interest in how mine design will evolve and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, automation and robotics as they become more specialized and commonplace in mining, Raza was given the opportunity to visit the company’s Bagdad mine, where he saw firsthand how Freeport is leading the industry’s adoption of autonomous haulage in the U.S.

“Bagdad is a very exciting location,” Raza said. “It is clear Freeport is looking to the future and is optimizing its operations for that. Autonomous haulage, robotics, artificial intelligence – these are the topics that should attract the next generation, and now I can help prepare them to contribute more significantly.”

Photos (top and bottom): Kate Brown Requist got a closer look at Arizona’s geology during a visit to the company’s Sierrita mine; During their time with Freeport, Azeem Raza and the other fellows toured the labs at Technology Center Tucson.