Juan Manuel Girao Sotomayor holds a PhD in Civil Engineering with an emphasis on Geotechnics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), working in the field of iron and gold mining tailings. As a researcher in the Mining area at ITV MI, he has 15 years of professional experience in geotechnics applied to mining. His projects focus on tailings containment dams, blasting piles, leaching dumps, laboratory testing of soils and mining tailings, and the use of 2D and 3D numerical modeling software. He has published in international journals.