Dr Penny Stewart

Chief Executive Officer, Petra Data Science

Dr Penny Stewart is a mining engineer, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technical Sciences and Engineering and founder and CEO of mining AI software company Petra Data Science. Penny worked on mine sites for five years in Tasmania and Western Australia before obtaining her Queensland 1st Class Mine Managers’ Certificate of Competency. She commenced PhD studies at UQ’s Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre, where she received the Ian Morley prize for Best Minerals Engineering Postgraduate student. In 2009, she instigated the application of self-organising maps (neural networks) for the study of SLC recovery analysis.  In June 2015, Penny founded PETRA to extract value from mining data.  PETRA is a world leading provider of machine learning and optimisation solutions to the global mining industry, including their flagship MAXTATM digital twin value chain optimisation suite. In 2016, PETRA collaborated with Newcrest Mining to develop and deploy some of the mining industry's first machine learning algorithms.