Mr. Ates is a Project Engineer and is responsible for engineering design and support for a wide range of tasks associated with solution mining, conventional underground mining, and geotechnical evaluations of underground mining conditions.

He has experiences in solution mining as a mine planning engineer and focuses on 3D modeling, reserve estimation, mine planning, and drilling operations. Mr. Ates is familiar with Micromine, WellCAD, LaModel, Ventsim, and RocScience software and Python programming language. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mining engineering from the Middle East Technical University and a master’s degree from West Virginia University (WVU). During his master’s degree studies at WVU, he concentrated on the influence of geological structures on pillar stability and proposed a new term, Local Large Discontinuity Factor (LLDF), to explicitly account for the impact of large discontinuities on local pillar stability.