International Student Spotlight: Julio Quijas de Lara

The University of Arizona is advancing initiatives and collaborative partnerships between Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. Considering the importance of developing new talent for the mining sector in the Arizona-Sonora Megaregion, UA is working with Mexican universities to deliver the Masters in Engineering in Mining and Geological Engineering to recent graduates and practicing engineers in Sonora.

Among these students is Julio Quijas de Lara, an MGE master's student from Aguascalientes, an industrial city and capital of the Mexican state of the same name. He works as a graduate research assistant under the supervision of Moe Momayez, developing a method to estimate the thermal conductivity of different materials. He also works as a research assistant in the Geotechnical Center of Excellence, where he focuses primarily on data analysis from slope stability monitoring systems in open pit mines.

"I like to be involved in my department and I often work at the UArizona San Xavier Mine doing geophysical surveys," he wrote in a spotlight in the UArizona Mexico Initiatives newsletter. "This has been a great year with many academic opportunities for me for which I am thankful to the university and the MGE department."