Dr. Sabanov started his carrier in 1992 working in the underground oil shale mines in Estonia before he received his mining engineering PhD diploma in 2008. Dr. Sabanov was executing multiple projects and teaching at a time, tracking technical progress, and reporting on both to the university and to the mining companies, and regulatory and technical review boards. Dr Sabanov industry experience with mine planning, scheduling and design, blasting operations, mine ventilation, mining risk management enabled him to understand detailed requirements of mining companies in mining specialists. Dr Sabanov was responsible for implementation of students’ theoretical knowledge to industrial practices, optimising study programmes to real life work of mining projects. Working for mining department at Tallinn University of Technology Dr Sabanov executed several local and two transnational projects: MIN-NOVATION - Mining and Mineral Processing Waste Management Innovation Network, and EUExNet - European Explosives Network for Explosive education and Certification. Dr. Sabanov supervised the interdisciplinary research group at Doctoral School of Energy and Geotechnology on the research topic ‘Sustainable mining: key challenges and opportunities to economic growth of mining waste management and innovative mining technology’. Dr Sabanov is a chartered engineer at the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, London with 30 years of experience in the mining industry. Working for SRK Consulting (UK) over 7 years Dr Sabanov supported a number of Business Improvement, Internal Investment Decision, Resources and Reserves Audit projects. For those he completed technical due diligence work, including Competent Person Reports (CPR) for stock exchange listings. His expertise lies in strategy planning, organisation, managing and working on technical studies (International and CIS standards). He has worked with projects in Russia, CIS countries, Europe and South America. Dr. Sabanov is experienced in a wide range of commodities areas including oil shale, coal, gold and silver, copper, iron ore, diamonds, zinc, bauxite, potash and rare earth elements.