Mohan Yellishetty

Professor of Resources Engineering, Monash University

Professor Mohan Yellishetty is a Monash University resources engineer and academic whose near-three-decade career spans Monash, CSIRO, Yale, and IIT Bombay, focused on sustainable mineral resources and the “resources trinity” of critical minerals, mine rehabilitation and closure, and tailings and waste. He is recognised for advancing sustainability frameworks in mining—industrial ecology, life-cycle thinking, and material/substance flow analysis—and for leadership on supply-chain criticality and resilience. Yellishetty’s group pioneered a dynamic, agent-based approach to assessing mineral criticality and built Australia’s first nationwide geospatial database of active and inactive hard-rock mine sites to guide rehabilitation policy and practice. He co-founded Monash’s Critical Minerals Consortium and founded the Australia–India Critical Minerals Research Hub to deepen Indo-Pacific collaboration across exploration, processing, recycling, and supply-chain security. His work informs public policy: he has provided testimony to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade on critical-mineral supply chains and to the Senate Environment Committee on mine rehabilitation, and he contributed to the national report Critical Minerals in Australia: A Review of Opportunities and Research Needs. He also serves as an Honorary Academic Fellow with the Australia India Institute, a Visiting Professor at IIT Bombay, and on the Advisory Committee for Civil & Infrastructure Engineering at IIT Dharwad, reflecting his broader “mineral diplomacy” across the region.