Amin Hekmatnejad

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Dr. Amin Hekmatnejad is a Mining Engineer specializing in rock mechanics, underground mine design, discrete fracture network (DFN) modeling, and geostatistics. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chile and both B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mining Engineering from the University of Tehran (Iran). He is currently a full-time faculty member at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and an associate researcher at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM), where he leads interdisciplinary research on digital rock mass twins, underground hydrogen storage, and AI-assisted geomechanical risk assessment. He is also involved in computational neuroscience research focused on seizure prediction from ECG signals, in collaboration with CMM and the UC Neuroscience Center.

Previously, he held academic appointments at the University of Talca and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV), contributing to both master’s and Ph.D. programs. Before pursuing his doctoral studies, he spent five years in the oil and gas industry at the Iranian Offshore Oil Company as a reservoir geomechanics specialist and geostatistical modeler, with hands-on experience in borehole stability, reservoir modeling, and drilling operations.

Dr. Hekmatnejad directs the Digital Rock Mass Twin & Supercomputing Laboratory, where AI, DFN–FDEM simulation, spatial statistics, and real-time visualization are integrated to address large-scale rock engineering challenges. He developed the Universal Discontinuity Index (UDi) and the R-Dis-Frag modeling system, which have been applied in major projects such as El Teniente Mine. Since 2024, he has hosted two postdoctoral researchers and currently supervises eight Ph.D. candidates. He also mentors four undergraduate researchers through UC’s IPRE program.

With more than 30 indexed publications, Dr. Hekmatnejad has led competitive research projects (including FONDECYT and FONDEF grants) and received the “Best Research Award on New Science Inventions” (2021)

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