An Orange business owner has taken home the top honour at the recent NSW Women in Mining Awards.
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Bianca Newcombe was named the "Exceptional Woman" for 2023, following years of dedication outside her day job.
"It was a bit unexpected and I'm not one to go for the spotlight," Mrs Newcombe said.
"I've been doing what I do for years and I do it just because I like it."
After graduating with a Bachelor of Engineering in 1998, Mrs Newcombe completed her PhD in mineral processing in 2014, three years after she and her family moved to Orange. It was in 2014 she started her own mining support business, OptiFroth Solutions, which specialised in mineral process engineering.
She noted that the change to running her own business came at the same time she started to have children.
"Mining can be quite difficult to manage when you have young children. It's a pretty common story that you hear and somebody has to be the primary caregiver at home," she said.
"My husband is a mining engineer so he kept on with his career, but I needed to have flexible working arrangements.
"Back then, there was no such thing as flexi time, the only way to manage it was work for myself and do project work for some big companies."
Having gone on to work with companies in Australia, Asia, Africa, Canada and South America, she was pleased by her decision to go out on her own.
But her recent honour didn't come via way of her business, instead, it was from her work to help the industry grow as a whole.
Since 2016, Mrs Newcombe has run conference with the aim to better connect regional engineers .
"The award isn't really for my day job, it's for all the extra things I've done," she said.
"I started up a little conference here in Orange to bring regional engineers together because we didn't really have anything in the way of professional networking out here. 40 people came to that first event and it's just grown since then.
The 2022 event was held in Parkes and saw roughly 130 people from across the country participate.
"That's just something that I do outside of work," she added.
"When you do a lot of volunteer stuff, it can often feel a bit thankless, because people come along and some of them don't even realise that I don't get paid to do it. This award is an acknowledgement that yes, they have started to notice and it is worthwhile."
NSW Minerals Council CEO, Stephen Galilee, congratulated Mrs Newcombe on the award and highlighted her achievements.
"Bianca's drive to apply her scientific expertise to the mining sector is an inspiration to young women exploring their career options, and illustrates the many opportunities that exist for women in our industry," she said.
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