WVU mining engineering students strike gold at national Capstone design competition for 13th year

Bucca-neer Mining Team members Odin Smith, left, Ethan Mann and Thommy Bafunye celebrate their first-place Senior Student Design Award plaques alongside teaching assistant professor of mining engineering Amy McBrayer, right. Team member Josh Riffle is not pictured. (Photo courtesy of Amy McBrayer)

A team of West Virginia University mining engineering students have once again secured first place in the national Senior Student Design Award competition for their comprehensive underground mine design plan.

Story by Laney Eichelberger, Storyteller
Photos courtesy of Amy McBrayer, teaching assistant professor of mining engineering

Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

The Bucca'neer Mining Team, composed of 2024 graduates from the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources Thommy Bafunye, Ethan Mann, Josh Riffle and Odin Smith, brought home the gold. This makes them the eighth WVU team to do so in the last decade.

Since the competition began in 1993, WVU has dominated the leaderboard with 13 first-place, seven second-place and two third-place recognitions — more top placements than all other mining engineering programs combined.

The Bucca'neer Mining team, overseen by teaching assistant professor of mining engineering Amy McBrayer , continued this legacy with their 2024 Capstone project. Mining engineering Capstone projects provide an all-encompassing application of skills acquired throughout students' time in the program, ensuring students are prepared to enter the workforce with the full proficiency of a Mountaineer.

“The Capstone is really geared towards helping students understand connections between everything they’ve learned and put it all together,” said McBrayer. “They’re meeting the Capstone requirements for graduation, but they’re also getting an opportunity to look at something deeper than what you could do in just a single semester, classroom setting.”

Students designed a comprehensive underground mine plan based on real world data from southwestern Pennsylvania. Their plan included everything from permitting requirements to equipment selection to economic evaluation, requiring students to apply knowledge from numerous mining disciplines. They also made suggestions on workforce recruitment challenges in the mining industry.

Hosted by the Pittsburgh Coal Mining Institute of American and the Pittsburgh Section of the Society for Mining Metallurgy & Exploration, the Student Senior Design Project Award is selected based on a project’s technical feasibility and level of precision. Competition judges applauded the team’s attention to detail, making them a clear choice among 6 national submissions.

All four team members have since secured positions in the mining industry. Bafunye is employed at Heidelberg Materials, Smith and Mann at Iron Senergy and Riffle at Core Natural Resources.

The mining engineering program’s success went beyond the first-place title, with another WVU team also securing second place — meaning all 2024 graduates of the mining engineering program made top placements at a national level. This achievement furthers the program’s reputation for producing engineers ready to drive industry advancement.

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