Claudio Heufemann, our Deputy Manager, is an Industrial Engineer from the Universidad de Concepción and holds an MBA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, has focused his career on project management, resource management, and business development. With ten years of experience, today, he takes care of the daily financial and administrative tasks, ensuring ProMet101 continues to operate, grow, and thrive.

During his time at ProMet10, Claudio served in project controlling, office relocation and habilitation, office managing, company investment managing, contract administration and invoicing. During this time Claudio was accepted and completed the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile MBA Program. All these activities and responsibilities had helped Claudio to grow professionally but also on a personal side.

Working in multicultural environments, interacting and sharing with all level on organizations and clients allowed him to keep and build a robust contact network, along with an excellent interpersonal set of skills and being able to dedicate his spare time to be a dedicated husband and father.

Claudio Córdova is our Senior Process Metallurgist, a metallurgical engineer from Universidad of Concepción and ex-alumni from the European Mining Engineering Course. He began his career supporting the metallurgy and geomet analysis for Spence Grown Options (SGO) Project, in the pre-feasibility and feasibility stages. After this posting, Claudio began working on a copper leaching operation, where he developed his skills as process geometallurgist, plant process optimization, and improvement engineer.

Later, Claudio moved to an process optimization and audits consultancy, where he worked on an irrigation optimization for OLAP Project from Minera Escondida, pilot plant audit in San Rafael Mine from Minsur and technical evaluation for a copper leaching asset.

During his time at ProMet101, he has been responsible for supporting plant audits and worked on multidisciplinary projects based on Mexico, as process leader for the commissioning of a SART plant start-up and optimization of Horizontal Belt Filters and implementation of Business Process Framework (BPF) methodology.

These last projects have stepped up Claudio into a new level of knowledge, acquiring skills on the process engineering area, reinforcing his initial career background and demonstrate that he can assume new challenges and achieve goals. He has shown that he can encourage people to teamwork and use an analytical process to evaluate issues. In time, these will lead him to manage projects inside our company.

During his free time, he likes to travel with his family, participate in cross country bike racing and sport fishing. Every year he’s going out for Chinook season, but we haven’t seen any fishtail so far…

Marcelo Perez is our process and simulation engineer, currently focused on the development of gold plant models. In his career, he has also worked as a researcher at the University, in projects linked to innovation and sustainability in metallurgical processes.

During his time with ProMet101, Marcelo has collaborated in various projects such as the commissioning and startup of a SART Plant, and as a trainer in the implementation of a new work management system, both located in Mexico. In the area of modeling and simulation, he has worked using SysCAD in engineering and design projects, planning filling, commissioning and startup strategies, and optimization of existing operations. As our resident expert on SysCAD, Marcelo is also our lead user and trainer for SysCAD in Chile.

The fundamental values that Marcelo brings us are his ability to develop new skills and willingly share them with the team, in addition to his commitment to teamwork and the fulfillment of 

John Hopkins has almost 30 years’ experience working on a wide range of projects in technical and management roles. He has proven to be flexible and versatile while continuing to improve his skills and add value to client projects.

After obtaining his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with an emphasis on mathematical modeling, he began his career working for CANMET as a Postdoctoral Fellow.  At CANMET, John worked on gold leaching hydrometallurgy and dynamic simulation of leaching circuits.

Following CANMET, John moved to Vancouver to work with Fluor Daniel Wright as a process engineer, specializing in gold, copper and nickel processes. He expanded his expertise in modeling by becoming proficient in METSIM and being the go-to resource for mass balance calculations for flowsheet development. 

Calgary and the oil sands were his next stop.  His initial assignment was process engineer for the Albian Sands project. At the time, Albian was the first greenfield oil sands project to be designed and constructed in about 20 years. He spent ten years in Calgary working as a process engineer, progressing through the ranks to eventually become the functional leader for oil sands for SNC Lavalin.  During his time in Calgary, John also accepted field assignments as a coordinator and pre-operations manager at Albian in Fort McMurray and Yanacocha, Peru.

John returned to Vancouver in 2010 to work with Fluor as a project/study manager.  He was often seconded to owners’ teams during this tenure and worked on large copper projects including Pebble (Alaska) and Sierra Gorda (Chile).  He also spent a year in Calgary managing several small projects in oil sands.

John joined Promet101 in 2016 as a  consultant. During this time, John has assisted in debottlenecking projects and as the commissioning manager for a SART plant in Mexico. John’s continuing work includes improving in-house software products for commissioning and mass balance/plant auditing as well as CIP modeling.  Currently, John is actively improving internal work processes and growing the Promet101 brand in the Vancouver market in particular, and the Canadian market in general.