Dr D J (Rick) Brake is a Chartered Practicing Mining Engineer, based in Brisbane, Australia, with 50 years’ experience in mining. Rick graduated from the University of Queensland with First Class Honours in Mining Engineering, completed an MBA from Deakin University in 1991 and a PhD in Biophysics from Curtin University in 2002, where he developed the now globally recognised Thermal Work Limit heat stress index. He was Adjunct Associate Professor in the Resources Engineering discipline at Monash University from 2017 to early 2020. He is a Fellow of the AusIMM, a Registered Professional Engineer in Queensland and a member of the Mine Ventilation Society of Australia. He was Ventilation Superintendent for the four Mount Isa underground mines in the mid-1980s and subsequently had other senior management positions in mine technical services and operations. In 1999, he established his own very successful consulting firm, Mine Ventilation Australia, and has been sole director since that time. He has been a member of the Editorial or Organising Committees for many mine ventilation conferences in Australia, North America and South Africa. He has consulted on more than 150 mining projects globally and he been called as an expert witness in several legal proceedings. He has presented over 100 training courses on mine ventilation, egress and entrapment, heat stress, airborne contaminants and mine cooling and heating, has published 60 technical papers in these areas, and has been invited to present keynote speeches at many conferences. Recently, he published a highly-regarded, two-volume technical reference book Mine Ventilation—An Engineer's Manual. In 2017, he was conferred with the Howard Hartman award by the Society of Mining Engineers for “Outstanding Service in the Field of Mine Ventilation Engineering”, the first non-North American to be honoured with this distinction.