Mirko van der Baan is a professor at the University of Alberta in the Department of Physics, specializing in Exploration Seismology. He graduated in 1996 from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, obtained a PhD with honors in 1999 from the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, and then joined the University of Leeds, UK, where he became the Reader of Exploration Seismology. He also holds an HDR (Habilitation) from University Denis Diderot, Paris, France.

Mirko is currently the Director of the Microseismic Industry Consortium, a collaborative venture with the University of Calgary, dedicated to research in microseismicity. He was the 2017 Honorary Lecturer, North America, of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists: 'How widespread is human-induced seismicity in the USA and Canada?'. He is also one of the founding members of the Integrated Petroleum Geosciences (IPG) professional MSc program at the Univ of Alberta.