The 2023 William Harvey Gross Award is awarded to Dr. Christopher Lawley. Dr. Lawley is a highly creative, intelligent, productive, and enthusiastic scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 2005 and worked with the industry for a couple of years. He obtained his M.Sc. degree in 2009 for the study of the MAX porphyry deposit, and his Ph.D. degree in 2012 for his work on the Paleoproterozoic Lupa goldfields of Tanzania. He joined the Geological Survey of Canada in 2012. In his first projects as leading scientist, he combined field work and state of the art geochronology, geochemistry and data analysis techniques, to demonstrate the multi-stage nature of gold mineralization in the Meliadine gold district of Nunavut and the Lynn Lake belt of Manitoba. His work later focused on deciphering mechanisms for gold upgrading in the lithospheric mantle and the formation of fertile reservoirs, helping elucidate why some regions are better endowed than others. Importantly, throughout such major metallogeny projects, Dr. Lawley developed new sample preparation and analytical methods, data analysis and interrogation tools, and new protocols for portable devices such as pXRF and pLIBS. He his currently heavily involved in collaborative research with the USGS and Geoscience Australia on critical minerals, and in national-scale mineral potential mapping and data analytics. He also currently leads a major research project on lithospheric controls on gold in the Golden Triangle area of NW B.C. This illustrates both his high-level knowledge diversity and expertise in economic geology that he has gained over the last few years. Dr. Lawley is a highly dedicated and prolific scientist, and an exceptionally talented writer with over 20 peer-reviewed papers in major journals in the last 10 years, plus numerous GSC reports and presentations. He was co-editor of the 2015-2020 TGI-5 Gold Project synthesis. He joined the Editorial Board of Economic Geology in 2016 and is highly valued as both as editor and reviewer. Dr. Lawley is part of a very promising generation of geoscientists, but what clearly separates him from many other talented young scientists is that he has the ability to conduct detailed field-based research, while being an amazing geochronologist, geochemist, metallogenist, programmer, and methodology developer – very few scientists can claim having all these skills.
The William Harvey Gross Award was presented to Dr. Christopher Lawley at this year’s GAC-MAC 2023 meeting in Sudbury.