Medals and Awards

Murray Hitzman has worked as a geoscientist in the industrial, academic, and government sectors. Hitzman served as SEG President from 2005 to 2006. He holds BA degrees in anthropology and geology from Dartmouth College (1976), an MS in geological science from the University of Washington (1978), and a PhD in geology from Stanford University (1983). Hitzman is currently Emeritus Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at University College Dublin, where he also served until early 2025 as the director of the Research Ireland Centre in Applied Geosciences (iCRAG). He served as associate director for Energy and Minerals at the U.S. Geological Survey (2016–2017) and was the Charles Fogarty Professor of Economic Geology at Colorado School of Mines from 1996 to 2016, where a primary research focus was (and remains today) the geology of the Central African Copperbelt (Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia). Dr. Hitzman served in Washington, D.C., as a policy analyst in both the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1994–1996) during the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Senate (1993–1994) for Senator Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut). He worked in the minerals and petroleum industries from 1976 to 1993, primarily conducting mineral exploration worldwide, and was largely responsible for Chevron Corporation’s Lisheen Zn-Pb-Ag deposit discovery in Ireland (1990). He has previously served on the boards of a number of mineral exploration and mining companies and currently serves as technical advisor for the private company KoBold Metals, focused on utilizing machine learning for battery metals exploration, and for GeologicAI, focused on using high-fidelity data, robust analytics, and domain expertise throughout the mining cycle. He has received a number of awards, including the Chevron Chairman’s Award for the Lisheen discovery (1992), the Society of Economic Geologists Silver Medal (1999), the Daniel C. Jackling Award by Society of Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration and the Des Pretorius Award by the Geological Society of South Africa (both 2015), and the Haddon Forrester King Medal by the Australian Academy of Sciences (2016).

Zhaoshan Chang is the Charles Fogarty Endowed Chair and Professor in Economic Geology at Colorado School of Mines (CSM). He worked at various universities before joining CSM in 2018, including Peking University, China (1997–2000); Washington State University, USA (2004); CODES, University of Tasmania (2004–2011), and EGRU (Economic Geology Research Centre), James Cook University (2011-2018). He was the director of EGRU from 2012 to 2018. Zhaoshan has studied a wide spectrum of mineral systems in 19 countries, including skarn, porphyry, epithermal, iron oxide copper-gold, greisen/pegmatite W-Sn, and sediment-hosted gold deposits. He works closely with the mineral industry on exploration-oriented research projects. He also works on ore-forming processes and ore-controlling factors, magma fertility, regional metallogenesis, and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry methodology (dating, mineral trace element analysis, and mapping). He serves as the director of the Professional Master’s Degree in Mineral Exploration program at CSM.

Santiago Tassara is an assistant professor of geology at the Universidad de O'Higgins (Chile). He earned his BSc in geology from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina (2014), an MSc in mineral resources from the University of Barcelona, Spain (2015), and a PhD from the Universidad de Chile (2019). He was the Bateman Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University until 2022. His research focuses on how magmas form and evolve in subduction zones to generate large magmatic-hydrothermal deposits of base and precious metals. He is particularly interested in processes that regulate the magmatic flux of volatiles and metals throughout the lithosphere and how these processes control the formation and regional-scale distribution of ore deposits.

Chico Azevedo is currently a director and vice president of exploration at King Copper Discovery Corp., a company focused on exploring gold and copper deposits in South America. He earned his geology degree from the University of Brasília in 1982 and began his career exploring gold deposits in Brazil with Gencor (South Africa), where he later joined an internal research group and dedicated a couple of years studying gold mineralization in Paleozoic terranes worldwide. In 1994, Chico moved to Argentina to evaluate Paleozoic gold occurrences across the Andean countries. In 1997, he joined IAMGOLD as exploration manager for Argentina, leading programs targeting Paleozoic (orogenic) gold in the Puna region and epithermal gold in the Patagonian Massif. A decade later, he was invited to join Gold Fields (South Africa) as South America exploration manager, focusing on gold and copper opportunities. Between 2007 and 2016, his team advanced the Chucapaca gold-copper-silver deposit (now the San Gabriel mine, entering production) in southern Peru and discovered and developed the Salares Norte gold-silver deposit in northern Chile, now also in the production stage. Chico has served the Society of Economic Geologists (SEG) as VP South America (2009–2011), Councillor (2013–2015), and President (2022).

Mark Hannington is a professor of economic geology at the University of Ottawa and the former head of marine mineral resources at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto (1989) and spent 15 years as a research scientist in the Mineral Deposits Division of the Geological Survey of Canada before moving to the University of Ottawa in 2005. His research combines the study of active volcanoes on the ocean floor and ancient volcanic environments that host volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits. He has participated in 30 research cruises and has conducted major research projects on VMS systems, including the giant Kidd Creek deposit and regional-scale hydrothermal alteration in the Abitibi region. Mark was editor of the journal Economic Geology from 2001 to 2008.