Daniel G. Wood is the recipient of this year’s Thayer Lindsley Award for his leadership of exploration teams responsible for numerous discoveries of mineral deposits in a variety of geologic settings with an aggregate gross value in excess of $100 billion.
Mr. Wood retired from mineral exploration in late 2008 after 24 years with BHP and almost 18 years with Newcrest Mining Limited, leading teams exploring for a range of mineral resources in Australia, SE Asia/SW Pacific and the Americas. During his career, the teams he led produced coal, gold, gold-copper and copper-molybdenum discoveries in Australia, Indonesia and Peru. The list of discoveries by these teams is extraordinary in its variety of geologic settings, in the number of commodities and in the aggregate gross value of the deposits—in excess of $100 billion.
Mr. Wood joined Newcrest Mining at its formation in 1990 and from the mid-1990s, as Executive General Manager Exploration, led its highly successful exploration team which was judged by the Metals Economics Group of Canada to have been the world’s most successful gold explorer, 1992-2005.
Mr. Wood is an Advisory Board member of the WH Bryan Mining and Geology Research Centre at the University of Queensland where he is an Adjunct Professor and strong advocate for enhanced geological input into mass mining research. He was jointly awarded the Joe Harms Medal by the Geological Society of Australia for discovering the Cadia gold-copper deposits in NSW, and is the 2013 recipient of the SME's Robert M. Dreyer Award. Mr. Wood is a Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists in the U.S.
