Adjunct Professor Chris Anderson

Chris is an anthropologist working within and around the private sector, in particular but not exclusively with the extractive sector: anywhere that industrial activity butts into local communities. He is a practitioner in the field now often called, ‘Communities & Social Performance’. His company, Yirri Global LLC, assists companies in due diligence assessments, stakeholder engagement, social impact assessments and building capacity internally with training, developing standards, systems and processes to improve engagement, communication and relationships between host communities and a project or operation, especially when Indigenous peoples are part of the latter's context.

Chris has spent some twenty five years in senior roles in the mining sector, working on four continents for Normandy Mining, Newmont Mining and Rio Tinto; previously spent five years as CEO of a major cultural heritage institution, the South Australian Museum, and taught anthropology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. As a research scholar,he undertook several years fieldwork with Kuku-Yalanji peoples of the Daintree Rainforest in far north Queensland and worked in Central Australia with Warlpiri and related peoples. He has worked during his mining career in some 14 countries, including Ghana, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Mongolia, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Peru and others. He teaches at the Colorado School of Mines and is a member of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at the Sustainable Minerals Institute at the University of Queensland.

Born in Philadelphia, he grew up in West Virginia and spent some thirty years in Australia. He is of Danish and Swedish extraction, has seven children, two grandchildren and has also been a psychologist and an R&B drummer. He lives in Denver, Colorado.