Citation by J. Kolb

Dear Clifford, Dear SGA members,

I know Clifford since he came to my institute in Karlsruhe, Germany in 2017, just a few months after I started my professorship. I know that this was a challenging step for him, since he started as a PostDoc directly after his PhD, just had a new family and had to move to yet another country. It helped that he has both a Canadian and a French passport, but a lot of administration had to be dealt with in German. He has been my partner in crime during the last 6-7 years in establishing a new economic geology department at KIT. This involved the design and organization of a completely new study program. Clifford was involved in teaching and the design of the new program from the start. He taught courses in metal deposit and industrial mineral geology, geochemistry and developed a course on mineral exploration. He established a portfolio in lectures and practicals for a variety of economic geology and geochemistry topics. Clifford also took part in a lot of field trips to the Black Forest. He has been a very important contact for students of the SGA Black Forest – Alpine student chapters and supported a lot of their activities.

When he left Stockholm, where he did his PhD on a gold-related topic, his supervisor, Iain Pitcairn gave him a gold pan as a gift, because Clifford was not able to actually see gold in his samples. When he came to my place it didn’t take long for him to actually see gold. Clifford started working on Finish orogenic gold deposits and at seafloor massive sulfide (SMS) mineralization at Kolumbo, near Santorini, Greece. He developed the idea from Iain to study metamorphic rocks at increasing metamorphic grade for their gold content in order to test the hypothesis of a metamorphic fluid and gold origin in the orogenic gold systems of Finland. He extended the approach to other elements like As, Sb, Co, etc. in order to explain various hydrothermal element enrichment. He built a conclusive model on the various element enrichment of orogenic gold-only and multi-element deposits for the first time through metamorphic processes in the Central Lapland Greenstone Belt. When we obtained a new LA-ICPMS, he started immediately working with the machine, and he refined a low-detection limit whole rock gold analysis using pressed powder pellets yielding sub-ppb gold data. This was an important step also for multi-element data sets. On the other hand, he developed his research on SMS by investigating the hydrothermal system of the Kolumbo volcano and metal source in magma and hydrothermally leached wall rock. Interesting publications on this topic are yet to come. On top of that, Clifford developed a new genetic model for ultramafic-hosted volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits including a detailed look at the geotectonic setting. He publishes regularly in well-recognized journals. I am impressed by the broad research, covering various economic geology and analytical aspects, he has been performing at his young age during the last years.

I congratulate Clifford to the SGA Young Scientist Award and wish him all the best for his future at the University of Innsbruck, where he moves in October and has to stand on his own feet in the future. Our collaboration will not stop. Good luck, Clifford and all the best.

Jochen