Citation by F. Tornos
President Huston, SGA members and Friends
It is a privilege, and an honour, for me to introduce my good friend Matthew Steele-McInnis to receive the 2022 SGA Young Scientist Award. First, I would like to acknowledge David Banks, Jean Cline, John Hanchar and Chris Heinrich for supporting his nomination, and the SGA council for voting for him among a group several other excellent and highly qualified candidates.
We feel that Matt is one of the best possible candidates for the SGA Young Scientist Award and his career thus far and enthusiasm should be an example for other young geologists interested in obtaining a better understanding of how ore deposits form. Nowadays, many published papers tend to use fancy analytical techniques and develop models without understanding the fundamentals of what is going on. Perhaps, the great merit of Matt is his ability to distance himself from this approach and try to integrate geology, thermodynamics, and geochemistry in a rigorous way; something that can only be done with an excellent background in hydrothermal geochemistry. If you are interested in these topics, you should read his many papers to better understand and appreciate his work.
Matt is a native of Newfoundland and graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) degree from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Matt then completed his PhD studies at Virginia Tech, supervised by Bob Bodnar. Afterwards, he held a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETH, Zurich. He then moved to Tucson for a faculty position at the University of Arizona, and later decided to go northwards for a cooler place and is now a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Alberta. He has had a successful group of students from undergraduate to postdocs and has an impressive record of papers oriented to our understanding of Earth’s fluids and its relationships with the formation of ore deposits. In just 11 years he has published 75 papers in top international peer-reviewed journals.
As mentioned above, his field of research is dominantly oriented to the geochemistry of ore deposits, including a wide variety of topics such as the basics of fluid and melt inclusions with development of thermodynamic equations for the H2O-CO2-NaCl system, solubility of minerals (specially anhydrite and quartz) in hydrothermal fluids, the origin of fluids in VMS systems and, more recently the origin of magnetite-(apatite) systems, where with his student
Wyatt Bain and other colleagues have proposed an exciting new model for the origin of these enigmatic rocks the results from which have recently been published in Nature Geoscience (2020) and Geology (2021).
SGA president, on behalf of the large group that probably agrees with us, I am happy to present Matthew Steele-McInnis as the recipient of the SGA Young Scientist Award.
Thank you, Fernando, for such a flattering introduction, and for nominating me for this
tremendous honor. I can’t tell you how much it means to me.
Thanks also to David, Jean, John and Stoeff for supporting my nomination. This award is already very humbling, but finding out that I was nominated and supported by such a group of outstanding scientists whom I admire so much, makes it all the more so.
I want to also thank the entire leadership of SGA for bestowing this honor, and for all of your many efforts that make this society such an active, vibrant and encouraging one for the study of mineral deposits.
As Fernando said, I grew up in Newfoundland and I went to university at Memorial, where John Hanchar was my first academic mentor. John gave me my first hands-on experience in research, and set me on the path that led me here. Next was Virginia Tech, where my PhD supervisor Bob Bodnar taught me the ways of fluid inclusions, and literally changed my life in the process. It was Bob who made me see the power of using fluid and melt inclusions to understand ore formation, by applying the fundamental constraints of thermodynamics to interpret what they tell us (or as Bob likes to say, looking down the microscope and seeing a phase diagram). It’s safe to say that everything about my career and research would be completely different if not for Bob. My postdoctoral supervisors at ETH Zurich, Stoeff Heinrich and Thomas Driesner, as well as Christian Schmidt at GFZ Potsdam, all helped expand my views further, by directing my eyes both towards the really big-picture geologic processes and questions, as well as to the sub- microscopic world of fluids and melts at the molecular scale.
I have no doubt that I would not be here today if not for many others, especially my research collaborators and students. I have been extremely fortunate in having many outstanding collaborators who have allowed me to share in their science and discoveries, including Simone Runyon, Ben Walter and Basem Zoheir. I’ve also been lucky to have many extraordinary students during these formative years of my research group, and this recognition really reflects their efforts and discoveries too. Among them, I want to especially recognize Wyatt Bain, who was my first ever PhD student, and who worked with me on what I consider some of my group’s most exciting discoveries so far, with regard to the properties of fluids that form magnetite-apatite deposits. That turned out to be one of those projects where the results were truly unexpected; and isn’t that the most exciting kind?
Finally, thank you to my most important colleague and collaborator of all, my wife, Pilar Lecumberri Sanchez. How lucky I am that I get to share not only my life, but also my love of mineral deposits, with you.
Thank you.
—Matthew Steele-MacInnis, Edmonton, Alberta, March 14, 2022