KoBold Team

Kurt House, Ph.D.

CEO

Kurt is an entrepreneur who works at the interface of technology and natural resources. He was previously an Adjunct Professor in Stanford University’s Energy Resources Engineering Department. And before that, he founded a carbon sequestration and enhanced oil recovery business as well as a direct investment platform to acquire North American natural gas assets based on a proprietary, physics-based tool that more accurately forecast natural gas production from hydraulically fractured wells.

Previously, Kurt was a KAUST Research Fellow at MIT where he studied the chemistry and physics of CO2 capture and storage. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in earth & planetary science for similar work and his B.A. in physics from the Claremont Colleges. Kurt has also worked in private equity and corporate advising for Bain & Company.

Jeff Jurinak, Ph.D.

COO

Jeff is a 35+ year professional in petroleum exploration and production with 20+ years in management of engineering and technology groups. His professional foundation is reservoir engineering and project assessment, and he has significant career experience in exploration management, business strategy and portfolio management, corporate restructuring, and organizational start-up.

The core of his career was with Conoco and ConocoPhillips. Jeff served as Chief Reservoir Engineer, responsible for reviewing and approving reservoir engineering for all major exploration and production projects for ConocoPhillips worldwide and for overseeing corporate reserves bookings of 11.5 billion bbl. In this role, Jeff also helped oversee COP’s global exploration portfolio.

From 2011-2014, Jeff was Vice President of Development for QGC, part of BG Group, based in Brisbane, Australia. He was responsible for the upstream component of the US$21 billion QCLNG CBM to LNG project, including development geoscience, operations geology, reservoir engineering, production technology, and water resources.

As a principal of Phase Change Resources, Jeff was responsible for technical underwriting on all private equity investment proposals, ranging from heavy oil thermal recovery to unconventional dry gas. Jeff also led PCR’s development of proprietary production forecasting for dry gas reservoirs.

Jeff has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he conducted research on solar energy applications.

Josh Goldman, Ph.D.

President

Josh is Co-Founder and President of KoBold Metals Company, which he has grown from inception to a team of over 100 geoscientists and technologists, industry-leading exploration technology, and a global portfolio of exploration projects.

Josh’s expertise lies at the intersection of technology and natural resource businesses. Prior to starting KoBold, he was a private equity investor in upstream oil & gas and wrote software to identify undervalued opportunities from large datasets and rigorously underwrite investments in subsurface resources. Previously, he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he advised leading energy and materials companies on strategy, corporate finance, and operations using advanced analytics.

Josh earned a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard for experiments on quantum computing. He also received master’s degrees in History of Science from Imperial College London and Applied Mathematics from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. in Physics from Cornell.

Ian Pearce

Senior Advisor

Ian Pearce has worked for over 40 years at the most senior levels in the field of mining and metallurgy.

In addition to his role as Senior Advisor at KoBold Metals; Mr. Pearce serves as Chair and Non-Executive Director of MineSense Technologies, a mining technology company; Vice Chair and Non-Executive Director at Outotec Oyj.; Chair of the Board at New Gold; and Non-Executive Director at Nexa Resources S.A.

Mr. Pearce was partner of X2 Resources, a private partnership focused on building a mid-tier diversified mining and metals group from 2013 to 2017. Prior to that he served as Chief Executive at Xstrata Nickel. As CEO, he was responsible for global nickel and ferronickel operations and projects in North and South America, Europe, Africa and the South Pacific. With a portfolio of Greenfield and Brownfield projects, his focus was on the continuing growth of the nickel commodity business.

Mr. Pearce was Chief Operating Officer at Falconbridge Corporation, and before that he worked on Canadian oil sands projects as well as metallurgical and mining projects for Fluor Inc. in Canada, Indonesia, Chile, and South Africa.

Mr. Pearce served as Chair of the Mining Association of Canada; Chair and Director of the Nickel Institute; served on the Advisory Board of Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100; and presently on the Trans Canada Trail Foundation Board.

He holds an Engineering HND in Mineral Processing and a BSc degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He also attended the Management Advancement Program at the University of the Witwatersrand and received strategic and general management training at Henley College in the United Kingdom.

Murray Hitzman, Ph.D.

Economic Geologist

Professor Murray W. Hitzman is a world-leading economic geologist with particular interest in basin-hosted metallic systems and iron oxide-copper-gold deposits and over 30 years of experience in the mining industry, academia, and government. In March 2018, he was appointed Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Professor at University College Dublin (UCD) and Director of the Irish Centre for Research in Applied Geosciences (iCRAG). He previously was Associate Director for Energy and Minerals at the US Geological Survey, where he served from 2016-2017, and prior to that, he was the Fogarty Professor in Economic Geology at the Colorado School of Mines from 1996 to 2016.

Dr Hitzman has a proven record as an ore-finder and mine developer. He began work in the mining industry in 1976, and from 1982-1993, he served throughout the world for Chevron Resources Company and initiated and managed base and precious metal exploration projects in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Spain, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Tanzania, Canada, and the United States. In Ireland he led the discovery of the Lisheen zinc-lead-silver deposit, which he then guided through exploration and pre-feasibility.

His key research achievements have centered on the development of new generic models for both established and poorly understood classes of metallic mineral deposits. In addition to his industrial and academic experience, Dr Hitzman has served as a government policy advisor, including: Geological Society of America Congressional Fellow on the staff of U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (1993-94); and American Association for the Advancement for Science/Sloan Foundation Executive Branch Fellow, serving as a senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1994-96).

Dr. Hitzman has been recognized for his work by his receipt of virtually every major award and citation in the field, including the Haddon Forrester King Medal by the Australian Academy of Sciences in 2016,
the Des Pretorius Award by the Geological Society of South Africa in 2015, the Daniel C. Jackling Award from the Society of Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, and the Society of Economic Geologists Silver
Medal. Dr. Hitzman received B.A. degrees in Earth Science and Anthropology from Dartmouth College in 1976, an M.S. in geology from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Geology from Stanford University in 1983.

Peter Lightfoot, Ph.D.

magmatic systems lead

Dr. Peter C. Lightfoot, P.Geo. has spent 20 years as a geologist with Inco and Vale. Dr. Lightfoot served as Chief Geologist with Vale Base Metals; Vale is one of the four largest mining companies in the world, where he led exploration teams and oversaw geologic evaluation in Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, Finland, China, India, Australia, Brazil, Angola, South Africa, and the U.S.

Dr. Lightfoot was a member of a team that made major discoveries in every one of the cobalt-producing Ni-Cu sulfide deposits in Canada. He was responsible for exploration at Voisey’s Bay, an important Ni-Cu-Co producing mine in Labrador; at Sudbury, the largest Ni-Cu-Co producing deposit in North America, Dr. Lightfoot helped make new discoveries at Victor and Totten; at Thompson, Peter was part of a team that discovered the North Hangingwall Deposit; and at Carajas, a highly productive transtensional rift in Para State, Brasil, Dr. Lightfoot worked with a team of geologists who discovered the Jaguar iron oxide nickel deposit.

In 2017, Dr. Lightfoot was appointed as the Hutchinson Visiting Industry Professor at the University of Western Ontario. In 2016, he published Nickel Sulfide Ores and Impact Melts, the first comprehensive textbook on the nickel-copper-cobalt-precious metal ore deposits of the Sudbury Igneous Complex. Dr. Lightfoot received his B.A. in Earth Sciences from Oxford in 1980, his M.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1982, and his Ph.D. from the Open University (U.K.) in 1985. He completed post-doctoral studies at the University of Toronto and undertook extensive research on the geology and geochemistry of the Noril’sk ore deposits during his tenure as an Adjunct Professor. Dr Lightfoot is now a consultant to the mining industry through his company (www.lightfootgeoscience.ca).

David Broughton, Ph.D.

Hydrothermal systems lead

Dr. David Broughton is world renowned expert in in sediment-hosted copper deposits. David has been instrumental in several significant discoveries, including Kamoa and Platreef. Early in his career, David worked primarily in the Abitibi greenstone belt. In 1997, he became Geologist and Project Manager for Cyprus Amax’s Kansanshi pre-feasibility project, which became Zambia’s largest producing copper mine, and he later worked as a part of the AMIRA p544 team that investigated mineralization controls in the Zambian Copperbelt. In 2008, David became Head of Exploration at Ivanhoe, and there he was co-leader of the Kamoa Discovery team that was the 2015 recipient of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada’s (PDAC) prestigious Thayer Lindsley Award for International Mineral Discovery, and co-recipient of AME BC’s 2016 Colin Spence Award for Excellence in Mineral Exploration, for the discovery of the Platreef deposit. He was recently awarded the Des Pretorius Memorial Award from the Geological Society of South Africa for lifetime achievement in economic geology.

Dr. Broughton received a BSc. (Hons) and a MSc. in Earth Sciences from the University of Waterloo and a Ph.D. in Geology from the Colorado School of Mines. He is a Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists, the Geological Association of Canada, and the Geological Society of South Africa.

Elizabeth Main, Ph.D.

Director of Data Science

Liz is a data scientist and physicist who has worked at the intersection of software and clean energy for nearly a decade. Her expertise includes driving software R&D projects, developing production machine learning systems, and cultivating new datasets. Liz holds several patents covering novel analysis techniques for electricity usage data.

Liz received her PhD in physics from Harvard University, where she built an atomic-resolution microscope from scratch to study high-temperature superconductors. She also holds a B.S. in physics from Harvey Mudd College.

Jessica Kirkpatrick, Ph.D.

Scientific Advisor

Jessica Kirkpatrick has been working as a data scientist in the tech industry for the past seven years. Her previous companies include Slack, Microsoft, Hired, and Chegg. Before making her transition to the private sector, Jessica earned a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from UC Berkeley, where she discovered and studied some of the most distant and brightest known objects in the universe, quasars, and worked with large and complex data sets. Her work led to the discovery of 200,000 new quasars.

As a data scientist, instead of spending her days finding patterns in the structure of the universe, she has spent them finding patterns in the behaviors of people in order to make technology work better for us all. In addition to her work in private industry, Jessica maintains an active role in giving back to the astrophysics and data communities. She is on the Board of Trustees for the American Astronomical Society and the advisory board for Udacity’s data science program.

Mark Topinka, Ph.D.

Principal SCIENTIST

Mark Topinka is a physicist and data scientist who has worked in a range of technical fields in the past two decades. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in 2008 at Stanford University where he researched organic (polymer-based) solar cells, he co-founded Alion Energy, a thin-film solar panel manufacturing start-up. As Chief Scientist at Alion Energy, he helped grow the company to 50 employees and a full-scale R&D pilot line before moving on in 2012. Since then he has worked as a scientific advisor and consultant to a number of bay-area companies, from Google to a number of different small green-tech startups, helping solve varied challenges in data science, computer vision, and other technical areas that those companies faced.

He received his BA/BS in Physics and Engineering from Swarthmore College, and continued on to do his Ph.D in Applied Physics at Harvard University in low-temperature condensed matter physics, where he worked on imaging electronic wave functions in one of the the basic building blocks for quantum computers. He continued his work as an Urbanek Post-doctoral Fellow at Stanford where he switched from quantum computation research into thin-film and organic solar cells.

John Thompson, Ph.D.

TECHNICAL & BUSINESS ADVISOR

Dr. John Thompson has over 35 years in the mining industry and related research. He is the Chair of Genome BC, and past Chair and co-founder of both Geoscience BC and the Canada Mining Innovation Council. He was a member of the Global Agenda Councils: the Future of Mining and Metals and Advanced Materials, both with the World Economic Forum, and President of the Society of Economic Geologists.

Over the last six years, he has divided his time between Cornell University, where he was the first Wold Professor of Environmental Balance for Human Sustainability, and Vancouver, BC where he consults on exploration, mining and sustainability. He has held diverse leadership roles in many organizations including Director of the Mineral Deposit Research Unit (MDRU) at the University of British Columbia and Chief Geoscientist/Vice President of Technology and Development for Teck Resources.

He holds a BA from Oxford University and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto.

Patrick Redmond, Ph.D.

VP EXPLORATION

Patrick is a professional geoscientist with +25 years of experience in international mineral exploration and the mining industry. He has a track record of value creation through exploration and discovery in multiple jurisdictions and across a range of commodities.

Prior to joining KoBold Metals, he worked for Teck Resources for over 12 years in successively more senior roles including; Regional Exploration Manager, Exploration – Europe and Africa, General Manager, Exploration – The Americas, and Technical Director of Geoscience Services. Prior to joining Teck he was Chief Geologist for QGX, a successful TSX-listed exploration company focused on Mongolia.

His diverse career has given him direct hands-on experience of all stages of the exploration business, from grass-roots exploration programs, to mineral inventory drilling and resource/reserve definition on advanced projects, through to resource expansion and orebody characterization within existing mines. He also has significant commercial and deal making experience within the exploration business.

Patrick has a strong academic geoscience record and is a recognized expert on ore-forming magmatic-hydrothermal systems across a range of ore deposit types. He received his Ph.D. in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University, his M.Sc. in Geology, and BA (Hons) in Earth Sciences from Dublin University, Trinity College. He is an Adjunct Professor at Dublin University, where he taught an “Introduction to Economic Geology” course to undergraduates for 8 years, and has acted as an academic advisor for a number of graduate students.

Danielle Schmandt, Ph.D.

Senior Project Geologist

Danielle is an economic geologist who has worked in minerals and energy resources for many years. She was first introduced to minerals exploration through her undergraduate summer job exploring for copper in Alaska. She graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in Geology working under Dr. Meinert for her undergraduate thesis. She then went to get her M.S. in Geology at the Colorado School of Mines with research on the world-class Kamoa Deposit under Prof. Hitzman and Dr. Broughton.

The following years she worked in base metals exploration in the Americas, ore deposit modeling and resourcing, and geochemical analysis and interpretation of shale gas plays. She then returned to academia to pursue her Ph.D. in Australia working on the world-class Olympic Dam deposit. Her research was multifaceted and included the advancing merging of mineralogy and metallurgy studies that contribute to both enhanced understanding of deposit formation and efficient metal extraction.

Danielle has worked across the globe in a variety of geologic settings for both industry and academia. With experience across the value chain she has seen the benefits of multi-disciplinary approaches and lateral communication and believes in the ability to apply new information and technology results in success.

Joanne Wood

NLP Engineer

Joanne Wood studied materials science, chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, with a focus on titanium alloys and low-cost production methods. After a stint in management consulting, Jo followed her passion for science back into a technical role as a data engineer and infrastructure engineer. She specialized in materials science data curation and developed her expertise in data extraction and data engineering for artificial intelligence applications in the hard sciences.

Taylor Kilian, Ph.D.

Senior Data Scientist

Taylor is a data scientist and geologist who is passionate about leveraging geospatial data using machine learning. His career began with a heavy focus on research and education, helping design and execute multinational projects in order to gather data and analyze the ancient history of tectonics on Earth back to the first supercontinent. He earned his Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics with distinction from Yale University, where he focused on supercontinent reconstructions in deep time using paleomagnetism, geochronology, and geochemistry. He was subsequently a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley and managed the Berkeley Paleomagnetism Lab.

He has conducted field work across the globe, including Australia, New Zealand, Siberia, Mongolia, Canada, Sicily, India, and Wyoming. His work is published in Nature, Geology, the Geological Society of London, and Lithosphere, among others. Taylor also holds a B.A. in Physics and Geology from Colby College.

Jef Caers, Ph.D.

Data Scientist Advisor

Jef Caers is Professor of Geological Sciences at Stanford University. He is also director of the Stanford Center for Earth Resources Forecasting, an industrial affiliates program in decision making under uncertainty with ~20 partners from the Energy Industry. Dr. Caers’ research interests are quantifying uncertainty and risk in the exploration and exploitation of Earth Resources. Jef Caers has published in a diverse range of journals covering Mathematics, Statistics, Geological Sciences, Geophysics, Engineering and Computer Science. He was awarded the Vistelius award by the IAMG in 2001, was Editor-in-Chief of Computers and Geosciences (2010-2015). Dr. Caers has received several best paper awards and written four books entitled “Petroleum Geostatistics” (SPE, 2005) “Modeling Uncertainty in the Earth Sciences” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), “Multiple-point Geostatistics: stochastic modeling with training images” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015) and “Quantifying Uncertainty in Subsurface Systems (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). Dr. Caers was awarded the 2014 Krumbein Medal of the IAMG for his career achievement. Jef received both an MSc (’93) in mining engineering / geophysics and a PhD (’97) in engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

Traci Paramore, CPA

Director of Finance and Operations

Traci is a Certified Public Accountant and a Chartered Global Management Accountant. She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. She began her career with the international accounting firm KPMG and has 20+ years of accounting and auditing experience across several industries including financial services, insurance, non-profit and construction. Traci has a B.S. in Accounting from Troy University.

Jake Edman, Ph.D.

Director of Machine Learning

Jake is a data scientist and atmospheric physicist with experience tackling a wide variety of problems related to climate and sustainable energy. His previous work has ranged from researching the basic physics of climate change to developing software and data science tools to facilitate the transition to a clean energy economy.

Jake received a B.S. in Physics from UC Irvine before moving to UC Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in Earth and Planetary Science. His dissertation focused on the physics and dynamics of convective clouds, and how they interact with large-scale weather patterns in the tropical atmosphere.

Savannah Blake

Associate Data Scientist

Savannah is a geospatial analyst and geologist who is excited about the growing intersection of Earth Science with geospatial and remote sensing technology. Before joining the Kobold team as a geoscience data analyst, Savannah completed a Masters with distinction in Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley with a focus in Geology and Remote Sensing. Her thesis focused on modeling shallow landslide occurrences in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties CA, using Geospatial Information Systems software (GIS).

Savannah received a Bachelors degree in Earth Science as well as a Bachelors in Evolutionary Biology at UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate, Savannah worked as a fossil preparator in the University of California Museum of Paleontology and conducted research in vertebrate paleontology on topics ranging from biomechanics of extinct mammals and fish to the last occurrence of a dinosaur linage before the Cretaceous extinction event.

Abdel Alfahham

Associate Data Scientist

Abdel is a geoscientist with over five years of geochemical data acquisition and analysis experience. Abdel conducted field sample collection, geochemical transport analysis, and geospatial modeling on complex federal and multinational corporate projects.

Abdel holds a B.S. in Environmental Science from Rutgers University and an M.S. in Applied Geosciences from University of Pennsylvania. His master’s research project focused on characterizing unsaturated zone biogeochemical properties and soil moisture dynamics. As a cross-disciplinary environmental humanities fellow at UPenn, Abdel translated complex scientific concepts from his research into an interactive public humanities exhibit.

Erika Ito

software engineer

Erika is a geologist and data scientist interested in geoinformatics. She received her B.S. in Geology and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After graduating, she worked in the Macrostrat Laboratory where she developed text mining applications and helped to build a global database of geoscientific information.

Erika obtained her M.S. in Geoscience from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her thesis work involved using groundwater models and geostatistical techniques to assess wetland restoration efforts.

Nancy Lin

Staff Software Engineer

Nancy brings over a decade of industry experience in software engineering. She has worked in problems as diverse as financial data warehouses, language processing, and healthcare, building highly curated datastores and large-scale data processing pipelines. Before going into engineering, Nancy was a mathematics Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin.

I-Kang Ding, Ph.D.

Staff Data Scientist

I-Kang is a data scientist and machine learning engineer who has over a decade of experience in a variety of fields, including financial services, semiconductor manufacturing, and solar cell R&D. He has years of hands-on experience in the full lifecycle of machine learning models at scale, from business problem definition and refinement, data and feature pipelines, model development, and model deployment and monitoring in production.

Prior to KoBold Metals, he was a data science manager at Capital One, where his work focused on developing machine learning models to detect and prevent various types of credit card fraud for the company’s entire credit card portfolios (with purchase volume equal to ~2% of US GDP), and deploying models to customer-facing production systems on AWS. He has also created inner-sourced Python packages and learning modules including self-directed trainings and in-person courses to empower hundreds of analysts to more easily automate their work with Python.

I-Kang completed his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the development of advanced characterization techniques to better understand the structure-property relationship of perovskite-family of solar cells. He is the author or coauthor of more than 15 peer-reviewed papers and holds 3 patents in design of advanced solar cells. He also holds a B.S. degree in Chemistry from National Taiwan University.

XinXin Xu

Director of Corporate Development

XinXin Xu has experience working on a variety of corporate transactions across a broad spectrum of industries. She started her career in investment banking at Foros Group, a boutique M&A firm, focusing primarily on the technology sector, advising clients such as Dassault Systèmes, IFS, and Kodak. She then worked as an investor at Basin Holdings, an integrated energy and industrials holdings company. Most recently, she was the Director of Finance and Operations at a PropTech SaaS startup, where she led the company to a successful Series A raise.

XinXin obtained her M.S. in Geology & Geophysics as well as her B.S. in Economics and Geology & Geophysics from Yale University, and was the part of the inaugural class of Energy Studies scholars. During her time at Yale, she worked on a variety of problems including supercontinent reconstruction with a focus on the Kalahari in Namibia, seismic anisotropy in North America, thermochronology of Glacial Valleys in Patagonia, and Chinese Rare Earth Elements policy.

Nick Knezek, Ph.D.

Staff Data Scientist

Nick is a data scientist and geophysicist with years of experience applying programming, statistics, and physics in a wide variety of fields. He received a B.A. in Physics from Dartmouth College where he built instruments and studied magnetospheric ions around Earth and near Jupiter’s moons. He joined NASA JPL in 2013, where he helped shield spacecraft from radiation and other hazards. He left to earn a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Science at U.C. Berkeley, where he studied magnetic waves in Earth’s core and the evolution of magnetic fields on Earth and Mars using a variety of computational and statistical techniques.

Nick transitioned to data science in 2018 as an Insight Data Science fellow. Prior to joining KoBold, he was a data scientist at Arceo.ai, studying cybersecurity risk using various machine learning models. There he led projects spanning the full lifecycle of data science from project proposal and management, data acquisition and cleaning, prototyping, training, and deploying and maintaining production code on AWS. He is excited to combine his physics and data science experience to important work facilitating a transition to green energy at KoBold Metals.

James Stevenson

Director of Engineering

James Stevenson is a software engineer with over a decade of experience in data engineering. He has helped to build data processing pipelines from small- to petabyte-scale in a range of industries including healthcare, education, and e-commerce. In addition, he has developed a diverse array of data-driven applications in the fields of natural language processing, recommender systems, and healthcare cost and quality assessment. James studied English literature and music composition at Johns Hopkins University before going into software engineering.

Matthew Plough

Staff Software Engineer

Matthew Plough brings a broad range of software development experience. He has developed machine learning systems in the human resources space and has created infrastructure and applications for petabyte-scale healthcare data processing pipelines. Prior to his data engineering work, Matthew developed safety-critical avionics software, automatic control systems for marine and aerial robotics, and sensors for network security tools. Matthew studied electrical engineering at Princeton University and computer science at Johns Hopkins University.

Daniel P. Schrag, Ph.D.

TECHNICAL ADVISOR

Daniel P. Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, and Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Schrag studies climate and climate change over the broadest range of Earth history. He is particularly interested in how information on climate change from the geologic past can lead to better understanding of anthropogenic climate change in the future. In addition to his work on geochemistry and climatology, Schrag studies energy technology and policy, including carbon capture and storage and low-carbon synthetic fuels.

From 2009-2017, Schrag served on President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Among various honors, he is the recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union and a MacArthur Fellowship. Schrag earned a B.S. in geology and geophysics and political science from Yale University and his Ph.D. in geology from the University of California at Berkeley. 

David Freedman

Senior Project Geologist

David is an exploration geologist with diverse interests in a range of ore-forming systems. Over the last eight years he has worked with prospecting, mapping, sampling, and drilling programs on early to mid-stage gold and polymetallic exploration projects in Nevada and Alaska. As an undergraduate and graduate student, David conducted research in igneous-hydrothermal and sediment-hosted ore deposits, paleomagnetism, and structural geology.

Prior to his geological training, David was involved in resource conservation and spent several seasons with trail crews in central Idaho before developing a passion for geoscience as an undergraduate. David has an M.Sc. in Geology from the University of Nevada, Reno, and a B.A. in Geology from Colorado College.

Alex Matthews

Country Manager – Zambia

Alex has managed exploration programs in Zambia and DRC from conceptual target generation through to resource definition drilling for both copper-cobalt and lead-zinc sediment-hosted deposits. Alex has been based in Zambia since 1999 and led programs for Avmin, Teal, and MMG. Earlier in his career, Alex was section geologist on a Witwatersrand gold mine, before moving into exploration geology in Namibia, where he undertook regional and detailed geochemical and geological mapping programs, the results of which led to planning, implementing and interpreting diamond and percussion drill programs. Alex holds an MSc in Mining Geology from the Camborne School of Mines.

Ian Fieldhouse, M.Sc., P.Geo.

Senior Geologist

Ian has spent +20 years working in the mineral exploration and the mining industry. Prior to joining KoBold Metals, he worked for Vale/Inco, largely on greenfield projects in Canada, Scandinavia and Africa. He has also worked in the mines and brownfield exploration in two of the larger Ni-Cu Mining camps of the world, those being Thompson and Sudbury.

This diverse career has given him valuable experience in the various stages and aspects of the mineral exploration business from project generation, to field work to management of projects, having set up and managed exploration projects in several countries. Ian has a strong background and passion for the structural controls and pathways for mineral deposit formation having received his M.Sc. from University of Manitoba with a focus on economic and structural geology, and his B.Sc. (Hons) in Geology and Applied Geology from Glasgow University, Scotland.

Damian Burch, Ph.D.

Principal Data Scientist

Damian is an applied mathematician who has developed data-driven and physics-based models for almost 20 years. He spent most of his career in the upstream oil & gas industry, where he worked on geoscience and engineering projects that spanned exploration, development planning, drilling, and production.

Damian earned his Ph.D. in physical applied mathematics from MIT, where he studied nonlinear phenomena in rechargeable battery materials and in microfluidic devices. He also holds a B.S. in computer science and mathematics from Caltech.

Kawai Washburn

Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Kawai Washburn is a software engineer with over a decade of experience in a variety of roles, from fullstack engineering to backend system development and service automation. He has worked in wide-ranging operating environments, from siloed bare-metal linux clusters backing a handful of monolith applications to global container orchestration platforms serving hundreds of thousands of concurrent requests per second, at companies that include Palantir Technologies, Digital Ocean, and Apple. In addition to his software engineering experience, Kawai has worked in public policy econometric analysis, international microfinance, climate policy advocacy, and as a teacher of math, english, and vocational computer studies. He is also a published author, with a novel that was included in many “best of” lists of 2020.

Kawai received his Bachelors in Computer Science from the University of Portland and his Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University.

Yuem Park, Ph.D.

Data Scientist

Yuem is a data and Earth scientist who combines statistical, machine learning, and numerical modeling techniques to improve our understanding of Earth systems. He received a B.A. in Geosciences from Princeton University in 2015, then a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Science from U.C. Berkeley in 2020, where he studied the drivers of climate change over the past 1 billion years of Earth’s history.

Yuem utilizes a diverse array of skills ranging from field expertise to cutting-edge computational methods, and his work spans a variety of domains including geology, tectonics, geochemistry, and climate science. He is excited to leverage these data and Earth science skills and knowledge to help society evolve into a more sustainable and equitable future.

Lib Covington

Senior Accountant

Lib Covington began her career in public accounting as an auditor of companies ranging from manufacturing to healthcare to nonprofit organizations. She subsequently specialized in the effective mitigation of operational risk at one of the largest banks in the United States. Lib holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Business from Rhodes College and a Master’s of Accountancy from The University of Alabama. She is also a Certified Public Accountant (inactive with experience).

Connie Chan

Board Member

Connie Chan is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she focuses on investing in consumer technology. Connie joined the firm in 2011 as a deal partner on the investment team before becoming a general partner in 2018. She serves on the boards of Whatnot and KoBold. She also led the firm’s investments in Knowable, NewNew, Reface.ai, and Run the World.

Before joining Andreessen Horowitz, Connie worked at HP leading its webOS efforts in China. She started her career as a private equity investor at Elevation Partners, investing in media and entertainment.

Connie is well-known across Silicon Valley for her deep knowledge of the Chinese consumer technology landscape and is often tapped as an expert to translate how trends may move from Asia to the west.

She has been named to LinkedIn NextWave Top Professional 35 and Under, Wired’s Next 20 Tech Visionary, and Fast Company Most Creative People 2017. Connie won a Sidney award for her writing on WeChat and is a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum.

Connie received her B.A. in Economics and M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

Karl White

Board Member

Karl White leads the Capital Formation effort at Breakthrough Energy Ventures and sits on the boards of Baseload and KoBold Metals. Karl is an experienced institutional asset management professional and has broad global investment experience having invested in venture capital, private equity, distressed securities, global tactical asset allocation and currency overlay. In addition to experience at major firms like Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Putnam Investments, Karl was also Executive Director and Chief Investment Officer for the ~$2 billion MBTA Retirement Fund. He has also been an entrepreneur in the investment industry and co-founded Elements Capital Partners Limited (Nicosia, Cyprus).

Karl has extensive board experience having served in the following capacities – Vice Chair, the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees where he was also responsible for Commercial Ventures and Intellectual Property; Audit Committee Chair and Member, the Florida A&M University Board of Trustees; Board of Governors, Tufts Medical Center (Boston); Board of Directors, Progress Investment Management (San Francisco); Advisory Board, European Strategic Partners, Standard Life Private Equity Funds (Edinburgh, Scotland).

Karl earned a BS degree in Pharmacy from Florida A&M University’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and received his M.B.A. in Analytic Finance and Statistics from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.

Jeroen van der Hoek

Board Member

Jeroen is an Investment Manager at Equinor Ventures and sits on numerous boards including KoBold Metals. His focus is on investments in subsurface and digital exploration and production technologies. Jeroen is passionate about investing in early phase start-ups and providing hands-on support to companies with unique technologies and broad implementation potential in the energy industry.

Prior to his current role, Jeroen had 17 years of experience in the oil and gas industry worldwide. He held various technical roles in exploration and geoscience, from Petroleum Engineer to Project Manager on exploration campaigns.

He holds an M.Sc. in Applied Earth Sciences from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.

Jarod Lapp

Senior GIS Data Specialist

Jarod is an exploration geologist and GIS analyst interested in the application of geospatial algorithms to automate workflows and enhance efficiency in exploration targeting. He brings six years experience in mineral exploration, within Canada, Burkina Faso and the United States, on precious metals projects ranging from grassroots to resource definition stage.

Prior to joining KoBold, Jarod also spent three years in the humanitarian aid sector with an NGO called REACH Initiative. Based in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Iraq, he facilitated technical trainings, developed interactive web map dashboards, and led spatial analysis efforts in support of needs assessment research activities across those countries.

Jarod holds a Master of Geoinformation degree from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, along with a B.Sc. in Geosciences from the University of Victoria.

Wilson Bonner

senior project geologist

Wilson is an exploration geologist with experience in both junior and major gold companies in Nevada. He uses a wide variety of techniques to explore incorporating traditional field mapping, geochronology, trace element and isotope geochemistry, geophysics, and downhole structural analysis. He has managed, designed, and implemented drill projects on both greenfield and brownfield programs including the discovery of the 1.2 Moz Helen-Gap gold deposit for Premier Gold Mines in 2014-2017. He most recently worked for Barrick Gold Corporation (Nevada Gold Mines) as a member of the Carlin Trend exploration group. His graduate work used microscopy, geochronology, and other methods to investigate the time-space relationships between polymetallic mineralization and Carlin-style gold at the Cove Au-Ag deposit in Lander County, NV.

Wilson has a B.Sc. in Geology from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN and a M.Sc. in Geology from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Nick Williams, Ph.D., P.Geo.

Principal Geophysicist

Nick specializes in advanced integration of geology and geophysics through geophysical inversion and numerical analysis. With over 20 years of exploration experience he has analyzed the geophysical footprints of copper, gold, and nickel deposits on six continents.

He joined Geoscience Australia in 2001 where he studied the geochemical and geophysical exploration vectors for numerous major copper, gold, and nickel deposits across Australia. In 2011 he joined the Ivanhoe group where he targeted expansions of the Kamoa (copper) and Oyu Tolgoi (copper-gold) deposits and used integrated geological and geophysical modeling to help significantly expand the Platreef Ni-PGE-Cu-Au deposit in South Africa.

As part of the founding team at High Power Exploration he led the deployment of a new generation of electrical survey methods to explore for copper, gold, and nickel deposits and groundwater under deep cover in Australia, Africa, and North and South America.

Most recently with Barrick, he helped define the geophysical footprint of the high-grade Goldrush-Fourmile gold deposit in Nevada and completed the integration and analysis of the world class geophysical databases from both Newmont and Barrick over all the major gold deposits of the Carlin district under the Nevada Gold Mines JV.

He holds a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of British Columbia and a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Geology from CODES at the University of Tasmania.

Beth Reid, Ph.D.

Staff Data Scientist

Beth thrives in the development and deployment of models incorporating both physical and data-driven, statistical insights. At Climate Corporation she built models of rainfall and airborne disease propagation. At Loon she incorporated her models of the stratospheric thermal and electrical environment into an autonomous balloon navigation system.

Prior to her transition to industry, Beth honed these same skills on the large-scale structure of the universe. She devised novel empirical measurements that, when coupled with highly non-linear gravity simulations, enabled important new constraints on the composition of the universe and behavior of gravity on cosmological scales. Her papers have been cited over 2000 times. She holds a Physics Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Kate Fugate

Head of Data Access

Kate is a geographer and GIS Analyst with a background in predictive modeling, anthropology, groundwater modeling and supply chain logistics. Her passions include data quality, making maps that tell compelling stories, and the preservation of the environment. She brings 9 years of experience in spatial analytics, modeling of groundwater flow and movement of contamination, freight movement and logistics (the traveling salesman problem), and predictive modeling of geological and archaeological resources.

Kate holds a Masters of Science in Geography from Portland State University, and a Bachelor of the Arts in Anthropology from Oregon State University.

Christian Bogeberg

Senior Technical Recruiter

Christian has spent the better part of his career helping technology companies grow engineering teams through conversation with incredibly intelligent and thoughtful people from all over the world. He’s been a part of organizations as small as three, and as large two hundred thousand, but seeks to understand how each and every candidate sees themself and where they might find the next big chapter of their career. Every part of the hiring cycle is crucial to a candidate’s experience, and Christian’s focus is on making each stage personal and smooth. He has scheduled interviews, sourced passive candidates, developed interview philosophy and traveled to college campuses, endeavoring to create successful and happy employment experiences at Disney, Google, Twitter, and Mesosphere (D2iQ), to name a few. Christian earned his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Outside of his talent practice, he spends his time watching ballet, walking his toy poodle, riding his OneWheel, spinning fire, and enjoying the outdoors with friends.

Rory French

associate data scientist

Rory is a data scientist with a background in Earth Science, GIS, and Remote Sensing. He received his B.A. in Earth and Planetary Science from UC Berkeley in 2018 and his M.A. in Earth and Planetary Science with a focus on Biometeorology and Remote Sensing from UC Berkeley in 2019. His research involved using GIS and Remote Sensing techniques to classify land vegetation for post-fire disturbance areas in San Diego County.

After graduating, he worked as an independent contractor for The Nature Conservancy where he managed and transformed a database of rasters and shapefiles to map the location of all coconut palm trees on Pacific coralline islands. He is excited to help move the world closer to a greener, more sustainable future.

Kris Darnell, Ph.D.

Senior Data Scientist

Kris is a data scientist and computational geoscientist who has extensive experience developing software and algorithms for a variety of spatiotemporal problems. He has used computer vision and deep learning to develop geospatial intelligence models using satellite imagery and lidar for natural disaster assessments, insurance applications, and earth monitoring. Most recently, he has contributed substantially to the development of in-house Python libraries for a cloud-based forecasting software platform that leveraged geospatial data, human choices, and historical production data to make predictions about the expected volumetric output of oil and gas wells. His specific contributions to that platform focused on uncertainty quantification of forecasts, feature engineering of noisy time series data, and a modular, extensible machine learning pipeline framework.

Kris received his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from The University of Texas at Austin where he studied clathrate hydrates with a particular focus on Carbon Dioxide storage as clathrate hydrate deposits in sub-marine and sub-permafrost sedimentary basins. He also holds a M.S. in Geophysical Sciences from University of Chicago and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.

Laurence Pascall

Senior Software Engineer

Laurence is a software engineer with nine years of experience in backend and data engineering. After receiving a Masters in Mathematics from Oxford University, he worked in start-ups in a wide-range of industries (music streaming, household services, publishing software etc.). He joined Spotify via an acquisition and spent several years working there, building terabyte-scale data pipelines and machine learning systems to enrich Spotify’s content metadata. He is passionate about building reliable, maintainable software and solving challenging problems. He is very excited to be part of Kobold Metals and to work towards mitigating climate change.

Laurie Shanks

Admin Assistant

Laurie began her career working at an advertising agency. She was an account executive for one of the agency’s largest clients. Seeing an idea go from conceptualization to being on television & print was intriguing to her and what started her career in advertising. Laurie has a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism/Mass Communication from Samford University.

She is married with two children. In her spare time, she loves to watch her kids play sports, read, exercise and spend time with family.

Janet Garner, CPA

Accounting Manager

Janet is a Certified Public Accountant and a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. She was a manager with the international accounting firm KPMG and the regional accounting firm Warren Averett, LLC. She has over 25 years of accounting and auditing experience with several industries including software development, construction, insurance, and distribution. Janet has a B.S. in Accounting from the University of South Alabama.

Marco De Mattia, Ph.D.

Staff Data Scientist

Marco is a physicist and data scientist who spent most of his career working on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. He helped discover the Higgs boson, analyzed terabytes of data in search of physics beyond the Standard Model, and coordinated alignment and calibration for the detector. His transition to the industry involved developing high-performance C++ software for a prestigious high-frequency trading firm for about a year. He then became a data scientist in the upstream oil and gas industry, where he spent about 3.5 years developing models to help maximize production in unconventional wells. He is very excited to start playing an active role in the energy revolution.

Marco received a master’s in physics at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” with a thesis in general relativity. He then obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Padua, where he developed a search for rare Higgs boson production in association with top quarks.

Bubile Nkhata

Project Exploration Geologist

Bubile is an economic geologist with a background in base metal exploration and mining. She has an enthusiasm for integrated, multidisciplinary approaches to search space-reduction and systematic project-scale work tethered to field-based observations. She first worked at Sentinel Mine in northwestern Zambia as a Mine Geologist where she developed an interest in the understanding of structural controls to aid in resource optimisation and translating geological characteristics into geometallurgical implications. Following that, she went on to join First Quantum Minerals’ sediment-hosted copper exploration team where she worked on early and advanced projects moving on to Generative exploration across the Katanga Basin. During this time, she also participated in field campaigns in the Northern Territory and Queensland for basin-scale assessment of the McArthur Basin and Mt Isa terrane in Australia, as well as South Australia in the Adelaide Rift Complex.

She has also served as Secretary for the Geological Society of Zambia during the first three years of its re-instatement with efforts centred on engagement with geology students from the University of Zambia and Copperbelt University. Bubile graduated from the University of Zambia in the School of Mines with a B. Sc. in Mineral Sciences.

Shane Nielsen

Principal Geologist

Shane is a geologist with 14 years of exploration and resource definition experience on world class projects. He has spent most of his career with the Ivanhoe group where he played key roles in delineating and expanding the Platreef Ni-PGE-Cu-Au deposit in South Africa, and the discovery and delineation of the Kakula and Makoko South sedimentary Cu deposits in the DRC.

He specializes in building a strong structural understanding of complex ore bodies and their hosts rocks, and the stratigraphic setting in which they occur, but has spent considerable time identifying new opportunities for greenfields exploration.

He has designed and executed numerous surface and underground drilling programs in the DRC and managed the resource delineation drilling program of Makoko. Shane has overseen the design, acquisition, and interpretation of large geophysical programs in Africa, including 2D and 3D seismic surveys. Shane also has experience exploring for and discovering iron-oxide copper-gold deposits in Australia.

Thibaut Astic, Ph.D.

Data scientist / Geophysicist

Thibaut is a geophysicist and data scientist that specializes in combining machine learning and physics simulations to simultaneously and quantitatively analyze multiple data types and produce enhanced 3D geological interpretations for resource exploration.

Before joining KoBold, he worked in geological mapping and geophysical data acquisition and processing companies. More recently, he completed a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC, Canada), where he developed innovative algorithms for multi-physics subsurface imaging.

His combined industry and academic experiences have placed him at the intersection of geology, geophysics, and data science. He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen scientific publications.

John Mern, Ph.D.

Decision scientist

John is a decision scientist and intelligent systems engineer. He specializes in stochastic algorithms for solving complex, sequential tasks with imperfect information. He has developed decision making methods that have been applied to autonomous vehicle control, safety-critical infrastructure planning, and computer network security.

John received a B.S. in mechanical engineering and finance from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Stanford University. While at Stanford, John conducted research on machine learning and stochastic planning in the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory. Prior to Stanford, John was an autonomous systems architect at Boeing Phantom Works.

Peter Illig, Ph.D.

senior geologist II

Peter is a Certified Professional Geologist with experience working in greenfield to brownfield exploration, underground mining, and project development for major and junior companies. Since 2013 he has worked on carbonate hosted copper-gold-zinc-lead and porphyry copper-gold deposits in Alaska, Queensland, and Arizona. Most recently he advanced the exploration and pre-feasibility geometallurgy programs at the Hermosa project in Southern Arizona after acquisition by South32.

Peter received his master’s degree in Economic Geology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and his doctorate in Geology from the Colorado School of Mines.

Jerry Vinokurov, Ph.D.

senior Software Engineer

Jerry Vinokurov is a software engineer who has worked at various times in academia, government, and industry. Prior to joining KoBold he worked at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology, where he built a data pipeline for the acquisition and processing of genomic data to predict gene functionality in biological contexts.

He got his undergraduate degrees in physics and math from UC Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in astronomy at Brown, where he worked on building instrumentation for balloon telescopes.

Lucie Mathieu, Ph.D.

Scientific advisor

Dr. Lucie Mathieu did her PhD at Trinity College Dublin (2010), worked on the Copper Cliff Offset dyke (Sudbury) prior working for the research and development group Consorem for 5 years, and was then hired as assistant professor at UQAC as part of the Metal Earth project (2017-2022). Her research program integrates two important geoscience disciplines, economic geology and igneous petrology. Her research interests include the morphology of magmatic systems, the quantification of hydrothermal alteration, and the distribution of precious and base metals in Archean magmatic systems.

Mweene Shansonga

Admin Manager – Zambia

Mweene Shansonga began her career working at a research project conducting an epidemiological study in Zambia where she was responsible for the collection of data and reporting. She then went on to join MMG Limited where she was responsible for the company’s administration and accounting activities including taxation, internal financial controls and contributed to the preparation of the annual budget and annual financial statements. It is from this role that she developed an interest in accounting and is currently pursuing a BSc in Accounting and Finance at the University of Zambia.

Zach Turner

Senior Technical Recruiter

Zach Turner has 18 years’ experience as an Executive Search Consultant with his family’s 58 year-old executive search firm, where he started as a researcher. As the firm’s “Jack of all Trades” he served clients, successfully recruiting for all positions in the mining industry globally. He takes pride and enjoys his ability to successfully recruit for any position from skilled/technical labor to CEO.

Prior to joining the family firm Zach honed his people skills working in the hospitality industry, as an Executive Chef after finishing his training in culinary arts and classical French cuisine at Johnson & Wales University.