Meet our team.

Kurt is the Co-founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration and development firm that combines the expertise of renowned mineral explorers with data scientists and engineers from top Silicon Valley companies. KoBold is dedicated to discovering the critical materials needed for the energy transition; it’s currently exploring ~60 properties on 4 continents for lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel, as well as developing it’s Mingomba project into a very large new mine. KoBold has also partnered with established firms like BHP and Rio Tinto.

Before KoBold, Kurt founded a carbon sequestration and enhanced oil recovery venture as well as a natural gas asset acquisition platform. Previously, Kurt worked in private equity and corporate consulting at Bain & Company. He has been an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and was a KAUST Research Fellow at MIT. He received his B.A. in physics from the Claremont Colleges, and his Ph.D. in applied math and earth science from Harvard University.

Josh is Co-Founder and President of KoBold Metals Company. Since inception in 2018, KoBold has grown under Josh’s leadership to become one of the top 3 exploration groups worldwide, the largest investor in R&D for exploration. Today, KoBold operates exploration programs guided by proprietary technology on four continents, including the world-class Mingomba copper project in Zambia.

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, operations, and advanced analytics.

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

Mfikeyi is an engineer and seasoned mining professional with over 15 years experience in industry. She worked on one of Zambia & Africa’s largest copper mines, First Quantum’s Kansanshi Copper-Gold mine in mining operations and the global internal audit division covering Australia, Finland, Mauritania and Panama’s operations. She was also the Country Manager and Director of one of Zambia’s largest mining and construction equipment supply and services companies, Barloworld Equipment, supplying Caterpillar products to various industries. Her portfolio covered First Quantum’s Kansanshi and Sentinel Mines, Barrick’s Lumwana Mine, Mopani Copper Mines, and Gemfields’ Kagem mine, the world’s largest emerald mine.

Mfikeyi has a BSc in Civil Engineering and an M. Eng in Environmental Engineering both from Old Dominion University, and an M.Sc. in Mining Engineering from Camborne School of Mines at the University of Exeter. She is an Executive MBA Candidate from the Lagos Business School at Pan-Atlantic University.

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. He has been based in Zambia since 1999 and led programs for Avmin, Teal, and MMG. Earlier in his career, Alex was a 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.

Audrey is an engineering leader with expertise in data infrastructure and distributed data systems. She’s experienced leading data teams at both large tech companies and fast growing startups. Audrey most recently led the ingestion and storage organization for Amazon Timestream, a fully serverless, highly scalable distributed database on AWS for time series data. Prior to this, she worked on data problems in the self-driving car space, including starting the data organization at Cruise Automation.

Audrey earned a BS in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College. Her past work includes roles at Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, and Cruise.

Chil is a commercial Lawyer and an advocate of the High Court and Supreme Court of Zambia of more than Seventeen years standing. Her previous role was Partner in charge of Mining and Real Estate at Chibesakunda & Co. where she spent over 16 years. While at Chibesakunda & Co. she covered extensive corporate and commercial work including banking and finance and M&A.

Chil holds an LLB and LLM from the University of East Anglia in the UK.

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.

Daniel previously served as Chief Operating Officer for SolarStone Development, a U.S.-based utility-scale and community solar project developer. His primary responsibilities included project origination, interconnection, engineering, portfolio management, and project finance. Daniel managed over 60 community solar projects across 4 jurisdictions and over 1,000 MW of utility-solar projects in the Upper Midwest and Mid-Continent regions. Daniel previously served as Vice President of Business Development at C12 Energy, and also founded and ran a software company focused on asset management for community solar projects.

Daniel has a Ph.D. in climate physics and chemistry from MIT, where he worked as Executive Director of the Sustainable Energy Revolution Program.

David is a world-renowned expert in sediment-hosted copper deposits. He 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.

David 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.

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. She holds several patents covering novel analysis techniques for electricity usage data.

Liz received her Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University, where she built an atomic-resolution microscope from scratch to study high-temperature superconductors.

Fabiana is a senior social performance and development professional with 17 years of international experience with major mining projects in Africa and Latin America. Her work has mainly focused on developing and managing teams of community relations specialists and in the development and implementation of Social Performance programs. Her expertise includes social management systems, stakeholder engagement, community development, land access strategies, resettlement action plans, local business initiatives, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) risk assessments, including human rights labor assessments. Fabiana is deeply passionate about implementing responsible mining practices that bring benefits and generate shared value opportunities to local communities.

She holds an M.A. in Globalization and Development from the University of Warwick and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Arizona.

Fanuel studied Mining Engineering and Civil Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines, USA, and has worked in the mining industry for over 16 years. He focuses on mine design and scheduling and producing plans that are safe, achievable and add value. Fanuel is also keenly interested in the old age challenge of optimizing mine plans while maintaining flexibility. He spent his career in gold country mines in northern Nevada interspaced by a 2-year stint at Lumwana Mine (NW Province, Zambia) in a variety of roles including building management operating systems. Fanuel spent the last 5 years with Freeport-McMoRan leading the Strategic Mine Design and Scheduling Team for the Indonesian Operations (PTFI). He recently completed the mine design and scheduling feasibility study work for the 33mtpa Kucing Liar project in the Grasberg Copper District in Indonesia.

Fanuel has lived and worked in the USA and Zambia. He has a BSc in Mining Engineering, an MSc in Civil & Environmental Engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas. He is a member of SME.

George studied geology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and has worked in the mining industry for over 20 years. He focuses on understanding the geological controls on mineralisation and ensuring these controls are built into geological and resource models used in exploration, mining studies and production environments. He began his career on the deep Witwatersrand gold mines before joining Snowden Consultants to work on projects across a range of different geological and geographical settings including southern and West Africa, South America, North America and Russia. George worked with Ivanhoe Mines for 11 years across their platinum group element, zinc and copper projects, and was heavily involved in the discovery, delineation, modeling and development of the Kakula Copper Deposit in the DRC.

George has lived and worked in both South Africa and Canada. He has a BSc (Hons) in Geology from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and is a Fellow of the Geological Society of South Africa.

Gladys brings 14 years experience in Community Relations having worked in Zambia, DR Congo, Sierra Leone on various community projects around exploration. Gladys is a trained teacher with a BSc. in Mathematics and worked as a Math teacher for 13 years before moving into administrative roles in Zambia under the Government of the Republic of Zambia.

Her goal is to help transform people’s lives through sustainable livelihoods. Some of her notable achievements include the successful implementation of the sustainable livelihoods project at Ivanhoe’s Kamoa-Kakula project in the DR Congo under Eco-Livelihoods. Gladys enjoys active community interactions and this has been one of the major factors in her achieving success. Her hobby is farming and due to this she spends most her off days at the farm.

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 his Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. His dissertation focused on the physics and dynamics of convective clouds, and how they interact with large-scale weather patterns in the tropical atmosphere.

James is a Technical Occupational Health Safety and Operational Risk Management Specialist with over 20 years’ of demonstrated records of accomplishments synchronizing transformative health safety and risk management maturity integration. James is a leader in influencing change and continuous improvement in safety performance delivery across diverse cultural and under-performing operations globally. James has led global change agent teams in the delivery of operational risk management control initiatives aligned to ICMM guidance, represented industry in heavy mobile equipment risk profiling, was the business leader in deploying global fatigue management standards and was the corporate representative and a strategic member of the Earthmoving Equipment Safety Roundtable (EMESRT) facilitated by the University of Queensland.

James has maintained throughout his career an underlying drive in sustainable health and safety practices that have yielded a personal fatality free career profile spanning over 20 years. James also excels instilling business centric solutions supporting continuous improvement, business continuity and performance agility results aligned to delivery of operational integrity performance.
James holds Technical Diplomas in Mining and Mineral Process Engineering Technology 1992/1994 and Occupational Health and Safety (2002/2004) from the British Columbia Institute of Technology and Canada Risk Management (CRM) from the Global Institute of Risk Management through Simon Fraser University (2004).

James positively influences engagement through a “Values” and “Fit for Purpose” mindset delivering strategic continuous improvement performance results towards advancing minimization of loss of life, production and reputation influencing events. He is a dedicated professional with the drive and skillset to excel in a fast-paced leadership role enhancing a company’s ability at demonstrating its commitment to sustainable core values.

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.

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

Prior to joining KoBold, Jen served as lead strategist for global critical mineral supply chains in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. At State, Jen directed global commercial and multilateral negotiations and forged mineral exploration alliances spanning multiple contents. Previously Jen worked for the U.S. Departments of Defense and Labor, where she led the critical and conflict minerals portfolio and spearheaded a successful artisanal mining formalization initiative. Jen is an amateur astronomer and lifelong student of emergence, complexity, and nonlinearity. She holds an M.A. in International Relations from George Mason University.

Kalimina is a mechanical engineer and project management professional with over 15 years experience. He has successfully managed engineering and construction projects in various industries within southern Africa, starting in Zambia for Cosira Group before moving to South Africa with the same company. He then moved on to Murray and Roberts, Veolia Water and BEH where he managed a various portfolio of engineering and construction projects from feasibility stage through to take over and operation. He worked on a number of large projects including Medupi and Kusile power station, Anglo Platinum, Royal Bafokeng Platinum (now Impala Bafokeng) and Rand Water. He has also implemented and managed the rollout of project governance systems and procedures as well as the set up of a Project Management Office (PMO). He has experience in managing multidisciplinary teams on complex projects. He brings a wealth of experience in engineering and construction management.

Kalimina holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Honors) from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom and is registered with the Project Management Institute as a Project Management Professional.

Leslie is a geologist and land manager with 20+ years of experience in property evaluation, budgeting, and GIS data management at Agnico Eagle Mines Limited, Newmont Goldcorp, and Teck America. Her stellar project coordination, regulatory compliance, and field work now helps KoBold secure mineral rights for hundreds of project sites around the world.

Leslie has a Bachelor’s of Science in Geology & Earth Science from Oregon State University.

Lucas is a finance leader with extensive experience in dynamic and fast paced work environments. He began his career in liquidity risk modeling at Goldman Sachs before moving to SpaceX, where he spent over 8 years leading financial planning, cost analysis, and operational finance activities.

Lucas earned a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

Lupupa has over 15 years experience as a finance professional with the professional services firms and the financial services sector. She has held senior managerial positions and served as Chief Financial Officer for Bayport Financial Services, the largest micro-financing company in Zambia. Prior to that spent most of her career as Audit Manager with Deloitte & Touche and BDO in Zambia, the United Kingdom and Cayman Islands.

Lupupa is a Fellow Chartered and Certified Accountant with ACCA attained from ZCAS, Fellow of the Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants (FZICA) and holds an MBA from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Michael Strevens, born and raised in New Zealand, is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, where since 2004 he has taught and thought about the nature of science, complex systems, the psychology of philosophy, the role of physical intuition in scientific discovery, and the nature of explanation and understanding, among other things. In his most recent book, The Knowledge Machine, he explains why science is so successful at creating knowledge and why it took so long for humans to figure out how to do it right.

Prior to joining KoBold, Patty was VP, Counsel at Paramount Global supporting Simon & Schuster’s international publishing operations and also spent several years as a legal consultant to various non-profits, most recently the American Museum of Natural History. Patty has broad corporate experience drafting, structuring, and negotiating complex transactions. During her 15 years at Time Warner Inc. (now Warner Bros. Discovery), as Vice President, Associate General Counsel & Assistant Secretary, she oversaw Time Warner’s venture capital investments group and led mergers & acquisitions, strategic partnerships and internal restructurings, including the $85B sale of Time Warner to AT&T and three divisional spin-offs. Patty started her career at Cravath, Swaine & Moore after serving as a law clerk to Judge Karen Nelson Moore on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Patty holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School where she was a Stone Scholar and served on the Columbia Law Review. She earned her B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Stanford University graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

Peter has spent 20 years as a geologist with Inco and Vale. He’s 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. Peter was a member of a team that made major discoveries in every one of the cobalt-producing Ni-Cu sulfide deposits in Canada.

Peter received his M.Sc. from the University of Toronto, and his Ph.D. from the Open University (U.K.) 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.

Robert is an expert on the behavior of critical metals in magmatic-hydrothermal systems. His research combines experimental studies of the solubilities of metals in granitic melts and field studies of critical metal deposits. He was an Associate Professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Waterloo from 1997 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2022 was the Robert Hodder Chair in Economic Geology at the Department of Earth Sciences at Western University in London Ontario.

He obtained MSc and PhD degrees from McGill University. He was subsequently a post-doc at CNRS-CRSCM in Orléans, France and a Research Associate at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut, Bayreuth, Germany.

Sandy is an attorney who works with interdisciplinary teams to invent ethical solutions to public problems. As an Assistant Attorney General, he represented Massachusetts in its groundbreaking investigation of the opioid industry and helped to secure billions of dollars to treat substance use disorders and a first-in-a-generation public archive to disclose millions of pages of evidence from Purdue Pharma, Insys, Mallinckrodt, and McKinsey. That work required a multi-year national strategy to negotiate significant agreements with corporations, universities, individual victims, and all fifty states. During a decade of private practice at WilmerHale, Sandy represented innovative clients including Apple, BP, Crane, Cree, General Electric, Harvard, Intel, and Novartis.

Sandy graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also holds a master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard. He served as a law clerk to Judge Reena Raggi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Shane is an exploration geologist with more than 15 years of exploration and resource definition experience on world-class base-metal 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 Kamoa-Kakula and Makoko sediment-hosted copper deposits in the DRC.

He specializes in drill core interpretation and building 3D structural models to make hypotheses about mineral systems. Shane has spent considerable time developing advanced stage resource models and identifying new opportunities for greenfields exploration globally.

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

Shane has a B.Sc. in Geology and Environmental Sciences from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand and is a member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists.

Steve is a professional geologist (P.Geo.) with over 20 years of experience in geology and mineral exploration, including international experience in a wide range of deposit types and commodities over the full spectrum of project development stages. He holds an MSc in Geology from the Colorado School of Mines and has had a broad range of industry experience, initially in greenfields exploration with Rio Tinto (including regional exploration for Ni-Cu-PGE deposits in Michigan, Minnesota and Ontario) and later in brownfield exploration with Lundin Mining. As Principal Geologist at Lundin Mining’s Eagle Mine, Steve led the target generative and technical aspects of the exploration program that resulted in the discovery of the high-grade Eagle East Ni-Cu-PGE massive sulphide deposit, now being mined. As exploration manager (Portugal) and later as Director of Exploration (corporate), Steve led multiple teams to add value to operating mines through the discovery of new near mine resources.

Tom previously ran the technology pipeline at Sila Nanotechnologies where he led teams developing revolutionary materials for electric vehicle batteries and the transition to clean energy. Tom also spent six years at Google X managing a portfolio of projects including next generation computation, applied machine learning, underground construction, biotechnology, and climate change reduction. He also founded a printed solar panel company in 2008, is a named inventor on over a dozen patents, and authored ten academic publications.

His academic work includes the Miller Fellowship at UC Berkeley, a PhD in Physics from Harvard, and a BS in physics from Stanford.

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.