Director, iCRAG
Murray Hitzman holds an SFI Professorship in the School of Earth Sciences at University College Dublin and is also the Director of the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre in Applied Geosciences (iCRAG; https://www.icrag-centre.org). He served as Associate Director for Energy and Minerals at the U.S. Geological Survey (2016-17) and was the Charles Fogarty Professor of Economic Geology at Colorado School of Mines from 1996-2016 where a primary research focus was the geology of the Central African Copperbelt (Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia). Dr. Hitzman served in Washington, D.C. as a policy analyst in both the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1994-96) during the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Senate (1993-94) for Senator Joseph Lieberman (CT). He worked in the petroleum and minerals industries from 1976 to 1993 primarily conducting mineral exploration worldwide and was largely responsible for Chevron Corporation’s Lisheen Zn-Pb-Ag deposit discovery in Ireland (1990). Hitzman has B.A. degrees in anthropology and geology from Dartmouth College (1976), an M.S. in geological science from University of Washington (1978), and a Ph.D. in geology from Stanford University (1983). He has previously served on the boards of a number of mineral exploration and mining companies and currently serves as technical advisor for the private company KoBold Metals, focused on utilizing machine learning for battery metals exploration. He has received a number of awards including the Chevron Chairman’s award for the Lisheen discovery (1992), the Society of Economic Geologists Silver Medal (1999), the Daniel C. Jackling Award by Society of Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration and the Des Pretorius Award by the Geological Society of South Africa (both 2015), and the Haddon Forrester King Medal by the Australian Academy of Sciences (2016).