Richard L. Bedell

As an undergraduate I was very interested in mineralogy and took a year off to work on pegmatites in Oxford County with Jim Mann in Bethel. I decided I needed more technical experience so contacted the AMNH and asked if I could do X-Ray diffraction work over the summer. They liked my enthusiasm and got some money to pay me to work on lead and calcium tungstates and molybdates i.e. scheelite, powellite, wulfenite stolzite, raspite. The museum liked my work and offered me a job on graduation to do research on mesosiderite meteorites funded by NASA. I also had access to the electron microprobe to continue my own research on mantle rocks. I published 6 papers that year using that microprobe, and that microprobe is now at MMGM.

I then went to the University of Toronto in part because of my mantle research, but when I got a fully funded project to study the pegmatites in Bancroft, Ontario (the mineral capital of Canada), I jumped on it. During that time, I went to the pegmatite conference in 1982 in Winnipeg, Manitoba where I took a conference photo with Al Faster and Skip Simmons, who are now both at MMGM.

After that thesis, I went to London to be a research geologist on global lead-zinc mineralization, followed by working for BP in southeast Asia on gold systems. Back in London, I got a job working on the Tanzania gold fields and then decided to go back and do another degree in London on Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). I then moved to Burundi, Africa for a couple of years after extensive consulting for the prior two years to run a gold exploration program.

I then decided to go back to the USA, as it was becoming a foreign country to me. I got a job at Boston College as Technical Director of their GIS center and got cross appointed at Boston University for the Center of Remote Sensing after teaching some courses there.

In 1993 I was asked to join Homestake Mining Company in Reno, Nevada to be part of their global exploration team to set up and run their technical group globally. In about 2000, Homestake got consumed by Barrick, making it the largest gold company in the world. One of the directors and I went off and staked our own claims and started a publicly traded exploration company, which had a magnificent discovery in Nevada. Hence, the ability to create the endowment.

I am currently a technical advisor to multiple exploration companies, chairman of TerraCore, which uses spectral data to map drill core, and an advisor to the Jet Propulsion Lab for the next generation of Earth Observing satellites.