Mike Caron (MS Geology, 2003)

I currently wear two hats, one as the Richland Operations Manager for the Richland, WA, office of GRAM, Inc., a consulting firm doing environmental cleanup work at the Hanford Nuclear Site, and another as Senior Geologist for Cambria Geosciences Inc. in Vancouver, B.C. I spent about 30 years of my life doing mining exploration work around the globe (Canada, USA, Mexico, Bolivia, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Tanzania, etc.) so it was natural to return to my previous incarnation as an exploration geologist when federal cutbacks impacted work at Hanford in early 2011. Recently, this work has involved digging deep into the memory banks regarding porphyry copper deposits, and spending the 2011 field season in a remote fly-in field camp in northwestern British Columbia trying to make sense out of about 100 km (that's 60 miles for those of you who haven't figured out what a kilometer really is yet) of drill core spanning a period of about 50 years. This work has involved fundamentally reinterpreting the deposit and generating a 3-dimensional model of structure, lithology, alteration, geophysics, and mineralization.

I am happily married to Suzanne, who is a missionary recruiter for Wycliffe Bible Translators. We live in Richland where remodeling our house seems to have taken on a life of its own and will never end.