Professor Dan Smith

Professor Smith's research and teaching cover critical minerals, with a focus on copper, minor technology metals, and by-products in gold deposits. His interests include the formation of ore resources, their mineralogy and chemistry, and how these might be applied to better explore, extract, process and remediate deposits.

Dan is the Director of the UKRI NERC Centre for Doctoral Training on Mineral Resources for the Energy Transition (TARGET), and a UKRI Senior Research Fellow on Critical Minerals within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) of His Majesty's Government, UK. 

• Hydrothermal ore deposits
• Sustainability and circularity in the mineral resources sector
• Geology of the SW Pacific
• Critical metals and security of supply
• Tellurium and other by-products
• Geopolitics of critical minerals
• Poprhyry copper deposit formation and exploration
• Post-subduction magmatism and mineralisation

Zhu, Smith, et al., 2024, Hornblendites as a record of differentiation, metasomatism and magma fertility in arc crust: Chemical Geology, 650, p. 121974.

Clarke, Smith, et al., 2023, Mineralogical constraints on the genesis of an alkalic-type epithermal Au-Te deposit: Tuvatu, Fiji: Ore Geology Reviews, p. 105279.

Gardiner, Roberts, et al., 2023, Geosciences and the Energy Transition: Earth Science, Systems and Society, 3, p. 10072.

Stonadge, Miles, et al., 2023, The volatile record of volcanic apatite and its implications for the formation of porphyry copper deposits: Geology, 51, p. 1158-1162.

Clarke, Smith, and Naden, 2022, Source controls on mineralisation: Regional geology and magmatic evolution of Fiji: Lithos, 432, p. 106897.

Ene, Smith, et al., 2022, Constraining the source of arc-like magmas in a post-subduction setting: the South Apuseni Mountains, Romania: Geologica Balcanica, p. 107.

Eskdale, Smith, et al., 2022, Economic By-Products in copper Porphyries: Silver in the Ascutita Cu-Porphyry, Romania: Ore Geology Reviews, 150, p. 105135.

Nathwani, Wilkinson, et al., 2022, Machine learning for geochemical exploration: classifying metallogenic fertility in arc magmas and insights into porphyry copper deposit formation: Mineralium Deposita, 57, p. 1143-1166.

Smith and Wentworth, 2022, Mining and the sustainability of metals. POST Brief 45, Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology.

• GL3110 - Mineral Resources for Net Zero Carbon II
• GL3113 - UK Field Course - Mining Lifecycle (Devon and Cornwall)
• GL3102 - Environmental Geoscience
• GL3109 - Mineral Exploration, Economics and Sustainability