THE TEAM

Altitude Minerals’ aims to build, test and refresh a pipeline of large-scale drill targets across multiple projects and commodities within geological domains containing established profitable mines.

The key to executing Altitude Minerals’ ambitious strategy is successfully identifying the best drill targets that can be made ready for drill testing with only a few months of low-cost fieldwork. To achieve that, you need a great team with the right experience across a wide range of commodities.

Altitude Minerals has spent several years assembling a Board, Exploration Team, and group of Commodity experts who have been involved in multiple discoveries.

Meet our team

The Altitude Minerals team in action

Mr. Duncan Chessell
Managing Director, CEO

Duncan Chessell is a qualified geologist with over 15 years’ experience in mineral exploration. He was responsible for co-founding and listing Resolution Minerals (as Northern Cobalt N27) in 2017. Duncan has held a variety of board and executive roles with ASX-listed and public unlisted companies, as well as not-for-profit groups. He has also climbed Mt Everest three times.

Mr. Chris Sutherland
Non-Executive Chairman

Chris is an engineer with over 20 years of business experience. He was Managing Director of Programmed from January 2008 until his retirement in September 2019. Programmed was a major publicly listed ASX company until October 2017 when it was acquired for an enterprise value of over $1 billion.

Mr. Peter McIntyre
Non-Executive Director

Peter McIntyre is an engineer with over 40 years of experience in the minerals industry in exploration and production and held senior roles in WMC. He established and was Managing Director of Extract Resources Limited, which discovered the world-class Husab uranium deposit in Namibia, which was ultimately acquired via a takeover for $2.3 billion.

Dr Paul Kitto
Non-Executive Director

Dr Kitto has 30 years of international exploration, mining, executive and board experience across gold, base and critical minerals. He has held senior leadership roles with Newcrest Mining and Gold Fields and has led exploration programs across Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea and the former Soviet Union. At Ampella Mining, he identified and acquired the Batie West Project, which grew to more than 10Moz of gold.

Dr. Antonio Belperio
Non-Executive Director

Geologist with over 40 years of experience in the mining industry and an impressive track record, including the discovery of the Prominent Hill IOCG Deposit and now a mine in the Gawler Craton, South Australia. Former chief geologist for the South Australia Geological Survey and active explorer for over two decades with Minotaur Ltd.

Dr Paul Kitto
Area of Expertise: Gold | Base Metals | Rare Earth Elements

Dr Kitto has over 30 years of experience working within the mining industry. Throughout his career, Dr Kitto has led or been part of exploration teams that have discovered numerous multi-million-ounce gold deposits in Africa, Australia and Papua New Guinea. Dr Kitto has extensive experience in many gold and base metal deposits, including meso-thermal lode gold and palaeo-placer gold deposits, porphyry copper-gold, epithermal gold, and volcanic-hosted massive sulphide deposits.

He holds a doctorate in Geochemistry and Structural Geology from the Centre for Ore Deposit Research at the University of Tasmania. He is currently NED of ionic clay REE developer Meteoric Resources (ASX:MEI), Peako (ASX: PKO) and Stellar Africagold (TSXV: SPX).

Professor Bruce Schaefer
Area of Expertise: Igneous geochemistry | IOCG | Cu-Au
Porphyry

Professor Schaefer is a well-recognised expert in IOCG and porphyry mineral systems, with deep subject expertise in geochemistry and geochronology. He has extensive experience working in mineralised systems research projects from Archaean to present-day across various geodynamic settings. Professor Schaefer is a pioneer of several new geochemical exploration methods.

Dr David Rawlings
Area of Expertise: Uranium | Lithium | Sedimentology

Dr Rawlings has significant experience in regional synthesis and resource assessment emanating from regional mapping for the Northern Territory Geological Survey and 10 years leading exploration and resource discovery in hard-rock and soft-rock uranium systems in central and northern Australia. He has also acted as Core Lithium’s exploration manager since March 2016, leading to the discovery of lithium in the Bynoe pegmatite field and defining prospects and resources at the Finniss Project. He has extensive uranium exploration expertise and has worked for Cameco and as the Exploration Manager for Toro Energy.

Gabe Graf
Principal Geologist (USA), VP Altitude Minerals Nevada LLC | Gold

Gabe began his career in epithermal gold & silver deposits in Nevada with Newmont, working on the exploration and mining operations teams at the Midas Mine. Subsequently, Gabe worked in gold systems elsewhere in the USA, including senior roles with Summitomo and Northern Star (ASX: NST), where his team discovered the Goodpaster Deposit in Alaska using modern CSMAT geophysics, structural geology and a strong mineral systems approach. The Goodpaster Deposit is now >1m oz Au at a grade of > 10g/t Au. 

Theo Aravanis
Principal Geophysicist

Theo has over 25 years of mineral exploration experience and works on a consulting basis for Altitude Minerals. Theo spent over a decade as the Chief Geophysicist for Rio Tinto’s global exploration group. Theo’s expertise spans a wide range of geophysical techniques applied to an enormous variety of mineral systems globally.

Michael Rodda – Data Scientist
Area of Expertise: Machine Learning | IOCG | Cu-Au Porphyries

Michael has been working on machine learning applications for mineral exploration for the last five years and recently won the OZ Minerals “Explorer Challenge” (prize $500,000) for his work on IOCG exploration in the Gawler Craton.