Background
About me
I have worked in exploration for more than four years across five deposit types: Carlin-type gold, volcanogenic massive sulfide, intrusion-related gold, carbonatite-hosted rare earth elements, and copper skarn. Most of that time has been spent where exploration decisions get made, at the drill rig, at the logging table, and out in the field mapping and sampling.
Before geology, I spent nearly eight years maintaining electrical substations at CDE Lightband, five of them as a team lead. The work was safety-critical, with equipment energized up to 161 kV, and it taught me to plan carefully, communicate plainly with crews, and take responsibility for the people around me. What it could not give me was room to keep learning and progressing. I have always needed that, so I went back to school, earned a geology degree from the University of Tennessee, and have kept building on it since.
Much of a drill program is repetitive tracking and data handling. When a task is done the same way every day, I write a tool for it. Those tools have saved my teams anywhere from half an hour per update to an hour per person per day, and they catch mistakes before they reach the lab or the client.
Featured project
Pumpkin Hollow
Running a six-rig drill program for a mine restart
the program I'm proudest of so far
Pumpkin Hollow is a copper skarn deposit where drilling supports underground expansion, the mine restart, and a planned open pit. Keeping six rigs productive at once takes a lot of coordination. Pads and stations have to be ready before a rig moves, drill plans have to be followed, holes have to be extended or stopped on the right call, and billing has to match what was actually drilled.
I handle that day to day: inspecting pads and stations before mobilization, visiting every rig for safety and plan compliance, working with Operations and construction contractors to keep rigs drilling between moves, and reporting daily to the client on geology, safety, and drilling conditions. A program with this many moving parts can easily slip. It has run smoothly, and much of that comes from the procedures and tools we built for it.
I write SOPs for underground and surface rig management and for tracking surface disturbance, and I help develop the project's logging, sampling, QA/QC, and safety standards. I model drillholes in Leapfrog to assess hazards near existing underground workings, and I train new core loggers and lead daily safety meetings with staff, clients, and contractors.
Tools I built
Drill log
Experience
Each interval below is one role, logged newest first. The strip colour marks the deposit type I worked on.
Dahrouge Geological Consultants
Geologist II
Pumpkin Hollow Project
Southwest Critical Materials / Kinterra Capital · Copper skarn · Oct 2025 – Present
- Manage surface and underground diamond drilling with up to 6 rigs at a time, including pre-mobilization pad and station inspections, daily rig visits, and hole extension and completion calls; nearly 100 underground and more than 30 surface holes completed in 2026
- Supervise 4–8 staff in the Project Manager's absence; train new core loggers and lead daily safety meetings
- Locate, survey, and stake new surface pads; survey final collars and pad boundaries with Trimble to track surface disturbance
- Approve down-hole surveys in IMDEX HUB and shift reports in Krux to keep billing accurate
- Log up to 100 ft of core per day with RQD and Q′ measurements
- Develop SOPs for rig management and disturbance tracking; help write logging, sampling, QA/QC, and safety standards
- See the featured project above for more detail
Elk Creek Project, NioCorp
Carbonatite-hosted rare earth elements · Sep 2025 – Oct 2025
- Logged 100–200 ft of core per day to support the portal sinking project
- Performed geotechnical measurements, including RQD, Q′, and point load testing
Donlin Gold LLC
Exploration Geologist
Donlin Gold Project, Alaska
Intrusion-related epithermal gold
- Logged diamond core for lithology, structure, alteration, and mineralization in sedimentary host rocks cut by dikes and sills
- Sustained more than 90 m of logging per day, keeping pace with the rigs so core never backed up
- Took geotechnical and geophysical measurements supporting resource modeling and engineering
- Managed sampling workflows and QA/QC from a remote field camp
Rangefront Mining Consultants
Exploration Geologist
A consulting role placing me on client projects, with seasonal breaks between field programs.
Antler and Javelin Projects, New World Resources
Cu-Zn-Pb-Ag-Au volcanogenic massive sulfide · Jun 2024 – Dec 2024
- Mapped, sampled, and staked claims, alone and in small teams, in remote desert and mountain terrain with limited communications
- Logged and oriented 100–200 ft of core per day in strongly metamorphosed volcanic rocks; provided quick-logs to senior geologists
- Worked daily with drill crews and aligned track- and truck-mounted rigs by compass and gyro
- Ran pXRF, magnetic susceptibility, specific gravity, and RQD; managed sampling and QA/QC
- Built an Excel tool to import and organize pXRF data, and set up a network license server and VPN for remote access to site resources
Carlin Trend, Nevada Gold Mines: Mineral Resource Management Growth Team
Carlin-type gold · Oct 2023 – May 2024
- Logged 200–800 ft of core per day in sediment-hosted systems and entered data in acQuire
- Built Excel workbooks that generate cut-sheets automatically and catch sampling errors before shipment, saving each logger at least an hour a day
- Managed sampling and QA/QC to NI 43-101 standards
- Trained new geologists on NGM procedures and Carlin Trend geology
Carlin Trend, Nevada Gold Mines: Exploration Team
Carlin-type gold · Aug 2022 – Oct 2023
- Mapped and sampled to find and expand surface geological and geochemical anomalies
- Presented daily findings to senior staff and helped set the direction of the drill program
- Logged RC chips and diamond core at 200+ ft per day; picked structures from down-hole televiewer data in WellCAD
- Ran daily rig visits and site safety inspections; led a data validation campaign to correct the project database
Nyrstar
Exploration Technician · Strawberry Plains, Tennessee
Exploration support work while completing my degree.
CDE Lightband
Substation Maintenance Specialist · Clarksville, Tennessee
- Served five years as team lead, training two new employees and supervising line crews during storm restoration
- Managed small- to medium-scale substation construction and rehabilitation projects in a safety-critical environment, up to 161 kV AC
- Operated heavy equipment, including bucket trucks, man lifts, telehandlers, excavators, and skid steers
Photographs
In the field
Toolkit
Skills
Strongest tools
Automating maps, data handling, and reporting
Custom scripts, field maps, disturbance and pad tracking
Automated trackers, cut-sheets, error checks, pXRF import
Software and instruments
- ArcGIS and QField
- Leapfrog drillhole modeling
- acQuire geological database
- WellCAD televiewer interpretation
- IMDEX HUB and Krux
- Trimble GNSS survey
- pXRF, magnetic susceptibility, specific gravity
Field and program work
- Surface and underground diamond drill management
- Core and RC chip logging, core orientation
- Geotechnical logging: RQD, Q′, point load
- Geological mapping, sampling, claim staking
- Sampling and QA/QC to NI 43-101 standards
- SOP writing, training, and safety leadership
Credentials
Education and certifications
Education
- University of Tennessee, Knoxville
- BSc Geology & Environmental Studies, Geology concentration, Statistics minor · 2019 – 2022
- Nashville State Community College
- Associate of Science, General Studies · 2017 – 2019
- edX
- Verified Certificate, Computing in Python I: Fundamentals and Procedural Programming
Certifications and affiliations
- MSHA Metal/Non-Metal Miner
- Surface and underground · valid through Nov 2026
- Adult First Aid / CPR / AED
- Valid through Aug 2027
- Society of Economic Geologists
- Member
- American Institute of Professional Geologists
- Member
- Languages
- English (native), Spanish (elementary)