Our Trainer is a professional geologist with 49 years of international mineral exploration and mining experience. Rod holds a Bachelor of Science degree (double major in geology) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand and has been a long-standing member of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. He has held senior management roles with a number of prominent exploration and mining companies and consultant firms based in New Zealand, Australia and Asia.

He is experienced in all facets of mineral exploration; at all scales and in all project phases (from greenfield reconnaissance, through advanced exploration to mining feasibility studies and development). He has conducted numerous exploration programs using most types of geological, geochemical, geophysical and remote sensing methods. He is familiar with data integration and the building of geological and genetic models; implementation of geological information management systems; design and running of drilling campaigns; resource estimation and financial modelling. He has extensive experience in exploration for a wide variety of mineral commodities (including gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, iron, nickel, chromite, sulphur, rare earths, coal, heavy mineral sands and industrial minerals) within terrains ranging from Archean through Phanerozoic.

Since 1996, Rod has been working with the Besra Group, for whom he led the exploration teams that discovered the Bong Mieu and Phuoc Son Gold Mines (in Vietnam) and collaborated with the mine development teams that brought them into commercial gold production More recently, Rod has been leading teams on other major exploration projects, including the advanced Bau Gold Project in Sarawak, East Malaysia. He is currently working on a potentially large-epithermal gold project in New Zealand.