In recognition of an excellent paper entitled "A Review of Iron Oxide Copper-Gold Deposits, with Focus on the Wernecke Breccias, Yukon, Canada, as an Example of a Non-Magmatic End Member and Implications for IOCG Genesis and Classification."

Dr. Derek Thorkelson is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Burnaby, British Columbia. His focus is on the relationships between magmatism and tectonics, applying field methods, petrology and geochronology in the study of regional geological problems.
His graduate work (M.Sc., University of British Columbia, 1987; PhD, Carleton University, 1992) focused on the petrology and tectonics of Mesozoic volcanic successions and accreted terranes in the Canadian Cordillera. While at Carleton, he also became interested in ridge-trench interactions and wrote the first in a series of papers on slab windows.

After a brief postdoctoral fellowship at UBC, in 1992 Dr. Thorkelson accepted a position with the Canada/Yukon Geoscience Office (now the Yukon Geological Survey). From his new base in Whitehorse, he led a four-year regional mapping program on Proterozoic assemblages in northern Yukon. During that time, he developed a keen interest in iron-oxide–copper–gold (IOCG) occurrences in the Yukon, and the geological history of the breccias that host them.

In 1995, Dr. Thorkelson accepted a faculty position at SFU but continued to carry out research on the IOCG occurrences of Yukon. He is currently on the faculty of the Department of Earth Sciences at SFU and teaches courses in field methods, petrology and tectonics.