Exploration geochemistry lost one of its most innovative and energetic champions with the tragic death of Dr. Peter Winterburn in an attempted street robbery in late June 2019 while in Valparaiso (Chile) with his family. Peter and his wife, Michelle, had only recently returned to Chile to live, working out of Santiago with the multinational mining company Vale S.A. Over the course of a 30-year career in both the mineral exploration industry and in academia, Peter was a well-known and highly regarded geochemist with Anglo American, Vale, and the Mineral Deposit Research Unit (MDRU) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) (Canada), where for five years he carried out research and supervised students as a Professor of Exploration Geochemistry. Peter was born in northern England in 1962 and graduated with his BSc (Honours) from the University of Aston (UK) in 1983. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh (UK) in 1988, studying peridotite xenoliths in southern African kimberlites. After a stint with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, he joined the Anglo American Research Laboratories in Johannesburg (South Africa) in 1990 as a geochemist, where he went to work managing the geochemical database. This was the beginning of a long 18-year (1990-2018) association with Anglo American, where he developed his geochemical skills in roles of increasing responsibility across Africa, including senior geochemist (1992-1993), manager of the geochemical laboratory (1993-1995) and, in 1995, manager of geochemistry for Africa. In 2002, Peter moved to Santiago to become Anglo's South American Regional Geochemist, a position that he was to hold for the next five years. He returned to South Africa in 2007 for a year as chief chemist at the Anglo American Research Laboratories, and then, in early 2008, he embarked on a new path joining Vale as chief geochemist - global exploration. Based at first in Johannesburg and then, in 2009, in Toronto (Canada), Peter spent the next four years travelling the globe while directing Vale's worldwide geochemical exploration program.
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