Ashley Gumsley is one of the success stories of the SET program. Ashley is a MSc Geology post-graduate student in the UJ  Department of Geology, and a member of the PPM Research Group. He is being co-supervised by M Knoper, Dr HM Rajesh, and Dr M de Kock. Ashley started his BSc in Geology and Chemistry in 2004, after completing the BSc Bridging Course in 2003. In 2008, Ashley completed his BSc Hons Geology degree cum laude. He started work on his MSc dissertation in 2009 with the title Establishing a ‘bar code’ for the southeastern Kaapvaal Craton in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Ashley will be very busy over the next several months. In January he was voted Chairman of the SAS-SEG (South African Student Chapter for the Society of Economic Geologists), whose membership largely consists of geology students from both UJ and Wits. More recently, Ashley was selected by the Society of Economic Geologists (SEG) to attend the annual 2010 SEG Foundation Student-Dedicated Field Course, taking place across the western United States. The course will emphasize the geology and ore deposits of the Tintic Mining District, the Bingham Canyon Cu-Mo-Au mine, both in Utah, and the Henderson Mo mine in Colorado, together with the stratigraphy and geochemistry of Colorado Plateau uranium-vanadium-copper deposits. The geologic setting, alteration and mineralization in each of the areas being visited will be reviewed. After the field course, Ashley will be a delegate at the SEG conference in Colorado, where he will be presenting a poster onRe-evaluating the provenance of gold in the Witwatersrand Basin, South Africa, using shale geochemistry. Soon thereafter in Denver, he will attend the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America where he will give a presentation entitled Episodic mafic magmatism during the Mesoarchean to Paleoproterozoic on the Kaapvaal Craton: Implications for cratonic reconstructions. Finally, Ashley will travel to Sweden, where he will carry out U-Pb age dating on baddelyeite (ZrO2) before wrapping up his busy schedule and arriving back in Johannesburg by January 2011.

Ashley is a success story because he has an inquisitive mind and good interpretative abilities. An intelligent and hardworking student, Ashley has a natural inclination for research. This inclination stems from his curious bent of mind and a nature for questioning. He has the ability to voice his ideas clearly, which greatly enhances his expressiveness when approached by fellow students. His extreme interest, persistent attitude and intellectual curiosity drive him to get deeply involved in his research and excel in it.