Tue
11 Feb 2025Laurentian’s Maggie Laverge to receive Mary‑Claire Ward Geoscience Award
Laurentian University Geology student Maggie Laverge will be honoured with a national award at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) 2025 Convention, taking place in Toronto, March 2-5.
She is the recipient of the Mary‑Claire Ward Geoscience Award, which is given annually to encourage and support a full-time graduate student in Canada whose thesis will likely increase our knowledge of Canada's geological history through field-based mapping. Laverge is completing her MSc in Geology at the Harquail School of Earth Sciences. Her thesis examines the structural controls on gold mineralization at the Great Bear Deposit, 25 km south of Red Lake in northwestern Ontario. Laverge’s mapping, sample analysis, and interpretation will help Kinross Gold better understand its deposit.
The project integrates detailed outcrop mapping, regional structural mapping, petrography, and U-Pb geochronology. It aims to establish the deposit’s structural evolution, identify controls on mineralization, and contextualize it within the Red Lake Greenstone Belt while providing relative and absolute timing constraints on gold mineralization.
Laverge’s project requires working with Kinross geoscientists and communicating results, just as the application for the Mary-Claire Ward Geoscience Award involved creating a concise and detailed summary of her work and findings. Receiving the award after almost two years of intensive effort means a lot to Laverge. “Mary-Claire Ward was a brilliant geoscientist and it’s an incredible honour to receive this award. It’s exciting to see the culmination of my work and share that with others,” she said.
Laverge is the fourth Laurentian University Geology student to be awarded the prize. Past winners include: Kendra Zammit (2020), Jordan McDivitt (2016) and Michelle DeWolfe (2005).
Comprising $5,000 and a certificate, the Mary-Claire Ward Geoscience Award was created to honour the memory of Mary-Claire Ward, who passed away in 2004. She was a passionate and vocal advocate for public investment in Canadian geosciences and particularly supportive of mapping programs to ensure our national geological knowledge base is conceptually and factually correct, which can help attract private sector investment in the mineral sector.
The award is administered by the Geological Association of Canada (GAC), the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), the National Geological Surveys Committee, the Canadian Geological Foundation, and Watts, Griffis and McOuat Ltd.
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