Professor Marco Fiorentini is the Director and a Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre in Critical Resources for the Future (CCRF). He chairs the Centre’s Leadership Team, participates in the Strategic Advisory Board, and plays a central role in shaping CCRF’s research vision, culture, and national engagement. He also serves as a Mentor in the Centre’s Mentoring Program, supporting researchers as they navigate academic, industry, and leadership pathways.
Marco is a geoscientist whose career bridges fundamental Earth science and applied mineral exploration. As Professor of Economic Geology at The University of Western Australia, his research focuses on igneous petrology and isotopic geochemistry, with the aim of understanding how metals and volatiles move through the Earth and how major ore deposits form. His work has particular relevance to nickel, copper, platinum-group elements (PGE), and critical metals, and is widely applied to improving exploration models and mineral system understanding.
A key strength Marco brings to CCRF is his ability to integrate multi-scale geological, geochemical, and mineralogical datasets to resolve the processes controlling metal fertility, transport, and deposition. His research underpins Centre activities focused on characterising alteration footprints, developing quantitative workflows for mineral system analysis, and understanding the role of mantle and lower-crustal processes in generating critical metal endowments.
Within CCRF, Marco supervises PhD research examining the formation and evolution of major magmatic and mineral systems, including projects on the petrogenesis of the Gonneville Ni–Co–PGE deposit in Western Australia and the cryptic relationships between Ural-Alaskan-type PGE systems and Cu–Au porphyries. He also contributes to Centre projects addressing hyperspectral–geochemical mineralogy of greenstone belts and alteration footprints, multi-scale characterisation workflow development, quantitative exploration of spatio-temporal metasomatic mantle sources of metals, and the role of carbonate melts in the genesis of critical metal deposits.
Through his leadership, mentoring, and research supervision, Marco plays a pivotal role in advancing CCRF’s integrated, systems-based approach to critical resource discovery, training, and translation, strengthening connections between academic research and industry-relevant outcomes.
As a mentor, Marco says he will be “genuinely interested in your research,” happy to share lessons from his own career, and equally happy to learn from yours. He aims to help mentees identify areas of growth, and—importantly—he’s comfortable sharing what he doesn’t know, fostering a collaborative and open learning environment.
