Jon North has 35 years experience in mineral exploration worldwide. In the early part of his career he completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in geology leading to a Ph.D. awarded in 1993 at the University of Western Ontario. He then worked with major mining companies including Western Mining and BHP until 1997. Since 1997, he has been the founding director of numerous junior mining companies including North Atlantic Resources that discovered the FT gold deposit in Mali, and most recently, Northquest Ltd., that was taken over by Nordgold N.V. in 2016 subsequent to the discovery of the Pistol Bay gold deposit in Nunavut, Canada.