Michael A. McKibben, Ph.D. is a geochemist and economic geologist at U. C. Riverside who studies natural processes responsible for metal and sulfur transport in modern and ancient hydrothermal and volcanic systems. He first visited the Salton Sea geothermal field as a high school freshman in the late 1960s and has since published extensively on geologic and geochemical aspects of that geothermal area. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from U. C. Riverside in 1976 and 1979 and his Ph.D. degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1984. He received the Waldemar Lindgren award for excellence in research from the Society of Economic Geologists in 1989 and has served on their Executive Council and on the Editorial Board of their journal Economic Geology. He has also served on the Editorial Board of the Geochemical Society’s journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. From 2009-2018 he was Divisional Dean of Student Academic Affairs for the science college at U. C. Riverside, overseeing 6,000 students in thirteen majors. From 2019-2021 he served as Chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at U. C. Riverside. He retired in 2021 and continues to do research on metals in geothermal fluids as an emeritus faculty at U. C. Riverside.