We are happy to announce that Professor Ken McClay is the recipient of the 2026 Barry Goldstein Award for Innovation, Collaboration and Communication in Geoscience.
We received several worthy nominations this year, some people got nominated by several individuals. A big thank you to all who took the effort to nominate some outstanding individuals! The final selection focussed specifically on the key skills of innovation, collaboration and communication that define the Barry Goldstein Award.
With Adelaide University announcing in 2019 his return to Adelaide with the title “World-leading economic geologist returns home to Adelaide” Ken is indeed an outstanding geoscientist.
He is highly respected across the world by his peers, pioneering the application of quantitative scaled analogue models to develop 4D evolutionary models of fault and fracture development in Earth’s brittle upper crust.
His work on modelling all types of structural geology (extension & compression, strike slip etc), working on most continents, and developing models from all the classic fold belts, strike slip basins and extensional basins, is renown.
Ken’s 56 years in geosciences has seen him involved in academia and industry across the world, with the 27 years as Professor of Structural Geology at Royal Holloway University the most well-known.
As Director of the Fault Dynamics Research (FDR) group Ken led a collaboration between academia and a number of resource companies, with the results of the research directly implemented successfully in a range of basin studies and field evaluations, and instrumental in appropriate prospect risking.
Ken has shared his knowledge widely; by writing (publishing over 190 papers in international peer review journals), presenting at conferences, and supervising 62 PhD students and 32 post-doctoral researchers.
….. and who doesn’t know his structural geology bible “The Mapping of Geological Structures”. Still available on Amazon.com.
Ken has organised regular courses and fieldtrips for both academia and industry, which many of us have attended over the years, and they are still continuing.
We congratulate Ken on receiving the 2026 Barry Goldstein Award.
