IAMG2026
The 24. annual conference of the IAMG
August 23 - 28, 2026, Montreal, Canada

Keynote Speakers and IAMG Awardees

Keynote Speakers

  • Dr. Arja Jewbali, Head of Global Resource Management, Newmont Corporation, USA
  • Prof. Peter Dowd, The University of Adelaide, Australia
  • Prof. Tapan Mukerji, Stanford Center for Earth Resources Forecasting (SCERF), and the Stanford Center for Geological Hydrogen (SCGH) projects, Stanford University, USA
  • Prof. Louis J. Durlofsky, Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Stanford University, USA

IAMG Awardees

Keynote Speakers

Arja Jewbali

Arja Jewbali is Head, Resource Management, Global for Newmont. She holds a Doctorate in Geostatististics from the University of Queensland and has close to 20 years of experience having worked extensively across gold, silver, iron ore, and base metal deposits. Throughout her career, she has built and audited resource models, led global teams, and developed geostatistical best practices that improve mine planning outcomes.. Before joining Newmont in 2011 she was employed by Rio Tinto Iron Ore in a number of positions including Resource Geologist and Senior Geostatistician. She has co-authored multiple papers on geostatistics and resource modeling.

Talk title: coming soon

Coming soon.

Peter Dowd

Professor Peter Dowd is Professor of Mining Engineering at the Adelaide University, Australia. Prior to his current appointment, he worked at universities in Canada and the UK. He is currently Director of the Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Integrated Operations for Complex Resources at the University of Adelaide. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. His research areas are in mathematical geosciences applied to natural resources and to environmental and climate variables. More recently, in collaboration with European colleagues, he has published widely in hydrology, groundwater, climatography, fractal analysis of karst landscapes, closed depressions on the surfaces of the moon and Mars, and fractal analysis of the Martian landscape. He was awarded the 2016 IAMG Krumbein Medal for his contributions to geostatistics and mathematical geosciences. He was President of the IAMG for the period 2020-2024 and is currently Past-President of the IAMG for 2024-2028.

Talk title: Coming soon.

Coming soon.

Tapan Mukerji

Tapan Mukerji is a Professor (Research) in the Departments of Energy Science & Engineering, Geophysics and Earth & Planetary Sciences at Stanford University. He received his B.S, Physics, and M.S. (Tech.), Geophysics from BHU, India, and his Ph.D. in Geophysics from Stanford University. The focus of Mukerji’s multi-disciplinary research, with students and colleagues, has been on integrating rock physics, wave propagation physics, spatial data science, and machine learning and their broad applications in subsurface characterization, stochastic geomodeling, uncertainty quantification and value of information in Earth sciences. He uses theoretical, computational, and statistical methods, to discover and understand fundamental relations between geophysical data and rock properties, to quantify uncertainty in subsurface models, and to address value of information for decision making under uncertainty. Prof. Mukerji was awarded the Society of Exploration Geophysicists’ Karcher award in 2000 and the ENI award in 2014 for pioneering innovations in theoretical and practical rock physics for seismic reservoir characterization. He co-directs the Stanford Center for Earth Resources Forecasting (SCERF), and the Stanford Center for Geological Hydrogen (SCGH) projects.

Talk title: coming soon

Coming soon.

Louis J. Durlofsky

Louis J. Durlofsky is the Otto N. Miller Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He co-directs the Stanford Smart Fields Consortium and the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage. Earlier in his career, Durlofsky was affiliated with Chevron Energy Technology Company. He holds a BS degree from Pennsylvania State University, and MS and PhD degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in chemical engineering. His research interests include subsurface flow simulation, geological carbon storage, data assimilation and uncertainty quantification, optimization, and deep learning-based surrogate modeling.

Talk title: Data assimilation for subsurface flow using deep learning-based surrogate models

coming soon

IAMG Awardees

Peter Atkinson - Krumbein Medal

Peter Atkinson is Distinguished Professor of Spatial Data Science at Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK where he was also Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology from 2015 to 2025 and interim Executive Dean of the Faculty of Health and Medicine from 2018 to 2019. Professor Atkinson’s research interests are highly interdisciplinary with a focus on methods for remote sensing, spatial statistics and artificial intelligence applied to a wide range of grand challenge-motivated questions in science, including in land systems, natural hazards, agriculture, ecology and epidemiology. He is highly regarded for his research on geostatistical change-of-support theory and downscaling in Earth observation. Professor Atkinson is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and is an inaugural highly ranked scholar on ScholarGPS (2024, 2025) and ISI highly cited researcher (2023, 2024). He received the Cuthbert Peek Award of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) in 2024, was the 2020 Distinguished Lecturer of the International Association of Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG), and Laureat of the Peter Burrough Medal of the International Spatial Accuracy Research Association (ISARA) in 2016. He was awarded the Belle van Zuylen Chair with Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands in 2014 and was Visiting Fellow at Green-Templeton College, Oxford University 2012-14. Professor Atkinson is founding Editor-in-Chief of Science of Remote Sensing and Associate Editor of Environmetrics.

Talk title: coming soon

Coming soon.

Denis Allard - Georges Matheron Lecturer 2026

Denis Allard is Research Director at INRAE, the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment. He holds a Master of Science and a PhD from the Ecole des Mines de Paris, France. He had appointments in the Statistics Department, University of Washington (Seattle, USA) and worked with British Petroleum as Geostatistician. He joined INRAE in Avignon in 1996 and found it to be an excellent place for research. He never left. From 2005 to 2011 he has been the head of the BioSP (Biostatistics and Spatial Processes) research unit at INRAE, Avignon. Recent contributions include the characterization of anisotropy for random fields, new classes of multivariate space-time cross-covariance functions, efficient geostatistical simulation algorithms in various settings, SPDEs for spatio-temporal data, flexible geostatistical methods for compositional data and aggregation of distributions in climate science. He is currently associate editor for Spatial Statistics and has served on its editorial board since the journal was launched in 2012. He has been associate editor for Computing and Statistics and Mathematical Geosciences. His research covers a wide range of topics in geostatistics and spatial statistics for modeling and analyzing spatio-temporal data, with applications in geosciences, environment and climate sciences. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator of the Geolearning Chair, a joint research program between BioSP and the Geostatistics team at Ecole des Mines de Paris.

Talk title: Coming soon.

Coming soon.

Mohan Srivastava - Distinguished Lecturer 2027

Mo is an author of “An Introduction to Applied Geostatistics”, and of more than 50 technical articles on the theory and practice of geostatistics. He has applied geostatistics to mineral deposits, petroleum reservoirs, environmental contamination, climate change, animal populations and epidemiology. He has taught geostatistics in public short courses and in several universities, most recently at the Universitat Politècnica de València. Outside of his day-job as a consultant, Mo “cracked the code” of an instant scratch lottery game, allowing him to separate winners from losers without scratching anything off the face of the cards (www.wired.com/2011/01/cracking-the-scratch-lottery-code). He also finds time to write, and is the 2013 winner of the Canada Writes Prize for Non-Fiction for his short story "The Gods of Scrabble" (www.cbc.ca/books/the-gods-of-scrabble-by-mo-srivastava-1.4112595). In 2016, Mo was chosen by the Professional Geoscientists of Ontario as the inaugural recipient of their Award of Merit for significant career contributions to geosciences. He was chosen by the Society of Mining Engineers as the 2025 recipient of the Harry Parker Award of Excellence for outstanding communication of geostatistical and spatial statistical concepts.

Talk title: Coming soon.

Coming soon.