Alex Brown graduated in geology from the University of Western Ontario (B.Sc.) and the University of Michigan (M.Sc. and PhD), followed by a post-doctorate at the University of Liège, Belgium. During 34 years as a professor in economic geology and metallogeny at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal, he supervised numerous industry- and government-sponsored graduate students who have gone on to establish distinguished careers in their own right. At Michigan and Liège, he participated in the definition of a new genetic model for sediment-hosted stratiform copper deposits, a major source of copper, cobalt and silver.

In recent years, Brown has refined that model considerably, such that occurrences of this mineral deposit type may be linked not only to particular lithologies, but also to particular tectonic settings and events. These insights are important in selecting geological terrains suitable for exploration for new, possibly world-class examples of sediment-hosted copper deposits.