OUR TEAM
MICK MCMULLEN
ADVISOR
Michael (Mick) McMullen brings more than 29 years of senior leadership experience in the exploration, financing, development, and operations of mining companies globally. Mr. McMullen most recently served as the CEO and President at Detour Gold Corporation (“Detour”), a 600,000 ounce per annum gold producer in Canada from May 2019 to January 2020. During his tenure, Mr. McMullen took the market capitalization from C$2.1 billion to C$4.9 billion over 7 months (date of deal announcement), which represented an internal rate of return of 208%, leading to the acquisition by Kirkland Lake Gold Ltd. in 2020. Through his strong technical background and commercial acumen, Mr. McMullen established and led a team that reduced all-in-sustaining costs (“AISC”, a mining metric that estimates all direct and recurring costs required to mine a unit of ore) by approximately US$250/oz over that period in a business that had historically been viewed as an underperforming asset.
Mr. McMullen also improved safety performance and repaired relations with its First Nations partners, enabling a large increase in operations to be permitted, which was fundamental to the increase in market value of the company.
Prior to Detour, Mr. McMullen served as CEO at Stillwater Mining Company (“Stillwater”) from December 2013 to May 2017 and as Technical Advisor from May 2017 to December 2018, where he was instrumental to the increase in market capitalization from US$1.3 billion to US$2.2 billion against a 10% fall in platinum group metals (“PGM”) prices over the same time. Mr. McMullen also served as a Nonexecutive Director at Stillwater from May 2013 to December2013. Stillwater was sold to Sibanye Gold Ltd. (“Sibanye”) in April 2017 in an all cash deal valued at US$2.7 billion, which represented an internal rate of return of 16% during his 41-month tenure. During his time as CEO at Stillwater, the company reduced AISC by approximately US$300/oz, increased production to approximately 600,000 ounces per annum of PGM’s, developed a new mine, and built its PGM recycling business to be the largest in the world. The Stillwater business had been operating for 27 years prior to Mr. McMullen’s arrival as CEO and was viewed as a difficult operation with poor labor relations and safety track record. Leading up to its eventual sale, the company favorably renegotiated its labor agreements and reduced by half its safety incidence rate to be best-in-class in US underground mining.
Mr. McMullen’s time before Stillwater involved the identification, acquisition, development, and operation of a variety of mining assets across North and South America, Europe, Australia and Africa. These ranged from gold to base metals and bulk commodities. In addition, he has provided technical and financial advisory services to many of the larger PE funds, activist funds, and banks providing mining finance.
Mr. McMullen has a strong technical background and track record of identifying undervalued opportunities in the mining space, assuming a management position, optimizing the assets, and ultimately realizing shareholder value, ranging from exploration assets (one of two founders at GT Gold Corporation (“GT Gold”), which sold to Newmont Mining Corporation for C$393 million) to large integrated downstream and upstream businesses like Stillwater.
Mr. McMullen is a qualified Geologist and received his B.Sc. from Newcastle University in 1992 and is currently a Non-Executive Director at Develop Global Limited (“Develop”), an ASX listed base metal developer since February 2021. He is also a former non-executive director at OceanaGold Corporation, a dual listed ASX-TSX gold miner with operations in the Philippines, US and New Zealand.
RASMUS GERDEMAN
ADVISOR
Rasmus Gerdeman is the founder of Heimdall Strategies, a boutique consulting firm providing C-suites and boards with strategy and capital markets advisory services around transformational events. Previously Mr. Gerdeman was a Managing Director at Ankura Consulting in the Office of the CFO and brings more than 20 years of experience in capital markets and corporate advisory with a particular focus on the Natural Resources and Industrial Sectors.
Mr. Gerdeman provides corporate finance, corporate strategy, and strategic communications counsel to clients around transformational events impacting a corporations enterprise value and reputation. His expertise includes IPOs, strategic investor relations advisory, capital allocation strategies, working capital improvement analyses, mergers and acquisitions, activist defense, restructuring activities, and management transitions.
Prior to his role at Ankura, Mr. Gerdeman was a Senior Advisor with FTI Consulting from October 2019 to July 2021. He also served as Chief Strategy and Investor Relations Officer for Livent Corporation a $2.4 bn market cap NYSE listed lithium producer from May 2018 to June 2019, during the company’s IPO and separation from FMC Corporation. Before his role at Livent Corporation, Mr. Gerdeman was a Managing Director at FTI Consulting in the Strategic Communications and Corporate Finance segments.
Mr. Gerdeman joined FTI Consulting in 2013, after having spent more than 12 years as a buyside analyst at leading U.S. investment firms. He was twice awarded Institutional Investor Magazine’s prestigious “Best of the Buy-Side” for his unparalleled understanding of the industries that he covered. Mr. Gerdeman has served as a senior member of the research and investment teams at Neuberger Berman, Northern Trust Global Investors, and Zweig-Dimenna & Associates. He is also a guest lecturer and mentor to Cornell University MBA Cayuga Fund students focusing on basic materials and natural resources. Mr. Gerdeman holds a Bachelor of Science in finance from North Park University in Chicago, and a Master of Business Administration from S.C Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and Queen’s School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
CASEY MCNEIL
FOUNDER
Former Chief Executive Officer
Casey McNeil brings 10 years of experience in bringing complex ideas to market, from back of napkin discovery to successful commercial viability. Mr. McNeil is the CEO and Founder of REEcycle Inc., a company with a patented process for recycling critical rare earth elements from electronic waste streams. Mr. McNeil successfully helped raise over $1.3M in non-dilutive funding for REEcycle through various awards and grants from Caltech, MIT, Baylor, Texas A&M, the NSF and the DOE. He is also the CEO and Founder of Vendera Inc., a rapidly growing start-up that allows enterprise customers to better manage and support their mobile devices, while also reducing overall costs.
Prior to REEcycle and Vendera, Casey was an initial member of iCracked, a high growth Silicon Valley start-up focused on simplifying mobile device repair and recycling (acquired by Allstate).
Mr. McNeil graduated from the University of Houston’s Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship in 2014, the #1 ranked entrepreneurship program in the country by The Princeton Review. He has been highlighted across numerous publications including Forbes 30 Under 30 in Energy, Kairos 50, Inc. 50 Global Entrepreneurs to Watch, and has presented key notes at conferences around the world.
LUKE WAIER
HEAD OF SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT
Luke Waier brings a unique creative and analytical skillset well-suited for the task of creating new manufacturing (or de-manufacturing) processes and managing those projects from start to finish.
Mr. Waier started his career as a junior mechanical engineer at Oceaneering International, Inc. where he assisted in the development of specialized tools used aboard deep-sea robotic vehicles.
He then worked as a full-time design engineer for 3 years at National K Works, Inc. and 2 years at Priority Energy, LLC, where he developed unique equipment and industrial machinery deployed internally to improve the efficiency, safety, and quality within the companies’ manufacturing processes.
Prior to entering the workforce, Mr. Waier participated in several national and international collegiate competitive robotics events. He and his teams won 1st place in the ATMAE Autonomous Robotics competition in 2006 and 2007, the “Rookie of the Year” award at the MATE Underwater Robotics competition in 2006, and 3rd place at IEEE Battlebots IQ in 2008.
Mr. Waier joined REEcycle, Inc. in 2017, where he developed the solutions and industrial machinery necessary to disassemble computer hard disk drives (HDDs) at a rate of thousands per day. Currently, Waier serves as a General Manager at Vendera Mobile, where he manages the design and manufacturing of unique electro-mechanical products in the mobile device management space. Mr. Waier also continues to be instrumental in commercializing REEcycle’s unique HDD Disassembly Machine, or DDM. Mr. Waier received a B.S. in Organizational Leadership with a concentration in Manufacturing Systems from University of Houston in 2017 and an M.S. in Lean Manufacturing from Kettering University in 2020.
DR. PRADEEP SAMARASEKERE
CHIEF CHEMIST & INVENTOR
Dr. Pradeep (Sam) Samarasekere carries more than 10 years of working experience both in the US and in Sri Lanka as an academic and R&D scientist. He is an expert in in the fields of Rare Earth Metallurgy and advanced materials. His research and inventions span across a variety of areas including, rare earth metals extraction from earth resources, selective extraction and recycling of precious metals from e-waste, sustainable chemistry focusing on affordable and clean energy technologies, low-dimensional solid-state materials and porous functional materials for electronic, photonic, and magnetic applications.
He holds several patents for novel technologies developed in these interdisciplinary areas. He has named Most Outstanding Inventor in all the categories in Sri Lanka by The Committee of Vice Chancellors and Directors of Sri Lanka (CVCD) in 2020, and also awarded with the Vice Chancellors Excellence Award for the Best Inventor of the University of Kelaniya in 2018, and the Inventor Patent Award by the University of Houston in 2017 for his seminal contributions to materials engineering. Dr. Samarasekere has also served on the Senate of the University of Kelaniya, reviewer panels of the Sri Lanka Inventors Commission, and Board of Chief Examiners in Department of Examinations in Sri Lanka.
Dr. Samarasekere received his B.Sc. degree in Computational Chemistry from University of Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2008, and his Ph. D in Chemistry from the University of Houston, Texas, USA in 2014. Successively, he was offered a Postdoctoral research Fellowship from the University of Houston. During his time at the University of Houston, Dr. Samarasekere co-invented, alongside his Ph. D. supervisor Dr. Allan J. Jacobson, the core rare earth element (REE) recycling technology used by REEcycle.