Professor Jonathan Blundy holds a Royal Society Research Professorship at the University of Oxford with a project entitled, From Volcanoes to Green Mining, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (since 2008).
Jonathan is a volcanologist most noted for advancing the understanding of how magmas are generated in Earth's crust and mantle and of the processes that occur beneath volcanoes prior to eruption. He uses methods drawn from physics, geology and geochemistry to address the fundamental problem of how volcanoes work. He conducts research into the generation, movement and evolution of magma within the Earth, and is particularly interested in the
destructive plate boundaries that host many of the world’s most explosive volcanoes as well as the relationship between magmatism and ore formation. Jonathan’s research has taken him to the sites of active volcanoes in the United States, Mexico, the Lesser Antilles and Ethiopia, amongst other places. He has ongoing research projects on subduction-related volcanoes in the Lesser Antilles, Kamchatka (Russia), Cascades (USA), Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Turkey and Vanuatu.
Jonathan is director of the cross-cutting Oxforf Martin School programme, ReSET: Rethinking Natural Resources looking at the role that magmatic systems can play in enabling the energy transition. ReSET investigates how we can use our evolving understanding of magmatic systems to develop new tools for mineral exploration and metal extraction. As we transition to a low-carbon economy, demand for certain key resources, such as copper, lithium and rare earth elements, is set to grow dramatically, placing a high priority on the discovery of new deposits and development of novel ways to access and extract these sustainably.
After 32 years at University of Bristol, Jonathan moved to Oxford in 2020. He undertook his PhD research at the University of Cambridge and has received several awards, including the 1997 F.W. Clarke Medal of the Geochemical Society, the 2005 Bigsby and 2016 Murchison medals of the Geological Society of London and the 2016 Science Innovation Award of the European Association of Geochemistry. He was a Fulbright Scholar at University of Oregon (1998), guest professor at Nagoya University (2007) and University of Tokyo (2021), Gledden Senior Fellow at University of Western Australia (2019), Catalyst Leadership Fellow at GNS New Zealand (2022-2025) and Moore Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (2014). He was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2011. He is co-founder (with Michael Kendall) of Oxford spinout company, Ascension Earth Resources.
