LAUSR

ON New Year’s Day 2017, Professor Hazel Prichard passed away after a long and spirited battle against cancer. As many know, Hazel’s overarching research passion was the platinum-group elements. She devoted herself to these fascinating metals for nearly 40 years and made numerous fundamental contributions to our understanding of them over her distinguished career. She collected and studied platinum-group minerals from every continent, except Antarctica, and never tired of interpreting their textures and elucidating the many and varied processes by which they formed. Over the course of her career Hazel was awarded two fellowships and a major award by the UK’s most prestigious research organisation, the Royal Society; an individual University Research Fellowship held first at the Open University and then at Cardiff, then later a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship and finally the Brian Mercer Award for Industrial Research to support her work on recycling platinum from road dust. She was UK Representative and Project Secretary for three major IGCP Projects on magmatic ore deposits and edited the landmark ‘Geo-Platinum 87’ conference volume in 1988 that did so much to expand platinum-group element (PGE) research beyond the narrow confines of layered intrusions and turn it into the broad field of research that we recognize today. Hazel supervised or co-supervised 14 PhD students, including three at the Open University and a further 11 at Cardiff on topics ranging from PGE in ophiolites and layered intrusions to gossan formation and Au mineralization in Turkey. She leaves behind an enormous legacy of research, includingmuch of it that shewas sadly unable to complete herself, among her many friends and collaborators. Hazel was an only child and experienced the advantages, and disadvantages, that this brings. She knew she wanted to be a geologist from the age of about five, when her parents took her to the Isle of Wight and she was fascinated by the different coloured sands in the cliffs at Alum Bay. Her father, Gordon, who had really wanted a boy, later took her to residential field study centres around the country. What she discovered on these trips increased her enthusiasm for geology and especially for igneous rocks. Hazel was dyslexic, and did not learn to read properly until she was 10. Failing the 11+ exam meant she went to Wombwell Hall, a technical school for girls in Gravesend where – despite her earlier learning difficulties – she quickly rose to the top of the class. Knowing of her growing passion for rocks, her father secured a position for her to study ‘O’ and then ‘A’ level geology at the local boys’ school. Many of her peers at the technical school still wonder how ‘square’ old Hazel managed to get into the boys’ school for three lessons a week! After school, Hazel studied for a BSc degree at the University of Hull. In Hazel’s words, Hull was an idyllic place for her to study her chosen subjects because at that time Hull had a number of renowned geomorphologists, and this resulted in a highly specialized degree coursewhich turned out to be perfect for Hazel’s later work in exploration. Hazel was the only person ever to do the hard-rock component of the geology course combined with geomorphology and the consequent chaos Hazel caused to the time-table resulted in this combination of courses never being offered again. In 1976, Hazel graduated with first class honours in Geology and Physical Geography. She was accepted to read for a PhD at the University of East Anglia, but after a year, moved with her supervisor Professor Joe Cann to Newcastle. Her PhD thesis focussed on the formation and composition of *E-mail: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1180/mgm.2018.128