Women in Chemistry: Corale Brierley


Corale Brierley
For hundreds of years chemists have been going after gold—figuring out ways to find, gather, and use it. Recently, Corale Brierley found an unexpected way to get gold by putting bacteria to work! Brierley corrals particular bugs and gets them to digest unwanted materials in gold ore, leaving the gold behind. Hers is a cleaner, more efficient method for mining precious metals and other minerals. Environmentally friendly gold jewelry is now for sale, thanks to Brierley, whose consulting business helps the mining industry put microbes to work.		Photo courtesy Corale L. Brierley, Brierley Consultancy, LLC.
About Her Life Like many scientists who live and work in the western United States, Corale Brierley (b. 1945) has spent her career in mining. She grew up on a cattle ranch in rural Montana and began her college education at Montana State University. While there, she married Jim Brierley of New Mexico and then transferred to New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where she earned her B.S. in biology and M.S. in chemistry. After graduating, she went to work at the New Mexico Bureau of Mines, where she first encountered the new mining technique called biohydrometallurgy. Biohydrometallurgy, aside from being difficult to say, is an environmentally friendly method of extracting valuable metals from the substances in which they naturally occur. In nature, metals like gold, copper, iron, and zinc are usually found in combination with other substances, minerals in particular. (These metal-containing minerals, together with rock and other stuff, are called ore.) Biohydrometallurgy uses tiny biological organisms ("bio"), such as bacteria, and water ("hydro") to trigger chemical reactions that separate the metals from the minerals, all without giving off the noxious byproducts that traditional methods produced. Gold and copper are two of the most important metals that can be produced using this technique. After 10 years of researching biohydrometallurgical processes at the New Mexico Bureau of Mines, Brierley went back to school. In 1981 she graduated with a Ph.D. in environmental science from the University of Texas at Dallas. She decided to go into business for herself and started a company called Advanced Mineral Technologies, but this company failed in the stock market crash of 1987. After working for a gold-mining firm for a short while, she launched a new company, Brierley Consultancy. Since 1991, Brierley Consultancy has specialized in designing innovative biohydrometallurgical processes and providing expertise to mining companies around the world. Today, Brierley lives in Colorado with her husband. For Further Reading on the Web Corale L. Brierley profile - self-profile from the Web site Engineer Girl!, which is part of the National Academy of Engineering's Celebration of Women in Engineering project.

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