Article
Turning Research Into Reality: Why I Do What I Do
September 5, 2025
What happens when a geologist with a passion for fieldwork, a knack for data, and a hunger for impact decides to rewrite the rules of mineral exploration? Learn more about the winding path that led Mason Dykstra from drilling wells in West Texas to building MinersAI, a company dedicated to transforming geoscience research into practical, decision-shaping technologies for the mining industry.
“There are so many ideas out there that could become revolutionary technologies for the mining industry.”
“When I first started studying, I ended up in geology by, what I suppose, is a common route – an outdoorsy person who takes a geology class and falls in love with the field work!
“I did a master’s degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and my first real job was working for an oil and gas company, drilling a lot of wells in west Texas for a few years. Then I went back for a PhD in deepwater depositional systems, working in Mexico, but also doing fieldwork in northern Italy and the Spanish Pyrenees. After that I took an academic position as a Research Professor at the Colorado School of Mines, running a research consortium for the oil and gas industry, but still focusing on deepwater depositional systems.
“I worked for a number of other oil and gas companies over the years, but immediately before setting up MinersAI, I was with a scientific software company building machine learning applications for subsurface analysis for oil and gas companies. Then I ran into Tomi at PDAC in 2023, and that’s when we decided to start a company of our own.
The jobs that shaped me
The most informative: After academia, I worked at two oil and gas companies, the first of which was Statoil (now Equinor). Statoil was also my first real leadership job, and I learned how to hire, how to build a team, and how to politic within a company. What I never learned was patience! Everything went too slowly, and when an old buddy recruited me to Anadarko Petroleum I was attracted to the more dynamic environment. At Anadarko I ran the Geoscience Technology group, and I learned a lot more about politics, guiding my team through two layoffs and a lot of internal change. When Occidental Petroleum bought Anadarko in 2019 it was time to move on. A common thread that has run through all of my jobs has been technical expertise and leveraging that, both personally and through other technical experts, to make a real impact on the bottom line.
The most adventurous: Working as a Research Professor, doing fieldwork in Baja California, Mexico, western Argentina, Northern Italy and the Spanish Pyrenees, was…er...interesting. I hadn’t been quite prepared for the various adventures involving 4WD vehicles, gun-toting military police and ranchers. Then there was the boat ride across to an island where the boat sprang a leak en route. With each wave, more water kept squirting up through the hull to the point where we did start to wonder if we would make it...
Turning research into practical solutions
“Before that meeting, what I’d realised a long time ago was that while I enjoyed being in academia and in companies, I was really missing the implementation side of things – being able to manifest research into practical applications that then get used.
“For example, I found there was a lot you could do for oil and gas companies indirectly by coming up with data-derived conceptual models and then applying them. But when I discovered the world of software development, I realised you can directly manifest things by building tools that help people with the decisions they need to make in order to invest in something, or not invest in it; to drill something, or not drill it. That's very powerful.
“I think there's a huge backlog of very useful concepts and techniques that haven't been turned into technologies, and that’s really been my goal in building MinersAI.
“We’re taking the first steps in a long process of building the foundational data layer that will manifest a lot of these technologies. Those solutions will impact the mineral exploration and mining industry in a hugely positive way by enabling people to make better decisions earlier in the process. Having a foundational data later with a tonne of geoscience data – geology, geochemistry, geophysics and more – all working together, will give you a rich picture that will enable people to explore in a way very different from today.
“The long-term aim is to be able to interrogate all that data with natural language – to ask questions of big data sets in a simple, natural manner that allows you to really build out your understanding of the potential of an area or a mineral system in a much more fundamental way than is possible now.
Getting MinersAI started
“Tomi and I met at PDAC in 2023. We were both in the same session, we both got up to ask a question, then we ended up having lunch together throughout the week, bouncing ideas off of each other. We had a final dinner together after the conference was over, at some pizza place or other, which is when we said, all right, let’s start something. Originally it was just the two of us figuring out everything together, but now it’s more divided with Tomi involved in the investor screening project while I’m more on the prospectivity side of things.
“For me, what’s important is being able to improve the industry’s prospecting success rates by bringing science to people’s fingertips in a more consistent way. At present I think it’s very inconsistent, and that contributes to a huge waste of capital in the industry. If we are to actually find the minerals and metals we need over the next 20 to 30 years, we really need to improve the way we are doing things.
“And right now is the time to do that because technology is catching up to the point where we can now leverage giant data sets in novel ways that have never been done in the past.
“I believe that what we’re doing at MinersAI is pretty unique and important. Yes, other companies are looking at specific niche problems within the industry. But to build a foundational layer across all of geoscience is the key that will help us solve so many problems across the entire industry – all the way from exploration to operations to mine closure.
“As I said, seeing our ideas manifested in software and watching them solve real problems is a lot of fun. It takes time, but it’s incredibly rewarding.”
Connect with Mason at mason@minersai.com to discover how MinersAI can help you tap into the potential of your data and accelerate your decision-making process.