Roy Starkey is a regular speaker on the British mineralogical / geological society circuit. He graduated from Sheffield University with a BSc(Hons) in Geology in 1974, and has a pursued a career in manufacturing and operations management, gaining experience in a wide variety of engineering and technology product sectors, including ten years with Morgan Crucible manufacturing technical ceramics (crushed high-purity rocks!). He is now retired and seeks to devote more time to his mineralogical interests.
He founded the British Micromount Society (http://britishmicromountsociety.homestead.com/) in 1981, and has held a variety of roles in the Russell Society ( http://www.russellsoc.org/ ), the UK’s leading society for amateur and professional mineralogists, and is a former President, and the current General Secretary.
Roy has published widely on British topographical mineralogy, including papers in the Mineralogical Magazine, Scottish Journal of Geology, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, Proceedings of the Bristol Naturalists Society, the Mineralogical Record, and the Journal of the Russell Society. He completed a major article for the Mineralogical Record on Herodsfoot mine, Lanreath, Cornwall, which was published in 2012.
Roy’s research interests are in the areas of British topographical mineralogy, the history of mineralogy, and the mineralogy of Scotland in particular. He published his first book – Crystal Mountains – Minerals of the Cairngorms, in September 2014; and followed this with Minerals of the English Midlands in September 2018.
Roy has worked as a part-time volunteer curator at the Lapworth Museum (University of Birmingham) – since 2010 http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/lapworth-museum/index.aspx
He served as a member of the Project Team, and Project Board, for the recent HLF-funded redevelopment of the Lapworth Museum, and was nominated as the recipient of the prestigious Marsh Award for Mineralogy 2016 https://blog.nhm.ac.uk/2017/02/21/roy-starkey-wins-first-marsh-award-for-mineralogy/ “in recognition of his scientific contributions and public promotion of Mineralogy in the United Kingdom”.
He is currently working on a biography of the famous British Mineralogist Sir Arthur Russell.