Carl Michael Lesher (born 1951) is an American geologist. He is an authority on the geology and origin of nickel-copper-platinum group element deposits, especially those associated with komatiites, their physical volcanology and localization, the geochemistry and petrology of associated rocks, and controls on their composition.
Lesher was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, but has been living and working in Canada beginning in 1975 and continuously since 1997. He holds BSc and MA degrees in geology from Indiana University, and a PhD degree in geology from the University of Western Australia. Between 1975 and 1979, he worked as an Exploration Geologist and Mineralogist for the Iron Ore Company of Canada; between 1982 and 1984, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the J. Tuzo Wilson Research Laboratories of the University of Toronto; and between 1984 and 1997, he was Professor of Economic Geology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In 1997, he was appointed Professor of Economic Geology, NSERC Senior Industrial Research Chair in Mineral Exploration, and Founding Director of the Mineral Exploration Research Centre at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. In 2010-2011 he served as Director of Mining Initiatives, designing and founding the School of Mines (now Goodman School of Mines). He has been a Visiting Fellow at Abteilung Geochemie Max Planck Institute für Chemie (1989 and 1991) and the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University (1990), an Honorary Professor at the Chengdu University of Technology (2000), and a visiting professor at Indiana University (2002-2003), and has given plenary, keynote, and invited lectures all over the world. In 2021 he was appointed Professor Emeritus at Laurentian University.
Between 1998 and 2002, Lesher was Leader of the International Union of Geological Sciences- and UNESCO-sponsored International Geological Correlation Program (now International Geoscience Programme) Project 427, Ore-Forming Processes in Dynamic Magmatic Systems. Between 2012 and 2018 he was Principal Investigator and Project Director of the $13M pan-Canadian "Integrated Multi-Parameter Footprints of Ore Systems" project, sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Mining Innovation Council. He is currently a Co-Investigator on the $100M Metal Earth program, sponsored by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund and the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund.
Lesher has authored or co-authored over 500 scientific publications, and has served on the editorial boards of Mineralogical Abstracts (1987-1988), The Canadian Mineralogist (1989-1991), Reviews in Economic Geology (1993-1998), and Mineralium Deposita (2010–2016). In addition to his research, he has consulted for mining companies in Australia, Canada, Finland, and the USA.
Lesher has been awarded the Duncan R. Derry Medal (2007) from the Mineral Deposits Division of the Geological Association of Canada, and co-awarded the Julian Boldy Award (2002) by the Geological Association of Canada, and the Wardell Armstrong Prize (2009) by the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy. He has served as a Society of Economic Geologists Thayer Lindsley Visiting Lecturer (1998-1999) and as a Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy University Lecturer (1997-1998). He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists, the Geological Society of America, and the Geological Association of Canada.