Heather White

Heather White is chief executive officer and a director of Sunshine Silver Mining & Refining, the company restarting the Sunshine Mine in Kellogg, Idaho — a historic silver, gold and antimony complex in the Coeur d'Alene district that the company describes as one of the highest-grade primary silver deposits in the world. She is a mining engineer with about 30 years of operating and executive experience, and the one thing she is genuinely known for is running the most senior attempt in a generation to put a Silver Valley silver mine back into production. Sunshine's classified resources total 263.7 million ounces of silver: 103.9 million ounces of Indicated Mineral Resources (the higher-confidence category) at an average diluted grade of 29.8 ounces per ton, plus 159.8 million ounces of Inferred Mineral Resources (the lower-confidence category) at 22.6 ounces per ton. Grams per tonne is the metric used in Canada and much of the rest of the world; the grades in both systems are roughly double those of other past-producing or currently producing mines in the district.

White's route into the chair is unusual for a chief executive because it runs through the operating side of the industry rather than finance or investor relations. She held senior management roles at Inco Ltd. and PT Inco from July 1995 to February 2007, then senior management roles at Vale S.A. from February 2007 to March 2011. She was vice president of mining at NOVAGOLD Resources from April 2011 to January 2013, has run her own White Mining Consulting since January 2013, and was senior vice president and chief operating officer of Nickel Creek Platinum from August 2017 to January 2021. She joined Sunshine as chief operating officer in January 2021, became chief executive in February 2024, and joined the board of directors in January 2026. Along the way she served on the boards of Victoria Gold from June 2016 to June 2018 and Sinda Ltd. from January 2022 to January 2026, and holds a bachelor of engineering from Queen's University. Her company's own filings record underground and open-pit work across Ontario, Indonesia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon and Idaho.

Her approach is engineering-first, and it shows in what she chose to buy, permit and build. Sunshine's central argument is that the project is a restart rather than a greenfield development: the company says it already holds the major permits needed to resume mining, milling and refining, will not need an environmental impact study to begin, and values the existing shafts, hoist, refinery, tailings storage facility and power infrastructure at roughly $600 million to replace. The technical case rests on grade, because high grade means more metal recovered per tonne of rock processed and therefore lower unit costs. The cost metric she points investors toward is AISC — all-in sustaining cost, what it costs to produce an ounce once the mine is already operating — which the study behind the plan models at $16.26 per ounce over the first five years of production in a 24-year base case. She also frames silver as an industrial input rather than a safe-haven asset, tying demand to data centres, semiconductors and power networks, and she has pressed the vertically integrated angle: mine to mill to refinery, with COMEX-eligible silver bars and antimony, copper, germanium and gallium capacity, against a company estimate that roughly 70% of global silver refining and about 90% of global antimony refining sits outside the United States.

Two things make her worth following now. The first is the execution window. The company raised approximately $310.5 million gross in a June 2026 IPO, selling 23 million shares at $13.50 and listing on the New York Stock Exchange under SSMR, and targets first production in late 2028 at roughly 6.7 million payable ounces of silver a year on average over the first five years — which the technical report puts at about 16% of the 35.7 million ounces of silver produced in the United States during 2025. The second is her public position on the metal itself, where she has argued that demand now runs ahead of what the industry can supply and that long-term prices in the $40 to $50 an ounce range are realistic rather than promotional. Investors should hold one caveat. As of the company's May 2026 registration statement, the Sunshine Mine had no Proven or Probable Mineral Reserves under the SEC's S-K 1300 standard, so the figures above are Mineral Resources and an initial assessment rather than a feasibility study, and a feasibility study and a formal project sanctioning decision were still ahead. Her price views are also a chief executive's on a specific asset, not independent research.