Kelly Biedenweg is an Associate Professor of Human Dimensions at Oregon State University's Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences Department. Her research interests are in human wellbeing, social values, and decision making in natural resource management. She has spent the last ten years focused primarily in the Puget Sound developing human wellbeing indicators and working with partners to integrate social science in ecosystem restoration. She received a EPA Early Career Award and an NSF postdoctoral Science, Education, and Engineering for Sustainability fellowship for her research on Integrating Human Wellbeing and Ecosystem Services in the Puget Sound. She has a PhD from the University of Florida in the human dimensions of natural resource management, a master of science in conservation biology and a bachelor of science in marine ecology.

Jhen Hsu is a Ph. D. student in the Quantitative Fisheries Lab at the Institute of Oceanography, National Taiwan University. Her master thesis focused on demography and the otolith sampling approach of Pacific Bluefin tuna (Thunnus orientalis). Her current research interests include the population dynamics and stock assessment modelling of the Pacific saury (Cololabis saira). Her research was closely linked and collaborated with the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC). In particular, she is responsible for analyzing the joint fishery data collected from all members in the NPFC and using spatio-temporal modelling (VAST) to develop a joint abundance index of Pacific saury, and also to explore changes in Pacific saury distribution.

Isaac Kaplan is a Research Fishery Biologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, USA. He is a member of the Conservation Biology Division and the Ecosystem Science Program, and a contributor to the California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment. His focus has been the development of Atlantis ecosystem models that simulate food webs, fisheries, and oceanography in a spatially explicit framework (created by Dr. Beth Fulton, CSIRO Australia). He has developed and collaborated on Atlantis models for the California Current and other US marine ecosystems, as well as the Gulf of California (Mexico). Isaac’s recent efforts include applying ecosystem models to test stock assessment and harvest control rules, and to project the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems and fishing communities. These climate change efforts center around small pelagic fish (Future Seas project) and groundfish (Groundfish, Communities, and Climate Change in the California Current project) – both apply a suite of oceanographic models, species distribution models, and ecosystem models to understand species and fisher vulnerability to climate change. Isaac is also a member of the joint PICES/ICES Working Group on Small Pelagic Fish (WG43), and NOAA’s Distribution Mapping and Analysis Portal (DisMAP) working group. When Isaac is not simulating whole ecosystems he also collaborates on applications linking seasonal ocean forecasts to fisheries, and a new application of a multispecies assessment model for California Current hake (Merluccius productus).

Michio Kondoh is a community ecologist, the President of The eDNA Society established in Japan in 2018 and a Professor of Ecological Integration Laboratory in the Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University. His research interest covers population dynamics, species coexistence mechanism, interspecific interactions and community networks. He had recently established a nationwide biodiversity monitoring network based on eDNA metabarcoding, called ANEMONE, to survey the fish biodiversity in freshwater, coastal and pelagic ecosystems of Japan. The data obtained by ANEMONE is made available through the open data database, ANEMONE DB (https://db.anemone.bio/), on 2 June 2022. He recently established ANEMONE Consortium as a platform for academia, private sector, governments and civil society to collaborate for better usage of ecological big data for solving social issues.

Dr. Jennifer Boldt is a Research Scientist at the Pacific Biological Station with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. She leads a program on pelagic fish and the environment. She conducts research and collaborates on integrative pelagic ecosystem monitoring surveys to understand biological and physical factors affecting the distribution, biomass, and trophodynamics of pelagic fish and prey species. Research also includes ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management, state of the ocean reporting, the assessment of the ecological impacts of environmental conditions at the ecosystem scale, improving the understanding of mechanistic linkages from physics to phytoplankton to zooplankton to fish, and the impacts of multiple stressors on ecosystem components. Dr. Boldt has been active in PICES, and served as MONITOR Chair, Science Board member, member of Working Group WG 28 on Development of Ecosystem Indicators to Characterize Ecosystem Responses to Multiple Stressors and WG 36 on Common Ecosystem Reference Points across PICES Member Countries; she is currently serving as a member of the PICES’ integrative science program Scientific Steering Committee (FUTURE-SSC), MONITOR, and WG 43 - Joint PICES/ICES WG on Small Pelagic Fish.

Dr. Telmo Morato is a Portuguese principal marine scientist at the Okeanos Research Institute of the University of the Azores. He co-leads the Azores Deep-sea Ecology research group aiming to advance the understanding of deep-sea ecosystems in a changing planet to inform the society and the sustainable management of the oceans. Over the last years, Telmo led several research projects and explorations that helped unveiling new deep-sea species, communities, biotopes, and even new hydrothermal vents, but also unveiling the impacts of deep-sea fisheries on such ecosystems. Telmo also lead the development of affordable camera systems to democratize deep-sea exploration and make it accessible to all. All the knowledge gained over the last decade has been successfully transferred for an improved ecosystem-based management and conservation of deep-sea ecosystems at regional, national, and international levels. Telmo is the sub-coordinator of the Okeanos research center and has produced over 100 scientific publications, participated as an international rapporteur for the UN World Ocean Assessment, the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and the FAO Deep-ocean climate change report. Telmo is a national delegate in the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic, among others.

Dr. Lisa Eisner is a Biological/Fisheries Oceanographer at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center of NOAA Fisheries in Juneau, Alaska and Seattle, Washington. Her research focuses on oceanographic processes that influence phytoplankton and zooplankton dynamics and fisheries in the eastern Bering and Chukchi seas. And she has been the lead oceanographer for the BASIS program (Bering Arctic Subarctic Integrated Survey). She is vice-chair for the PICES MONITOR committee and a lead/co-PI on current (and past) eastern Bering Sea and Chukchi Sea research programs.

Senior scientist Dr. Lis Jørgensen is an Arctic ecologist at the Institute of Marine Research in Tromsø, Norway. Her research is transferring large dataset on oceanography, biology, human activities and its pressures into area-based integrated ecosystem assessment. She participates in the Norwegian-Russian long term monitoring (started early 1950s) in the Barents Sea and investigate trends and patterns within ecosystem components (with benthos as a specialty) into the larger ecosystem understanding. She co-leads the ICES-PICES-PAME Integrated Ecosystem Assessment working group on an Integrated Ecosystem Assessment for the Central Arctic Ocean that compiles Panarctic temporal and spatial data into ecosystem understanding, human activities, pressures and how this is managed by international regulations. She also leads the expert group in the Arctic Council, PAME (Protection of the Arctic Marine Ecosystem) on the Ecosystem based management. This group deliniated the 17 Arctic Large Marine Ecosystems and a framework to do national, bilateral or multinational ecosystem based management.

Khushboo Jhugroo is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Hakai Institute and University of British Columbia in Canada. She is investigating the continental shelf dynamics of British Columbia’s Central Coast using ocean glider observations. Khushboo has a PhD from the University of Auckland and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, where she studied the interaction between terrestrial and oceanic environments. More specifically, she investigated river-induced submesoscale processes in shelf seas. She is currently applying her knowledge gained on shelf seas about freshwater forcing, upwelling, estuarine-like circulation, ocean acidification, marine heatwaves, shelf exchanges with fjords and implications for MPAs to a British Columbia shelf sea. Khushboo earned her MSc from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Growing up on the island of Mauritius where she is originally from, she developed a big interest in coastal oceanography and ocean risks in Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries. She is also passionate to learn about human-ocean interactions, a sustainable blue economy, interdisciplinary work and science communication.

Takeshi Tomiyama is an Associate Professor at Hiroshima University, Japan. He worked as a researcher in Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan, until 2012, studying stock enhancement and fisheries management of coastal flatfishes. After that he undertook ecological studies on the life history of coastal fishes in the Seto Inland Sea, western Japan, through field observations and laboratory experiments. His research interests involve spatial and temporal variations in habitat utilization, reproduction, feeding, and growth of flatfishes. He is also interested in many aspects of flatfish ecology including bathymetric distribution, predator-prey relationships, carrying capacity, and thermal responses. He contributed to the IUCN Red List assessments of 16 western Pacific flatfishes in the family Pleuronectidae in 2021.

Brian Palermo has over 30 years experience in the entertainment industry. And while the content of that industry is wildly variable, the skills of audience engagement are valuable and applicable to scientists. But those techniques are rarely shared amongst science cohorts. So Brian developed a specialized niche of training scientists to improve their communication skills as both writers and presenters.

As a facilitator, Brian has worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, The Monterey Bay Aquarium and MBARI, USC’s Keck School of Medicine, the US National Park Service and more. And as a professional actor and member of The Groundlings Theatre, he’s performed with and directed comedy legends such as Kristen Wiig, Will Ferrell, Melissa McCarthy and many others.

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Kate Wing is the founder and Executive Director of Intertidal Agency, a non-profit working at the intersection of conservation, technology, and strategy. Through Intertidal Agency, she leads a team exploring innovations in data governance for a more connected and equitable Blue Economy as part of NSF’s 2021 Convergence Accelerator. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the UN Ocean Decade Data Coordination Group. She’s a founding partner at the Net Gains Alliance, a coalition supporting data modernization in U.S. fisheries, and the Senior Advisor for the Digital Ocean Pillar for the Friends of Ocean Action, a community convened by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the World Resources Institute. She was The Nature Conservancy California’s 2018 Ocean Data Fellow, where she supported the development of Fishnet.ai, the first open training library of commercial fishing images. She regularly mentors ocean tech accelerator programs and has a breadth of experience in the social sector.