Hiroaki is a Professor at the University of Tokyo's Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute. He is studying the role of marine organisms in food-web dynamics and biogeochemical cycles. The main targets are phytoplankton and zooplankton but covering from viruses to whales. He has been led inter- and transdisciplinary projects such as Deep-Sea Ecosystem and Exploitation (GLOBEC), Population Outbreak of Marine Life (IMBER), Study of Kuroshio Ecosystem Dynamics for Sustainable Fisheries (IMBeR), Collaborative Research and Education Project in Southeast Asia for Sustainable Use of Marine Ecosystems (JSPS Core-to-Core CREPSUM). He is also enthusiastic about engaging in national and international activities related to the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14 "Life under Water" and making a scientific contribution to ocean-related social issues. He is a member of the Advisory Board of UN Ocean Decade. In PICES, he has been active in various expert groups and committees such as Model Task Team, IFEP Advisory Panel, BIO Committee, FUTURE Advisory Panel on COVE, FUTURE SSC. From 2016-2019, he served as Chairperson of PICES Science Board.

Yuki Minegishiis an associate professor of Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo. Her scientific interests are ecology and evolution of aquatic organisms, particularly migratory fishes such as freshwater eels and chum salmon, using molecular markers and environmental DNA (eDNA) technique. She has also been working on cooperation with local communities in various approaches including community science to fill knowledge gaps, promote knowledge coproduction and its local applications, and address societal needs/issues. Together with her colleagues, she has been recently dedicating herself to development of a global network of eDNA-based biodiversity monitoring, named ANEMONE Global. This international initiative aims at monitoring global aquatic biodiversity for a long term with an internationally standardized protocol and open-data concept, just like ANEMONE (all-Nippon eDNA monitoring network) launched in Japan in 2019, involving non-academic sectors such as local governments and citizens. She is leading a working group as a co-chair under IOC-WESTPAC to promote participatory science in the western Pacific region since 2023.

SungHyun Nam, born and raised in Seoul, is a physical oceanographer and professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Seoul National University (SNU), Korea. He has participated in over 70 research cruises, published more than 90 journal articles, and authored or co-authored over 10 books. His research involves broad interdisciplinary collaborations, covering a wide range of physical oceanographic processes that influence climate, biogeochemistry, ecosystems, fisheries, the cryosphere, and society. Professor Nam earned his B.S. (1999), M.S. (2001), and Ph.D. (2006) from SNU. He began his career as a senior researcher (2006-2008) at the Agency for Defense Development, Korea. Following this, he was a postdoctoral fellow and assistant project scientist (2008-2014) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego (UCSD), USA. He then joined SNU as an assistant professor (2014-2018), progressing to associate professor (2018-2023), and full professor (2023-present). SungHyun was a member of the Young Korean Academy of Science and Technology (Y-KAST) from 2017 to 2020. His contributions have been recognized with several accolades, including awards from his college for excellent teaching (2018), outstanding research (2020), and excellent education (2023). In 2024, he and his colleagues received the POMA award from PICES for the EC1 Program. He currently serves as co-chair of AP-CREAMS and is a member of the POC Committee and AP-UNDOS for PICES.

Ileana Fenwick is a quantitative community ecologist and data scientist with a focus on marine community dynamics. Her research uses innovative quantitative methods to improve our ocean management outcomes and focuses largely on fisheries ecology, global climate change impacts, and stability and resilience of ecological systems. Ileana is also working at the intersection of actionable science, data science, and open science with Openscapes and is the Principal Investigator of the Pathways to Open Science series, an annual remote event series for Black environmental & marine researchers to build community for the future of data intensive science. Currently, she is completing her doctorate degree in Marine Sciences as a PhD Candidate at the University of North Carlina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Hiroshi Kuroda is an Associate Professor at the Pan-Okhotsk Research Center, Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University, Japan. He has published extensively in international journals in the fields of physical and fisheries oceanography, integrating ocean observations with numerical modeling to investigate marine ecosystem dynamics. In recent years, he has made significant contributions to understanding extreme events in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, including marine heatwaves, cold spells, and the unprecedented harmful algal blooms that occurred off the Pacific coast of Hokkaido, northern Japan, in autumn 2021.

Notably, Dr. Kuroda was among the first to identify a decadal-scale cooling trend in sea surface temperatures—manifesting both regionally and seasonally—during the 2000s to mid-2010s, and to emphasize its potential impacts on major fisheries resources around Japan. His research plays a critical role in understanding and addressing emerging non-stationary and unconventional climate–ocean variability that may already be unfolding.

Dr. Robert Wildermuth is a fish biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego, California, USA. He is a member of the West Coast Decision Support Team for NOAA’s Changing Ecosystems and Fisheries Initiative (CEFI). In his role with CEFI, Robert works to link climate, oceanographic, and ecosystem monitoring data to the management of fishery resources along the West Coast of the USA. His research focuses on understanding the short- and long-term dynamics of small pelagic fish demographics related to environmental and fishing pressures. Robert’s work relies on modeling techniques and simulation to assess robustness of management actions and to explore the effects of model structure on understanding and forecasting marine ecosystems. Robert is a co-lead of two activities for the Joint ICES/PICES Working Group on Sustainable Pelagic Forage Communities. Robert’s previous work with the Future Seas team as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Santa Cruz leveraged multi-model and interdisciplinary approaches to understand climate impacts on coastal pelagic fishes, their predators, and their associated fisheries.

Shusaku Sugimoto is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Science, Tohoku University, Japan. His research focuses on ocean–atmosphere interactions and their impacts on the regional climate and marine environment around Japan. With a background in physical oceanography, he investigates phenomena such as the Kuroshio Extension variability, ocean heat content change, and water mass dynamics, using a combination of observational data, numerical models, and climate reanalysis products. He has played a leading role in several multidisciplinary projects aimed at understanding the influence of oceanic fronts on weather patterns and marine ecosystems. He also serves as a member of national and international collaborative frameworks, including the “Habitable Japan” project. He is actively involved in field observations aboard research vessels, and in recent years, has contributed to the analysis of the extreme meandering of the Kuroshio Extension and its societal impacts.

Hyoeun Oh is an assistant researcher at the Center for Climate Physics, Institute for Basic Science (ICCP) in Busan, South Korea. She received her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from Pusan National University, where she studied large-scale climate dynamics and their regional impacts over East Asia. During her postdoctoral fellowship at Yonsei University, she focused on the contrasting roles of land and ocean in driving irreversible climate responses through CO₂ ramp-up and ramp-down experiments. This work deepened her understanding of long-term ocean responses to radiative forcing, which became foundational to her later research on the future evolution of marine heatwaves (MHWs) at the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KIOST). At KIOST, she examined both atmospheric and oceanic drivers of MHWs around the Korean Peninsula and expanded her research to include their projected changes under climate change. Currently at ICCP, she integrates atmospheric and oceanographic sciences to study compound climate extremes and their broader societal impacts—including climate-sensitive disease risks. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges fundamental climate processes and their regional consequences, offering insight into the physical mechanisms behind past, present, and future climate risks and extremes.

Silvana Duran is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology (TUMSAT). Her research focuses on submesoscale oceanic processes and their influence on primary producers, combining high-resolution numerical simulations with in-situ observations to better understand nutrient dynamics and biological productivity in the Kuroshio Current. Her previous work explored multiscale physical processes—from microscale to mesoscale—and their influence on nutrient transport and marine ecosystems, including implications for plankton communities and fisheries productivity.

Akinori Takasuka is a Professor of the Department of Aquatic Bioscience, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the University of Tokyo, Japan. After completing his PhD in 2003, he worked for the National Research Institute of Fisheries Science, Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency. In April 2019, he returned to the school where he studied for his BSc, MSc, and PhD, and his focus now is on education of junior fellows of the Fisheries Biology Laboratory. He has been working in the fields of Fisheries Biology and Oceanography. His current major research themes include biological mechanisms behind climate impacts on population dynamics of small pelagic fish, growth and survival dynamics during the early life stages of fish, and density-dependent and density-independent processes in the life history of fish. He also worked as a co-chair of the joint PICES/ICES Working Group on Small Pelagic Fish (2019–2023) and a co-convenor of the Small Pelagic Fish symposium held in Lisbon, 2022.

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Yongjun Tian is currently a professor at the Ocean University of China. He is a marine fisheries scientist renowned for his work on fisheries oceanography. He received his PhD in Fisheries Science from the University of Tokyo, Japan. Following a position as a senior researcher at the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency (FRA), he joined the Fisheries College at the Ocean University of China (OUC) as a professor in 2015. His research interests include: 1) fisheries oceanography, particularly the impact of climate regime shifts and variability on fisheries and fish communities, 2) fish life histories and the recruitment process, and 3) fish population dynamics, including stock assessment and ecological modelling for fisheries management. He has published 200 papers in leading fisheries and oceanography journals, and has received the Uda Award from the Japanese Society of Fisheries Oceanography (JSFO) in 2022, as well as the JSFS award in 2014. In his current role as Director of the Deep Sea and Polar Fisheries Research Centre at the Ocean University of China (OUC), he focuses particularly on the ecosystems of the overfished China Seas, the Northwest Pacific Ocean, and the Antarctic Ocean.

Dr. Kazutaka Takahashi is a professor of the Department of Aquatic Bioscience in the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the University of Tokyo. His research interests focus largely on biology and ecology of marine zooplankton, including hyper-benthos, with the aim of understanding their role in the marine food web and material cycle. He has published studies on the production ecology of littoral mysids, feeding and reproductive ecology of subarctic copepds, growth characteristics of chaetognaths, the blooms dynamics of doliolids and the behavioural ecology of sapphirinid copepods, symbiont of pelagic tunicates. In recent years, as PI, he is also leading several research projects including the long-term variation of marine plastic debris and a comprehensive assessment of the impact of marine heat waves on pelagic ecosystems in the transitional area of the North Pacific as well as a high-resolution assessment of active carbon flux through marine vertically migrating biota around Japan in response to climate change.

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Dr. Shin-ichi Ito is a Professor of Fisheries Environmental Oceanography at the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, the University of Tokyo. He is broadly interested in climate impacts on ocean ecosystems, with particular interest in the formation of ecological hotspots by ocean currents, fish response to climate variability and change, and comparative studies on fish responses to global climate. Shin-ichi was responsible for the development of a fish growth model coupled to the lower-trophic-level ecosystem model NEMURO.FISH (North Pacific Ecosystem Model for Understanding Regional Oceanography For including Saury and Herring). His laboratory conducts swimming and respirometry experiments to estimate the parameters in the model, rearing experiments to estimate the relationship between water temperature and otolith oxygen isotope ratio to estimate the migration routes of fish species using otolith microchemistry information, and ocean environmental DNA (OceanDNA) monitoring to detect the distribution of fish species and to assess overlap of microplastic distribution and fish species. Shin-ichi serves on a couple of editorial boards, as a lead author of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) WG-II Sixth Assessment Report, and as the President of the Japanese Society of Fisheries Oceanography.

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Gen Kanaya is Chief Senior Researcher of Marine Environment Section, Regional Environment Conservation Division, National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan. His research is mainly focusing on the biodiversity of coastal macrozoobenthos including polychaetes, gastropods, bivalves, and crustaceans and conservation of tidalflats, saltmarsh, and seagrass beds along the Japanese Coast. He had assessed sediment-animal relationships, benthic food web structures, land-estuarine interaction, and bioturbation in fields. For the last 15 years, he had monitored environmental recovery processes of tidalflats in northeastern Japan after the huge disturbances by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. More recently, he started a research about the impacts of ongoing climatic changes on coastal ecosystems around Japan. He is a member of the steering and editorial committees of Japanese Association of Benthology.

Akio Sohma is a Professor at Osaka Metropolitan University and serves as the Chief Director of the Center for Urban Socio-Ecological Systems (CUES). He specializes in mathematical ecology, with a particular focus on coupled processes involving water and sediments, as well as interactions between marine and terrestrial systems. His main research areas include coastal ecosystem restoration (mitigation of hypoxia and red tides), productivity enhancement (implementation of nature-positive approaches), and climate change mitigation (blue carbon). In recent years, he has expanded his interests to the dynamics of ecosystem networks, advancing research on the significance and roles of biodiversity from the perspectives of species persistence, functional group sustainability, and ecosystem resilience. His work aims to advance the prediction and assessment of ecosystem dynamics to inform policy-making and promote public understanding of ecological systems. Prior to entering academia in 2016, he served as Research Director at a think tank affiliated with the Mizuho Financial Group.

Karen Hunter has over 20 years’ experience focused mainly on climate adaptation science in DFO’s Pacific Region, Ecosystem Science Division. With a large network of colleagues, she helps create solutions to improve how we conserve and manage living resources in a changing climate. Karen’s science approach emphasizes the need to bring conceptual and theoretical ideas into our day-to-day operations to manage problems creatively and flexibly. She was part of a DFO team who co-developed novel risk-based frameworks that can operationalize multiple human values and risks from threats like climate change into decision-making, and co-developed studies to better understand the integration of climate adaptation and ecological integrity in marine protected areas at a global scale. Prior to DFO, Karen led the re-establishment of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve on Vancouver Island, BC, and worked at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, where she focused on the impacts of changing habitat conditions on fish movement and growth – thus ‘challenging problems’ and the ‘changing environment’ have been central to her work since 2000. Karen serves as Vice-Chair of the PICES Human Dimensions Committee and is co-chair of two PICES Working Groups (WG51: Exploring Human Networks to Power Sustainability and WG49: Climate Extremes and Coastal Impacts in the Pacific).

Dr. Azra is a Senior Researcher and Head of Climate Change Adaptation Laboratory at Animals and Environmental Adaptation group, Institute of Climate Adaptation and Marine Biotechnology (ICAMB), Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT), a Leading Marine University in Malaysia. He is one of the Inaugural Fellows for the Leadership for Climate Resilient Fisheries (U.S.A.) and a Visiting Researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Indonesia. Currently, he is a project co-lead for the "Community-Driven Nature-Based Solutions for Environmental Sustainability in Malaysian Aquaculture", under the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s International Science Partnership Fund (ISPF) - International Research Empowerment Programme (IREP) with strategic partnership of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia (ASM). He was the project coordinator for invasive species related to environmental sustainability and societal well-being, under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability and a project entitled “Multi-physiological approaches for unraveling the effects of global warming on the commercial Malaysian ectotherm species” under the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia. He authored and co-authored 120 scientific indexed papers, and edited three books, with more than 20 chapters. He was also sponsored and awarded by the Malaysian Public Service Department Scholarship, Scholarship Talent Attraction and Retention (STAR), and MyBrain15 (MyPhD & MyMaster) Postgraduate Scholarship during 2011 - 2018.

Dr. Szymon Smoliński is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fisheries Resources at the National Marine Fisheries Research Institute in Gdynia, Poland. His research focuses on fish ecology, particularly employing otoliths as ecological indicators, spatial modeling of fish distribution, population dynamics, and the impacts of climate change on growth patterns and habitat utilization. Recently, his work has concentrated on pelagic species in the Baltic Sea, investigating fundamental ecological processes as well as building biological foundations for sustainable fisheries management. He is also an enthusiast of bibliometric analyses, applying quantitative methods to explore trends, networks, and impact within scientific literature. Szymon Smoliński is a recipient of the Polish Minister of Science scholarship and has been honored as a Baltic Fellow by the Björn Carlsons Foundation, a recognition conferred on researchers focused on the Baltic Sea. As an active member of the ICES community, he contributes to working groups on fish biology and resource assessment and serves as a member of the ICES Scientific Committee, including Science Impact and Publications Group, and as an editor of the ICES Journal of Marine Science.

Yusuke Yokoyama is a Professor at the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo. He is also appointed at the School of Science (Department of Earth and Planetary Science) as well as at Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Graduate Program on Environmental Sciences). He is also an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University (Research School of Physics) since 2020. Yusuke Yokoyama received his PhD from The Australian National University (2000), where he conducted his study at the Research School of Earth Sciences. He then moved to the Space Science Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, as a Postdoctoral Chemist, and then was appointed as a Research Scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA before returning to Japan in late 2002. He is a geochemist who studies Earth's surface systems using isotopes. His research covers climate science and biology, as well as the interaction between the Earth's various components—including the ocean, atmosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere—in the past, present, and future. He is an elected fellow of the Geological Society of America (2018), fellow of the Past Global Changes (2022) and was listed in the Reuters Hot List: the world’s top 1,000 climate scientists (2021).

Dr. Beth Fulton is a Chief Research Scientist with CSIRO where she helps lead work on integrated oceans stewardship and the blue economy. Beth is also an Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director at the Centre of Marine Socioecology, a centre focuses on working collaboratively to find transdisciplinary, equitable and sustainable solutions to the problems facing coasts and oceans. The common theme to Beth’s work has been on developing system-scale decision support tools in support of sustainable management of potentially competing uses of marine environments and adaptation to global change.

Todd is a plankton and ecosystems researcher, a data scientist, and creator of the Coastal & Oceanic Plankton Ecology, Production, & Observation Database (COPEPOD and COPEPEDIA). As a data scientist, he enjoys creating online exploratory interfaces, data products and compilations, and integrations of different data types (e.g., in-situ, satellite, model) to support both personal and collaborative research needs.

Todd first started working heavily with plankton time series in 2004, as a member of the SCOR Global comparisons of zooplankton time series working group (WG125), and continued this time series work with the ICES Working Group on Zooplankton Ecology (WGZE), the ICES Working Group on Phytoplankton & Microbial Ecology (WGPME), and the IOC/UNESCO International Group for Marine Ecological Time Series (IGMETS). His other collaborative products include the SCOR WG157 MetaZooGene Atlas and Database (MZGdb), and the Pelagic Size Structure database (PSSdb).

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Dr. Yanli Lei is a principal investigator at the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and serves as the Manager and Convenor of ISO/TC8/WG15, the first international standardization working group focusing on ocean negative carbon emissions and carbon neutrality. Her expertise lies in marine biodiversity, global change, and the development of international standards for ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

Dr. Lei has led or participated in over 50 national and international projects, including the formulation of ISO 25283-1: "Ocean Negative Carbon Emissions and Carbon Neutralization—Part 1: General Guidelines and Requirements," which was officially approved as a New Work Item Proposal (NP) in 2024. She plays a central role in connecting scientific research with global governance through standardization.

In addition to her leadership in ISO, Dr. Lei is also Executive Deputy Editor of the Journal of Sea Research and actively contributes to UN Decade of Ocean Science initiatives. Her work is at the forefront of translating emerging marine CDR technologies into globally recognized frameworks to support climate mitigation and marine ecosystem resilience.

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Dr. Toru Suzuki is a director general of Marine Information Research Center (MIRC), Japan Hydrographic Association (JHA). His scientific background is physical oceanography, and he has worked for oceanographic data and metadata management and rescue, and development of quality control procedures since 1997. Toru has been member of Working Group on Biogeochemical data Integration and Synthesis (WG-17; 2001-2005), Section on Carbon and Climate (CC-S; 2005-present), TCODE (2007-2023 as Japan representative, 2024-present as ex-office represents IOC/IODE), Science Board (as TCODE char; 2010-2016). He also became members of some groups for IOC/IODE programme, and has been members of Expert Working Group No.8 “Creating a digital representation of the Ocean” of the Ocean Decade Vision 2030 and the Ocean Decade Data Strategy Implementation Group (DSIG) by the Decade Coordination Office for Ocean Data Sharing, UNESCO/IOC in the present.

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Previously Shiozawa served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as First Secretary at the Embassy of Japan in Fiji (2012-2015) and as Economic Adviser at the Embassy in Marshall Islands (2006-2009) in charge of economic cooperation and politics. He was also Program Officer at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (2009-2012), JICA Volunteer Teacher in the Marshall Islands (2003-2006), private cram school teacher in Japan (1998-2003), and JICA Volunteer Teacher in Zambia (1996-1998).

Shiozawa rejoined SPF in November 2015 as Senior Program Officer for the Pacific Island Nations Program, and was appointed Director of the Division of Island Nations in July 2024, a position he holds to date.

Since 2003, Shiozawa has been involved in over 70 ODA projects and 30 SPF projects in the Pacific Island Countries and a number of dialogues. Most recently, he has been facilitating projects for Enhancing Human Resources for Maritime Security in the Micronesia Region III, Economic Revitalization in Pacific Island Communities By Boosting Community Based Tourism, Enhancement of Public-Private Partnership For Upgrading Japan's Strategy Toward Pacific Islands Region, Building a Foundation of Human Relationships Between Pacific Islands and Japan for Future Generation, Creation of a New Regional Order Layer in the Pacific Islands Region, and Promotion of Global Synergies under the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

Shiozawa holds an MSc in Earth Science from the Graduate School of Science and Engineering at Ibaraki University in his home prefecture in Japan.

Meshach Sukulu is a Senior Research Analyst and Office Manager with WorldFish, based in Auki, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands. Brought up in a coastal village, he has witnessed firsthand the gradual decline of the marine ecosystem over the years. With a background in fisheries and the opportunity to work with WorldFish, he is now reaching out to help communities restore and protect their marine environments. Meshach has been actively involved in Community-Based Fisheries Management (CBFM) initiatives across Malaita and beyond, working to integrate traditional marine stewardship practices with modern management approaches. His responsibilities include facilitating community engagement, coordinating field activities, training local facilitators, and promoting knowledge exchange between villages. He is dedicated to empowering communities to sustainably manage and protect their marine resources for future generations.

Dr Amandine Schaeffer is a physical oceanographer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia, whose research focuses on coastal ocean dynamics, including marine heatwaves, current systems, subsurface variability, and ocean transport. She uses in situ platforms such as moorings, HF radar, and ocean gliders to explore processes shaping the continental shelf, particularly along Australia's southeast coast. She leads the BluebottleWatch project, which integrates lab experiments, field surveys, statistical and Lagrangian modeling, and citizen science, to understand and predict marine stingers strandings. She is a member of CLIVAR heatwave research focus group and a co-chair of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) marine heatwave co-design exemplar. Her work provides critical insights into shelf / western boundary current exchanges and extreme marine events, bridging gaps across disciplines and supporting more effective and sustainable coastal management.

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