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Prof. Fei Chai received his Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from Duke University in 1995. He currently holds the Tang Shifeng Chair Professorship at Xiamen University and serves as Deputy Director of the Fujian Ocean Innovation Center. He was named to the National Distinguished Overseas Talent in 2018 and selected as a Fujian Provincial Hundred Foreign Experts fellow in 2026. From 1994 to 2021, he was on the faculty of the University of Maine, where he served as Dean of the School of Marine Sciences (2012–2015) and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 2021. From 2016 to 2022, he also directed the State Key Laboratory of Satellite Ocean Environment Dynamics at the Second Institute of Oceanography, MNR. He has led or contributed to more than 40 large-scale interdisciplinary research projects and serves as a review expert for numerous national and international funding agencies and major research programs.

His research centers on physical–biogeochemical and ecological dynamics. He has developed world-leading coupled ocean hydrodynamic–ecological models that provide essential tools for simulating and predicting marine environments and ecosystems. Through these models, he has clarified how climate change modulates carbon cycling across the Pacific and its marginal seas. By integrating BGC-Argo in-situ measurements with satellite remote-sensing data, his team has revealed the effects of mesoscale physical processes and extreme events on upper-ocean ecosystems. His CoSiNE ecological model has been widely adopted worldwide for marine ecosystem modeling and forecasting, exerting far-reaching scientific influence.

Prof. Chai holds several leadership positions in international marine science initiatives, including Co-Chair of the UN Ocean Decade Digital Twins of the Ocean (DITTO) programme, Board Member of the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO), Co-Chair of the Tropical Pacific Observing System (TPOS), Vice Chair of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean Circulation and Climate Experiment (NPOCE), Scientific Committee Member of the BGC-Argo Program, and Co-Chair of the OceanObs'29 Program Committee.

He has published over 240 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals, including Science, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, and Geophysical Research Letters. His work has attracted nearly 15,000 citations, with an h-index of 66 (Google Scholar).

Dr Patrick Lehodey is expert scientist in marine ecosystem and fish population dynamics modelling working at Mercator Ocean international, Toulouse France, and for the Pacific Community Fisheries, Aquaculture and Marine Ecosystems programme. Patrick Lehodey’s interests include the modelling of ocean ecosystems and the management of marine resources under the combined impacts of fisheries, climate variability and climate change. He was a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of GLOBEC (2000-05) and co-chair of the GLOBEC/CLIOTOP (Climate Impacts on Oceanic Top Predators) program until 2010. He contributed to the development of a fish and ecosystem model (SEAPODYM) used to project the impact of climate variability and climate change on large (tunas) and small (anchovy, mackerel) pelagic species and their fisheries, as well as the zooplankton and micronekton functional groups of the oceanic ecosystems.

Anna Sulc is an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. student at the University of Washington working at the intersection of fisheries, marine policy and oceanography. Her research focused on expanding a climate-enhanced age-based model with temperature-specific trophic linkages and energetics (CEATTLE) to include Northern Fur Seal (Callorhinus Ursinus) bioenergetics and population dynamics. These additions will allow for exploration of management tradeoffs under future ocean conditions given the importance of the predator-prey interactions between Northern Fur Seals and commercially important fish like Walleye Pollock (Gadus Chalcogrammus). Anna is supervised by Dr. Kirstin Holsman and Dr. André Punt and is part of the Alaska Climate Integrated Modeling (ACLIM) project.

Dr. Xinru Li is an Associate Professor at the Advanced Institute for Marine Ecosystem Change, Tohoku University, Japan. She completed her Master at Simon Fraser University and received her PhD from the University of British Columbia. Her research has long been driven by a commitment to advancing scientific understanding of how climate change affects the global ocean, and how insights from the ocean can inform mitigation and adaptation strategies that support effective climate policymaking while safeguarding ocean health and sustainability. Drawing on high-resolution observations and a hierarchy of global climate models, her work focuses on understanding how anthropogenic climate change affects global ocean environments, particularly the anomalously extreme conditions (e.g., ocean temperature extremes known as Marine Heatwaves) and their ecological impacts. She is a full member of the SCOR Working Group on Subsurface Marine Heatwaves (SubMHW-WG) and also an ECOP member of the Western Pacific and the Marginal Seas of South and East Asia Regional Team of the UN OceanPrediction DCC.

Dr Claire Spillman is a Principal Research Scientist and leads the Seasonal and Marine Applications Team in Research at the Bureau of Meteorology, Australia. Her current research is focused on seasonal forecasting for marine applications, particularly marine heatwave prediction, coastal hazards, and coral reef, aquaculture and fisheries management. Translation of transdisciplinary science to support decision-making for real world impact is a key area of contribution.

Dr Spillman is a Partner Investigator in the Future Oceans Centre for Excellence, a member of the IMOS Science and Technology Advisory Committee and Event-based Sampling Facility, and was the Australian representative on the WMO Subseasonal to Seasonal (S2S) Project Steering Committee. She is frequently called on to give national briefings, provide expert scientific advice and contribute to government and industry.

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Mikko is currently a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a visiting researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Japan. He has also spent longer periods at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria, and at the National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He was trained as an evolutionary and population ecologist at the University of Helsinki, Finland. After moving to Norway in 2001, first to the Institute of Marine Research and then to the University of Bergen, he has worked at the intersection between fisheries science, life-history theory, and population ecology – with fisheries providing a data-rich and practically relevant playing ground for both fundamental and applied research. He is interested in how organisms adapt to their environment, with adaptation of fish to exploitation (i.e., fisheries-induced evolution) being a prime example. He is also interested in how humans interact with ecological systems, such as how climate change is shaping our interaction with exploited fish stocks. To these ends, he has been using both theoretical, statistical, and experimental approaches.

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Akira Iguchi is the research team leader of the Natural Capital Diagnosis Technology Research Team at Integrated Research Center for Nature Positive Technology of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and concurrently serves as the research group leader of the Marine Geo-Environment Research Group within the Geological Survey of Japan, AIST. His research aims to systematically elucidate the details of the diverse phenomena woven by organisms and the environment, and to derive new discoveries and applications by examining these details from a bird’s-eye view across various scales. Currently, as a principal investigator of a JST-CREST project, his team aims to develop nature-positive decarbonization technologies that maximize the ocean’s potential by establishing a methodology for neutral comparative evaluation that goes beyond conventional NETs technologies through the refinement of detailed environmental impact assessment techniques and ocean NETs.

Ruth Joy is a Marine Ecologist in the School of Environmental Science and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Statistics at Simon Fraser University. Her research sits at the intersection of ecology, statistics, and conservation, with a strong emphasis on using quantitative methods to inform marine conservation.

Hiroko Sasaki is a senior researcher at the cetacean group of the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency (FRA). Since she was a graduate student at Hokkaido University, she has been participating the research on habitat modelling for whales and presenting her findings at the PICES annual meetings since 2008. Having completed her Ph.D. in 2013, she worked in some research project as a postdoctoral fellow before joining the FRA. Upon starting her career in FRA, she leveraged her previous research experience to explore the spatiotemporal habitat variability of small cetaceans using habitat modeling approach which, incorporates oceanographic features and species information into the analyses. She has and continues to join field campaigns on ship sighting surveys, and tagging activities on bycatched or stranded small cetacean. Currently, her main researches are focused on abundance estimates of small cetaceans and their trends, especially for Baird’s beaked whale (Berardius bairdii) in waters surrounding Japan.

Dr. Ciara Willis (“keer-ah”) is a biological oceanographer investigating how highly migratory predators connect physical, biological, and human systems in the open ocean. Her research integrates animal tracking, biochemical tracers, and bioeconomic modelling to understand how processes spanning individual behaviour, food web dynamics, and fisheries governance shape pelagic ecosystem function and resilience. Ciara is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), where she co-leads the development of Piscivore, a mobile autonomous platform for observing marine predators and their prey. On the other side of the Pacific, she is also an Adjunct Researcher at the University of Tasmania, assessing how recreational fisheries impact fish behaviour and stock health. Previously, Ciara was a member of the Ocean Twilight Zone project at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In parallel to her ecological research, she contracts as an analyst for stakeholders across the Indian and Pacific Oceans to evaluate trade-offs among conservation, profitability, and equity goals in transboundary fisheries systems.

Martin Huret is a research scientist at IFREMER, France, where he was responsible for the Fishery lab in Brest between 2022 and 2025. He is a biological oceanographer with expertise on pelagic ecosystem functioning and dynamics. He started modeling dispersal of fish early life stages, and extended his expertise in full life cycle modeling based on fish bioenergetics (DEB-IBM) coupled to hydrodynamic and biogeochemical models. He is also responsible for hydrology and egg sampling during the small pelagic survey in the Bay of Biscay, and co-chair of the ICES Working Group on Acoustic and Eggs Surveys for Small Pelagic Fish in the Northeast Atlantic (WGACEGG). Combining field data and modeling, he has investigated within several national and European projects the impact of climate change and fishing on the connectivity, life history traits and population dynamics of anchovy and sardine. He recently coordinated a national project studying the structure and dynamics of the French small pelagic social-ecological system, that is currently jeopardized by the decrease of fish quality under the impact of climate change.

Silas Principe is an Associate Researcher at the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC-UNESCO), working at the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), a program component of IODE. His research interests center on understanding how climate change affects ecosystems, with expertise spanning species distribution modelling, thermal biology, and ecophysiology. At OBIS, he contributed to the EU Horizon project MPA Europe, where, in collaboration with international partners, he led efforts to generate species distribution models for over 12,000 marine species in European waters to inform prioritization analyses aimed at identifying optimal locations for marine protected areas across Europe. Beyond this project, he also contributes to the development of data products and tools that support both research and policy.

Steve Cadrin is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts School for Marine Science and Technology. Steve has a PhD in Fisheries Science from University of Rhode Island, a MS in Marine Biology from University of Massachusetts, and a BS in Marine Science from Long Island University. He has been a stock assessment scientist for decades, previously with the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts Marine Fisheries, and New York Department of Environmental Conservation. His accomplishments include the advancement of stock assessment methods for a wide range of invertebrate and finfish species, fishery management advice for regional, national and international fisheries, and global leadership in evaluating geographic stock structure and modeling spatially complex populations. He has chaired several regional, national and international working groups and committees and has convened workshops, symposia, and conferences for the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, National Marine Fisheries Service, New England Fishery Management Council, American Fisheries Society and the Northeast Fish and Wildlife Conference. Steve received the American Fisheries Society’s Oscar E. Sette Award for sustained excellence in marine fishery biology, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s 2021 Scholar of the Year Award, and the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative’s Excellence in Mentoring Inaugural Award. He is also Past President of the American Institute of Fisheries Research Biologists. His teaching and research agendas focus on population modeling, stock identification, fisheries management, collaborative research with fishermen, and application of advanced technologies for fishery science.

Alexa Fredston is an Assistant Professor of Ocean Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. She earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University. Her postdoctoral research was at Rutgers University and she also previously worked for the Environmental Defense Fund on management of the US West Coast groundfish bottom trawl fishery. A quantitative ecologist, Dr. Fredston aims to understand and predict the dynamics of species over space and time, and to translate these insights into ocean management and conservation. Most of her research focuses on “species on the move” and on the dynamics of species’ range edges. A champion of open science and interdisciplinary collaboration, Dr. Fredston has played leadership roles in many working groups at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and the Centre de Synthèse et d'Analyse sur la Biodiversité (CESAB).

Dr. Taiki Fuji is a senior research scientist specializing in biological research at the Fisheries Resources Institute, Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency (FRA). His research focuses on the stock biology of Pacific saury based primarily on fishery-independent surveys. His work addresses growth, maturation, migration, feeding ecology, and energy acquisition across the life history of the species. As a member of the Japanese delegation to the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC), he contributes biological information for stock assessment. He also participates annually in the Pacific saury abundance estimation survey, a key component of the species' management and assessment.

Angelica Peña is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Ocean Sciences, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). She received her BSc at the Universidad de Concepcion in Chile, and her MSc and PhD in Oceanography at Dalhousie University in Canada. Her scientific interest mainly focuses on biogeochemical cycles, phytoplankton ecology, and physical-biological interactions. Her research uses field observations, satellite data and numerical models to improve our understanding of the impacts of climate variability and change on ocean ecosystems. Her research involves broad interdisciplinary collaborations, covering a wide range of oceanographic processes that influence biogeochemistry, aquatic ecosystems, fisheries and climate. She has been an active participant of the Line P monitoring program since she started her career in the mid-90’s and has published numerous research articles on this multi-disciplinary time series. In PICES, she is currently a member of the BIO Committee and has been active in various past expert groups and committees such as PICES Science Board, S-CCME and WG 29 on Regional Climate Modeling.

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Dr. Scott Spillias is a Research Scientist at CSIRO in Hobart, Australia, and a member of the Centre for Marine Socioecology at the University of Tasmania. With a background spanning marine ecology, mathematics, and environmental management, his research explores how artificial intelligence—and generative AI and large language models in particular—can accelerate and broaden access to the development of marine ecosystem models. His recent work ranges from automating the discovery of mechanistic ecosystem models to synthesizing ecological knowledge and classifying marine functional groups, all aimed at making ecosystem modelling faster, more transparent, and more widely usable. His earlier doctoral research examined the promise and trade-offs of seaweed farming and other emerging ocean industries, combining spatial analysis, scenario modelling, and stakeholder perspectives to understand how the blue economy might develop sustainably. Holding degrees from Duke University and the University of Queensland, Dr. Spillias is focused on the responsible integration of artificial intelligence into ecosystem science, evidence synthesis, and decision support for ocean sustainability.

Anela Choy is a seagoing biological oceanographer and Associate Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, USA. Anela leads the Deep Pelagic Food Web Ecology Lab and her group studies the diversity, distributions, and food web connections of small swimming animals that live and feed across the deep ocean water column. Anela’s group uses a range of empirical diet and biochemical tracer tools to pinpoint key food web relationships, and they specialize in quantitative sampling of animal assemblages in epipelagic and deep mesopelagic waters.

Evgeny Pakhomov is a Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. A graduate of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he has over 35 years of research experience as a biological/fisheries oceanographer. His research focuses on understanding feeding ecology and physical-biological interactions in marine ecosystems in order to predict climate change ecosystem effects. Dr. Pakhomov has more than 300 publications. He contributed organizationally and participated personally in two expeditions during the International Year of the Salmon, 2019-2022. He is a recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award, Rhodes University, South Africa; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award, Germany; the New Opportunities Fund Award from the Canadian Fund for Innovation; and the Senior Early Career Fellowship from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.

Dr. Kohen W. Bauer is the Senior Manager of Research and Technology for The Carbon to Sea Initiative. A biogeochemist by trade, Kohen previously worked as the Science Director at Ocean Networks Canada. He has led multidisciplinary research teams and managed large-scale scientific portfolios that advance climate solutions across Canada’s diverse ocean environments. His work has included designing and overseeing real-world marine carbon dioxide removal research; examining relationships between climate change and ocean deoxygenation in the geologic record; building partnerships across academia, government, industry, and communities; and translating complex science into practical programs with measurable impact. Kohen currently serves as co-lead for the BC/WA mCDR Community of Exploration (CoEx), funded by MEOPAR and is a regional representative for British Columbia as part of the California Ocean Science Trust’s Pacific Coast mCDR Collective. He holds degrees in Geology (BSc.Hons), Earth Science (MSc.) and Geological Sciences (PhD.) and contributes active research in Earth system science and chemical oceanography. Kohen lives in Victoria, BC.

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Akira Iguchi is the research team leader of the Natural Capital Diagnosis Technology Research Team at Integrated Research Center for Nature Positive Technology of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and concurrently serves as the research group leader of the Marine Geo-Environment Research Group within the Geological Survey of Japan, AIST. His research aims to systematically elucidate the details of the diverse phenomena woven by organisms and the environment, and to derive new discoveries and applications by examining these details from a bird’s-eye view across various scales. Currently, as a principal investigator of a JST-CREST project, his team aims to develop nature-positive decarbonization technologies that maximize the ocean’s potential by establishing a methodology for neutral comparative evaluation that goes beyond conventional NETs technologies through the refinement of detailed environmental impact assessment techniques and ocean NETs.

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I am the Executive Director at the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research and a Pew-Gerstner Fellow in Ocean Plastics Research. I lead a team of 9 plastic pollution researchers and the world's only accredited nonprofit microplastics lab. Our facilities are open for public, student, private, and researcher use and exchange. My research interest is in developing new ways to open science to improve our ability to shut off plastic pollution.

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Heather Gross convenes important conversations and leads teams, programs and workshops that promote belonging, cohesion and productive collaboration. With experience in educational leadership, facilitation, and intergenerational programming, Heather is committed to advancing equity, belonging, and collaboration. She is a sought-after workshop leader and has supported organizations in shaping strategy, navigating transitions, and building inclusive cultures.

From 2017 to 2021, Heather served as Deputy Head and Vice President of Education and Programming at Pearson College UWC. During her 14-year tenure at Pearson, she also held the role of Director of Admissions, where she led international and Canadian student admissions processes to ensure access and representation from diverse backgrounds. She engaged extensively with international stakeholders, advocating for equity and transparency in student selection and finding ways to improve collaboration across the United World College system. In 2010, she added University Counselling to her role, guiding students from multiple educational systems in post-secondary pathways and gap year opportunities.

Heather’s global perspective on education has been shaped by her extensive travel to educational communities worldwide, and as a volunteer and a student in India and Germany, where she witnessed the transformative power of diverse learning environments. Her background also includes roles in recruitment and admissions at the University of Alberta, and in experiential education at the Royal Alberta Museum and William A. Switzer Provincial Park.

Heather is a graduate of Pearson College UWC and holds a master’s degree in Human Geography (2010). She completed a Professional Certificate in Advanced Facilitation Practices (2021), with a focus on the Art of Hosting and Liberating Structures and is a member of the International Association of Facilitators.

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