Dr. Rebecca Lent is the Executive Director of the International Whaling Commission, located in Cambridge, UK. The IWC is the global cetacean organization charged with the science and stewardship of cetaceans. Rebecca joined the IWC in January of 2018 and has been focused on a number of key issues including the Governance Review of the Commission, the new Bycatch Mitigation Initiative, and outreach to other organizations to address the growing scope of threats to marine mammals. From 2013-2017 Rebecca served as the Executive Director of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, and for twenty years prior to that she worked on international fishery policy at the National Marine Fisheries Service. Rebecca received her PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from Oregon State University.

Dr. Yinji Li is a marine social scientist with a Master's in Fisheries Science and a Ph.D. in Marine Science from the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology in Japan. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Marine Science and Technology at Tokai University. Her research interests and expertise lie in small-scale fisheries in Northeast Asian regions centered on Japan. Li is also the Too Big To Ignore (TBTI) Japan Research Network coordinator and the Japan country coordinator of the Vulnerability to Viability Global Partnership (V2V) project and a member of the board of trustees of International Pole and Line Foundation (IPNLF).

Amanda Schadeberg is a PhD candidate studying the anticipatory governance of mesopelagic fishing at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. A social scientist by training, she focuses on topics related to society and marine resources. Her previous work has focused on understanding fisher behaviour and she has contributed to projects about marine plastic, environmental risk assessment, and stakeholder consultation. She is co-founder and co-chair of the Strategic Initiative on the Integration of Early Career Scientists at ICES.

An economist by training, my research focuses on the use of concepts, methods and tools of economic analysis, in connection with knowledge from other disciplines of marine sciences, to inform the management of marine and coastal resources. After obtaining my PhD in economics from the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Paris) with support from a European Marie-Curie fellowship at the University of Portsmouth (UK), I joined Ifremer in 1998. I led the economics research team of the Institute for ten years, and with the aim to strengthen social science research capacity on the ocean, contributed to the foundation of the (AMURE) research unit (UBO, Ifremer & CNRS), today one of the largest European research groups in economics and law of the sea, which I directed from 2013 to 2021. Several years with the Marine and Atmospheric Research Division of CSIRO (Australia) also made me aware of the diversity of approaches implemented in the world to govern the uses of the ocean, and the wealth of lessons to learn from international cooperation on these issues. Convinced of the key role of a science organisation such as ICES in supporting such cooperation, I became increasingly involved in its activities, as a member of its Science Committee, supporter of its Strategic Initiative on the Human Dimensions, chair of its working group on Economics (WGECON) and co-convener of the first Marine Socio-Ecological Systems (MSEAS) symposium in Brest, in 2016. My publications are listed here.