Professor Grottoli has been studying coral reefs for 30 years. She and her team are currently focused on determining what drives resilience in corals in the face of climate change and developing blue technology for enhancing coral survivorship and restoration success. She uses a combination of biology, physiology, geochemistry, and technology tools in her research coupled with fieldwork and scuba diving. She has a pending patent for the UZELA technology (Underwater Zooplankton Enhancement Light Array) — a device that locally concentrates zooplankton so that corals have more to eat, grow more, and die less. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles with some in such journals as Nature, Global Change Biology, and Nature Communications, and she has  been featured on National Public Radio and several websites and newspapers. Her recent Science Sundays talk “Can We Save Coral Reefs?” and Voices of Excellence podcast “Will Coral Reefs Survive?” summarizes her current work and passion for coral reefs. She has been recognized with several awards including Fulbright Scholar (2020-21), the International Coral Reef Society's Mid-Career Award, and the Rachel Carson Lecturer of the Ocean Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union. She currently serves on the Technical Advisory Committee for the National Coral Reef Institute, the Scientific Council of LabEX CORAIL, and the Coral Restoration Consortium's Genetics Working Group. She is deeply committed to training the next generation of coral reef scientists and over her career has  advised 17 graduate students, 6 postdocs, 37 undergraduate research theses, and supervised over 100 undergraduate students researchers and volunteers in her lab. Professor Grottoli is the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the International Coral Reef Society (ICRS), and past-president of the International Coral Reef Society.

Carlos M. Duarte (Lisbon, 1960) is the CEO of the Global Coral R&D Accelerator Platform.  Duarte’s research addresses the effects of global change on marine ecosystems and the development of ocean-based solutions to global challenges. He developed evidence-based strategies to rebuild the abundance of marine life by 2050, and leads efforts to solve the coral reef crisis. Building on his research showing mangroves, seagrasses and salt-marshes to be globally-relevant carbon sinks, he developed, working with different UN agencies, the concept of Blue Carbon as a nature-based solution to climate change. His research, across all oceans, depths, organisms and ecosystem types, has led to more than 1.100 scientific papers. Duarte is ranked as the top marine biologist and the 12^th most influential climate scientist worldwide (Reuters), and has received multiple accolades. On April 16 2025, he was presented by the Emperor of Japan with the Japan Prize 2025 for his “contribution to our understanding of marine ecosystem in a changing earth, especially through pioneering research on Blue Carbon”. He serves as Chief Scientist at E1 and is heavily involved with sustainability in sports.

More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_M._Duarte 

Dr. Christian Voolstra is a coral reef scientist whose research investigates how symbioses and microbiomes shape coral resilience to environmental change. His work integrates ecological, molecular, and microbial approaches to understand the function of coral metaorganisms and to develop tools with real-world impact. His work emphasizes the need for experimental standardization and robust analytical frameworks to enable broader comparability and insight across studies. Dr. Voolstra has led and contributed to the development of several open-access community resources, including the SymPortal.org platform for coral algal symbiont typing, standardized CBASS short-term thermal stress assays, the reefgenomics.org data repository, and the Tara Pacific expedition data collection. These efforts aim to foster accessibility, interoperability, and integration of research data across the global coral reef science community.

Dr. Voolstra has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles, contributed to multiple book chapters, and holds patents related to bioactive compounds from marine organisms. He is the current President of the International Coral Reef Society (ICRS) and serves as scientific co-director of the upcoming Tara Coral expedition. He earned his PhD from the Institute of Genetics in Cologne, completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, and was a faculty member at the Red Sea Research Center at KAUST, Saudi Arabia, where he served as Associate Director from 2016 to 2019. Since 2019, he is Professor (Chair) of Genetics of Adaptation in Aquatic Systems at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

I examine how kelp forests and coral reefs function today and how this will be altered by future climate change. Recent work focuses on determining mechanisms of resistance/tolerance against climate change exploring the role of organism physiological, adaptive/acclamatory processes, and environmental interactions. My work combines a strong ecological background with organism physiology to test multiple alternative hypotheses. Recently I have been working on better estimates of future coral reef carbonate production, as well as projecting future ecosystem states.

David Obura chairs the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and is Founding Director of CORDIO East Africa. After 30 years of research on coral reef vulnerability to climate change and their importance to society, his focus is now on linking local to global challenges to help society pivot towards a safe and just future.

Professor David Suggett is Director for the KAUST Coral Restoration Initiative (KCRI) at Shushah Island, Saudi Arabia – the world’s largest reef restoration effort – and a Professor in Practice at KAUST. He is a world leading expert in coral biology and how corals shape the functioning of reef systems, from scales spanning coral reef microbes to human-ecological interactions. Prior to moving to KAUST in 2023, he was a Professor at University of Technology Sydney, where he established and led the "Future Reefs" Program, Australia's largest team dedicated to unlocking how the environment and climate change influence corals of the Great Barrier Reef – a major focus of which was developing and applying novel technologies for resolving how corals function. This work led to a world-first partnership between researchers and tourism (the largest economic asset to the Great Barrier Reef) to restore degraded sites at scale, the "Coral Nurture Program", which he co-founded and led for 4 years. Work through the Coral Nurture Program has led to innovative methods to propagate and plant coral for reef restoration, and in recognition as a global model for successful targeted reef restoration, become an official Actor for the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration in 2022. He has contributed to numerous international committees and workshops for studying and conserving coral reefs, and has served the Coral Restoration Consortium - the international body dedicated to advancing knowledge on reef restoration – in several capacities since 2020. He has been a leading advocate for restoration activities as effective tools within wider reef management frameworks, and where his current role positions global efforts to develop and deploy innovations needed to transform restoration cost-efficiencies and scalability.

Dr. Emily Darling is an award-winning coral reef ecologist and has published over 75 peer-reviewed papers on coral reef resilience, multiple stressors, conservation, and climate change. As the Director of Coral Reef Conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society, she coordinates coral reef strategy, science, and monitoring across WCS’s global portfolio in 18 countries. Passionate that science is improved by clean data, Dr Darling co-founded MERMAID, a data platform for coral reef monitoring used in 51 countries by over 100 organizations that is used for global analyses of coral reef ecology and conservation.

Gareth Williams is Professor of Marine Biology and Director of Research Impact at Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences, UK. His work focuses on the effects of local and global human impacts and biophysical gradients on coral reefs across multiple trophic levels (microbes to sharks) and scales (individual reefs to entire ocean basins). Much of his work incorporates remote coral reefs free from direct local human impacts, providing key replication at the unimpacted end of an intact-to-degraded ecosystem spectrum. By surveying across extensive geographical areas, his research group address broad questions pertaining to: 1. the human and biophysical drivers of coral reef ecosystem structure and function, 2. climate change impacts to coral reef ecosystems, and 3. the spatial ecology of coral reefs. His recent works have highlighted the impacts of global warming and local human pressures on reef structure and function, the importance of coupled land-sea policies (like wastewater management and fisheries governance) for supporting reef persistence under climate change, and the need to better quantify ocean-reef connections to improve our models and predictions of reef futures.

Professor Iliana Baums is vice director and head of the marine conservation department at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. She is a leading expert on coral conservation genetics founded on her studies of the molecular evolution and ecology of corals and their symbionts. Over the past ten years, her research has focused on discovering the factors that promote and limit the ability of corals to adapt to rapid climate change and develop tools and strategies for effective coral restoration. The Baums lab showed that not only can coral larvae can inherit somatic mutations from their parents, somatic mutations can be used to age long lived coral genets. In an ongoing effort to provide accurate and high-throughput genotyping services and genomic resources to the coral restoration community the Baums lab designed the first commercially available coral genotyping chip. Along with the genotyping chip the team developed an open-access, point-and-click bioinformatics workflow that standardizes the analysis and was the key technological innovation that underpins genetic management of threatened Caribbean coral genets. Baums has contributed to and led international coral conservation working groups. She chairs the ‘genetics and science’ working group of the international Consortium for Reef Conservation and led the development of restoration guidelines for the Caribbean region. She co-chaired a workshop on the failure of sexual recruitment in the Caribbean that developed a service blueprint for the restoration community.  Baums also serves on the scientific advisory board of SECORE, the Sexual Coral Reproduction Foundation, a conservation initiative.

Baums has co-authored over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and books and has delivered presentations on her research around the world. She was elected as a fellow of the International Coral Reef Society in 2024 and has received numerous prizes for her work. Baums joined the Helmholtz Institute for functional marine biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg as a Professor and Group leader in Marine Conservation in September of 2022. Previously, she was a full professor of Biology at the Pennsylvania State University. She had joined Penn State in August, 2006, as an assistant professor of biology. Prior to that, Baums was an assistant researcher to Dr. Rob Toonen at the University of Hawaii since 2005 and a postdoctoral researcher to Dr. Jack Fell at the University of Miami from 2004 to 2005. She earned her doctorate degree at the University of Miami in 2003 and her Diplom in marine biology from the University of Bremen in Germany in 2000.

Josh Cinner is a Professor of Geography and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia. He began working on coral reefs while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Jamaica in the mid 1990s, and has been at the vanguard of research on the human-dimensions of coral reefs ever since. He has over 200 publications, which include pioneering the bright spots approach on coral reefs, developing the human gravity metric, introducing model-based counterfactuals to quantify the contexts under which conservation is most effective, and spearheading assessments of vulnerability in coastal communities.  He has received numerous awards and recognition, including the Pew Marine Fellowship, the Elinor Ostrom award for collective governance of the commons, the Eureka prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Research, the Mid-Career award from the International Coral Reef Society, four ARC fellowships, “Highly Cited Researcher” (Clairvate Analytics 2021, 2018), Fellowship in the Academy of Social Science in Australia, and Fellowship in the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, Josh moved to Sydney to launch the Thriving Oceans Research Hub- a team of 16 social scientists and ecologists working to increase the sustainability and resilience of coral reefs and the livelihoods of people who depend on them.

Based at CARMABI Foundation in Curacao, The Marhaver Lab works to solve the trickiest puzzles in coral breeding and share the solutions with science and restoration teams worldwide so that everyone can grow more corals, faster. Dr. Marhaver was the first person to raise juveniles of the endangered Caribbean Pillar Coral and the rare, disease-prone Caribbean Pineapple Coral. With collaborators, she helped achieve the first demonstration of assisted gene flow in endangered Elkhorn Coral using cryopreserved sperm. Current projects include breeding understudied coral species, improving fertilization and cryopreservation technologies, and developing engineered materials for reef restoration. 

Dr. Marhaver's research has been featured by NPR, BBC, The Economist, Harvard, TED, Google, Mission Blue, and hundreds of other outlets. She is a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, a TED Senior Fellow, a National Geographic Explorer, and a World Economic Forum Young Scientist.

Dr. Line K Bay (Denmark) is a coral reef scientist with nearly 30 years of experience in the field. After completing a PhD in population genetics at James Cook University in 2006, she undertook postdoctoral research in eco-evo coral genomics at the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. In 2011 she joined the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) to lead research on coral adaptation to climate change. Line’s expertise spans genetics, ecology, and evolution of coral reef organisms, with highly cited papers in leading peer-reviewed journals. Line co-designed the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP) and co-led the coral aquaculture and deployment, and genetics sub-programs (2019 - 22). She also led the CORDAP landscape study for natural and assisted evolution in 2023. She now directs AIMS’s research into Reef Recovery, Adaptation and Restoration where ~70 scientists, technical staff, and higher degree students undertake R&D to enhance knowledge and practices for coral restoration and adaptation while delivering tangible training, capacity building and job opportunities in local communities. Passionate about science communication, Line's research has gained significant attention across various media platforms. Committed to ethical and inclusive research, Line champions collaboration among scientists, engineers, practitioners, local communities, and First Nations Peoples.

Nils Rädecker is a microbial ecologist whose research focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that govern photosymbioses—intimate partnerships between heterotrophic hosts and their phototrophic endosymbionts. By studying the interplay between metabolic interactions and host immune responses, his work seeks to elucidate the processes underlying the repeated formation of these symbioses throughout evolutionary history and their ongoing ecology collapse in the Anthropocene. 

Nils recently established his new research group at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) in Oldenburg, where he combines latestomics approaches with advanced imaging techniques to understand symbiotic interactions in their spatial context. 

Dr. Rebecca Vega Thurber is the Director of the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara and a Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology. Dr. Vega Thurber’s lab investigates the role and dynamics of bacteria and viruses in marine hosts and habitats in order to better understand and mitigate or prevent the proximate causes of marine disease, habitat degradation, and ecosystem alteration. She was a Senior Editor of the flagship journal The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal (ISMEJ) and is now the Editor and Chief of the new fully free journal Open Advances in Marine Biology, PeerJ. 

Dr. Vega Thurber is an author of over 120 scientific publications, including 5 book chapters, and her collective work has been cited over 27,000 times to date. Dr. Vega Thurber has been awarded over $7.3 million dollars in funding, and her lab has trained 11 postdoctoral researchers, 14 PhD students, and 30 undergraduates. In 2024, she received the International Coral Reef Society’s Mid-Career Scientist Award (given annually to one scientist worldwide) for outstanding scholarship and mentoring, and in 2025 she became a California Academy of Sciences Fellow. 

Dr. Vega Thurber is committed to communicating science to broader audiences including the production of a multilingual cartoon series and a full-length documentary on coral reef decline entitled, Saving Atlantis. She has spoken on Capitol Hill and has been a featured speaker at national and international meetings. Currently she is a UCSB Public Voices Fellow and has authored articles in periodicals such as The Hill, The Conversation, The Opinion Pages, and The Sun Sentinel. Through these platforms, she seeks to influence the public discourse on marine conservation and its importance to biodiversity, local economies, and cultural preservation.  

Dr. Vega Thurber graduated from UC Santa Cruz, in 1999, with dual degrees in Marine Biology and Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology. She received her PhD from Stanford University in Biological Sciences in 2005. She conducted her NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship (PFRB) at San Diego State University with Dr. Forest Rohwer from 2006 to 2009.

Verena Schoepf is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, Department of Freshwater and Marine Ecology, at the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores how reef-building corals are affected by climate and environmental change. By integrating biogeochemical and eco-physiological analyses, Verena’s research aims to provide new insights into the mechanisms and traits that enable coral resistance to multiple, co-varying climate change stressors and promote their adaptive capacity in a changing ocean. Her research and efforts to communicate science and promote women in STEM have been recognized with several awards, including “ Superstar of STEM ” and a “ Young Tall Poppy Science Award ”. She is also a TEDx speaker and her research on “super corals” was featured in the 2016 documentary series “ Women and Oceans ”. She is currently the Chair of the IBED Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council, and also serves on the Board of the Women in the Faculty of Science (WiF) Group.