Roman Stocker is a Professor of Environmental Engineering at ETH Zurich. He is internationally recognized for pioneering the study of microbial dynamics in aquatic environments through microfluidics, high-resolution imaging, and mathematical modeling. His work explores bacterial motility, chemotaxis, and the physical ecology of the microscale.

Naomi M. Levine is the Gabilan Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering at the University of Southern California where she holds joint appointments in Marine and Environmental Biology and Earth Sciences. She is currently the chair of the Department of Marine and Environmental Biology. Dr. Levine received her BA in Geosciences from Princeton University and her PhD in Chemical Oceanography from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. Dr. Levine's research focuses on understanding the interactions between climate and marine microbial ecosystem composition and function.  The Levine Lab is developing innovative, interdisciplinary numerical models that allow them to understand how dynamics occurring at the scale of individual microbes impact large-scale ecosystem processes such as rates of global carbon cycling. Dr. Levine is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator, NSF CAREER recipient, and Simons Foundation Investigator in Aquatic Microbial Ecology.

Prof. Griet Neukermans is an Associate Research Professor at Ghent University (Belgium) and Head of the MarSens (Marine Optics and Remote Sensing) research group, MarSens. Her research focuses on the development and application of innovative optical sensing technologies to study planktonic ecosystem dynamics and the ocean’s biological carbon pump. Her work bridges sensor engineering, field observations, autonomous ocean technologies, and satellite remote sensing to support next-generation ocean observing systems for climate and ecosystem research. As Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project CarbOcean, she currently leads the development of novel optical sensors for measuring particulate inorganic carbon (PIC) in seawater, with targeted deployment on BGC-Argo floats, aiming to advance autonomous observations of the biological carbon pump.

Prof. Neukermans obtained BSc and MSc degrees in Applied Mathematics and an MSc in Oceans and Lakes from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), followed by a PhD in Physics from the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale (France). She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (USA), Laval University (Canada), and Sorbonne University’s Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche (France), supported by prestigious Banting and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships. She has received several national and international distinctions for her contributions to ocean optics, remote sensing of marine environments, and ocean observation technologies.  

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 Program 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 Tobias Fischer is a Senior Lecturer (US equivalent: Associate Professor) and ARC DECRA Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology, where he is a Chief Investigator in the QUT Centre for Robotics. His research develops robust, efficient perception and localisation systems for robots operating in challenging environments, with a particular focus on underwater perception, bio-inspired robotic vision, and neuromorphic computing. He has secured more than AUD $6M in research funding, including major projects with the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, a CRC-P with Emesent, the Queensland Quantum Technologies Talent Building Program, Intel Labs, and Amazon.
Dr Fischer obtained his PhD from Imperial College London, which received the UK Best PhD in Robotics Award. He has published more than 70 papers in leading venues including Science Robotics, IEEE TPAMI, IEEE T-RO, AAAI, CVPR, IJCAI, and ICRA, and his work has received several best paper and best poster awards. He was named one of Queensland’s Top 40 Under 40 and serves the robotics community as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and as an Area Chair for major robotics conferences including ICRA, IROS, and RSS. He is also a co-chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Women in Engineering Committee, where he supports initiatives to improve gender diversity and inclusion in robotics and automation.

Gerhard J. Herndl is Professor of Aquatic Biology at the Department of Functional and Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Vienna, Austria, since 2008. Prior to that, he was Head of the Department at Biological Oceanography at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) in the Netherlands and Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Groningen from 1999-2009. His research group investigates the carbon cycle in the ocean and the role of organisms in the nutrient cycling in the present and future ocean. Gerhard J. Herndl has published more than 320 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. His research has been funded by the European Research Council with two Advanced Grants, he received the Wittgenstein Prize of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), considered the Austrian Nobel Prize, the G. E Hutchinson Award of ASLO and is member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Julie is the Head of Ocean Technology and Engineering at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. She has been working on marine 'omics' for 25 years in the US, Australia and UK. Her work centres around scaling marine observations, developing a suite of new deployable technologies to broaden the time, space and taxonomic coverage for marine organisms. She's an Executive Board Member of the Ocean Biomolecular Observing Network (OBON), a member of the EMB Working Group on "Biomolecular approaches to the observation and management of marine life," and Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) BioEco Panel Expert: Lead author of the Microbial Biomass and Diversity EOV Specification Sheet.

Yu Jun Tan (National University of Singapore, NUS) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, where she is a PI at both the NUS Centre for Additive Manufacturing (AM.NUS) and the Advanced Robotics Centre (ARC).
Dr. Tan’s research integrates materials science, mechanics, and bioengineering to develop next-generation bio-derived, bioinspired and biohybrid materials for biorobotics. Her group investigates the processing, deformation, and functional behaviours of soft materials (such as bio-based polymers, gels, and living tissues) with particular emphasis on self-healing, electro-mechanical behaviours, and large-deformation mechanics. By linking fundamentals with sustainable design, her work advances the development of adaptive, self-powered, and eco-responsible machines. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier journals, including Nature Materials, Nature Electronics, Nature Communications, Science Robotics, Science Advances, and Advanced Materials. Her publications have been featured on journal covers and highlighted in the media. She is a recipient of the MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35” Asia Pacific 2021 (Pioneer), MRS postdoctoral award, and Science, She Say! Award.

Dr Nan Wu is a marine ecological modeller at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) whose research centres on particle dynamics in the ocean, integrating field observations, laboratory experiments, meta-analysis and numerical modelling. His main research interests are microplastic pollution and the marine biological carbon pump. He is particularly interested in how microplastics, as anthropogenic particulate matter, interact with natural suspended particles and biological aggregates. During his PhD at Queen Mary University of London, he investigated how these interactions influence the aggregation, settling and transport of microplastics across aquatic environments, from coastal waters to the open ocean. Later, at BAS, he extended this work to explore how microplastics and other anthropogenic stressors may alter the sinking and fragmentation of marine aggregates and faecal pellets, with consequences for carbon export to the deep ocean.

His broader work addresses marine particle dynamics, ecosystem functioning and the biological carbon pump in polar regions, particularly the Scotia Sea in the Antarctica and Baffin Bay in the Arctic. He examines how sea-ice dynamics influence phytoplankton blooms, marine snow formation and zooplankton-derived particles, and how these processes regulate carbon transport through polar oceans. He is also interested in how anthropogenic stressors interact with these natural particle and biogeochemical pathways.