Dr. Courtney Carothers has devoted her career to working with fishing communities across Alaska and the Pacific to better understand the social and cultural dimensions of fishery systems and to improve education, research, and policy processes that better incorporate these dimensions. She partners with Indigenous communities to advance social and environmental justice goals. Her current work focuses on transforming fisheries systems to center and elevate Indigenous perspectives through the Tamamta program.

Dr. Hekia Bodwitch is trained as a human geographer, and her research investigates how government policies can support Indigenous self-determination in the governance of fisheries, forests, and other socio-ecological systems. Her work is inspired in part by her family roots in New Zealand, where she has examined how trade regulations impact Māori fishing rights and small-scale Tribal businesses. Now based in Alaska, she studies how state and federal initiatives to engage Indigenous Knowledge can lead to changes in policymaking processes and outcomes.

Craig Kaviak Chythlook is Yup’ik and originally from the Bristol Bay region in southwest Alaska, where he has spent his life fishing for salmon in the waters of Bristol Bay. He is currently the Executive Director of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His work focuses on ensuring recognition of Tribal sovereignty and stewardship over traditional territories and resources.

Dr. Yoshitaka Ota is the founder of Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus, a scholarly network of ocean researchers who devoted their research to advance ocean equity. Dr. Ota believes that all ocean policy and intervention shall be ‘anti-inequity’, explicitly designed and implemented to eliminate systemic issues, such as racism, colonial legacy and gender discrimination through ocean governance. This conceptual core is stemmed from a mount of evidence that Ocean Nexus offers by the research and further the network find that any conservation and sustainability effort for ocean environment ultimately fails to deliver the outputs without addressing social equity as the outcome.

At the University of Rhode Island, Dr. Ota is a Professor of Marine Affairs. Dr. Ota graduated University College London with Ph.D. in Anthropology and worked in Universities and research institutes of UK, Japan, Canada and US as a researcher and professor. He has over 100 research publications, book chapters and reports. Dr. Ota has held the Professor of Practice position at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs in University of Washington and have had various visiting and affiliate positions in US and Canada. He also has the Executive Masters of Public Administration from Evans Policy School in University of Washington.