Gerald Singh is Assistant Professor and Ocean Nexus Chair in Global Change and Sustainable Development at the University of Victoria. His research is situated in the science-policy interface, focused on understanding the dynamics between social, economic, and environmental dimensions in sustainable development, and characterizing risk and impacts towards environmental decision-making. His work is connected with risk assessment and management related to sustainable development under global change. His recent work includes understanding extremes, including characterizing disasters brought out from climate change interacting with human development. Part of this work is an explicit focus on unintended risks that come from well-intentioned development meant to address important problems.

Charlie Mather is professor in the Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. His recent research is focused on salmon aquaculture and its industrial messaging as well as effects on food security. This research is framed theoretically through political ecology and science and technology studies (STS) and focuses on the various problems of salmon aquaculture including escapes, mass mortalities, and sustainability.

Yoshitaka Ota the founder of 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.