Philippa (Pip) Louey is an interdisciplinary scholar working across political ecology, Pacific Studies and critical ocean studies. She is interested in the ways societies relate to and through oceans, with a particular interest in how power is (re)negotiated in these interactions. Having completed a PhD from the Australian National University in 2025, Pip is now a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University where she works alongside Dr John Childs on the 3-yr project “Decolonising the deep-sea: countermapping territory, heritage and knowledge.”

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.