Dr. Mia Strand is an Ocean Nexus Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the Institute for Coastal and Marine Research at Nelson Mandela University (Gqeberha, South Africa), in partnership with the One Ocean Hub. Her research focuses on cognitive justice in marine science, specifically looking into opportunities to re-imagine ocean literacies as a process that values and recognises a plurality of ocean knowledges.

Her PhD explored knowledge co-production processes using arts-based participatory research methods for more inclusive and equitable ocean governance processes, and she has formerly worked in international development and NGO sectors with ocean conservation, youth engagement, gender and human rights projects.

At Ocean Nexus, Mia explores theoretical and practical opportunities to advance cognitive equity in transdisciplinary knowledge co-production and ocean literacies.

In her spare time, you can usually find Mia freediving in the Cape Town kelp forest or running in the mountains.

Dr. Jacqueline Uku is a seagrass scientist and conservation leader based at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute in Mombasa, Kenya. She has contributed to the development of the National Environmental Policy, been a member under the African Women Agricultural Research and Development Programme, served as a technical member of the National Blue Economy Technical Committee, and was the out-going President of the WIOMSA. She is the National Coordinator for Marine Spatial Planning in Kenya and has recently been elected as the Chair of the Africa Ocean Decade Task Force.

Dr. 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.