Science

Dr. David E. Guggenheim is president of the recently-formed nonprofit organization, 1 Planet 1 Ocean, dedicated to building international partnerships for marine conservation. He is also an independent consultant in conservation policy and science, based in Washington, DC. For the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Guggenheim is currently leading the first-ever comprehensive research and conservation program in Cuba’s Gulf of Mexico region. He is also working with Aquaculture Developments, LLC to introduce cutting edge technologies for sustainable aquaculture practices to the Americas in order to reduce pressure on overfished wild fish stocks.

Milton Love is a Research Biologist at the Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara. He has conducted research on the biology and ecology of marine fishes for the past 40 years.

Stephen Cairns is a research scientist and curator at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian, where he is responsible for the national collections of Cnidaria.  He has published 110 papers on the systematics, zoogeography, biodiversity, and mineralogy of deep-water Scleractinia, Stylasteridae, and Octocorallia.  He has described over 350 new species and 40 new genera of deep-water Cnidaria from throughout the world, including the North Pacific.  He has participated in submersible expeditions in the Galapagos, NW Hawaiian Islands, northern Gulf of Mexico, and off South Carolina.

George I. Matsumoto is the Senior Education and Research Specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. He is interested in any type of gelatinous creature and is dedicated towards enhancing public awareness of the ocean and the issues that are of high importance.

Peter Etnoyer is a Graduate Research Associate at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. His dissertation research examines deep water gorgonian (sea fan) distributions using geographic information systems (GIS) to correlate gorgonian abundance to environmental conditions. He is also the co-editor for the Deep Sea News at Seed Magazine's ScienceBlogs.

Peter is familiar with some of the benthic invertebrate species this expedition will encounter, because he took part in the Gulf of Alaska Seamount Expeditions in 2002 and 2004, diving six different seamounts with the Alvin submersible down to 2700m. He expects that the Deep Worker divers will encounter many large gorgonians, possibly even a new species of bamboo coral called Isidella that grows up to 2m tall. New samples, photos, and videos from this expedition could help in the species' description.

Charles G Messing (Nova Southeastern University) received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, where he accompanied several deep-sea trawling expeditions around the Bahamas, Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. He specializes on the systematics, ecology and biogeography of living crinoids but also works on the ecology of deep-water coral reefs and other hard-substrate assemblages. He has been using submersibles such as Alvin and Johnson Sea Link to investigate deep-water habitats since 1975.

Dr. Paul Johnston, a marine and freshwater biologist, obtained his BSc and PhD from London University. He has managed the Greenpeace Research Laboratories, located at  the University of Exeter, since 1986 and has published extensively on marine management and protection.

Andrew Malavansky is an Unungan born in 1964 and on St. George Island, Alaska, on a mix of western and traditional subsistence lifestyle. Andy fished in the local small boat fishery as well as on larger commercial ships in the Bering Sea and North Pacific. He currently works for the St. George tribal government as Co-Director in the newly formed Kayumixtax Eco-office and serves as vice-president on the tribal council and as a director of the local village corporation.

Greg Rouse is the curator of the Benthic Invertebrate Collection at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  His research interests include phylogeny and systematics of marine animals particularly annelids and echinoderms , evolution of life history strategies in marine animals, and whalefall and hydrothermal vent fauna.

Daniel Jones is a research scientist at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, U.K. He currently coordinates the SERPENT project  and specializes in deep-water megabenthic ecology. He has used a large variety of imaging systems for ecological assessment, particularly in high-latitude waters.

Bob Stone is a NOAA Fisheries research biologist stationed at the Auke Bay Laboratories in Juneau, Alaska.  He has studied seafloor and deep-sea ecology in Alaska during the past 22 years and has made more than 2000 scuba dives and 100 submersible dives during that period.  Recent projects include studying red tree coral communities in the eastern Gulf of Alaska and Southeast Alaska glacial fjords and Aleutian Island coral and sponge gardens.

Lance Morgan is the Vice President of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute.  Dr. Morgan received his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California-Davis, and did postdoctoral research at Bodega Marine Laboratory and NOAA Fisheries.  He worked at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA as Science Director and Marine Mammalogist, and studied seal and sea lion behavior and evolution. Lance has led MCBI's effort to identify priority conservation areas from Baja California to the Bering Sea for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, and authored the influential Shifting Gears study which focused on collateral damage from commercial fishing.

More recently he authored the first assessment of deep sea corals in US waters, and has published a number of papers on this topic. He is currently the Conservation Chair of the Cordell Bank Sanctuary Advisory Council.

Michelle Ridgway is an ecological consultant with Oceanus Alaska, and a member of the Advisory Panel of the North Pacific Fishery Managment Council.

Alan Springer is a professor of biological oceanography at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks.  Dr. Springer's research interests concern matters of scale in time and space of large marine ecosystems and of variability in production at various trophic levels.

Jon Warrenchuk is the Marine Conservation Coordinator for Oceana, in their Juneau office.