Dr. Ferretti is a quantitative and computational marine ecologist specialized in research synthesis. His scientific work is on marine conservation, fishery sciences, population dynamics, and quantitative ecology with a special interest in sharks and rays. He worked extensively on analyses of elasmobranch abundance, distribution and temporal trends in the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the world. Francesco is an Assistant Professor of Fisheries Management and Conservation at Virginia Tech

Fiorenza Micheli is a marine ecologist and conservation biologist conducting research and teaching at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, where she is also the David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science and the Director, with Jim Leape, of Center for Ocean Solutions. Micheli’s research focuses on the processes shaping marine communities and incorporating this understanding in the management and conservation of marine ecosystems.

Sal Jorgensen is a research scientist for the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Project White Shark. Sal’s research interests include studying movements and migrations of commercially targeted sharks and fishes, acoustic tagging and telemetry, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis and modeling. Before joining the aquarium, Jorgensen was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. Beginning in 2006, he led the white shark research team under the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) program.

Trevor Hastie is the John A Overdeck Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Hastie is known for his research in applied statistics, particularly in the fields of data mining, bioinformatics and machine learning. He has published six books and over 180 research articles in these areas. Prior to joining Stanford University in 1994, Hastie worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories for 9 years, where he helped develop the statistical modeling environment popular in the R computing system. He received his B.S. in statistics from Rhodes University in 1976, his M.S. from the University of Cape Town in 1979, and his Ph.D from Stanford in 1984.

Steve is a Senior Scientist at MBARI. His work focuses on deep-sea gelatinous zooplankton. He is doing research on bioluminescence, biodiversity, and ecology of deep-sea and open-ocean ctenophores, siphonophores, radiolarians, and medusae. Steve's educational background includes a B.S. from Harvey Mudd College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also holds an adjunct professorship in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the creator of the citizen-science site JellyWatch.org.

Cheryl Butner has an MA in International Environmental Policy from Monterey Institute of International Studies and is research assistant for the Micheli Lab at Stanford University. Cheryl is currently working for SharkPulse as communications and social media manager and doing the Spanish translations for the project.

Jeremy is a Master's student in Dr. Ferretti's lab at Virginia Tech. He is a former biochemist turned data scientist who is interested in web scraping, machine learning, image processing, and database management. He is helping develop and structure the shark classification architecture using convolutional neural networks and object detection. His research is focused on scraping, classifying, and mapping inferred shark sightings from Instagram.

Zac is a geophysicist turned data scientist and a machine learning engineer for De Leo Lab at Stanford University. He received his MS in Geological Sciences from Brigham Young University. He specializes in remote sensing image processing, geospatial analysis, scientific computing, modeling, and deep learning. He is developing computer vision algorithms with convolutional neural networks for image classification and object detection tasks in SharkPulse project.

Filippo is a Ph.D student in marine biology and ecology at the Marche Polytechnic University (Ancona, Italy). His Ph.D is focused on shark conservation related to Citizen Science actions. He is also a staff member of the Cattolica Aquarium (RN, Italy), that co-fund his Ph.D. fellowship. He is working for creating a sharkPulse network in the Mediterranean Sea and a co-founder of the Italian sharkPulse team.

Stefano is a graduate M.Sc. in Marine Sciences (Sapienza University of Rome). As a quantitative marine ecologist, he is interested in sharks abundance and distribution patterns and he is currently reconstructing the historical baselines of white sharks occurrence in the Mediterranean Sea using opportunistic sightings. He is involved in developing the sharkPulse network and is part of sharkPulse Italia Staff. He is currently a visiting scholar at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University.

Agostino Leone is an evolutionary and marine biologist interested in the population genetics and ecology of marine organisms. His main research interests ranging from the evolution, connectivity and dispersal of fish populations (with a special focus on elasmobranchs), to the development and use of new genomic and biotechnological resouces for the study and the sustainable management of fishery resources.​ He is completing his PhD at the University of Bologna, Italy, with a thesis focused on the population genetics and genomics of Mediterranean/North-Eastern Atlantic blue shark.

Ioannis Giovos is a marine biologist with a background on the conservation of the Mediterranean marine megafauna. His research focuses on citizen science, on social media in science, on the illegal trade of elasmobranchs and on invasive species. Ioannis is the co-founder of iSea, part of the CIESM Task Force for Sharks and Rays and member of the ICES WGHIST. He has been involved in several research projects and has more than 15 articles published in peer-review journals and more than 20 scientific communications in conferences.

Responsible for the synthesis of information in the South Atlantic, Rodrigo is a marine biologist with a master's degree in ecology and a doctorate in fishing and wildlife. With experience in elasmobranch ecology and quantitative techniques of exploited fish populations, currently coordinates the national action plan for the conservation of sharks and rays in Brazil. Rodrigo is the coordinator of the regional sharkPulse focal point sharkPulse Brazil.

David Curnick is a marine ecologist at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London. David’s research seeks to understand the spatial and temporal behaviour patterns of sharks and other pelagic predators, and how they interact with both marine protected areas (MPA) and fisheries. Since 2010, David has focused his research on the British Indian Ocean Territory MPA through a multi-disciplinary approach of telemetry tagging, remote sensing and historical fisheries analyses, to assess the extent to which the MPA affords protection to pelagic predators in the Indian Ocean. David is the coordinator of the sharkPulse network in the United Kingdom.

Athina is a marine scientist, currently working in iSea. She holds a BSc in Marine Sciences from the University of the Aegean, completing her MSc in Biotechnology-Molecular and Microbiological Analysis at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. For her Bsc dissertation, she collaborated with the Natural Sciences, Education, and Research Centre of the University of Szczecin, in diatom research. She is fluent English, Greek, and Polish speaker, passionate about the conservation and protection of marine ecosystems with a special interest in Chondrichthyes.

Dr. Fox is a Professor of Computer Science (and by courtesy of Electrical and Computer Engineering) at Virginia Tech, where he has researched and taught about “information” since 1983. As part of his work directing its Digital Library Research Center, and as a member of the Global Change Center, he has applied a variety of information technology, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction methods to global issues. He is a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE, cited for his work on digital libraries and information retrieval (e.g., search engines). He has (co)authored over 1100 publications/presentations. His BS (1972) was at MIT, and his MS (1981) and PhD (1983) at Cornell.