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Ocean Visions Governance

Board of Directors

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Brad Ack

Chief Executive Officer

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Paul Bunje

Co-Founder and President of Conservation XLabs

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Emanuele Di Lorenzo

Chairman & Co-Founder of Ocean Visions and Professor at Brown University

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Nancy Knowlton

Sant Chair in Marine Science Emerita, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

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Fiorenza Micheli

Co-Director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions and of Hopkins Marine Station, and the David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science at Stanford University

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Julie Pullen

Climate Tech Investor and Adjunct Research Scientist at Columbia Climate School

Board of Directors

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Brad Ack

CEO of Ocean Visions

View Biography

Paul Bunje

Co-Founder and President of Conservation XLabs

View Biography

Emanuele Di Lorenzo

Chairman & Co-Founder of Ocean Visions and Professor at Brown University

View Biography

Nancy Knowlton

Sant Chair in Marine Science Emerita, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

View Biography

Fiorenza Micheli

Co-Director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions and of Hopkins Marine Station, and the David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science at Stanford University

View Biography

Julie Pullen

Climate Tech Investor and Adjunct Research Scientist at Columbia Climate School

View Biography

Brad Ack

Brad Ack has 35 years of experience working at the intersection of science, policy and environmental innovation, focused on the preservation of nature and a living world.  During his career he has designed and implemented innovative conservation and sustainability initiatives spanning tropical forests and high deserts to estuaries and the global ocean.  Brad has worked for both government and NGOs at senior levels.

Brad serves as Chief Executive Officer for Ocean Visions, an NGO at the center of a collaborative network of research institutions and innovators, investors, and practitioners of ocean regeneration.  Ocean Visions is advancing a new agenda for the ocean, focused on directly addressing the greatest cause of harm – greenhouse gas pollution that is driving existential threats to the ocean.  Ocean Visions works across sectors and disciplines to unlock new intellectual and financial resources to source, develop and scale cutting-edge innovation to regenerate critical components of the ocean-climate system.

Previously Brad served as SVP Oceans at WWF-US; Executive Director of the Puget Sound Recovery Program for the State of Washington; and Regional Director-Americas for the Marine Stewardship Council.  He earlier led conservation programs at Grand Canyon Trust and started his career working on community-based conservation in Latin America.  Brad received his Master’s degree from Georgetown University and Bachelor’s degree at Macalester College.

Paul Bunje

Paul Bunje is the co-founder and President of Conservation X Labs, an organization that brings innovation to global conservation threats. Conservation X Labs is a leader in using technology and entrepreneurship to protect biodiversity using a mix of crowdsourcing, open innovation, directed research, and acceleration. Paul was formerly the Chief Scientist at the XPRIZE Foundation, where he led the impact strategy across grand challenge domains at XPRIZE, spanning civil society, environment, energy, health, and exploration. Dr. Bunje is a global thought leader in bringing innovation to solve environmental grand challenges. Paul was formerly the founding Executive Director of the UCLA Center for Climate Change Solutions, the Managing Director of the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability, and served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for Oceans. The American Association for the Advancement of Science selected Paul as one of 40 individuals that exemplify the thousands of AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows who are dedicated to applying science to serve society. Paul is trained in biology, with a B.S. from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Emanuele Di Lorenzo

Emaunele Di Lorenzo is Professor of Earth, Environmental, & Planetary Sciences at Brown University and Founding Chairman of Ocean Visions. He previously served as Professor and Founding Director of the Program in Ocean Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and conducted postdoctoral work at UCLA from 2003-2004. Di Lorenzo is recognized as a world expert in large and regional-scale Pacific Ocean dynamics and climate. Throughout his career he has served in several leadership role for international organizations such as CLIVAR, US CLIVAR, PICES, and ICES, where he led transdisciplinary efforts to understand the impacts of climate on marine and social-ecological systems. More recently in 2019, through a multi-institutional agreement between Georgia Tech, Stanford, MIT, Scripps, WHOI, Smithsonian, MBARI, UGA, Monterey Bay Aquarium and Georgia Aquarium, Di Lorenzo established the Ocean Visions (www.oceanvisions.org) — an effort to transform and accelerate the transfer of science and engineering into solutions for the ocean grand challenges.

DR. Nancy Knowlton

Dr. Nancy Knowlton is a coral reef biologist who spent much of her career at the Smithsonian, in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.  She was also a professor at Yale and the founding director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego. She is the author of Citizens of the Sea and former Editor-in-Chief of the Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal. In 2013 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.  She is a winner of the Peter Benchley Prize, the Heinz Award, the Women’s Aquatic Network 2018 Woman of the Year award, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and the International Coral Reef Society’s Darwin Medal. In 2014 she helped launch #OceanOptimism on Twitter, where you can follow her at @SeaCitizens, and in 2017 she co-hosted the Smithsonian’s inaugural Earth Optimism Summit.

Fiorenza Micheli

Fiorenza Micheli is co-director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions and of Hopkins Marine Station, and the David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the processes shaping marine communities and coastal social-ecological systems, incorporating this understanding in marine conservation and for co-designing solutions with decision-makers and communities. She investigates climatic impacts on marine ecosystems, particularly the impacts of and adaptation to warming, hypoxia and ocean acidification in marine species, communities and fisheries, marine predators’ ecology and trophic cascades, the dynamics and sustainability of small-scale fisheries, and the design and function of Marine Protected Areas. Her research takes place in California, Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea, Palau, The Pacific Line Islands, the Caribbean and the Chagos Archipelago. She is a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and advisor to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, Seafood Watch, Global Fishing Watch and the Benioff Ocean Initiative.

Julie Pullen

Dr. Julie Pullen is an oceanographer and meteorologist working on climate resilience and climate solutions. Her expertise spans climate, weather and water with a particular focus on earth system modeling and observing, and climate tech. A climate tech investor and Adjunct Research Scientist at the Columbia Climate School, she previously was a partner at Propeller, Climate Strategist (and before that, Director of Product) with Jupiter Intelligence, an early climate risk analytics startup. Prior to that she was an ocean engineering professor at Stevens Institute of Technology where she held a joint appointment with the Department of Energy’s Environmental and Climate Sciences division and was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in the Philippines.

A former oceanographer with the Navy, she was also a Science Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and led the Department of Homeland Security’s National Maritime Security Center.

Dr. Pullen serves on the U.S. Government’s National Climate Security Roundtable and the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) advisory committee for the Sustainability and Climate Risk program. She is also on the board of Waterfront Alliance and an advisor to Resilience Rising and Carbon to Sea.

Dr. Pullen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee peer-reviewing the most recent National Climate Assessments, as well as committees on Earth System Prediction and Ocean Observations. She was a chapter co-author of the New York City Panel on Climate Change report. She has been elected to the leadership council of both the American Meteorological Society and The Oceanography Society.