Dr John Bell is the ”Healthy Planet” Director in DG Research & Innovation. He is responsible for leading the Research and Innovation transitions on Climate Change within planetary boundaries, Bioeconomy, Food Systems, Environment and Biodiversity, Oceans and Arctic, Circular Economy, Water and Bio-based innovations. This includes harnessing the investments of €10 billion Horizon Europe, Circular Bioeconomy, the EU Bioeconomy Strategy, and Governing Board of €3.7 billion in Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking. 

A native of Dublin, Ireland, he was educated at University College Dublin and Doctorate (D. Phil.) at St John's College, Oxford University. During his E.C. career he has worked in External Relations Public Administration reform and on Poland's accession to the EU. Dr Bell was a member of the Cabinet of Commissioner David Byrne with responsibility food safety, tobacco control and public health. He was Chef de Cabinet to European Commissioner Meglena Kuneva on Consumer Affairs. As Chef de Cabinet to Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn on Research and Innovation, he was responsible for delivering Horizon 2020. Until 2019, he was Director of Bioeconomy, delivered the EU Bioeconomy Strategy and policy initiatives including FOOD2030 and the Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance.

Jon is the Associate Director for the Digital Ocean division at the UK's National Oceanography Centre. The role of Digital Ocean is to develop and implement the required digital technologies to ensure that priceless data about our oceans are well-managed and made available to support scientific analysis and decision-making, both within NOC and beyond. This encompasses a huge range of data types from in situ observations, remote sensing and numerical modelling, from all disciplines within ocean science. 

Before joining NOC in 2022, Jon worked at the University of Reading, most recently as CTO of the Institute for Environmental Analytics, where he managed an interdisciplinary delivery team, working with partners in government and industry to create new capabilities for data-driven decision-making. Prior to this, Jon worked for several years in marine informatics in the Department of Meteorology, working on various projects including MyOcean (which later transitioned into the Copernicus Marine Service), in which he led the development of the data visualisation services. He holds a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Bristol, and a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. 

Jon’s particular areas of expertise include: 

- Supporting real-world decision-making through marine data, e.g. through Digital Twins 
- Data analytics, including Big Data processing 
- Data visualisation 
- Data management, standards and interoperability 
- High Performance Computing 

Tim Collart (Ph.D 2019) works as a Marine Data Analyst and GIS Support Officer at the Secretariat of the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet). In this role, he is involved with assessing and streamlining the data flow from research project and national data repositories to the users of EMODnet, technical performance monitoring of the EMODnet data portals and maintenance and development of the European Atlas of the Seas.