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. 

Deputy Director General of NMDIS, Research Fellow, Leader of the IUCN China Member Network Legal Policy Working Group and Chief Editor of the Journal of Marine Economy. Mainly engaged in top-level design of marine informatization, analysis and research of marine economy, research on marine ecological protection and restoration policies, and comprehensive marine management and application. He has been committed to building a monitoring and evaluation system for the operation of the marine economy for a long time, addressing major issues related to the high-quality development of the marine economy.