Prof Dr Baris Salihoglu (PhD Physical Oceanography) is the Director of the Middle East Technical University Institute of Marine Sciences and Director of the newly established METU Climate Change and Sustainable Development Center. He leads a DEKOSIM project establishing a new interdisciplinary centre of excellence (Centre for Marine Ecosystem and Climate Research) funded by the Turkish Ministry of Development. He is the director of METU Climate and Sustainable Development Center. He is the coordinator of the H2020 Black Sea CONNECT CSA and BRIDGE-BS RIA projects. His main research focus is on understanding the effects of climate change and other stressors on the seas, exploring marine ecosystems and biogeochemical dynamics via the combination of modelling and data analyses. His research interests include developing strategies for blue economy, developing technologies to foster blue economy, design and development of digital twins of the sea and marine spatial planning. 

Jun She is a senior researcher and chief consultant at Danish Meteorological Institute, with over 30 years of experience in oceanography. His expertise encompasses designing optimal observational networks, marine pollution, seamless observations, modelling and integration in land-to-sea aquatic continuum, digital twin of ocean, and development of operational forecasting systems and marine information service in multi-scales, especially Green Transition in recent years. Jun has dedicated to develop operational oceanographic systems in Baltic-North Sea, and collaboration in national, regional and European scale by actively involving in CMEMS, EMODnet and EuroGOOS activities in the past two decades. He has been chairing the EuroGOOS Scientific Advisory Working Group and Baltic Sea Operational Oceanographic System (BOOS) for the past 8 years. He was coordinator of EMODnet Baltic Sea Check Point project and scientific coordinator of EU-China Marine Data Partnership project EMOD-PACE. 

Researcher at Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV, Bologna, Italy) since April 2011, Ph.D. in Environmental Science with main focus on statistical data analysis, in situ data quality control, mapping techniques, model validation and ocean monitoring indicators. She has experience on coastal modelling, regional reanalysis, climatologies and data management. She participated to several EU-Projects such as SeaDataNet I and II, MyOcean, SeaDataCloud and the Copernicus Marine Service (phase I) as responsible for the Mediterranean Monitoring and Forecasting Center of multi-year products’ cross cutting activities and contributing to the Copernicus Ocean State Report. In SeaDataNet and SeaDataCloud projects she coordinated the quality assurance activities of temperature and salinity data, the release of derived aggregated datasets and climatologies for all EU marginal seas. Scientific manager of the EMODnet MedSea Checkpoint project, dedicated to the assessment of the adequacy of the observing system at the Mediterranean basin scale. She is currently involved in important EU projects dedicated to the developments of the European Open Science Cloud services in the marine domain, such as FAIR-EASE and Blue Cloud 2026. In Blue Cloud 2026 she coordinates the Physical Workbench task. She promotes open data practices within the EMODnet Data Ingestion project to facilitate data sharing in the marine domain. Topical Editor (Ocean) for the Earth System Science Data (ESSD) Journal since October 2021.