Dominique Obaton, responsible of data management at Ifremer, Brest, France. Involved in data management coordination at European and international levels. She leads the in situ Thematic Assembly Center (TAC) of the Copernicus Marine service: consortium of 15 European partners in charge of the production, validation, operation and continuous improvement of the in situ products of the marine catalogue. She is also involved in several European projects and UN decade initiatives.

With a PhD in physical oceanography as a background, she was hired by Ifremer as a scientist to do numerical modelling in coastal areas. After few years, she joined Mercator Océan International until end of 2020 where head of Services and Uptake and team leader, she guaranteed the achievement of the Copernicus marine service and of the Mercator Océan service, decided their evolution and ensure their implementation.

Partner of EMODnet physics lot; member of the Data Management, Exchange and Quality (DATAMEQ) working group of EuroGOOS and EMODnet physics; co-coordinator of the Marine In situ Coordination group gathering In Situ TAC of Copernicus, EMODnet physics, chemistry and ingestion and EuroGOOS. Previously co-chair of an ICES working group and contributor to the Copernicus User Forum on the marine service.

Nadia Pinardi, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna 

Nadia PINARDI holds a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, and she is full professor of Oceanography at Bologna University.  Her major achievement is the conceptual design and practical implementation of ocean forecasting systems across the world open ocean and coastal areas.  

From 2012 to 2019 she was co-president of the Joint Committee for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) of UNESCO-IOC and WMO and she is, since 2019, elected vice-president of the Commission for Observation, Infrastructure and Information Systems (Infrastructure Commission) of WMO. She is chair of the UN Decade for Ocean Science Program “CoastPredict” and Director of the UN Decade Collaborative Center for Coastal Resilience hosted by the University of Bologna. 

Peter Pissierssens is the Head of the IOC Project Office for IODE, Oostende, Belgium and IOC Capacity Development coordinator. He has a background in marine biology and development cooperation. He joined UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) in 1989, dealing with marine data and information management, data management (IODE), bathymetry and tsunami warning and mitigation (Pacific region). The Oostende Office is the global headquarters of the OceanTeacher Global Academy, a training centre network for ocean data and information management, secretariat of the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) and global node of the Ocean Data and Information System (ODIS). Since June 2023 the Office also hosts the UN Decade Coordination Office for Data Sharing. The IODE network federates over 100 oceanographic data centres as well as marine libraries.