Members of Marine Observation and Data Expert Group

Following a call for expressions of interest, the following members were selected to advise the Commission on matters concerning marine observation and data.

Hermanni Backer

Hermanni Backer is working as a project manager at the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM) Secretariat. Over the recent years (2004-) he has been dealing with implementation of marine environmental policy in the Baltic Sea intergovernmental context. Keywords for these activities include ecosystem approach and maritime spatial planning. During 2011-2012 he will coordinate the PLAN BOTHNIA project, a DG MARE -funded trans-boundary maritime spatial planning action in the Baltic Sea, with 6 partner institutions.

He holds a M.Sc. in marine and brackish water ecology from University of Helsinki, with studies carried out also in universities of Bergen (Norway), Stockholm (Sweden) and Nha Trang (Vietnam). In addition he has completed a LL.M in International Law (University of Helsinki). He functions in English and French, and somewhat in Japanese, in addition to his native Finnish and Scandinavian (covering Swedish, Norwegian and Danish).

Jean-Marie Beckers

Jean-Marie Beckers born in 1965, is full professor at the University of Liège, where he holds the chair of physical oceanography and directs the MARE group. Since his doctorate in 1992 and a post-doc in Hamburg, he is active in the domain of data analysis, modelling and data assimilation into hydrodynamic models. He is particularly interested in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. He is author of 110 refereed publications and the textbook ' Introduction to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Physical and Numerical Aspects' with Benoit Cushman-Roisin for which they received the FNRS Wernears award 2010. He participated in numerous european research projects and serves as expert at various instituts and institutions, among which Ifremer, the European Union and the ESF marine board. He is actively involved in the organization of the annual Liege Colloquium on Ocean Dynamics held for the 42nd time in 2010.

Sükrü Besiktepe

Şükrü Beşiktepe holds a B.S. in physics from Ankara University and a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography (1991) from the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Middle East Technical University (IMS-METU), Turkey. Dr. Beşiktepe joined IMS-METU as an Assistant Professor in 1991 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996. He was a visiting scientist at Harvard University at different times during 1996-2002. He became Director of IMS-METU in 2002 served as a director till 2007; he had coordinated the Institute’s national and international interdisciplinary activities ranging from oceanographic data base development studies to marine pollution and from development of ocean observing and prediction system to health of the ecosystem funded by NATO, EU Framework Programmes, Turkish Scientific and Technical Research Council, etc. Sukru Beşiktepe was the Executive Secretary of Black Sea GOOS, collaborating with international organisations active in the Black Sea region and. He worked at NATO Undersea Research Laboratory, La Spezia, Italy as head of the Modeling and Prediction group during 2007-2010 and starting from May 2010, he is a Professor of Physical Oceanography in the Institute of Marine Sciences and Technology of the Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey. Dr. Beşiktepe's research interests include combining observations and dynamical models to attain coupled physical and biogeochemical dynamical processes in semi-enclosed seas.

Frédérique Blanc

Frédérique Blanc is in charge of the Marine Information Value Chain within the Data Collection and Positioning Division of CLS (subsidiary of CNES and IFREMER) to enable integration and use all type of ocean data, fishery data, and localization data for added value applications in support to marine resources management and global monitoring of environment and biodiversity.

Her background is related to technical and project engineering in the marine environment coupled to a MS in Meteorology and Oceanography. She started to work on tropical ocean models for NASA (Goddard Space Flight Center, Oceans and Ice Branch), in 1987, as an Associate Scientist. She was then hired by CLS in 1988.

She has 20 years of experience in the field of product information and dissemination of ocean data within the CLS Space Oceanography Division, in support to institutional activities, CNES/SALP/AVISO (satellite altimetry) and Mercator Ocean (analyses and forecasts).

She was responsible of the MyOcean Information System including rationalization of interfaces and developing interoperabilities of this marine core service with other systems and services (e.g. US-IOOS, WMO-WIS, EMODNET-SEADATANET). She is expert for JCOMM and Eurogoos on data management issues for convergence of means.

She has participated to the recent following projects: MYOCEAN (EU GMES), SEADATANET (EU FP7), HUMBOLDT (EU INSPIRE), SIH Ifremer.

Antonio Bode

Antonio Bode (Ph D in Biology, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain, 1990) is Staff Researcher of the Instituto Español de Oceanografia (IEO) at the Oceanographic Centre in A Coruña. His main research field is plankton ecology, particularly related to studies of productivity and nitrogen dynamics, but also marine food web analysis from microbes to top predators using stable isotope tracers (http://www.xente.mundo-r.com/abode/index.htm).

He is the Principal Investigator of the IEO Project “Radiales” (since 2007), a long-term study of plankton and oceanography in coastal waters of northern Spain, coordinating the observations of 4 coastal laboratories. Among other scientific advisory activities, he has been Scientific Manager of the Spanish Marine Research and Development Program (1998-2003) and member of the ICES Science Committee (since 2008).

Jean-François Bourillet

Jean-François Bourillet works as senior geologist in the Marine Geosciences department at IFREMER (French Research Institute for the Sustainable Exploitation of the Sea). He is a graduate geologist from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Géologie de Nancy and has more than 29 years of experience in seafloor mapping and geostatistics, gravity processes and slope stability, ecosystemic studies, regional survey for submarine cables and site survey for oil companies. He has managed from 1990 to 1996 the cartography laboratory and has been involved in several European projects (RESECUSED, ENAM, STARFISH, POSEIDON) and in 449 IGCP. He was the scientific director of the R/V Pourquoi pas ? project.

He is currently in charge of the « Exploration and mapping of continental shelf» programme of IFREMER, is the French representative of the FP7 « CoralFish » project and belongs to the French delegation for the negotiation on the continental shelf extension at UN

Erik Buch

Peter Burkill

Simon Claus

Simon Claus has an MSc in Ecology from the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) and a Msc in Oceanography from the University in Liège (ULg). He is currently a scientific staff member of the marine data and information centre of the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) involved in data management activities of several European Research projects (MarBEF, ENCORA, THESEUS). His main interest is coastal and marine data and information management. This includes processes and systems to archive, document, integrate and redistribute coastal and marine data and information. There is a focus on biological, taxonomic and ecological data, spatial data and marine environmental metadata in general. Geographic focus is on the North Sea, but also on other European Marine waters are covered.

Franciscus Colijn

After 15 years at the University of Groningen where I finished my PhD in Marine botany (primary production of microphytobenthos and phytoplankton in the Ems-estuary) I worked for 7 years at Rijkswaterstaat in the Hague (Former Tidal Waters division ,later National Institute for Coastal and Marine Management) till 1994. Generela research issues were ecology of the EWadden sea and the North sea, inclusing the development of ecological indicators (AMOEBE approach) Then I moved to the University of Kiel in Germany to accept a position in Coastal Ecology and became the director of the Research- and Technology Centre (FTZ) in Büsum. Main research issues were eutrophication of the Wadden Sea and the development of observational methods. In 2001 I moved to GKSS (now HZG) in Geesthacht to become the director of the Institute of Coastal Research. Again environmental issues of the Wadden Sea and the North Sea were the main topics , whereas the further development of observational networks became a major issue after obtaining a infrastructural grant of about 10 Million € through the Helmholtz Foundation. The further incorporation of this observational network called COSYNA into European networks will be my main interest and task even after retirement through an ongoing contract with HZG (Helmholtz Zentrum Geesthacht).

Hans Dahlin

Hans Dahlin has been Director of the EuroGOOS Office since January 2002, but has been active in EuroGOOS since its creation in 1994 and was the initiator and first chair of the Baltic Operational Oceanographic System, BOOS.

He has always had a keen interest in international co-operation and has been Head of the Swedish delegation in the IOC Assembly, Executive Council, a delegate in I-GOOS and JCOMM, vice chair of IGOSS, and delegate in the Oceanography Committee of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, ICES.

Prior to his current position Hans Dahlin was senior advisor and co-ordinator of oceanography at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) for 10 years, and during 1982-1992 was Director of the Oceanographic Section of SMHI with a staff of 50 people working on marine observations, marine data management, marine operational forecasting, marine environment quality assessment, and applied oceanographic research.

Gerben de Boer

Gerben J. de Boer works as a marine scientist at Deltares (partner of Rijkswaterstaat; former Delft Hydraulics) since 2002. He holds a teaching appointment at TU Delft, where he earlier received his MSc. on cohesive sediments in the marine environment in 2002 and his PhD on the coastal oceanography of the Rhine ROFI (Region of Freshwater Influence) in 2009. His current research focuses on the transport of fine sediments in coastal seas, tidal basins, estuaries and lakes, with main interest in the North Sea and Wadden Sea. In the fine sediments research field he routinely interacts with a wide range of disciplines: geomorphology, hydrography, ecology, chemistry, and physical oceanography. Fine sediments also provided him with ample practical experience with remote sensing (joined ESA summerschool), numerical models, in situ data (collaboration with Port of Rotterdam) and laboratory data.

Next to his research he is product manager of Matroos, the operational storm surge system of Rijkswaterstaat. Matroos provides direct access web services for tens of TBs of assimilated forecast and hindcast results for the North Sea and inland waters. Matroos plays a role in NOOS (EuroGoos) and ECOOP (FP6). Combining his experience of data variety in the fine sediments world and reliability/robustness in the operational forecast world, he co-initiated www.OpenEarth.eu. OpenEarth is a web 2.0 approach for data management on a distributed, open source infrastructure. The OpenEarth workflow is currently employed for data management in a number of large research projects including Building with Nature (Dutch), MICORE (FP7), VECTORS (FP7) and DIPOL (InterReg).

Nic Flemming

Nic Flemming has been diving on underwater cities and submerged prehistoric caves formore than 50 years. He has dived in over 20 countries, and worked additionally with manned submersibles and autonomous underwater robotic vehicles. His surveys in the Mediterranean have provided archaeological data on 411 coastal and submerged cities, and his work on submerged prehistoric sites has resulted in the discovery of stone age tools underwater ranging from 10,000 to 300,000 years old. He has published over 300 scientific papers and reports on sea level change, coastal earthquakes, human occupation on the continental shelf, diving technology, ocean economics, and ocean forecasting. At present he is active in the European project “SPLASHCOS” which is studying the whole European sea area out to a depth 150m to search for prehistoric settlements which were occupied during the Ice Age. Nic Flemming is a Research Fellow at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.

Juliusz Gajewski

Juliusz Gajewski, senior researcher in the field of system dynamics modeling and decision support systems. Former member of BOOS steering group responsible for data exchange. Participating in EU – and national-founded projects – among them: FP5 PAPA, FP5 CROSSGRID, FP6 SPICOSA, FP6 ECOOP. Participation in habitat mapping projects, Baltic Sea Region Programme projects especially including maritime spatial planning projects BaltSeaPlan, leading project Submariner on innovative and combined uses of marine areas. At the moment national contact point for EMODNET and expert on implementation of INSPIRE Directive in marine areas of Poland.

Robert Gatliff

Robert Gatliff

Robert Gatliff is director of the Energy and Marine Geoscience division of the British Geological Survey. Previously, he worked as a government geologist in Tonga and as a marine geoscientist in the UK. His research interests include basin analysis of the UK and North Atlantic, marine geology of the UK, and technology for sub-sea coring and surveying. Over the years, he has been involved in a broad range of projects and collaborative efforts, including the ROCKFALL PORJECT, MAREMAP, IODP and CHARTING PROGRESS 2010. He currently sits on the board of UKMMAS, and is a member of DEFRA HBDSEG and MODEG.

Neil Holdsworth

Neil Holdsworth is head of the Data Centre at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Neil’s background is in environmental sciences but for most of his working life he has focused on the retrieval and manipulation of data through programming, GIS, databases and data management. With previous experience in both the public and private sector, in his current role the focus is on data partnerships and the dissemination of data through direct feeds and as part of other networks. You can read more about the work of the ICES data centre in this newsletter.

David Mills

David Mills is a Programme Directors for Marine Observatories at the Cefas (Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Sciences). He currently leads the UK-IMON (UK Integrated Marine Observation Network) and coordinates the EMECO and Western Shelf Observatory initiatives. With a broad background in marine science his experience ranges from studies on benthic microalgae in polluted estuaries, phytoplankton dynamics in shelf seas, development of an operational mooring network (SmartBuoy), modelling the response of coastal seas to nutrient enrichment and development of environmental indicators for detection of environmental change.

David provides a range of advice to the UK government, OSPAR, ICES and the Commission on matters ranging from eutrophication, environmental change, monitoring and assessment of environmental status and development of marine observing systems. Recent work has led to the development of web-based environmental assessment and reporting system that increase efficiency and the robustness of environmental assessments making best use of all available marine data.

He has previously led an OSPAR technical working group on eutrohication modelling (ICG-EMO) and contributed as an expert to the EU Marine Research Infrastructures working group. David is a member of the the EU JERICO programme and the EU CSA Oceans project that supports the initial development of the JPI Healthy Oceans programme.

Cherith Moses

Cherith Moses is a geomorphologist whose primary area of expertise is coastal geomorphology and nearshore dynamics, focusing on understanding coastal dynamics and their adaptations to past and predicted future climate change. She was awarded her BSc and PhD in Geography from the Queen’s University Belfast and is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Sussex. She has more than twenty years’ experience in researching rock coasts, cohesive foreshores, beaches, dunes and estuaries.

Cherith has led and contributed to a series of European Union and UK Government funded projects, including ESPED (European Shore Platform Dynamics), BAR (Beaches At Risk), BERM (Beach Erosion in the Rives Manche) and Understanding the Behaviour of Cohesive Foreshores. She has conducted fieldwork primarily in the English Channel and North Sea but also the Atlantic, Baltic and Mediterranean coasts. She has also done research in Australia, Asia and North Africa. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the British Society for Geomorphology and the International Association of Geomorphologists’ research group on rock coast dynamics She is co-editor of ‘Beaches At Risk’ (Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, Supplementbände, Volume 52, Supplementary Issue 3- 2008).

Glenn Nolan

Section Manager, Oceanographic Services, Marine Institute. Responsible for a team of 9 multi-disciplinary scientists and technicians monitoring and researching the ocean climate around Ireland.

Dr. Nolan has 13 years experience as an oceanographer and in the management and roll-out of oceanographic and marine climate programmes. Responsible for the Irish National Weather Buoy Network, Irish Tide Gauge Network, Ocean Modelling, Remote Sensing, Coastal and deep water oceanography at the Marine Institute, he headed the newly formed Marine Climate Change team at the Marine Institute between 2007 and 2009. His own research is primarily in the area of coastal processes and in the descriptive physical oceanography of the Irish region having conducted more than 30 research cruises in Irish waters, the Caribbean and the sub-polar regions, 14 as chief scientist. He has considerable experience in management of large-scale research projects

Recent Funded Projects include European Seafloor Observatory Network Implementation Model. (Coordinator), EuroARGO Preparatory Phase. (Partner), ESONET NoE project (FP7). (Joint WP Leader), EasyCo and ARCOPOL Interreg projects. (Partner and WP Leader), ASIMUTH (FP7 Space). (Partner and WP Leader), JERICO (European Research Infrastructures call) (Partner and WP Leader)

He is a Board Member of the European component of the Global Ocean Observing System (EuroGOOS), Co-Chair: of the Technology Plan Working Group (EuroGOOS), Steering Group Member of the North West Shelf OOS (2005-present) and co-chair of the ICES Working Group on Oceanic Hydrography and the National Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Advisory Council (2003-present).

Lesley Rickards

Dr Lesley Rickards, Deputy Director of BODC, has over 25 years experience in marine data management. Following on from her role as the UK National Co-ordinator for Marine Environmental Data, she has worked with others to set up the UK Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN). She has also been involved in a number of EU funded data management projects; currently this includes SeaDataNet, Geo-Seas, EUROFLEETS, EuroArgo and MyOcean.

She was Chair of the IOC’s International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) Committee for two terms between 2003-2007 and has represented IODE on the Joint IOC/WMO Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) Management Committee. She is currently a member of the International Council for Science World Data System Scientific Committee (ICSU WDS-SC), the governing body of the WDS.

Lesley was appointed Director of the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) in April 2007: PSMSL is the international mean sea level data bank whose prime objective is the acquisition, analysis and distribution of sea level data. For many years she has been a member of the IOC/JCOMM Group of Experts on the Global Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS). In recent years has been a member of the Governing Board of the European Sea Level Service (ESEAS).

Dick Schaap

Dick Schaap

Dick M.A. Schaap, MSc in Coastal Engineering at Technical University Delft - The Netherlands, is Managing Director of Mariene Informatie Service MARIS. He has considerable competence and experience in the definition, development, implementation and operation of ocean and marine data and information management infrastructures at a national, European and global scale through his active career first as coordinator and later as managing director of Mariene Informatie Service (MARIS) and its involvement in various projects.

MARIS originates from a governmental initiative at the North Sea Directorate of Rijkswaterstaat in the Netherlands in 1986 to improve the overview and access of data, information and knowledge about the sea and human activities in relation to the sea. MARIS was initiated to stimulate more exchange and co-operation between organisations, in various sectors, related to the sea, such as oceanographic research, environmental management, and offshore & maritime industry. MARIS was privatised in 1996 and nowadays comprises a MARIS foundation and a MARIS company with 10 staff.

Dick M.A. Schaap can be considered as a true European expert in the domain of ocean and marine data and information management, and in applying internet technologies, but also in finding ways for organising feasible solutions and managing developments and cooperations on a transnational scale involving government, science and private industry. This can be underpinned by a large involvement in European projects in the last 2 decades. Recent selections: Coordinator SIMORC, Technical Coordinator SeaDataNet and SeaDataNet II, Coordinator BlackSeaSCENE and Upgrade BlackSeaSCENE, Coordinator CaspInfo, Technical Coordinator Geo-Seas, Coordinator EMODNet Hydrography, Coordinator EMODNet Seabed Mapping, and Technical Coordinator EMODNet Chemistry.

Angela Schäfer

Dr. Angela Schäfer is GIS- and Data Manager for the Northwest Marine Research Association in Germany working with PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data) an ICSU World Data Center at the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) in Bremen and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven.

As a marine geologist and GIS-specialist with long lasting experience Angela has developed and coordinated several WebGIS-platforms for national and international projects: MarGIS with its digital Atlas of the North Sea at the AWI, a distributed data management concept for the International Research Consortium on Continental Margins (IRCCM) with oil-industry partners integrating strategies for long-term observation and Sensor Web Enablement. Besides lecturing GIS and GDI at the international Jacobs University of Bremen she was responsible for establishing and coordinating the WebGIS for northern European Margins within the EU major-project HERMES (Hotspot Ecosystem Research on the Margins of European Seas). In cooperation with PANGAEA she is recently developing a marine geodata infrastructure and WebGIS for joint marine habitat research for the North Sea.

Stefania Sparnocchia

Stefania Sparnocchia is a physical oceanographer working in Trieste, Italy, at the Institute of Marine Science (ISMAR) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR).

She has experience in field observations, data analysis, and in handling and using oceanographic instrumentation. Her studies focus mainly on the Mediterranean Sea, and deal with marine circulation, water property distributions and budgets, variability and long term trends, and air-sea interaction. She has participated actively in several European research projects (e.g. EUROMODEL I & II, GEODYME, MATER, MFS, and recently SESAME and KM3NeT) and in many oceanographic expeditions in the Mediterranean Sea. She has authored a number of scientific papers and technical reports.

She is currently part of the ISMAR Advisory Board, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO). She will coordinate the CNR contribution to the approved EU FP7 I3 project JERICO - Towards a Joint European Research Infrastructure network for Coastal Observatories.

Terje Thorsnes

Terje Thorsnes is a senior marine geologist working with the Geological Survey in Norway. His primary area of expertise is within marine geology, with emphasis on seabed sediments and morphology, links between geology and biology within an ecosystem framework, and applied aspects for ocean management. He has a long experience with geological, geophysical and geochemical data, from the initial stages of cruise planning, to offshore data acquisition, laboratory work, processing, interpretation, reporting, scientific publication and web publication.

Since c. 2000, he has worked closely with scientists and managers from the Institute of Marine Research in Norway, and other environmental institutions on initiation and management of a large national seabed mapping program, MAREANO which has now completed its first phase. This program delivers data on nature types and vulnerable habitats for national ocean management in Norway.

Vasilis Valavanis

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Vasilis Valavanis is part of the research stuff of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) located in Crete, Greece. With a background in Environmental Biology (BSc) and GIS-Remote Sensing (MSc), he coordinates and participates in EU-funded research projects on fisheries, fish-environment interactions, essential fish habitat modelling and mapping as well as on the use of Earth Observation data in aquatic sciences. He is the author of 'Geographic Information Systems in Oceanography and Fisheries' (Taylor & Francis-2002) and the Editor of the Hydrobiologia Special Issue on the 'Environmental Approach to Essential Fish Habitat Designation' (Springer-2008). More information on completed and ongoing projects and article reprints are available at: http://arch.her.hcmr.gr/

Henry Vallius

Henry Vallius works as senior scientist in the Southern Finland Unit of the Geological Survey of Finland. His is a marine geologist specialized in the geochemistry of the Baltic Sea sediments. During recent years he has worked with the marine environment of the Gulf of Finland, which is a sea area under strong pressure from human activity and suffers from pollution and severe eutrophication.

Vallius has more than 15 years experience in marine science from tens of research cruises in the Baltic Sea as well as on the Atlantic Ocean. He has participated in many international research projects such as EUMARSIN, QUASH, BASYS, EUROSEISMIC, SAMAGOL, TRANSIT, BONUS and ODP. Vallius acted as national coordinator for the EU funded EUMARSIN and EUROSEISMIC projects, which both dealt with collection of marine metadata from EU-countries.

Vallius is the chairman of the EuroGeoSurveys (European Geological Survey Organizations) Marine Geology Expert Group and a member of the Finnish National SCOR Committee for Marine Research. He is a corresponding member in ICES Working Group on Marine Sediments in Relation to Pollution and ICES Working Group on Marine Extracts.

Christoph Waldmann

Christoph Waldmann

Christoph Waldmann is working as a senior scientist at the University of Bremen. As member of the Centre of Marine Environmental Research MARUM he is working on the development of new methods of ocean research and is heavily involved in the planning process of long term ocean stations.

He has been involved in a number of EC funded projects like CARBO-OCEAN, ESONET, EMSO, HYPOX and is currently coordinating the EC funded project COOPEUS which aims at fostering links across the Atlantic for research infrastructures in the environmental field. MARUM is operating the PANGAEA data infrastructure for geoscience data and is also contributing to the development of persistent identifiers like DOI, the Digital Object Identifier.

Christoph Waldmann is a physicist by education and has been studying at the University of Munich and Kiel. He did his PhD at the former Institute for Applied Physics with the subject of investigating the relationship between density and the optical index of refraction. Just recently the interest in this topic has been rekindled in the context of the Thermodynamic Equation of State. Christoph Waldmann has been working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for one year and has been employed by the Alfred- Wegener- Institute for Polar Research for three years. In the academic year 2006- 2007 he has worked as the Doherty Visiting Professor at the Florida Institute for Technology.

Christopher Zimmermann

Dr. Christopher Zimmermann is the deputy director of the Federal Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries (part of the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute) in Rostock, Germany. He is also the German member of the Advisory Committee (ACOM) of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

Christopher studied Marine Biology, Zoology, Limnology and Physical Oceanography at Kiel University; Master's and Ph.D. at the Institute for Polar Ecology (zoogeography and ecophysiology of polar fish); applied ichthyology at the Institute for Sea Fisheries in Hamburg (mainly working with pelagic species and acoustic surveys) 1997-2005; Member of the ICES Advisory Committee on Fisheries Management (ACFM) from 2002; member of various ICES and EU survey planning groups, fish stock assessment working groups and marine and fisheries data related study and working groups (and chair of some of them). Numerous research vessel cruises and field trips to the Antarctic, Arctic, Tropics and North and Baltic Seas, participant of a variety of EU funded studies, projects (mainly on surveys or stock discrimination) or programs, including the collection of fisheries data under the EU Data Collection Regulation.