Alessandro Marroni
Prof. Alessandro (Sandro) Marroni is the founder and President of DAN Europe, Member of the Board of Directors of the International DAN Federation.
He serves as Vice President of the European Committee for Hyperbaric Medicine (ECHM); President of the European Foundation for the Education in Baromedicine; and Secretary General of the European College of Baromedicine. He is a Past-President of the International Congress on Hyperbaric Medicine, of the European Underwater and Baromedical Society, and of the International Academy of Underwater Sciences and Techniques.
Prof. Marroni received his Medical Degree (Magna cum Laude) from the Bologna University and specialized in Underwater and Hyperbaric Medicine at the University of Genova, Italy.
In 1974 he obtained the Post-Graduate Specialization Degree in Occupational Medicine, and in 1993 the Post-Graduate Specialization Degree in Anesthesiology and Intensive Care.
While active in the international Underwater and Hyperbaric Medical scientific and diving communities, Prof. Marroni remained involved in clinical Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine and has served as Associate Professor of Underwater and Hyperbaric Medicine at the Underwater and Hyperbaric Medicine Post Graduate School of the University of Chieti and at the Post Graduate School of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care of the University of Ancona, between 1980 and 1997; Professor of Hyperbaric Medicine and International Faculty Coordinator at the International Post-Graduate School of Baromedicine of the University of Belgrade Medical School, Yugoslavia, since 1997.
He has also serves as Professor of Diving Medicine at the Faculty of Marine Biology of the University of Ancona and at the post-graduate Masters Programmes in Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine at the Universities of Pisa, Italy, since 2005, at the University of Palermo and Catania, since 2011, at the University of Padova since 2014 and at the University of Insubria since 2016.
Initiator and Director of International School of Diving Safety and Medicine at the Malta Institute of Tourism Studies and of the first in the world Bachelor of Science Degree in Diving Safety Management since 2018.
An avid skin-diver since his early years, he learnt SCUBA diving at the age of 13 and became a Certified Diver with CMAS in 1964 and has been an Active SCUBA Instructor since 1966.
Author of over 250 scientific papers and publications, he is particularly active in underwater medicine research, with special interest in the prevention of Barotrauma and Dysbaric Illnesses in recreational diving and in the development of advanced techniques for remote diver’s physiological monitoring and of bidirectional diving telemedicine.
Darcy Kieran
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Will Rogers
Darcy has been a Course Director and scuba diving Instructor Trainer with numerous dive training agencies. He owned/managed dive shops, dive resorts, and charter boats in Canada and the USA. He’s been on the Board of Directors of DEMA. He brings with him valuable experience from other industries, including sporting goods manufacturing, radio & TV broadcasting, railroads & transportation, digital marketing agencies, and education. Darcy is an engineer, radio announcer, and author.
The Business of Diving Institute (BODI) is the brainchild of Darcy Kieran. It started in September 2000, shortly after Darcy purchased his first dive shop. At the time, he was in charge of sales for the largest division of a multi-billion dollar international transport company, and he could not understand the lack of training available to his dive store staff. And even less, the lack of dive industry market data. There were numerous dive training agencies ready to support teaching scuba divers and dive instructors, but nobody was providing sales and management training — or any other form of staff training — tailored to the dive industry. It’s to address these issues that The Business of Diving Institute was born.
David Doolette
Assoc. Prof. David Doolette is the 2022 recipient of the Albert R. Behnke Award for outstanding scientific contributions to advances in undersea medicine and physiology. He is expert in the development of decompression strategies, the pathophysiology and management of decompression sickness, and the evaluation of closed-circuit rebreathers. He has over 100 scientific and technical publications, He has developed and tested decompression tables, dive computers, dive planners, diving standards, and specialized diving procedures for the technical diving, commercial diving, and military diving communities. He began scuba diving in 1979, is a pioneer of technical diving, and is an avid underwater cave explorer.
Gareth Lock
Gareth Lock is the owner & founder of The Human Diver, an organisation formed to bring human factors knowledge, experience and practice from high-risk domains and academia into the sport of diving. Since January 2016 when he formed the company, he has taught hundreds of people in face-to-face classes around the world and thousands via online and webinar-based programmes. He has published Under Pressure: Diving Deeper with Human Factors, the only textbook that looks at this topic and in May 2019, released ‘If Only…’ which looks at a tragic diving accident through the lenses of human factors and a Just Culture. Over the last 3 years he has also led two reviews of fatal military diving accidents on behalf of Defence departments, applying systems thinking and human factors.
Recognising that the need for human factors is greater than one person can deliver, he has also trained ten instructors to deliver Human Diver materials around the globe and is working with two agencies to incorporate human factors concepts and tools into instructor development and diver training materials.
The Human Diver website is https://www.thehumandiver.com where you can find everything you want to know about HF in Diving and associated training materials.
João Correia
João was born in 1972 and is a raconteur with a Ph.D. in marine biology, who’s been focusing his academic research on shark fisheries and conservation. A three-times featured TEDx speaker, he began his career in Bimini, studying lemon shark behavior, then became curator of sharks at the Lisbon Zoo, researched deep-sea shark growth at IPMA (then IPIMAR), and joined the Oceanário de Lisboa in 1997, one year before the opening, where he’d become Head Diver and Curator of Collections.
In 2006 he founded his own collections firm, Flying Sharks, and, as a professor at ESTM since 2005, he also teaches future marine biologists. João is also a prolific speaker, with over 200 motivational lectures, and/or on the biology and conservation of sharks, climate change, and other ocean related topics. In 2015/6/7 João also published his trilogy ‘Sex, Sharks and Rock & Roll’, an illustrated memoir covering his career studying sharks and moving marine animals all over the world, while selling adult toys on the side.
His Portuguese title ‘Tubarões Voadores’ (which is Portuguese for ‘Flying Sharks’) was also a best-seller and the sequel features not just the birth of his beloved baby boy Nikola, but also how the Covid-19 pandemic turned a completely dead fish business into a thriving odyssey of PPEs, alcohol, and disinfectants, among many other amazing items, such as plush toys. In the end, Flying Sharks enjoyed its finest financial result ever in 2020, only to be surpassed in 2021, while simultaneously running a half million euros EEA Grants project which will yield the most modern unit for moving live fish built to date anywhere in the world.
Jonathan Bird
Jonathan Bird is an Emmy award-winning cinematographer specializing in underwater production. He is the host and producer of Jonathan Bird’s Blue World, an educational family-friendly underwater adventure series with more than a million subscribers on YouTube @BlueWorldTV. This series has won 8 Emmy Awards. He has shot and produced over 50 films. His films have appeared all over the world, on networks such as National Geographic Channel, PBS, ABC, USA Network, Discovery and even the SciFi Channel. He is currently in production on his fourth IMAX® film. He is the principal at Resolution Post, a post-production facility that specializes in giant screen film finishing. Jonathan is the president and founder of Oceanic Research Group, Inc., a non-profit environmental organization founded in 1990 to promote conservation of the world’s oceans..
Karen van den Oever
Karen van den Oever is a Cave and Trimix Diver and Instructor based in South Africa. Karen along with her husband (Francois) are owners and founders of “Somewhere Out There Diving”. “Somewhere Out There Diving” was created for the purposes of out of the ordinary, expedition and exploration type diving trips. Karen is very passionate about technical diving and cave diving and in March 2021 set a new Woman’s World Record for the deepest Scuba dive with a depth of 236.04m, in Boesmansgat Cave in South Africa and in October 2022 bettered that record with a depth of 246.56. Karen has a passion for exploration and also enjoy teaching others and sharing her knowledge and passion for technical diving.
Michael Menduno
Diving since 1976, Michael Menduno is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of InDepth, and an award-winning reporter and technologist who has written about diving and diving technology for more than 35 years. He coined the term “technical diving.
His magazine aquaCORPS: The Journal for Technical Diving (1990-1996), helped usher tech diving into mainstream sports diving. Menduno also co-organized the Enriched Air Nitrox Workshop (1992), and produced the first Tek.Conference (1993-1996), EUROTek (1994), and ASIATek (1995) conferences in the nineties.
Menduno has been reporting on rebreather technology for more than thirty years. He organized and co-chaired Rebreather Forums 1.0 (1994) and Rebreather Forum 2.0 (1996) with engineer Tracy Robinette, was a presenter at Rebreather Forum 3, Orlando, FL (2012) and is now organizing Rebreather Forum 4 to be held in Valletta, Malta (2023). He is certified on the Divesoft Liberty and AP Diving’s Evolution rebreathers.
In addition to InDepth, Menduno is a senior editor for DAN Europe’s Alert Diver magazine, a contributing editor for X-Ray mag, and a staff for DeeperBlue.com. He is also on the board of the Historical Diving Society (USA), and an associate member of the Rebreather Training Council.
Pete Mesley
Learning to dive off the south coast of England in 1990 and moved to New Zealand in 1994, Pete has made a full time career out of diving. An Instructor trainer and technical instructor trainer in Rebreathers for over two and a half decades, Pete is arguably the Southern Hemisphere’s most experienced Technical diver, Instructor and explorer. Pete has been hunting, finding, diving and documenting shipwrecks throughout his entire dive career and has planned and led expeditions in over 29 countries. Pete’s primary business is doing all the logistical planning, organising and leading technical dive trips to the most remote locations on the planet. Pete has been DSO (Dive Safety Officer) for many underwater film shoots for Natural History, National Geographic, and other production companies. He has also a co author for 7 scientific studies which have been published in prestigious medical journals round the world. A DMT (Dive Medical Technician) and fully qualified chamber operator. Pete is also a world class underwater photographer. Dedicating over 2 decades in perfecting the art of light painting over very long exposures stitching multiple images together. The main objective is to light up areas in Wrecks or Caves which would never be able to be seen by a diver. Capturing these images is a massive process and something Pete loves doing.
Phil Short
Phil Short is a professional diver and explorer whose passion is the exploration of caves. A diving educator specialising in closed circuit rebreather training at all levels both open water and overhead to students, instructors and instructor trainers.
A 3 month cave project in 2013 under the leadership of Bill Stone saw Phil and Marcin Gala pass the fourth sump of the J2 cave in Southern Mexico 12 kilometres horizontally and over 1 kilometre vertically into the cave whilst spending a total of 45 days underground.
Over the last 12 years Phil has focussed on Scientific Diving project supervision and management working with organisations including WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, US NPS SCRU (United States National Parks Service Submerged Cultural Resources Unit), Lund University Sweden and the DPAA (Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency). Projects have included Archeological Excavation of the 1492 Danish King’d ship Gribshunden and the successful recovery and repatriation of WWII American airmen from a B-24 and B-17 Heavy bomber in 40 and 70 metres respectively.
Currently Phil works in Research and Development within the Commercial and Scientific Diving communities as a Trainer, SME and Underwater Missions Lead.
Phil is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Explorers Club and currently works as Underwater Missions Lead for a Commercial/Scientific Diving Research and Development company..
Simon Caruana
Simon Caruana is Senior Manager (Academia) at the Institute of Tourism Studies ITS. His main role is to consolidate the existing Sustainable Tourism Department which currently runs a Bachelor Degree in Dive Safety Management and a Diploma in Climate Friendly Travel, the former being run in blended learning mode, whereas the latter is fully online. He has a PhD from the University of Leeds and is an active PADI Staff Instructor. His research interests are: sustainable tourism, niche tourism, use of social media in tourism, blended learning and assessment in higher education, learning outcomes design and implementation, intercultural competence as a skill set within tourism education.
Simon Mitchell
Simon works as an anaesthesiologist at Auckland City Hospital, a diving physician at North Shore Hospital (Auckland), and is Professor of Anaesthesiology at the University of Auckland. He is widely published with two books and over 170 scientific journal papers or book chapters. He co-authored the hyperbaric and diving medicine chapter for the last four editions of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine and has been Editor-in-Chief of Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine Journal since 2019.
Simon has a long career in sport, scientific, commercial, and military diving. He was a member of teams that were first to dive and identify three historically significant deep shipwrecks in Australia and New Zealand, including one in 2002 which was the deepest wreck dive undertaken at the time. He was conferred Fellowship of the Explorers’ Club of New York in 2006, and was the Rolex Diver of the Year in 2015. In February 2023 he was a member of the Wet Mules expedition to the Pearse Resurgence cave in New Zealand where a 230 m dive was conducted using hydrogen as a breathing gas on a deep dive for the first time in over 30 years.
Tom St George
Tom discovered a passion for diving over 20 years ago after emigrating from the UK to New Zealand. A decade later, the wanderlust struck again but with renewed force, motivating him to quit his office job and travel the world. When he settled on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula it was in cenotes that his dual obsessions of scuba diving and photography truly came together. He is best known for his award-winning images of the cenotes and underwater caves which have been published worldwide. He now works full-time as a professional photographer as well as offering underwater photography coaching and group workshops.
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