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Speakers


This is the fantastic group of speakers that will bring to the table exciting and new content to share and discuss with the international diving community. This list will be updated periodically.

Christine West

Christine is a polar expedition diver, naturalist, conservation photographer and videographer. She is an Explorer’s Club Fellow who has worked as a professional diver for 18 years dedicated to ocean education, exploration and safety. Christine now spends over six months per year in the field documenting stories about places that are rarely seen and yet are rapidly changing due to the warming of the Earth such as the High Canadian Arctic and Antarctica. Christine uses a variety of tools such as underwater cameras, drones and ROVs to create imagery that serve as voices for ecosystems that need immediate protection. It is important to her to not only document species presence and abundance, but to share their stories and behaviors in a memorable way that drives wider audiences, including inland communities, to care about places that may not be in their backyard but to which they influence and are connected. Christine’s passion to share the lesser-known stories continually pushes her to dive the coldest, sometimes murkiest, most remote areas on the planet.

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.

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.

Jarrod Jablonski

Jarrod Jablonski is an avid explorer, researcher, author, and instructor teaching, and diving in oceans and caves around the world. Trained as a geologist, Jarrod is the founder and president of Global Underwater Explorers (GUE). GUE is an international non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation and discovery of the aquatic realm. Jarrod is also the CEO of Halcyon Manufacturing and Extreme Exposure Adventure Center while remaining active in conservation, exploration, and filming projects worldwide. His explorations regularly place him in the most remote locations in the world, including several world record excursions at 90m/300feet during cave penetrations of nearly 10km/29,000feet. These dives include bottom times of more than 12 hours at 90m/300feet with total immersions of 30 hours. Jarrod is also an author with dozens of publications, including several books and numerous articles.

Nathalie Lasselin

Nathalie Lasselin, a award winning underwater cinematographer, explorer, and environmental advocate, is renowned for her expertise in capturing breathtaking underwater visuals in some of the most demanding and harsh environments. Her portfolio includes a diverse array of underwater projects, spanning documentaries, expeditions, and collaboration on scientific research.
Fueled by an unwavering passion for the underwater realm, Lasselin has undertaken exploration and documentation endeavors across a spectrum of ecosystems, from the Arctic to underwater caves and dark deep waters. Her collaborative efforts with scientists, researchers, and filmmakers serve as a powerful means to spotlight environmental concerns and advance the cause of ocean conservation.
Kids 8 years old study her in their school book in Quebec.
She was the first to dive and film several places including deep wreck in the St Lawrence river in Canada, caves in China, the 4th biggest crater lake and dove 70kms in the river in Montreal to raise awareness towards out drinking water source.
She is an inductee of the WDHOF ( Women Divers hall of Fame) the Explorers club, the RCGS (Royal Canadian Geographical Society).

Nuno Gomes

Richard is 74 years old. He lives in England, close to Heathrow, but he and his wife also own an apartment on the Red Sea in Egypt.
He served for 30 years in the Metropolitan Police retiring as the Director of Training and Development, for what, at the time was the world’s largest police training and development agency.
He then worked within the Home Office for 9 years as Strategic Head of HR for the National Probation Service.
Since 2009 he has been involved in adaptive teaching, which has become a passion for him. In 2014 he founded Deptherapy, a UK charity that sought to rehabilitate UK armed forces’ veterans through scuba diving. Deptherapy specialised in those who had experienced life changing mental and/physical injuries or illnesses.
He believes that much of the adaptive scuba diving world is locked into the past and that a section of the dive industry misquotes research to overstate the benefits of adaptive diving. He believes that parts of the industry are flippant its approach to adaptive teaching.
He is keen that common standards should be created for adaptive teaching through both ISO and WRSTC.

Phil Short

Phil from a background of dry caving has followed a life long passion with all things underwater. Working professionally for over 33 years in the Recreational, Technical, Media, Scientific and Commercial Diving communities with a specific specialisation in Rebreather, Cave, Mine and Test diving. He has logged over 8000 hours underwater with half of those on CCR. A Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Phil is currently working in Research and Development for the merging of diving disciplines to assist and improve scientific diving project capabilities.

Richard Cullen

Richard is 74 years old. He lives in England, close to Heathrow, but he and his wife also own an apartment on the Red Sea in Egypt.
He served for 30 years in the Metropolitan Police retiring as the Director of Training and Development, for what, at the time was the world’s largest police training and development agency.
He then worked within the Home Office for 9 years as Strategic Head of HR for the National Probation Service.
Since 2009 he has been involved in adaptive teaching, which has become a passion for him. In 2014 he founded Deptherapy, a UK charity that sought to rehabilitate UK armed forces’ veterans through scuba diving. Deptherapy specialised in those who had experienced life changing mental and/physical injuries or illnesses.
He believes that much of the adaptive scuba diving world is locked into the past and that a section of the dive industry misquotes research to overstate the benefits of adaptive diving. He believes that parts of the industry are flippant its approach to adaptive teaching.
He is keen that common standards should be created for adaptive teaching through both ISO and WRSTC.

Rico Besserdich

Rico Besserdich, born 1968 in Germany,  is a professional photographer, aquatic imaging artist, visual philosopher, book author, journalist, and a professional scuba-diver (CMAS Course Director).

He has been involved in the art of photography since 1978.

His mission to raise awareness for the importance of water by utilizing water as the key element of his artistic expression earned him recognition by the Nobel Organisation, the Swedish Parliament, the United Nations, among others.

Rico Besserdich is a member of the OCEAN ARTISTS SOCIETY.

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 has participated in cutting edge wreck and cave diving expeditions spanning many years. In 2002 he performed the deepest dive to a shipwreck at that time. 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. He was conferred Fellowship of the Explorers’ Club of New York in 2006, and was the Rolex Diver of the Year in 2015.
The only thing Simon enjoys more than diving is sharing knowledge and experiences with fellow divers and explorers at events like Diving Talks!

Stefan Panis

Stefan started diving at the age of 6 through his father. In 1992 he did his first “official” course. Since then he moved on to doing courses like nitrox and trimix, and he started diving an Inspiration rebreather in 2009 and Started photographing in 2013.
Meanwhile, he developed a great interest in wrecks and researching the history of the wrecks in the archives.
He spent many dives on wrecks in the North Sea (this year he was there when a virgin VOC ship from 1661 was found, and they are pushing to get a TV documentary done in 2022), the English Channel, where he is part of the expedition-team which has located and identified many shipwrecks, and abroad in Sardinia, Portugal, and Cuba just to name a few. He was involved in different successful expeditions searching for new wrecks, like the identification of the 1852 “Josephine Willis”.
In 2014 he also obtained his full cave CCR certificate.
Since then, Stefan has participated in many cave dives in Sardinia, France, and Spain, and he has become a “specialist” in looking for new Belgian mine sites, and he is photo-documenting them often with breathtaking pictures!
He is the leader of the “Mine Exploration Team”, a dedicated team who does official mine research and documentation.
In 2020, Stefan became a member of The Explorers Club – New York.
The season 2024 kicked off really well, with an exploration of an unknown level in the Morépire mine, the search for an underground tunnel under a Monastry, and geological research in what can be called the largest and the deepest mine in Belgium! Stay tuned!
Stefan has written more than 50 articles for international magazines as well as several books.

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Present your Talk


Have you achieved something remarkable underwater? Do you hold a dive under your belt, worth sharing with the diving community? Would you like to share it in the Talks?

Reach out to the DIVING talks 2022 Organizing Committee and explain why there should be a slot in the Talks, with your name in it.

We are interested in hearing from you

You are a technical diver or a recreational diver, maybe you are into the scientific approach or you thrill with the discovery of a new wreck.

We want to share all that!