Adam Wood
Adam started diving aged 12 and knew he had to teach people to dive wanting them to experience the same thrill underwater the way he had.
Once he reached 18 Adam left the UK for Egypt to complete Divemaster and Instructor programs. Working hard to become a PADI Master Instructor having issued over 400 Certifications withing 3 years. It was at that time, a passion for Technical Diving developed with a determination to extend the boundaries of diver education and strive for perfection.
After his crossover and Instructor Trainer course with SSI, Adam has been running one of the most successful and exciting diving centres in the UK. In 2014. He became SSI International Training Director for Recreational and Technical diving.
His work involves training Instructor Trainers and product development. He has been instrumental in the XR Range of OC, CCR and Overhead Environment Programs.
As one of the busiest instructors, you can find him teaching at all levels almost every day around the word.
He is happy in tropical seas as he is in frozen caves and mines.
Adam’s passion is teaching, his aim is to raise the profile of scuba, challenge old perceptions and philosophies to make exceptional divers and dive professionals.
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.
Armando Ribeiro
Diver since 1999, specialized in underwater photography and video, has won several national and international awards.
The taste for deep dives, unexplored wrecks and caves, lead Armando Ribeiro to create the 1st team of technical divers that use closed circuit rebreathers (CCR) in Portugal. Created in 2004/2005 the In-Silence Dive Team has as main objectives the development of CCR diving, the exploration off deep shipwrecks and caves on the Portuguese coast and the participation in international diving expeditions. Armando quickly became one of the first serious advanced expedition divers in Portugal, taking part in numerous adventures with some of the world’s best technical divers.
His most recent project aims to explore, obtain cave’s cartography and capture in video the biggest springs in Portugal. This exciting adventure was recently renewed by the discovery of new galleries that open the door to new challenges due to the greater depts and distance that can be achieved. The expeditions and projects impact, through the publication of articles in diving magazines and the national and international public projection of their videos, had a strong recognition in the national diving community, being already a reference in all expos and events related to technical diving.
Audrey Cudel
Audrey Cudel is a cave explorer and technical diving instructor specialising in technical sidemount and cave diving training.
She started diving 30 years ago in the south of France where she grew up. She left her former consulting career in 2009 to dedicate herself full time to education, conservation and exploration projects. In 2012, she founded one of Malta / Gozo’s most famous Technical Diving Facility that she ran for seven years before establishing her own company AUDREY CUDEL TECHNICAL. She is actively training divers in Gozo/ Malta, Mexico, Hungary, France, Spain and Egypt.
Beside designing and distributing sidemount and cave equipment, she also became a Brand Ambassador for SANTI and works in close partnership with Gralmarine, DAN Europe and Razor.
She is also renowned in the diving community for her underwater photography portraying deep technical divers, cave divers and all diving training sessions. Her photography and articles have been publlished in various magazines such as Wetnotes, Octopus, Plongeur International, Perfect Diver, Times of Malta, SDI/TDI and DAN (Divers Alert Network) publications.
Bill Stone
During the past 41 years Dr. Stone has founded 8 startup companies, holds 33 issued patents and 7 patents-pending, and serves on the board of directors for 4 corporations. He led the design, development, and manufacture of numerous scientific and exploratory inventions including closed-cycle life support systems, autonomous ground and sub-ice underwater vehicles; ice penetrating cryobots; and high energy optical waveguided power transmission. Since 2003 he was PI or Co-I of the NASA field robotics systems: ARTEMIS [NNX14AC01G] (first AUV to undertake long distance exploration under the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica, 2015); ENDURANCE [NNX07AM88G] (first sub-glacial lake exploration robot, 2008); VALKYRIE [NNX11AJ89G] (first laser-powered cryobot, 2014); and DEPTHX [NNG04GC09G] (autonomously explored the world’s deepest hydrothermal spring and discovered 4 new bacterial phyla, 2007). He is the chief architect of the Stone Aerospace SUNFISH AUV. Dr.
Stone was PI or Co-I on eight NASA field campaigns. All of those field campaigns were conducted with novel robotic systems in demanding settings with zero accidents and the teams all returned safely, as did all of the vehicles. During the past 5 years Dr. Stone has successfully directed the SPINDLE [NNX15AT32G], ARCHIMEDES [NNX17AF64G], and THOR [80NSSC18K1738] projects for the NASA Ocean Worlds program and is the PI for the SESAME project PROMETHEUS [80NSSC19K0612], all of which deal with technologies to enable Ocean World planetary missions. These NASA-funded endeavors have created 21 inventions affecting both sub-glacial AUV autonomy and cryobot design.
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Brandi Mueller
Brandi Mueller is a photographer and writer obsessed with traveling and sharing the stories of what she sees. Learning to dive when she was 15 as a foreign exchange student in New Zealand, Brandi became a diving professional at 20 and a captain at 24. She studied marine biology in college and has a Master’s degree from the University of Hawaii.
Working on liveaboards around the world (and traveling other places to dive on her vacations) she started to take photos and collected tips and tricks from any photographers she met, eventually meeting a few editors willing to publish some of her work.
WWII wrecks are some of her favorite subjects and she is a captain of the M/V Truk Odyssey liveaboard which dives the Japanese WWII wrecks of Chuuk (Truk Lagoon.) But you can also find her with a macro lens photographing nudibranchs that live on the wrecks. She finds capturing the behavior of small critters just as exciting as tiger sharks or an airplane wreck.
Brandi continues to dive around the world with the intent to share images and stories of the people, animals and wrecks that live around the water and below. One of her current projects involves ocean environments and communities likely to be impacted by climate change with hopes of those images and words inspiring empathy and protection of those places.
Brandi has won several awards and is widely published in books, magazines, online and has a book called The Airplane Graveyard. She is an Ikelite Ambassador, is part of the Ocean Artists Society and a Platinum Pro 5000 recipient.
Dalia Faria
I’m Dália Faria, 51 years old. Born in South Africa I consider myself to be vibrant by nature with an acute love for life and facing challenges.
Learning is one of my passions, having a degree in Human Recourses Management and an MBA in Business Administration.
Accomplished, experienced organization development leader, delivering innovative strategies and programs that result in higher workforce performance, improved national employment rate, as well as enhanced individual career development, learning skills and productivity. Brings 22+ years of consulting, competency assessment and development expertise and leadership of European Union funded strategic projects. Influential, results oriented systems thinker with successful track record in developing sustained improvements in competitive advantage of underperforming local economies by creating strategic partnerships between government, public and private sector. Active nationally in leading the community of training and development professionals and advocating for rights and equality of disabled people in Portugal.
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.
Jean Claude Monachon
1974 marked the first dive of JC in a cold and dark Swiss lake, he was 14. It took him another 12 years to turn into a dive professional.
In 1986, JC decided to leave the corporate 9-5 and Swiss comfort to follow the dream of working as a diving professional in the Maldives. This passion changed the curse of his life for ever (like for many people that JC transformed the life in his career).
After climbing the stairs of a prominent diving organization and being a CEO for over 20 years, he continued to dedicate his passion to help SSI – Scuba Schools International to change the approach, and moved completely to a digital version of the programs, which certainly helped to change the approach of the diving education.
Monachon’s function as an International Business Development specialist gave this unstoppable traveler the opportunity to speak 5 languages and identify the needs in various market places. A typical example would be the launching of a Mermaid Program that nobody would have seen as a boost for the industry.
Scuba Diving education is one aspect of his career and his favorite claim is that better to take imperfect action than inaction.
Monachon’s aim is to stay as close as possible to local communities and market places, find ways to improve their marketing while using social media marketing organically, in which he has specialized over the past three years helping to develop specific webinars. He personally conducted over 423 webinars in 5 languages in the past 24 months.
Diving is covering all great market demands – relationship, health and wealth. It’s not a trend activity and that’s why the future can be seen with an optimistic view.
Kirk Krack
Kirk’s multidisciplined diving professional and Instructor Trainer who’s been instrumental in many innovations relating to breath-hold and freedive training. While a life-long freediver, he is also a mixed gas instructor trainer with TDI.
Founder and President of Performance Freediving International formed in Jan of 2000, PFI was the world’s first fully integrated freediving educational system with professional liability insurance. Kirk has trained and coached seven athletes to 23 world records including training seven different special operations groups from three different countries. He’s been an innovator in developing Technical Freediving.
A Performance Advisor with the Liminal Collective focused on human performance in the diving environment, he is currently forwarding the goal of seeing a ‘liquid breathing’ project come to life after a 2019 collective symposium on the subject.
Since 2017, Kirk has been the trainer and consultant for the cast and crew of the Avatar Sequels by James Cameron. In this time Avatar completed over a quarter-millions freedives with their largest scene involving 26 people underwater on breath-hold with breath-hold times as long at 4.5min and no hypoxic events or blackouts due to ‘technical freediving’ procedures being used.
Kirk is a wilderness EMT and Hyperbaric Technician along with being the 2016 DAN Rolex Diver of the Year.
Leigh Bishop
Leigh Bishop is a British shipwreck explorer and pioneer of deep wreck mixed gas diving. He is a well-known deep wreck photographer, and his research has led to the discovery and identification of hundreds of shipwrecks. He has been a member of the most significant deep shipwreck expeditions and scientific projects that have carried the explorer’s club flag.
Leigh has been featured on many television shipwreck documentaries and worked as a deep-water cameraman for National Geographic, History Channel, ITV, Channel 4 and other global networks. He is a prolific writer, speaker and lecturer of shipwreck exploration globally. Over the last two decades, his photographs and articles have appeared in countless magazines, books and major newspapers. He was the man behind the original concept of Eurotek, The Advanced Diving Conference. In recent times his focus of attention is directed towards forthcoming personal book projects.
Mark Caney
Mark first started scuba diving while serving with the British army. In 1980, he left the military to open a diving center in Cyprus and has worked full time in the diving industry since.
For eighteen years, he travelled to many countries training scuba instructors and working on diving-related projects. He also led an award-winning, four-month diving expedition to east Africa.
In 1996, he became a vice president of PADI (the Professional Association of Diving Instructors) and was based in their office in Bristol, England which covers the area of Europe, Middle East and Africa. In 2016, Mark moved into a global role for PADI Worldwide, although he continues to live in England.
Mark was instrumental in setting up PADI’s TecRec rebreather training range is presently involved in creating ISO standards for rebreather diver training and scientific diving.
Mark is well known in the diving world; he is the President of the European Underwater Federation, is President of the Rebreather Training Council and continues to serve in the senior positions in leading diving industry bodies such as the World Recreational Scuba Training Council. He is also the chairman of a major marine charity, PADI AWARE Foundation for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Mark published the novel Dolphin Way – Rise of the Guardians in 2016, and in 2020, also released it as an audiobook.
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Mark Powell
Mark Powell is one of the UK’s best known technical diving instructors. He has been involved in diving since the mid 1980s, has been teaching since 1993, and holds the rank of technical instructor-trainer for TDI.
Mark’s true passion is wreck diving and it is his exploration of deeper wrecks that led him into technical diving. Mark has served on the National Executive of the SAA, as well as being its technical diving advisor. He currently represents TDI/SDI at British Safety Diving group meetings and he is also a member of the BSI committees defining standards for diver training and diving equipment.
He also writes a monthly column in Sports Diver, which covers all aspects of technical diving. Mark is the author of the best-selling book Deco for Divers, which allows the average diver to fully understand the principles behind this fascinating and critical aspect of diving.
Nuno Sá
A full-time cameraman since 2015, Nuno Sá was part of the team of the BBC series – Blue Planet 2, having been awarded in 2018 with a BAFTA award as well as a Panda award for your participation in this series. The following year he was the main cameraman for the documentary of the National Geographic Wild channel “Europe’s Wild Islands”, and on several high profile documentaries such as BBC “Animal with cameras”, NHK “Islands of the Atlantic” and several others.
Between 2017 and 2019 he divided his time between participation as an underwater cinematographer for major international productions and the production of the first major series about the Sea of Portugal, the series “Sea, the last frontier” in partnership with Oceanário de Lisboa and Fundação Oceano Azul, that is currently being show on chanels RTP1 and RTP3.
Nuno Sá is also part of the Mares ambassador team.
Simon Mitchell
Professor Simon Mitchell
Professor of Anaesthesiology, School of Medicine, University of Auckland
Simon is a physician and scientist with specialist training in diving / hyperbaric medicine and anaesthesiology. He is widely published with over 160 scientific papers or book chapters. He works as a consultant anaesthetist at Auckland City Hospital, and Professor in Anaesthesiology at the University of Auckland. He provides on-call cover for diving emergencies at the North Shore Hospital Hyperbaric Unit in Auckland. Simon is Editor-in-Chief of Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine Journal.
Simon’s diving career has included more than 6000 dives spanning sport, scientific, commercial, and military diving. He has been a lead member of teams that were the first to dive and identify 3 deep wrecks of high historical significance in Australia and New Zealand. At the time of one of these dives (2002) the 180m depth represented the deepest wreck dive undertaken. He was elected to Fellowship of the Explorers’ Club of New York in 2006, and was the DAN Rolex Diver of the Year in 2015. His most recent expeditions were Truk in November 2019, the Pearse Resurgence cave (New Zealand) in February 2020, and a New Zealand project to take arterial blood gas specimens from an elite freediver at 60m in February 2021.
Stef Panis
Stefan started diving at the age of 6 through his father. In 1992 he did his first “official” course. Since than he moved on 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 did many dives on wrecks in the north sea, the English channel, and abroad in Sardinia, Portugal and Lithuania 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, and he also loves to dive, explore and document the many old mine sites in Belgium as founder of the Mine Exploration Team.
Stefan writes articles for several international (Tek) diving magazines, ans wrote 4 books.
In 2020, Stefan became member of the Explorers Club in New York.
https://www.stefpanisphotography.com
https://www.mine-exploration-team.com
Stephane Hourdez
Stéphane Hourdez is a researcher in Marine Biology in Banyuls-sur-Mer, France. He obtained his PhD in Biological Oceanography in 2000 from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris (France). He was then a post-doctoral fellow at the Pennsylvania State University for 3 years before returning to France. His research focuses on adaptations of marine invertebrates from extreme habitats, especially regarding temperature and oxygen levels. The environments on which he mostly works are deep-sea hydrothermal vents and Antarctica. He spent four summer campaigns at the French Antarctic Station Dumont d’Urville in Adélie Land. During these four seasons, animals were collected while diving and later experimented on in the laboratory on shore.
Teresa Amaro
Teresa Amaro is a deep-sea ecology researcher who adopts a holistic view of Marine Sciences and uses a multidisciplinary approach to solve scientific problems. Teresa has a degree in Biology from the University of Porto in Portugal (1998) and a PhD in Environmental Sciences from Wageningen University in The Netherlands (2005).
Since 1998 she has acquired an extensive experience in seagoing (over 50 cruises) and sampling the seafloor using many different techniques such as Remote Operated Vehicles, man-submersibles, landers, sediment traps, corers, trawlers and especially in-situ experiments. In 2013, she had the chance to dive to 5262 m in the Pacific Ocean using SHINKAI 6500.
Teresa has been a diver since 1996, but only in 2017 she became an Open Water Instructor from both SSI and CMAS. As she has an extensive admiration for the deep sea, during Covid pandemic, she became a rEvo Decompression Diver.
Teresa has only used recreational diving as a hobby, but currently, she is leading a project in Cabo Verde islands, where she will combine both deep-sea instrumentation and diving (recreational and technical).
Tomasz Stachura
Tomasz Stachura is one of the most active wreck divers in the Baltic Sea. He specializes in deep underwater wreck photography. He has taken thousands of underwater pictures of Baltic wrecks as well as many caves on different continents. His photomosaic from MARS wreck in Baltic sea was on the covers of National Geographic in Poland and abroad. Member of the Explorers Club New York. Founder, owner and CEO of SANTI Diving – a worldwide diving company producing diving equipment. Co-founder of an international Baltictech Conference dedicated to promotion of the wreck diving in the Baltic Sea. Originator and chief of the ‘SANTI Find the Eagle’ expedition – a long term project aiming to find lost wreck of the submarine ‘Eagle’ (ORP Orzeł). Author of the book “Route of Death”- describing wrecks connected with Operation Hannibal. As a host he appeared in 20 episodes of a documentary series about Baltic wrecks.
My web www.stachuraphoto.com
Xavier Meniscus
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