Blue Economy

Edward R. Urban Jr. retired as Executive Director of the international non-profit science organization, the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), in 2020. His 19 years at SCOR and 11 years at the U.S. National Research Council involved editing several books and reports. Urban earned a Ph.D. in Applied Ocean Science from the University of Delaware in 1989 and a Masters of Business Management from the same university in 1986.  Venugopalan Ittekkot is a Retired Professor of Biogeochemistry with research focus on fluxes and cycling of carbon and other nutrient elements in aquatic systems under natural and perturbed conditions and has published and co-edited reports and books on the theme. He was Director at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research at the University of Bremen (2000-2010) and at the Institute of Biogeochemistry and Marine Chemistry at the University of Hamburg (1993-2000). Ittekkot has initiated and coordinated several of Germany’s bilateral marine research and capacity-building programs with countries in the Global South, and has been advising and contributing to the work of several ocean-related national and international agencies and organizations, in particular to their research-based capacity-building efforts.