Lecture date: October 16, 2013. Dr. Robert Ballard is a former United States Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. He is most known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998.

Lecture date: December 5, 2013. Jesse Ausubel is one of the founders of the Census of Marine Life, a ten-year scientific initiative to determine the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the ocean.

Lecture date: November 20, 2013. Sandy Trautwein, Aquarium of the Pacific curator of fishes and invertebrates, received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, for her research on coral crabs.

Lecture date: November 12, 2013. Laurence Madin is the executive vice president, director of research, and a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Lecture date: November 6, 2013. Bernard David is a partner in Energy Management International, Inc. and a senior fellow at The Wharton School’s Initiative on Global Environmental Leadership.

Lecture date: October 9, 2013. Dr. Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, has developed non-invasive wildlife monitoring methods, including genetic, endocrine, and detection dog techniques.

Lecture date: September 24, 2013. Dr. Shirley Pomponi is a senior research professor at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution at Florida Atlantic University.

Lecture date: September 11, 2013. Michael Latz is the principal investigator at the Latz Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he is also a senior lecturer.

Lecture date: August 27, 2013. Edith Widder is a deep-sea explorer, oceanographer, marine biologist, and co-founder of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association.

Lecture date: August 13, 2013. Bruce Robison is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.