Bjarte Bogstad M.Sc., Dr.Sc. is a mathematician whose doctorate was in multispecies models for interactions between fish and marine mammals in the Barents Sea. He has 26 years of experience in fish stock assessment and scientific advice to management. He has been employed by Institute of Marine Research (IMR), Norway for the last 28 years. He has published frequently in scientific literature and for the general public, and has chaired several working groups and workshops in ICES.

Villy Christensen, M.Sc., Ph.D, professor at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, Canada. He is the lead developer of the Ecopath with Ecosim approach and software, which is being used throughout the world for ecosystem-based management of marine and freshwater areas. He has through this initiative worked with colleagues internationally and gained considerable experience with the ecology and management of marine ecosystems. He develops models to evaluate the combined impact of environmental change, food web structure and direct human impacts on marine populations. He also leads the development of 3D-visualization tools linked to ecosystem models, which are used to visualize status and trends of populations in aquatic ecosystems and involves a combination of gaming and modeling approaches.

Jeremy S. Collie, B.Sc., Ph.D., Professor of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, USA. He has more than 30 years of experience in quantitative marine ecology with focus on exploited marine fish and invertebrate populations the factors affecting the productivity of marine fish populations: harvesting, climatic variability, trophic interactions and other human disturbance. Jeremy Collie is a member of the Rhode Island Ocean Special Area Management Plan, Habitat Advisory Board; the ICES Working Group on Ecosystem Effects of Fishing Activities; and the New England Fishery Management Council's Scientific and Statistical Committee. He has been working internationally in ICES and other similar fora.

Rob van Gemert, M.Sc., and PhD candidate at the Centre for Ocean Life, DTU Aqua, Denmark. His chief experience lies in theoretical fisheries ecology, mainly using size-structured models to calculate fisheries reference points. His PhD is part of the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie innovative training network MARmaED, with 15 partner institutes. He is proficient in various modelling programs such as R and MATLAB, and has also taken part in fish tagging studies.

Ray Hilborn, B.A. Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington specializing in natural resource management and conservation. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in food sustainability, conservation and quantitative population dynamics.  He authored several books including “Overfishing: what everyone needs to know” (with Ulrike Hilborn) in 2012, “Quantitative fisheries stock assessment” with Carl Walters in 1992, and “The Ecological Detective: confronting models with data” with Marc Mangel, in 1997 and has published over 300 peer reviewed articles.  He has served on the Editorial Boards of numerous journals including 7 years on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science Magazine. He has received the Volvo Environmental Prize, the American Fisheries Societies Award of Excellence, The Ecological Society of America’s Sustainability Science Award, the International Fisheries Science Prize. He is a Fellow of the American Fisheries Society, the Washington State Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jan Horbowy, M.Sc., Dr.Sc. is a stock assessment scientists being employed at NMFRI, Poland, since 1977. From 1999 up to present he has been head of the Department of Fishery Resources. Since early 1990s he has participated in ICES work both within Expert Groups and ACOM (formerly ACFM) tasks. For years he has been Polish member of ACOM. He chaired or co-chaired several Expert Groups, Workshops, Review Groups and Advice Drafting Groups within ICES work. He participated in several EU founded projects (e.g. STORE, BECAUSE, EFIMAS, InExFish, ODEMM, MYFISH, EURO-BASIN, INSPIRE, MareFrame) and a few national research projects. He publishes regularly in international scientific journals. Education: M.Sc. in mathematics, Ph.D. in Natural Sciences, Dr.Sc. in Agricultural Sciences.

Daniel Howell, B.Sc, M.Sc, and Ph.D., IMR, has about 16 year of experience in multi-species models and he is Chair of the ICES WG on multispecies modelling , WGSAM (2013-ongoing). His research concentrates on using age-length structured models (mainly the ‘Gadget’ age-and-length structured marine ecosystem model) to produce detailed, biologically realistic, single- and multi-species fisheries models. He has focused on the northern parts of the Northeast Atlantic, Icelandic seas and Barents Sea, but has assisted in setting up single and multi-species models for researchers in England, France, Spain and South Africa He has been involved in a number of international projects, focusing on multispecies fisheries modelling; oil industry joint funded SYMBIOSES, and EU projects FACTS, DEFINITE (WP leader), JAKFISH (IMR project leader), DEEPFISHMAN, BECAUSE, UNCOVER, DST2.  Member of various ICES working groups focused on single and multi-species assessment, and invited external expert at the ICES WKROUND, WKSOUTH and WKBALT benchmark workshops, and IWC JARPA II review committee (2014).  

Søren Anker Pedersen, M.Sc., Ph.D. is chief biologist at Marine Ingredients Denmark & EUfishmeal. He has a wide practical experience in marine ecology, covering more than 20 years of research in Greenland, Norwegian and Danish waters. His research includes zooplankton studies, recruitment processes for fish and shrimp, stock assessments of fish, shrimp and scallops, ecosystem modeling, as well as the effects of climate, ocean currents and fishing on the evolution of marine ecosystems. He was Professional Officer at ICES for 8 years e.g. as coordinator for the EMPAS project "Environmentally sound fisheries management in protected areas" and the ICES Training Programme. His Ph.D. thesis “Mortality on northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis) and species interactions on the offshore West Greenland shrimp grounds” is from University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1995. 

Henrik Sparholt, B.Sc. M.Sc. Dr.Sc., is a fisheries biologist whose doctorate was in multispecies interactions in fish components of the marine ecosystems. He has 35 years of experience in fish stock assessment and scientific advice to management. He has been employed by Greenland Fisheries Investigations, DTU AQUA and for the past 24 years in ICES’s Advisory Programme. He has published frequently in scientific literature and for the general public, and been co-author of the ICES Advisory Report the past 24 years. He is often used internationally as an independent external reviewer of fish stock assessments and management. Since May 2016 he has been a scientist in Nordic Marine Think Tank network.

Gunnar Stefansson, M.Sc. Ph.D. and Professor at the Mathematics Department of the University of Iceland and director of the University Statistics Center. He has more than 30 year of experience in statistical models of marine ecosystems. He has a recent large a multispecies model grant from Rannís (Icelandic Centre for Research), and is scientific coordinator of the EU MareFrame project project with 28 partner institutes (2014-2017). He also has a very large experience with more management oriented fish stock assessment and management. He has been chairing and participating in a large number on ICES and other international expert groups on fisheries biological issues with a focus on methods and analysis.

Petur Steingrund, M.Sc., Ph.D., and fisheries biologist at the Marine Research Institute, Faroe Islands, for more than two decades as a researcher. His experience lies in stock assessment (member of ICES NWWG since 1997 and chair 2012-2015) and other disciplines of fish biology such as fish behaviour, stomach analyses, fisheries ecology, and fish tagging as well as in biological statistics. PS has also led and participated in groundfish surveys in Faroese waters for two decades. PS is head of the fish stock assessment department. PS has been author or coauthor in several scientific publications.