Sargasso Sea Ambassadors
One of the overarching goals of the Commission is to "promote international recognition of the unique ecological and biological nature and global significance of the Sargasso Sea." Our Ambassadors play an important role towards this goal by raising awareness and support, which can make a real difference to promoting the vital work that the organisation carries out each year.
Meet Our Ambassadors
SYLVIA EARLE
Dr. Sylvia Earle is the President and Chairman of Mission Blue, an Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, Founder of Deep Ocean Exploration and Research Inc. (DOER), Chair of the Advisory Council for the Harte Research Institute and former Chief Scientist of NOAA.
Author of more than 225 publications and leader of more than 100 expeditions with over 7,500 hours underwater, Dr. Earle is a graduate of Florida State University with M.A. and PhD. degrees from Duke University and 32 honorary degrees. Her research concerns the ecology and conservation of marine ecosystems and development of technology for access to the deep sea.
She is the subject of the Emmy® Award Winning Netflix documentary, Mission Blue, and the recipient of more than 100 national and international honors and awards including being named Time Magazine’s first Hero for the Planet, a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, 2014 UNEP Champion of the Earth, Glamour Magazine’s 2014 Woman of the Year, member of the Netherlands Order of the Golden Ark, and winner of the 2009 TED Prize, the Walter Cronkite Award, the 1996 Explorers Club Medal, the Royal Geographic Society 2011 Patron’s Medal, and the National Geographic 2013 Hubbard Medal.
JEAN-PIERRE ROUJA
Jean-Pierre Rouja is a Photographer, Media Producer and Conservation Technology Developer focused on producing media for public engagement and developing and deploying technology to solve conservation challenges.
He is the founder of The Nonsuch Expeditions and Station-b.org. Rouja has run the 'CahowCam' for over a decade on Nonsuch Island - a livestream from inside the burrows of the critically endangered endemic Bermuda bird that is broadcast around the world. Rouja is also the co-founder and Executive Director of Bio-Quest, a NGO using genomics to support biodiversity conservation in Bermuda - one of their projects sequenced the genome of the Bermuda cahow. Rouja is also involved with the 'Sound of Science' humpback whale song project, which collects data on the acoustic behaviours of migratory whales.
Rouja's photography has been extensively featured in Commission materials, from our website, to publications, to presentations. Rouja has captured some of the only high quality photos of the microfaunal community living within Sargassum.
WALTER H. ROBAN
A seasoned public service leader with nearly 30 years of experience, Walter H. Roban, JP, MP, is the former Deputy Premier and Minister of Home Affairs for the Government of Bermuda. With a distinguished career marked by a commitment to sustainable development and modernization, Mr. Roban is now focusing his expertise on the renewable energy consulting sector, drawing on his instrumental role in advancing Bermuda's clean energy transition.
Mr. Roban holds a Bachelor's Degree in Business and International Studies from Morehouse College and a Master of Arts in International Studies from the University of Birmingham, specializing in international politics and political risk. His early career included roles in the legal profession and banking, including as an Assistant Vice President at HSBC Bank in Bermuda.
Mr. Roban has been involved with a number of high profile environmental initiatives in Bermuda, including the Integrated Resource Plan, which includes a target of 80% renewable energy by 2035, the creation of the airport's solar farm and the electrification of Bermuda's bus fleet. He has also been a champion for two significant conservaiton initiatives in Bermuda: The Bermuda Ocean Prosperity Programme, which seeks to fully protect 20% of Bermuda's waters, and the Sargasso Sea Commission, a collaborative organisation for the conservation and stewardship of the Sargasso Sea surrounding Bermuda.
DAVID DOUBILET
David Doubilet has been called the Audubon of the sea, a master craftsman who combines technology and art to create extravagantly beautiful photographs of coral reefs, shipwrecks, or sharks to make us see the oceans in a new way. Born in New York in 1946, David first put his Brownie Hawkeye camera in a rubber anesthesiologist's bag at the age of 12. He has spent over 26,000 hours in the sea creating a window into the hidden world beneath the surface. Today, with over 75 features under his belt, he is the most published photographer working for National Geographic.
David enters the sea as a journalist, artist, and explorer to document both the beauty and the devastation in our oceans. He believes that photography has the power to educate, honor, humiliate, illuminate, and influence change.
David is a featured speaker for the National Geographic Live! series, a columnist, contributing editor and author of 12 books, including Light in the Sea, The Kingdom of Coral, and Fish Face. His many prestigious awards include The Academy of Achievement Award and The Lennart Nilsson Award in Scientific Photography. One of his photographs of coral reefs was even sent into space with the Voyager Mission. He was named a Contributing Photographer-in-Residence at the National Geographic and a NOGI Fellow. David is a member of both the Royal Photographic Society and International Diving Hall of Fame, and is a founding member of the International League of Conservation Photographers.
JENNIFER HAYES
Jennifer Hayes, a contributing photographer and author for National Geographic magazine, specializes in marine environments. Some of the unique locations she has explored include the Coral Triangle in the western Pacific, Botswana's Okavango Delta, oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and the frigid seas of the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland. She has spent more than 11,000 hours under water.
It all began with elasmobranchs, which are creatures like rays and sharks. Having begun diving at an early age, Jennifer went on to study zoology and marine ecology, documenting shark finning and commercial shark landings in the Northwest Atlantic. Her doctoral research focused on sturgeon, a critically endangered species. A life in academia seemed the logical next step, but the call of the wild and the desire to share science through story-telling and imagery was stronger.
Among her many accolades, Jennifer is a trustee of the Shark Research Institute, an Explorer Club National Fellow and Principal Photographer for Elysium Artists for Antarctic, Arctic Expeditions, and Coral Triangle Expeditions. Hayes is also a speaker for the National Geographic Live! series, presenting "Coral Kingdoms and Empires of Ice" to an international audience.
JAMES PROSEK
Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek published his first book at nineteen years of age, Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America. Prosek's work has been shown at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY, Gerald Peters Gallery, NY and Santa Fe, The Royal Academy of Arts in London, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, The Yale Center for British Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, The Addison Gallery of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, The North Carolina Museum of Art and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC among others. He has been an artist-in-residence at numerous institutions, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Addison Gallery of American Art.
Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. He co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout in 2004 with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia clothing company, which raises money for coldwater habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings (Since the start of the program in 2005, the World Trout Initiative has given $2 million to over 200 fish conservation groups). His book Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish, published in September 2010 was a New York Times Book Review editor's choice, and is the subject of a documentary for PBS series "Nature" that aired in 2013. He is currently working on a book about how and why we name and order the natural world and an article for National Geographic on the Sargasso Sea.
His latest book (Ocean Fishes, Rizzoli, 2012) is a collection of paintings of 35 Atlantic fishes, all of which were painted life size based on individual specimens he traveled to see. In autumn of 2012 Prosek was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.Prosek is a curatorial affiliate, as well as on the board (Leadership Council), of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, and a member of the advisory board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.
JIM TOOMEY
A native of Alexandria, Virginia, and the son and grandson of engineers, Jim Toomey earned a degree in mechanical engineering and had every intention of following the family tradition. While attending college, he drew political cartoons for the college newspaper, and after graduation, while holding down his engineering job, he began to develop a comic strip in his spare time.
Through the years, Sherman's Lagoon has grown its client list to over 250 daily newspapers. The lead character, Sherman the Shark, is more than just a comic hero; he's an ocean champion, introducing people everywhere to our underwater world, and educating readers on the important challenges facing our ocean today. The conservation message in his comic strip earned him the Environmental Hero Award in 2000, presented by NOAA "for using art and humor to conserve and protect our marine heritage" He was given the award again in 2010.
Jim has since repurposed his cartooning skills into filmmaking, and has produced several award-winning short videos for clients such as the United Nations, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the World Resources Institute. Playing the role of host and animator, he specializes in making science and environmental issues understandable in short, entertaining and visually rich videos.
