Ingénieur général de l'armement (vice admiral) - retired in 2001

Etienne CAILLIAU chose to enter the Hydrographic Engineer Corps of the Navy in 1961 on leaving the Ecole Polytechnique. In 1964, he joined the French Naval Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service (SHOM) where he held various posts at sea and ashore, in the fields of hydrography and of oceanography. Among others, he was head of the Cartography Department of the Main Establishment of SHOM (EPSHOM) from 1974 to 1978.

From 1986 to 1992, on secondment to the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER), he was director of Oceanic Research. On returning to SHOM, he was appointed as Deputy Director and, from 1994 to 2000, Director of EPSHOM. From 2000 to 2001, at the Staff College for Military Engineers, he was Deputy Director, Head of the National and International Sessions Department.

Besides the above, he has been an expert advisor for the technical aspects of maritime delimitations to the French Foreign Affairs Ministry (1983-1986), chairman of the French Committee for the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (1988-1992) and in charge of the marine environment branch of Ecole nationale supérieure de techniques avancées (1989-1995). He was a member of the Scientific Committee of IFREMER from 1996 to 2001.

Dr. Christopher Fox has served as the Director of NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) since April, 2004. NGDC provides scientific stewardship, products and services for geophysical data describing the solid earth, marine, and solar-terrestrial environment, as well as earth observations from space.

Before coming to NGDC, Dr. Fox served 19 years as a Principal Investigator at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, where he led a diversified research program in marine mapping, geophysics, and underwater acoustics.

Prior to joining NOAA in 1985, Dr. Fox worked for the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where he participated in a wide variety of studies including the numerical modeling of seafloor microtopographic roughness and the development of automated cartographic mapping from multibeam sonar systems. Before joining NAVOCEANO, Dr. Fox worked within the U.S. Geological Survey developing numerical simulations of geothermal reservoir dynamics.

He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory with an emphasis in marine geophysics, a Master's Degree from Brown University in marine geology (paleoclimatology), and an undergraduate degree in geology from the University of Tennessee.

After a degree in geophysics from Durham (UK) and graduate work at Oxford, I spent eight years at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. There, I continued my research interests of lithospheric flexure using shipboard gravity and bathymetry; the construction of satellite-derived geoid and gravity fields; and, the creation of gridded depth databases from echo-soundings and contours. I spent five of those years years working part-time in the SIO Geological Data Centre. I specialised in the acquisition and processing of shipboard multi-beam bathymetry, gravity and magnetics data; in the development of techniques and algorithms to improve the ease and efficiency of data processing; and in spear-heading the SIO-GDC involvement of shallow-water bathymetric surveys.

For GEBCO, I have contributed the 1-minute bathymetric grid for the entire Indian Ocean and Environs based upon Bob Fisher's contours; have manned GEBCO information booths at AGU and EGS conferences; and have helped to develop the GEBCO website. I now work in the marine geosciences database management group at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory which is responsible for managing data for the Ridge2000 and MARGINS initiatives, among others.

Karen Marks has worked as a geophysicist at the NOAA Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry since 1990. She received a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Houston, USA. Her current research includes evaluating bathymetric datasets for United Nations Law of the Sea applications. Her research also encompasses marine tectonic and geodynamic applications of satellite altimetry with emphasis on plate tectonic histories and seafloor spreading.