Dr. Roy He is a oceanographer and the SAS Innovation Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University. He is also the Founder and President of Fathom Science, Inc., a pioneering marine data company specializing in advanced marine data analytics and predictive technologies to support the rapidly expanding maritime challenges and development of Blue Economy. With a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography and prior experience as a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dr. He has made significant contributions to marine environmental prediction and actionable intelligence for maritime applications. He has authored over 140 peer-reviewed publications and delivered more than 400 conference presentations. Dr. He is a leader in developing digital twins of the marine environment, combining AI, machine learning, and cloud computing to create predictive models that enhance decision-making across various sectors. His innovative work. along with his team's efforts, has earned numerous accolades, including STTR Awards from the US Navy and DOE, as well as the NASA iTech Award.

Dr. James D. Doyle is a Senior Scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Marine Meteorology Division in Monterey, CA, and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. He is one of the lead scientists and developers for the Navy's operational numerical weather prediction systems, including COAMPS, COAMPS-TC, and the next-generation model NEPTUNE. Dr. Doyle leads several high-impact AI/ML programs focused on weather prediction, deep-learning sensitivity analysis, and tactical sensor placement. He holds a Ph.D. in meteorology from Pennsylvania State University, and has authored over 230 peer-reviewed publications.

Mica Linscheid is an AI Engineer at Koniag Government Services, where he focuses on applying artificial intelligence and software engineering to DoW challenges. HE previously spent four years at Lockheed Martin working on command and control systems. He has since develop data integrated AI capabilities supporting the Defense Commissary Agency. Mica currently supports KGS's Zephyr effort with the U.S Navy, where his work includes development and evaluation of AI weather models and exploring how these technologies can be implement in operationally constrained environments. His work focuses on bridging AI weather model development with practical field implementation, including lightweight weather forecasting dn data assimilation approaches designed for communications denied and resource constrained environments. He holds a B.S in Computer Science from Western Colorado University.

Dr. Pieter Smit is Head of Ocean Science at Sofar Ocean, where he has worked since the company's earliest days, helping grow it from a five-person startup into a team of more than 100. He was part of the founding vision to turn real-time ocean data into better decisions at sea, and helped build what is now the largest privately owned global grid of ocean sensors. Pieter created Sofar's operational wave forecasting system, including its data assimilation pipeline, and is the original author of the Polaris route-optimization engine that powers Wayfinder, Sofar's voyage optimization platform, as well as Sofar's vessel performance models. He holds a PhD (cum laude) and in environmental fluid mechanics from Delft University of Technology, and has published more than 40 peer-reviewed papers on ocean wave physics, prediction, and observation.

Dr. Mike Sierks joined WindBorne Systems in 2025 as a member of the team building WeatherMesh, the company's AI weather model. He previously worked on physical climate risk modeling as a research scientist and consultant. Mike holds a doctorate in Oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where his research examined extreme weather impacts under future climate scenarios. 

Jasmine holds a degree in Oceanography. She began in sales at Nortek, building a foundation in marine instrumentation, before moving to Sofar Ocean where she played a key role in growing the commercial adoption of Spotter buoys across global markets. Now at Oshen, she is focused on building the commercial sector from the ground up, bringing the C-Star autonomous surface vessel and its persistent metocean and acoustic data to customers across the globe. 

Dr. Jayesh K. Gupta is the founder and CEO of Silurian AI, a Washington-based company pioneering large scale AI foundation models for the physical world to address some of the most critical challenges facing our planet. Silurian’s flagship technology, the Generative Forecasting Transformer (GFT), is a frontier weather foundation model delivering state-of-the-art weather forecasts hours earlier than other operational systems. By combining global and hyper-local data, GFT empowers industries and communities to improve their decision making for weather impacts.

Before founding Silurian, Dr. Gupta co-led the creation of the first foundation model for weather and climate, ClimaX, and helped build the largest open-source foundation model for Earth systems, Aurora, during his tenure at Microsoft. He has been working on advancing data-driven simulations of the physical world for the past decade. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2020.