International Seabed Authority Endowment Fund
ADVISORY PANEL
The Advisory Panel for the International Seabed Authority’s Endowment Fund for Collaborative Marine Scientific Research is responsible for evaluating all of the applications for Fund assistance and providing recommendations to the Secretary-General of the Authority as to Fund awards. Members of the Advisory Panel serve a three-year appointment.
Seven members of the Advisory Panel were announced on 10 April 2008. They include:
His Excellency Mr. Alfredo Garcia Castelblanco, Permanent Representative of Chile to the International Seabed Authority and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Chile to Jamaica. Ambassador Castelblanco held previous posts as Deputy Chief of Protocol at the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Minister Counsellor at the Embassy of Chile to Portugal.
His Excellency Mr. Chen Jinghua, Permanent Representative of the People’s Republic of China to the International Seabed Authority and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People's Republic of China to Jamaica. Ambassador Chen has nearly 30 years experience as a diplomat, during which he has served in Beijing, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. He has also been China’s Ambassador to Suriname and the Fiji Islands.
Mr. Coy Roache, Deputy Permanent Representative of Jamaica to the International Seabed Authority. Mr. Roache was a member of the Jamaican delegation to the United Nations Preparatory Commission for the Law of The Sea between 1988 and 1994. He has been the Deputy Permanent Representative to the ISA since 1994, and was also a member of the ISA’s Finance Committee for 10 years, representing the Latin American and Caribbean regions.
Dr. Elva G. Escobar is the head of the Academic Unit in Coastal and Oceanographic System at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and affiliate research professor at Texas A&M University. Dr. Escobar is a member of the ISA’s Legal and Technical Commission and, since 1996, she has served as the Latin American Governor of the Crustacean Society. Dr. Escobar's research interests include marine benthos, the effect of benthic-pelagic coupling on marine biodiversity, cycling of carbon, trophic structure, and energy flow.
Dr. Craig Smith is a member of the faculty of the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, where he has organized international projects to address the probability of species extinctions from deep-sea mining. Dr. Smith has also worked extensively with the International Seabed Authority to predict and manage the environmental impacts of nodule mining in the abyssal Pacific. He has appeared on numerous national television and radio broadcasts in the USA, Canada, Korea, and Europe, including BBC's 'Blue Planet' series The Deep in 2001-2002. In addition to having published more than 70 papers in professional journals such as Nature, Deep-Sea Research II, BioScience, Marine Ecology Progress Series, and Environmental Conservation, Dr. Smith's work has appeared in Science, New Scientist, National Geographic Magazine, Wildlife Conservation, and many other popular science publications. Recently, Dr. Smith won a prestigious Pew Marine Conservation Fellowship for his plan to design marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean and thereby help conserve the delicate and diverse ecosystems of seamounts and abyssal plains in the face of fishing and future mining.
Dr. Lindsay M. Parson is a marine geophysicist at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton in the United Kingdom. As an expert in the Law of the Sea and the exclusive economic zone, Dr. Parson heads up the technical team advising the UK Government on extending the UK offshore economic territories, and helps many developing countries justify their claims to extending or defending their own maritime territories. Dr. Parson also served on the ISA’s Legal and Technical Commission from 2001 to 2006, and was elected chairman of the Authority’s Commission in 2006. His research interests focus on geophysical and geological evolution of slow spreading mid-ocean ridges, structural controls on mid-ocean ridge axial geometry, interaction between volcanism and tectonism on mid-ocean ridges and location of hydrothermal venting.
Mr. Kaiser de Souza is the chief marine geologist of the Division of Marine Geology at the Geological Survey of Brazil, Ministry of Mines and Energy. He completed his post-doctoral work at the Federal Institute of Geosciences and Natural Resources in Germany. In 1993 he was attached to the Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de Ia Mer and Association Française pour l’Étude et la Recherche des Nodules Océaniques where he undertook a 12 month traning programme on international seabed mineral prospecting. He joined the International Seabed Authority in 1997 where he was responsible for scientific and technical activities related to the development of marine mineral resources of the international seabed area; participated in the development of regulations for mining activities in the international seabed area and the environmental guidelines to minimize the potential effects of these activities and assisted in the pocessing of applications to approve plans of work for exploration in the international seabed area.
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