An Institution for Our Ocean’s Future

A serial entrepreneur and Biopixel Oceans Foundation’s Co-Founder, Bevan Slattery has been successfully building IT and telecommunications businesses in Australia for nearly 20 years. He has experience transforming ideas into ASX-listed innovations, having started and scaled numerous now-public companies including Pipe Networks, NEXTDC, Megaport and Superloop.

Having grown up on the coast of Queensland, Bevan developed a true passion for the Great Barrier Reef at a young age, which has since set in motion a philanthropic mission to help conserve and restore critical marine ecosystems.

Now the Founder and CEO of Soda, Bevan is driving Australian innovation and prosperity through digital infrastructure, environmental sustainability and business ventures. He co-founded Biopixel Oceans Foundation, a proud part of the Soda Group, alongside Richard Fitzpatrick in 2016 with the vision of discovering a better future for our oceans.

Read Bevan’s Full Bio

Richard Fitzpatrick is an Emmy-awarded cinematographer and an Adjunct Professional Research Fellow at James Cook University where he specialises in sharks. He has shot more than 120 films for clients such as the BBC, National Geographic and Discovery Channel. Richard is renowned for filming unusual complex behavioural sequences.

Extreme environments are no problem for Richard who has filmed all over the world, from the deserts of outback Australia, to the jungles of the Amazon, to snow-covered Alaska. Having spent more than 20,000 hours underwater, he has filmed in the crystal-clear coral gardens of the Great Barrier Reef, the murky waters of the Amazon, and everything in-between.

In the process, Richard has won numerous international awards. He started out as a marine biologist, learning how to work with sharks in public aquariums around the world, including Oceanworld in Manly, Maui Ocean Centre in Hawaii and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s Reef HQ in Townsville.

Currently based at James Cook University in Cairns, Richard and his team at Biopixel now manage one of the largest marine stock vision libraries and dedicated biological filming studios in the world. Many of the complex behavioural sequences for shows such as ‘Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef’. ‘Welcome to Earth with Will Smith’ and James Cameron’s ‘Supernatural’ series, were filmed in Biopixel’s Aquarium studio at JCU, Cairns Campus.

Richard’s current research through the Biopixel Oceans Foundation has contributed to over 20 scientific publications. This research includes a scientific response to shark bites off the Queensland coast for the State Government – satellite tagging and tracking tiger sharks, bull sharks and other reef sharks along the Great Barrier Reef. The Foundation has also had recent unprecedented success with a new discovery, identification and tracking of under-researched megafauna (whale shark, manta and whale) aggregations in the far north of the Great Barrier Reef.

Stories of his underwater adventures and career highlights are catalogued in the University of New South Wales (UNSW) publication ‘Shark Tracker – The Confessions of an Underwater Cameraman’.

Dr. Adam Barnett is the Principal Scientist of Biopixel Oceans Foundation, Chair of BOF’s Science Committee, and a Senior Research Fellow at James Cook University. Adam has over 20 years’ experience in marine research, with a broad interest in ecology, including population dynamics, conservation, spatial ecology (ie. migration, movement behaviour and habitat use), and fisheries ecology.

He has a particular interest in predator-prey interactions and unravelling the role of predators in structuring ecosystems. Much of his work is focused on research with applied outcomes and includes, for example, identifying habitats that are essential for the sustainability of fish stock, developing resilient sports fisheries and understanding shark-human interactions (eg. shark tourism, depredation and shark bites) to assist management and find solutions to mitigate negative interaction.

Matt Dunbabin is an internationally accomplished robotics specialist and engineer with a proven track record in the research, field evaluation and operational use of AI, autonomous systems and sensors for unsupervised monitoring and conservation tasks in complex marine environments. His applied research interests include AI-enabled marine pest identification and control, autonomous systems for scaling reef restoration, and real-time vision and acoustic detection and tracking of marine animals.

Matt is a Professor at the Queensland University of Technology Centre for Robotics where he leads the Marine Robotics Lab, and is a chief investigator in the ARC Special Research Initiative Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF).