Wonder of Sri lanka’s Marine Environment

Date: 18th July 2020

Time: 7.30am to 9.00am Local Time in Los Angeles

8pm to 9.30pm Local Time in Sri Lanka

This is the Eighth of a series of WEBINARs hosted by the America Sri Lanka Photographic Art Society (ASPAS) in Los Angeles, California USA, a member of the Photographic Society of America (PSA), and International Federation of Photography Art (FIAP) based in France. The objective of the series is to promote environmental conservation in the context of nature photography and eco-tourism

Panelists: Dr. Christopher Charles is a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He received his B.A. in palaeontology from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.A. and Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University. He was a NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union and serves as editor-in-chief of the AGU journal Palaeoceanography. He has served as an advisor for the National Science Foundation Earth Systems History Program.

His research focuses on the geological record of recent climate change, and in the mechanisms of climate variability, forced and unforced. Along with former and current students in his group, he is helping to build a detailed record of the El Niño phenomenon extending through the last few millennia using fossil corals. This work has taken him to coral reefs throughout the tropical oceans, including Sri Lanka, where he developed a keen interest in the controls on sea level variability and coral reef vitality.

Dr. M. F. M. Fairoz is Dean, Faculty of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, Ocean University of Sri Lanka. He is received his B.Sc. and M.Phil. from the Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sciences Technology, University of Ruhuna. He has a PhD from the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Shizuoka University, Japan. He has followed courses on Coral Health Assessments at Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), Hawaii, and in Microbial Oceanography at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS). In 2015 received a Global fellowship from Duke University Marine Laboratory in the United States and completed a summer course on Marine Conservation and Policy with Prof. Larry Crowder. He has carried out extensive research on the coral population of Sri Lanka and Sseko Island in Okinawa, Japan; and he is presently carrying out pioneering research with Prof. Forest Rohmer on coral microbial ecology for the first time in the South Asian Region.

Dr. Nishan Perera is a marine biologist with an interest in coral reef ecology, fisheries, and marine protected area management. He is a co-founder of Blue Resources Trust, a Sri Lankan marine research and conservation organization, where he is conducting field research on coral reefs and reef-based fisheries. Nishan is also an underwater photographer and his work has been featured in Sri Lankan and international publications. He is also the co-founder and owner of Island Scuba. He has previously worked as the Senior Program Office of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN) and has a MSc degree from the Eckerd College in Florida U.S.A.

Ms. Nesha Dushani (Moderator) is a lecturer in the Department of Fisheries and Marine Sciences at the Ocean University in Sri Lanka. She has a BSc (Hons) Degree from the Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sciences of the University of Ruhuna, and a MSc from Tromso University in Norway.