Dr. Craig Stephen is one of Canada’s leading One Health professionals. He has devoted his career to developing ideas, peoples, policies and evidence to concurrently promote the health of people and animals and their shared environments. He uses population health and health promotion concepts on a wide set of issues ranging from conservation, to global health, to emerging threat preparedness. As a One Health and EcoHealth consultant, Craig works globally with all levels of government, the non-profit sector, community groups, universities and industry to examine complex health issues at the nexus of people, animals and environments.

Craig has held several One Health and Environmental Health leadership positions including being the CEO of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, the founder and director of the Centre for Coastal Health, the Scientific Director of the Animal Determinants of Emerging Diseases Research Unit and the founding director of the BC Environmental and Occupational Health Research Network. He held a Canada Research Chair in integrating human and animal health. Craig was a founding faculty member of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Calgary where he was charged with developing ecosystem health components of the program. He was also a faculty member at the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology in the School of Medicine (University of British Columbia) and a Professor at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (University of Saskatchewan).

He began his career as a rural veterinary practitioner, followed by doctoral research on emerging infectious diseases. This led to a position as an infectious disease epidemiologist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. From here his career as an inter-species health practitioner began by the creation of the Centre for Coastal Health, which was the first population health practice devoted to One Health, but preceding the birth of One Health by almost a decade. The Centre was born as emerging infectious began to arise more frequently and severely, leading to an international expansion of the Centre’s work. With an eye on preventing the next emerging environmental threat and creating resilient human-animal systems to cope with them, Craig became a leader in advocating and experimenting with health promotion and harm reduction concepts in a One Health setting. Today he works on building the evidence, expertise and policies to promote and protect the co-dependence of human, animal and environmental health to better prepare the world for the rapid and unprecedented changes of the Anthropocene.

Craig is the Director of the McEachran Institute, a think tank dedicated to future-readying animal health professionals. He is a Clinical Professor at the School of Population and Public Health (University of British Columbia) and a Clinical Professor at the Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine.

Dr. Tim Green is an internationally recognized expert in aquaculture, with a strong emphasis on aquatic animal health and immunology. Tim received his PhD in marine sciences (Awarded 2010) from The University of Queensland under the supervision of Dr. Andrew Barnes. His postdoctoral training at IFREMER (2012-13), Flinders University (2013-14) and Macquarie University (2014-17) expanded the knowledge base in the field of invertebrate immunology by identifying new immune pathways in the oyster. As the Canada Research Chair in Shellfish Health and Genetics, Dr. Green is examining the response of the Pacific oyster to climate-change exacerbated threats: ocean acidification, marine heatwaves and Vibrio bacteria. Dr. Green is studying the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of shellfish adaption to these stressors. By determining the mechanisms involved in evolutionary adaption, an outcome of his research program is the implementation of a selective-breeding program to future-proof the Canadian shellfish industry against these climate change threats.

Dr. Maya Groner is a Senior Research Scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Her research focuses on the interactions between climate change and marine disease. She employs elegant quantitative approaches, combined with field surveillance and controlled lab experiments to detect the impacts of changing ocean temperature and chemistry on a variety of marine infectious diseases, including epizootic shell disease in lobster, ichthyophoniasis in Pacific herring, and sea louse infestations of salmon, mycobacteriosis in striped bass, and wasting disease in eelgrass. She received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Pittsburgh, and completed postdocs at the Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of Prince Edward Island and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Dr. Reyn Yoshioka is a postdoctoral scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. He received his PhD from the University of Oregon's Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in 2021 and BS from Cornell University in 2014. He has over a decade of research experience in marine disease ecology, where he uses both experimental and observational data to study drivers and underappreciated ecological consequences of disease. His work has included diverse systems such as growth anomalies in Hawaiian corals, wasting syndrome in North Pacific and Atlantic sea stars, and wasting disease in Salish Sea eelgrass. His current research focuses on determining potential demographic and environmental drivers of black eye syndrome in Bering Sea snow crab (Chinoecetes opilio) using spatiotemporal models incorporating fisheries observer data and oceanographic model outputs.

Dr. Patrick Whittaker has been Grieg Seafood BC’s veterinarian since 2016. He graduated from the Western College of Veterinarian Medicine in Saskatoon in 2004 and practiced in both Alberta and New Zealand. Although he began his vet experience with cows and other farm animals, Dr. Whittaker’s relationship with salmon goes back to his childhood, as his dad was an avid fresh and saltwater sport fisherman on Vancouver Island.

Dr. Suja Aarattuthodi is an Assistant Research Professor at the Thad Cochran National Warmwater Aquaculture Center, Mississippi State University. Dr. Aarattuthodi’s area of specialization includes characterization (phenotypic and genotypic) of fish pathogens especially viruses, host-pathogen interactions, cell line studies, development and evaluation of vaccines against fish pathogens, and screening and characterizing antivirals. Dr. Aarattuhthodi has also served as the director of the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff Fish Diagnostic Laboratory which is approved by the USDA-APHIS to inspect fish for commercial export. She received her M.S. degrees (Fish Pathology, Fish Nutrition) and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). As a postdoctoral researcher at UAMS, she identified antiviral agents that inhibit replication of Hepatitis C Virus leading to a patent.

Dr. Julie Alexander is an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology at Oregon State University. She received her PhD from Montana State University and her M.Sc. from James Cook University. Dr. Alexander has over a decade of experience in aquatic disease ecology and invertebrate hosts of Myxozoan parasites. Her work has primarily focused on factors that drive and determine the outcomes of host-parasite interactions, how interactions may change under different environmental contexts, and how ecological and life history variables influence the evolution of host-parasite dynamics. This has included effects of dam removal in the Klamath River system and impacts of climate change on host/pathogen interactions. Dr. Alexander has extensive experience in using modeling approaches to explore hypotheses, identify data gaps, and evaluate multi-scale abiotic and biotic interactions in aquatic systems.

Sascha Hallett is an Associate Professor of Senior Research in the Department of Microbiology at Oregon State University. She obtained her PhD in marine parasitology from the University of Queensland in 1998 and then received an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to study in Germany for two years before joining the Bartholomew Lab at OSU in 2003. Dr Hallett’s research focuses on fish parasites and their classification, life cycles, ecology and epidemiology. She develops pathogen monitoring approaches to mitigate and manage disease in wild and hatchery salmonid fish. Her methods include host susceptibility experiments (field and lab), and molecular assay development for detection of hosts and their parasites. She seeks to understand infection dynamics to inform fisheries management and conservation, and how these dynamics are influenced by anthropogenic activities, including dams and climate change. Dr Hallett is on the editorial board of the Journal of Aquatic Animal Health and Parasitology Research.