Captain Andrew Armstrong

Andrew Armstrong is the co-director of the Joint Hydrographic Center (JHC) at UNH and a retired officer of NOAA, assigned to the Center as a civilian NOAA employee. Capt. Armstrong specialized in hydrographic surveying and served on several NOAA hydrographic ships, including the NOAA Ship Whiting where he was Commanding Officer and Chief Hydrographer.

Before coming to the JHC, he was the Chief of NOAA’s Hydrographic Surveys Division, directing the agency's hydrographic survey activities. He has a B.S. in Geology from Tulane University and a M.S. in Technical Management from the Johns Hopkins University.

Capt. Armstrong oversees the hydrographic and ocean mapping education and training program at UNH and coordinates the Center’s cooperative research with NOAA.

Captain Kenneth W. Barton

Captain Kenneth W. Barton has served as the Acting Director of NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration since May 2006. The Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R), within the National Ocean Service, responds to threats in order to protect and restore coastal resources. OR&R is the primary NOAA office that responds to oil spills and hazardous material releases. It provides scientific support to the U.S. Coast Guard for spills and technical assistance to other agencies for hazardous material releases. It also works with federal, state, and tribal natural resource trustees to restore damaged coastal resources. In addition, OR&R houses the NOAA Marine Debris Program and leads the Emergency Response Program within NOAA. Prior to taking on his current role, CAPT Barton served as Deputy Director of OR&R for 19 months. He has also worked for the Emergency Response Division of OR&R (ERD, formerly HAZMAT) as Chief Scientific Support Coordinator (SSC), managing the 11 regional SSCs located around the country and serving as part of the leadership team that managed HAZMAT. He was the alternate Department of Commerce Regional Response Team (RRT) representative for the mid-Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Regions. Prior assignments within OR&R have included three years as Spill Operations Coordinator where he was responsible for managing the "home" team response to oil and chemical spills (1998-2001). He served as Scientific Support Coordinator (SSC) for the Great Lakes Region (1993-1996). As the SSC, his responsibilities included coordinating all scientific response activities of Federal, state, local, and academic institutions for the Federal On-scene Coordinator. Prior to becoming an SSC, he worked as HAZMAT's Contingency Planning Officer (1990-1993). In that position he provided support to the SSC program in various aspects of contingency planning.

CAPT Barton' NOAA Corps career spans over 24 years. He has served aboard five NOAA vessels. His first sea assignment was aboard the RAINIER (1982-1984) conducting hydrographic surveys in California, Hawaii, and Alaska. The R/V GLORIA MICHELLE (1987-1990) was his second sea assignment, where he served as Officer-in-Charge. During this three-year assignment he became a skilled fisherman, conducting bottom trawling and other fishing along the New York and New England coastline. From 1996 to 1998, he was Commanding Officer of the JOHN N. COBB. During his two years aboard the COBB, the ship completed two outstanding seasons in southeast Alaska with nearly zero downtime and high scientist satisfaction. His most recent sea assignment actually began with assuming command of the TOWNSEND CROMWELL for one month in July 2002 to familiarize himself with the working grounds and ship's crew. He then accepted command of the OSCAR ELTON SETTE in August 2002. CAPT Barton successfully brought the SETTE out of an 11-month shipyard conversion in Jacksonville, Florida. He worked closely with the NMFS Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center to continue to improve the SETTE's functionality, at the same time maintaining a high quality of life for the ship's crew. Highlights of this assignment included a safe and interesting Panama Canal transit, the organization in January 2003 of a successful and high-profile re-commissioning ceremony for the ship and two 3-month deployments to Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands and to American Samoa on coral reef ecosystem cruises.

During his first land assignment (1984-1987) he was assigned to the NMFS Narragansett Lab to conduct fisheries research using AVHRR satellite remote sensing. He produced sea surface temperature charts that were widely used by scientists and fisherman alike and helped develop scientific applications for remote sensing data.

CAPT Barton acquired a Bachelor of Science degree from State University of New York Maritime College in 1982 and a Masters of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island in 1989.

Nancy Bird

Nancy Bird is President of the non-profit Prince William Sound Science Center and Executive Director of the Oil Spill Recovery Institute, a federally established entity which is administered through the Science Center. Both institutes are located in Cordova, on the eastern side of Prince William Sound, Alaska. OSRI’s mission focuses on cold water oil pollution research and development while the Science Center’s mission is more broadly based to improve scientific understanding of the North Gulf of Alaska and Prince William Sound ecosystems. Bird works closely with OSRI’s Research Program Manager, Dr. W. Scott Pegau and the 16-member OSRI Advisory Board. She is currently the City of Cordova representative on the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, a citizen oversight council promoting environmentally safe operation of the Alyeska terminal and associated tankers. Other Board on which she serves include the North Pacific Research Board and the Alaska Ocean Observing System.

David Fritz

David Fritz is a Crisis Management Coordinator for BP America in Naperville, Illinois, supporting the company’s oil refining, transportation, and marketing businesses in the eastern United States.  Besides training and exercising BP’s emergency response and crisis management teams, he also provides oil spill technical and scientific expertise for BP’s oil spill response teams.  He is active in the oil spill R&D community and has helped develop many response guides and reference documents that promote alternative response technologies.  He currently chairs the Spill Science and Technology Work Group for the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Industry Technical Advisory Committee (ITAC) for OSRL.

David M. Kennedy

David Kennedy has served as the Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management since May 2006. In this position, David directs a multi-disciplinary program that provides national leadership, strategic direction, and guidance to state and territory coastal programs and estuarine research reserves. He oversees efforts to develop a scientifically-based, comprehensive national system of marine protected areas (MPAs) in conjunction with state and territory coastal resource managers. He also manages the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program, whose goal is to support effective management and sound science to protect, sustain, and restore coral reef ecosystems.

Prior to this, he served as the Director of the Office of Response and Restoration (ORR) for eight years. In this position, David directed a multi-disciplinary program that worked to reduce risks to coastal and marine resources from environmental threats, including oil and chemical spills, hazardous waste sites, and vessel groundings. Additionally, Mr. Kennedy was the Acting Director of the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (Co-ops) during 1999 to 2001. He developed and implemented reorganization in order to ensure that the operational infrastructure supporting Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System (PORTS) was sufficient to meet the program needs and provide data to mariners. David served as Chief of the NOAA Hazardous Materials Response and Assessment Division from 1991 to 1998 and led intensive planning to accommodate Hazmat's growth from Branch to Division status. From 1989 to 1991, David managed Hazmat's Scientific Coordination Branch, which provides technical support during oil and chemical response through its network of Scientific Support Coordinators located around the coastal U.S.

From 1978 to 1991, Mr. Kennedy was a Scientific Support Coordinator, providing scientific advice to the United States Coast Guard during oil and chemical spills. During this time he coordinated Federal scientific response to well over 100 oil and chemical spills, including the Argo Merchant, Amoco Cadiz, IXTOC I oil-well blowout, Presidente Rivera, World Prodigy, and Exxon Valdez. Prior to 1976, David was Director of the Spilled Oil Research Team at the University of Alaska Geophysical Institute.

Mr. Kennedy has served on many scientific committees, including the National Academy of Science Dispersant Task Force and the American Petroleum Institute Spill Response and Effect Task Force. He was a U.S. delegate to the International Maritime Organization's Conference on Oil Pollution Preparation and Response, chaired the Washington State Legislative Committee on Oil Spill Response, and was a member of the 1990 Program Committee of the National Oil Spill Conference. David has also co-authored a number of scientific papers related to hazardous materials response. He founded the Islands Oil Spill Association, a non-profit oil spill response cooperative, and is former President of the Board of Directors of the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington. He is a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado (1969).

Dr. Dwight Douglas Trueblood

Dwight Trueblood is the NOAA co-director of the Cooperative Institute for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technology (CICEET), which fosters the development of technology for clean water and healthy coastal habitats. In his tenure at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dwight also has served as chief scientist for the Deep Seabed Mining Program (1991-1994) and science coordinator for both the National Estuarine Research Reserve System (1994-1999) and the National Marine Sanctuary Program (1994-1996). Dwight obtained a B.S. in biological oceanography at the University of Washington (1979), an M.S. in marine science at the University of Puerto Rico (1985), and a Ph.D. in environmental sciences, with an emphasis in benthic ecology, at the University of Massachusetts at Boston (1990). He was a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences (1990). Dwight's interests include benthic community ecology, coastal monitoring, and fostering better communication and technology transfer between scientists and coastal managers.

Dr. Larry Mayer

Larry Mayer has a broad-based background in marine geology and geophysics that is reflected in his association with both the Ocean Engineering and Earth Science Departments.

He graduated magna cum laude with an Honors degree in Geology from the University of Rhode Island in 1973 and received a Ph.D. from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in Marine Geophysics in 1979. At Scripps his schizophrenic future was determined as he worked with the Marine Physical Laboratory's Deep-Tow Geophysical package, but applied this sophisticated acoustic sensor to problems of the history of climate. After being selected as an astronaut candidate finalist for NASA's first class of mission specialists, He went on to a Post-Doc at the School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island where he worked on problems of deep-sea sediment transport and paleoceanography of the equatorial Pacific.

In 1982, he became an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Oceanography at Dalhousie University and in 1991 moved to the University of New Brunswick to take up the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Ocean Mapping. In 2000 he became the founding director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire and the co-director of the NOAA/UNH Joint Hydrographic Center.

Dr. Mayer has participated in more than 50 cruises (over 60 months at sea!) during the last 30 years and has been chief or co-chief scientist of numerous expeditions including two legs of the Ocean Drilling Program. He has served on, or chaired, far too many international panels and committees and has the requisite large number of publications on a variety of topics in marine geology and geophysics.

He is the recipient of the Keen Medal for Marine Geology and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Stockholm. He served on the President's Panel for Ocean Exploration and has recently chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee on "National Needs for Coastal Mapping and Charting."

His research deals with sonar imaging, remote characterization of the seafloor, and advanced applications of 3-D visualization to ocean mapping problems.

Robert W. Varney

Robert W. Varney was appointed Regional Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency's New England Office by President George W. Bush in August, 2001. In this capacity, he is responsible for managing an agency with over 700 employees and a budget of $532 million.

During his tenure as Regional Administrator, Mr. Varney has made energy efficiency, brownfields redevelopment, environmental justice, urban issues, enforcement and strong partnerships with state and municipal governments among his top priorities.

With diesel issues a key national priority for EPA, Bob has encouraged the region's creative use of supplemental environmental projects (SEPs) to fund diesel retrofit and low sulfur diesel fuel projects. Through this approach, the region has been able to leverage more than $7 million in settlement funds for projects that will clean up of all the school buses and commuter locomotives in the City of Boston as well as transit buses in Rhode Island. In addition to these great projects, the region's leadership in using SEP funds has enabled them to leverage other resources including CMAQ funds, private funds, state EPs and national grants for diesel retrofit projects across the region.