Chris Harvey-Clark is a research veterinarian and marine biologist based at Dalhousie University. He has ongoing research on the biology of the Greenland shark and the Atlantic torpedo ray. In his second career as an underwater image maker, he has been director of photography in more than 50 marine-themed documentaries. Chris published the first documentation of basking sharks mating in 1998, did the first-in-Canada dives with blue sharks in 2000, filmed mako sharks underwater for the first time in Canada in 2002, and recorded Greenland sharks underwater in natural conditions for the first time in 2003. In October 2020 he cage dove to document great white sharks underwater in Nova Scotia for the first time in Canadian waters. In November 2021 he and navy diver Michael Schwinghammer became the first divers in Canadian waters to encounter a 10-foot great white shark while open-water diving on a shipwreck in Halifax Harbour.

Linda Nichol, who joined the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 2001 as a research biologist, has worked on sea otters and cetaceans in the Pacific region. Ms. Nichol participated in field studies of marine mammals in the Canadian Pacific in 1988 as part of her master's degree on the feeding ecology of resident killer whales. Since then, she has been involved in research on monitoring killer whales through photo-identification and acoustic analysis, studied the effects of human-induced noise on harbour porpoises, and compiled whaling catch records as biological data on the evolution of large cetacean populations. She has also worked on projects involving coastal seabirds, intertidal plants and invertebrates, and environmental monitoring. Her current research focuses on the conservation status of the sea otter, which is listed as threatened under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.