Prof. S. Ayyappan, with a Master’s Degree in Fisheries Science, has a Ph.D. in Aquatic Microbiology. His specific areas of research are Fisheries, Freshwater Aquaculture and Aquatic Microbiology. With several assignments during the scientific career for four decades, he has served as the Director, ICAR-Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture (CIFA), Bhubaneswar, India & ICAR-Central Institute of Fisheries Education (CIFE), Mumbai, India; Deputy Director General (Fisheries), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), New Delhi; Chief Executive, National Fisheries Development Board (NFDB), Hyderabad, India; Secretary, DARE, Govt. of India & Director General, ICAR, New Delhi; President, National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), New Delhi; NABARD Chair Professor; Chancellor, Central Agricultural University, Imphal; Chairman, KSTA, Bengaluru; NABL, Gurgaon, India.

He has been conferred D.Sc. (honoris causa) by 15 Universities and is a recipient of several awards including Padma Shri, 2022 and Karnataka Rajyotsava Award, 2013. Representing the country in important international fora, the interactions have developed a deep understanding and widened the horizon of his vision of Food & Agriculture, Fisheries & Aquaculture, especially in the Developing countries.

Neil Loneragan is a Professor Emeritus at Murdoch University with research interests covering fish and invertebrate ecology, estuarine and marine food webs, stock enhancement, ecosystem modelling and small-scale fisheries. He spent 14 years with CSIRO researching prawn/shrimp fisheries and habitats in northern Australia and through southeast Asia. At Murdoch, he has been Director of the Centre for Fisheries and Aquatic Ecosystems Research, leader of the Environmental and Conservation Sciences and has completed 25 PhD, 10 Masters and 35 Honours candidates, including students from Indonesia and Malaysia. He has delivered training workshops in Indonesia on Fisheries Science, Management Strategy Evaluation for Data-Limited Fisheries and Ecosystem Modelling for Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management and has published 185 articles in international journals, edited one book and five special symposia (Scopus H = 50; Google Scholar H = 63). He is the President of the Asian Fisheries Society and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Fisheries Science.

Professor Jun Zou is a professor in Shanghai Ocean University (China). He obtained his B.SC. degree in Peking University, M.Sc. degree in the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Ph.D. degree in the University of Aberdeen. Prof. Zou’ research focuses on fish immunology and disease control. He reported the first interleukin in fish in 1999, and has been researching on fish cytokine biology for nearly 30 years. He published more than 250 papers in his career, which are cited over 12,000 times. Prof. Zou is the editor of Fish and Shellfish Immunology, and serves as the editorial board member of several scientific journals including Developmental and Comparative Immunology, Comparative Immunology Reports, and Aquaculture and Fisheries. He is a committee member of Asian Society of Developmental and Comparative Immunology.

Professor Nicholas Andrew Robinson is a Senior Scientist with the Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture Research (Nofima) and Professor in Aquaculture Genetics with Deakin University Australia with over 30 years’ experience with the genetic improvement of livestock and aquaculture species, holding more than 50 research grants and authoring of over 90 journal publications and book chapters with his many collaborators around the world. His main research concerns the application of genomics to the genetic improvement of fish and shellfish in aquaculture. Access to reliable, fast-growing disease resistant and stress resilient seedstock is needed to ensure the sustainability of aquaculture. Recent work by Prof. Robinson includes the use of genomic selection for improving host disease resistance (e.g. to white spot syndrome virus in shrimp) and CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing for proving gene function influencing disease resistance (e.g. for Aeromonas disease in rohu carp and sea lice in Atlantic salmon).

Prof. Dr. Soottawat Benjakul is a professor in Food Science and Technology and Director of International Center of Excellence in Seafood Science and innovation (ICE-SSI), Prince of Songkla University, Hat Yai, Songkhla, Thailand. He received his Ph.D. (Food Science and Technology) from Oregon State University, USA in 1997 under the support from the Fulbright scholarship. His major fields of interest are seafood quality as well as the valorization of fish processing byproducts. He has currently focused his research on non-thermal processes and natural additives for shelf-life extension of seafood and products. Moreover, he has emphasized his research on functional ingredients or nutraceuticals from seafood processing leftovers. He has received several research grants from national and international granting agencies. He has published more than 1,115 research and review articles in peer-review international journal indexed by Scopus with H-index of 106 and his citation is higher than 48,000.