Alexei Orlov is the Principal Scientist of the Laboratory of Sea Fishes of the Russian Far East in the Russian Federal Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography, and the Leading Scientist of the Laboratory of the Ecology of Lower Vertebrates of the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has participated in more than 50 scientific conferences, and is the author of over 650 scientific and popular publications. His scientific interests include distribution, stock assessment, ecology, general biology, zoogeography, and the taxonomy of bathydemersal and midwater fishes of the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans.Dr Richard Beamish, CM, OBC, PhD, DSc, FRSC is an Emeritus Scientist at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, Canada. He has been honoured with a number of awards, including the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and became the first foreign scientist to be an honorary member of the fisheries centre in Vladivostok, Russia.

Dr Beamish was also a member of the International Panel on Climate Change that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. In 2015, he became a Fellow of the American Fisheries Society, and was designated as a Legend in Canadian Fisheries Science by the Canadian Aquatic Resources Section of the American Fisheries Society.