Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Keynote Speaker and Planning Committee Members1
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Admiral Thad Allen (U.S. Coast Guard, retired) was the 23rd Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). He was designated by President Obama as the National Incident Commander for the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. He previously served as the Principal Federal Official for the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He commanded Atlantic Coast Guard Forces during the response to the 9/11 attacks. Admiral Allen also oversaw USCG operations in support of the response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. He is a 1971 graduate of the Coast Guard Academy and holds master’s degrees from The George Washington University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He has also been awarded five honorary doctorate degrees.
PLANNING COMMITTEE
Richard Sears (Chair), a geophysicist, is an adjunct professor at Stanford University. As the chief scientist for the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, Mr. Sears provided technical and policy recommendations on offshore drilling to prevent future
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1Appendix C includes biographical sketches for the keynote speaker and the current members of the planning committee.
accidents. He provided technical expertise for the investigation into the causes of the incident and assisted in the preparation of recommendations to the commission. He was responsible for accessing industry expertise to aid the commission in carrying out its duties and was a contributing author to the Chief Counsel’s Report, which detailed the technical and managerial factors leading to the blowout and spill. Mr. Sears also served as a member of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee. During his 33 years with Shell Oil Co. and Royal Dutch Shell, Mr. Sears acquired significant domestic and international experience in the upstream oil and gas industry, holding technical and managerial positions including exploration geophysicist, technical instructor, economist, strategic planner, and general management. He received a B.S. in physics and an M.S. in geophysics from Stanford University.
Patrick A. Barnes is a licensed professional geologist and an environmental justice advocate. In 1994, he founded BFA Environmental, a minority owned, multidiscipline environmental engineering, scientific consulting, and land surveying services firm. At its peak, BFA had more than 150 employees in the Gulf states, executing more than $20 million in contracts. BFA has completed water resources management, emergency response, and environmental assessment/restoration projects in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. At the core of a successful environmental restoration project is data collection, monitoring, and true community engagement. Under contracts with the South Florida Water Management District, charged with helping to implement the multibillion dollar Everglades Restoration Program, BFA provided more than $3 million of data collection and environmental monitoring services. For hurricanes in the early 2000s, BFA trained and employed hundreds of residents from affected areas to participate in the recovery effort. Seeing a community need in 2006, Mr. Barnes provided $300,000 of seed capital to establish Limitless Vistas, Inc. (LVI), a workforce development and STEM skills job training nonprofit. LVI uses the Conservation Corps approach and a service learning model to engage young adults. It has trained and certified more than 600 at-risk young adults for the emergency response and coastal restoration projects resulting from hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, and Irma as well as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In April 2013, Mr. Barnes was recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change for his effort to bring environmental resiliency to vulnerable coastal communities through job training.
Brian M. Salerno is the senior vice president for maritime policy at the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA). In this capacity, he works in conjunction with member companies to develop industry positions on a wide variety of safety, health, environmental, and security matters affecting cruise ship operations around the world. He oversees a team of experts who interact with government agencies, standards-setting organizations, and international bodies for the purpose of shaping the regulatory landscape in a way that enables uninterrupted cruise operations. Vice Admiral Salerno served 36 years in the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), retiring in 2012. During his career, he worked in a variety of USCG operational missions, with a particular focus on maritime safety. He commanded field units in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in Boston, Massachusetts, serving concurrently as the captain of the port, the officer in charge of marine inspection, the federal on-scene coordinator for environmental responses, and after the 9/11 attacks, as the federal maritime security coordinator. Overseas assignments included a tour as the maritime safety advisor to the Panama Canal Authority. As a flag officer, he was responsible for establishing program policy for all prevention and response missions. He also led the U.S. delegation to the International Maritime Organization’s Maritime Safety Committee. His most senior position was that of deputy commandant for operations, which he held from 2010 to 2012. Immediately upon retirement, Vice Admiral Salerno began working as a marine consultant. He served as the U.S. liaison for BIMCO—an international ship owner’s association headquartered in Copenhagen. He also served on the Panama Canal Navigation Safety Advisory Board. In 2013, he was appointed by the Secretary of the Interior to lead the recently established Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), which was focused on offshore oil exploration and production. While in this position, he strengthened government oversight procedures based on lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He stepped down in January 2017. Following his term at BSEE, Vice Admiral Salerno resumed work as an independent marine consultant. He also serves as the vice president of the U.S. Friends of World Maritime University and as a board member for the North American Marine Environment Protection Association (NAMEPA). He joined CLIA in December 2017.
Francis Wiese is a senior principal within Stantec’s Environmental Services Group and serves as Stantec’s overall technical leader for marine science. Dr. Wiese brings 25 years of experience working in the coastal and marine environment throughout the world, designing, implementing, and man-
aging large interdisciplinary, multi-institutional science programs in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, and the Arctic, and conducting projects in the North Sea, Caribbean, Galapagos, Gulf of Mexico, and the east and west coasts of North America. Dr. Wiese has worked for and with academia, government, nonprofits, and industry, and is a technical reviewer for more than 20 international journals. In addition, he serves on a variety of national and internal science panels and working groups. He has also provided expert testimony for oil pollution–related issues in Canada and the United States. Dr. Wiese has focused extensively on environmental impacts as a result of anthropogenic stressors, marine shipping, marine spatial planning, climate change, environmental policy, adaptive management, resiliency, population and bio-energetic modeling, aerial surveys, satellite telemetry, marine mammals, seabirds, fisheries, study design, statistical analyses, and public speaking. He most of all enjoys thinking outside the box to solve complex, real-world issues.
Charles R. Williams is an independent consultant on safety management and oil and gas engineering. He recently retired from the Center for Offshore Safety (COS), where he served as the executive director from March 2012 to May 2020. Before taking the lead at the COS, he had a 40-year career at Shell Oil Co., where he held numerous positions, including the chief scientist and the vice president of global research and development. Mr. Williams serves on the U.S. Department of the Interior Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Federal Advisory Committee, and he has presented extensively on safety management and drilling technology, including to the Presidential Commission, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Mr. Williams chaired the Joint Industry Task Force on subsea well control and containment and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement/Argonne National Laboratory workshop on the effects of water depth on offshore equipment and operations. Currently, he is a member of National Academies’ Marine Board and is serving on two committees, the Offshore Situation Room Planning Committee and the Report Series on Progress and Opportunities Toward Decreasing the Risk of Offshore Energy Operations. In 2012, he received the Offshore Technology Conference Special Citation, and he has been the recipient of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Corporate Citizenship Award, the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ (SPE’s) Regional Safety Award, and the National Ocean Industries Association’s Safety in the Seas Award. Mr. Williams has also served on the petroleum
engineering curriculum advisory committee at The University of Texas at Austin and is a lifetime member of SPE. Mr. Williams earned his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is a licensed professional engineer.
Monica Wilson is a member of the Sea Grant Oil Spill Science Outreach Team. She is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, with the UF/IFAS Extension of the Florida Sea Grant College Program. Dr. Wilson started as a physical oceanographer modeling circulation, flushing, and the impacts of tropical storms on coastal systems in the region. During her graduate tenure at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, her research involved using numerical models as a tool to aid in the understanding of the circulation and flushing changes in the Tampa Bay Estuary during extreme events such as hurricanes and extratropical/winter storms. She investigated both the short- and long-term effects of large-scale weather events on the flow field and tidal residual circulation, as well as their cumulative impact of flushing on the bay. In her current role, she transfers and shares information between the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) oil spill scientists and coastal stakeholders at a state, regional, and national level. The team’s focus is on the two-way transfer of information between the people whose livelihoods depend on a healthy Gulf of Mexico and the GoMRI scientists, administrators, and board of directors.
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