Federico Baltar is a lecturer at the Department of Marine Science at University of Otago (NZ). His research in biological oceanography integrates marine microbial ecology and biogeochemistry. His postgraduate studies were at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain) and the Royal Netherlands Insti- tute for Sea Research, NIOZ (The Netherlands), followed by a post- doctoral phase at the Linnaeus University (Sweden). His research group mainly focuses on the role of microbes on the marine biogeochemical cycles by looking at the factors that control their diversity and function, trying to follow a multidisciplinary approach, always with the aim to draw connections between different scientific disciplines.

Antonio Fernandez Guerra obtained his PhD at the Universi- ty of Barcelona studying the ecology and evolution of ammo- nia oxidizers. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Oxford e-Research Centre and at the Max-Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen. His research activities are in the area of metagenomics, developing new graph-based approaches to generate hypothe- sis on the hypothetical proteins (genomic unknowns) and for the potential open reading frames lacking similarity to any of the actual biological databases (en- vironmental unknowns). He is a coordinator in the Ocean Sam- pling Day (OSD), with focus on OSD data analysis.

Andreas Nocker