Company · Team
The people on the water.
Scientists who write like humans, engineers who sea-trial their own designs, and field crews whose field notes arrive still dripping. Team members who also write for the Journal are linked to their author pages.
Leadership
Dr. Ines Velasquez
Co-founder & CEO
A former open-ocean aquaculture engineer, Ines started Tidewright after watching a Tasmanian heatwave erase a forest she had dived for a decade. She sets the company’s compass: forests first, spreadsheets second.
Marcus Hale
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Marcus designed autonomous survey craft for polar research before co-founding Tidewright. He leads the Drifter fleet program and still insists on sea trials in bad weather.
Sana Whittaker
Chief Financial Officer
Sana joined from infrastructure finance and built the funding stack that mixes harvest revenue, credits and council contracts without selling the mission down the river.
Science
Dr. Theo Nakamura
Kelp Biologist & Science Lead
Theo runs the Holdfast seed-stock program — gametophyte banking, genotype-to-site matching, and the species deep-dives he wishes he’d had as a student.
Dr. Mara Ellison
Head of Ecological Monitoring
Mara leads the survey programs that decide whether a forest is truly coming back — quadrats, eDNA, drop cameras and a healthy distrust of good news.
Dr. Lena Fischer
Head of Climate Science
Lena models ocean warming and marine heatwaves, and decides where Tidewright should — and should not — promise a forest.
Dr. Elias Brandt
Restoration Genetics Lead
Elias matches kelp genotypes to sites and futures. He keeps the provenance rules strict and the herbarium strangely beautiful.
Canopy Ledger
Priya Raman
Blue Carbon & MRV Lead
Priya turns canopy maps and sediment cores into numbers a registry can stand behind — and writes the blue-carbon explainers buyers actually read.
Operations
Naomi Reyes
Head of Aquaculture Systems
Naomi designs the longlines, hatcheries and harvest gear that survive real winters, and runs Tidewright Harvest’s production standard.
Jack Callum
Field Operations Lead
Jack runs Drifter fleets and dive crews on restoration sites across four time zones. His field notes are written on deck, usually still dripping.
Tidewright Harvest
Sofia Andersson
Head of Harvest Products
Sofia leads product development for food-grade kelp. Her rule for the whole division: if it isn’t delicious, it isn’t sustainable.
Reef Partners
Tom Okafor
Dive & Community Programs Lead
A former commercial diver, Tom runs the dive-operator partnerships, school programs and citizen-science surveys that keep the community in the water.
Join the fleet.
We hire people who’d rather be cold and useful than warm and ornamental.
Tidewright is a fictional company created as a design and content demonstration.