Ric Williams obtained a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from the University of East Anglia in 1987. He worked as a researcher at Imperial College and as a research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before taking up a Lectureship at the University of Liverpool in 1993. In 2004, he was promoted to a Professor with a Chair in Ocean Dynamics and Biogeochemistry, and he is now Director of the Research Centre in Marine Sciences and Climate Change in Liverpool. Professor Williams' research focuses on understanding how the ocean circulates and its role in the climate system and he teaches undergraduate courses in 'Climate, Atmospheres and Oceans' and 'Physics of the Atmosphere and… Oceans'.
Mick Follows obtained a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of East Anglia in 1991. After a year as a Royal Society Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is now a Senior Research Scientist in the Department for Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. His research is focused on understanding the interplay of physical, chemical and biological processes which determines the distributions and fluxes of elements in the ocean.