David is one of Australia’s leading environmental statisticians. He has held research and teaching positions at universities in Australia, the U.K., and the United States. Together with Graeme Batley, Rick van Dam and others, David was instrumental in the development of national water quality standards and co-authored the ANZECC/ARMCANZ (2000) National Water Quality Guidelines and recent revisions to those Guidelines. David has an international reputation in statistical ecotoxicology and continues to lead a team of Australian and Canadian researchers to develop new, innovative statistical methods and software for establishing risk-based thresholds for contaminants in aquatic environments. David is co-recipient of CSIRO’s Chairman’s gold medal for his contributions to the landmark Port Phillip Bay Environmental Study. He also a recipient of the Edwards Deming award for distinguished performance in his Phd. studies

Graeme is one of Australia’s leading researchers on trace contaminants in aquatic systems. His focus has been on contaminant speciation, bioavailability and toxicity in waters and sediments. Since 1995, he has played an ongoing major role in the development of a water and sediment quality guidelines for Australia and New Zealand, most recently including the application of weight-of-evidence assessments. Graeme is author of over 460 scientific publications and in 2006 was awarded the Eureka Prize for Water Research. He is a past recipient of both the Analytical Chemistry and Environment medals of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) and was foundation President of the Asia/Pacific geographic unit of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC Asia/Pacific). Graeme has had an active involvement with SETAC for over 30 years, receiving a lifetime achievement award in 2016 and in 2022 was inducted as a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to environmental toxicology and chemical science.

Rebecca is a quantitative ecologist with over 20 years of experience in marine ecology, more than 80 peer reviewed publications, and highly developed skills in statistical modelling. Rebecca has experience working across academia, industry and government. Her interests lie at the interface between ecology, numerical modelling and quantitative decision science and she is committed to environmental science research that is of direct relevance to government and industry end users. Rebecca’s most recent work has focused on statistical methods in ecotoxicology and she is currently researching and developing robust statistical tools for quantifying and handling various forms of uncertainty in environmental risk management.

Joe Thorley is a Canadian biologist, modeler and software developer with over 20 years of experience. He primarily uses Bayesian models to estimate the effect of environmental variables including water quality on fish populations. He has co-developed over 15 R packages on CRAN including ssdtools which fits and plots species sensitivity distributions using Maximum Likelihood.As well as being a Registered Professional Biologist with the College of Applied Biology he has a PhD in Theoretical Phylogenetics. Joe is the director of a Poisson Consulting Ltd., an independent Canadian consulting company that he co-founded in 2007.His clients include Governmental, Indigenous, Industrial and Conservation organizations.

Rick has been involved in applied science related to water quality and aquatic ecosystem protection since 1990. Since 2018, he has been operating an independent consulting business that undertakes water quality related projects for government and the private sector, and also participates in strategic research and development projects. Prior to this, he was the Director and a Senior Principal Research Scientist of the Environmental Research Institute of the Supervising Scientist (ERISS).Rick has been significantly involved in the development and revision of the Australian and New Zealand Guidelines for Fresh and Marine Water Quality. He continues to work with the federal environment department as the technical manager for the current program of improvements to the Guidelines