Greg W. Rouse is a professor of marine biology and is also curator of the Benthic Invertebrate Collection at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, USA. He specializes in studying the biodiversity, phylogeny, and systematics of marine animals. He has been on numerous oceanographic expeditions involving deep sea habitats, including whale falls, hydrothermal vents and methane seeps and has been involved in the discovery and naming of more than 150 species, mostly annelids. Prior to joining Scripps, he held research positions at the South Australian Museum and University of Sydney, and as a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., USA. Fredrik Pleijel is a Senior Researcher at Tjärnö Marine Laboratory, Department of Marine Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He previously held a position as curator at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, completed a post-doc working mainly on hesionid polychaetes with Kristian Fauchald at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, USA, and was formerly Professor at Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, France. Ekin Tilic is a postdoctoral researcher working on annelid evolution and morphology at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Bonn, Germany. A major focus of his research has been the ultrastructure and development of annelid chaetae. He has also been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, USA and also the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His current work combines phylogenomic methods to help uncover the evolutionary relationships of annelid taxa while studying their morphology using a variety of bioimaging techniques.
