James Bellingham, PhD, is the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of exploration robotics. For more than 30 years, Bellingham has served as a global leader in the development of small, high-performance autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), introducing and refining a class of systems that are now widely used within the military, commercial industries, and science communities. He has been instrumental in innovations for ocean observation and has spent considerable time at sea, leading two dozen AUV expeditions in locations across the Antarctic, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, South Pacific, and Arctic. Bellingham previously led robotics teams at MIT, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Claudia Geib is a science journalist, editor, and the producer of the podcast Gastropod. She is also the author of Secrets of the Elephants. Her reporting, focusing on marine, environmental, and wildlife science, can be found in Nautilus, The Guardian , and WIRED, among others, and has been featured in The Best American Science Writing.
