Dan Tchernov - Professor Dan Tchernov was recognized early in his career for his unique combined skill set; both a world-class marine scientist-researcher and an excellent manager-administrator. Because of this, Dan began his faculty-level career as the director of the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences (IUI-Eilat, Asst. Professor at Hebrew University, 2004-2009).  During this period he turned a relatively stagnant marine station into an active and up-and-coming facility including orchestrating the construction and delivery of the first research vessel placed in the Red Sea by Israel as well as Israel's first technical scientific diving center, while simultaneously maintaining his own active research lab group.  From there, he founded the Marine Biology Department at the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences University of Haifa (2009 -2017) and founded the M. Kahn Marine Research Station (opened 2016). In parallel, he was the deputy director of the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences (in charge of all operations and budgets) and vice president of the University of Haifa (until October 2019). Dan is currently the scientific director of the M. Kahn Marine Research Station that practices marine operations such as routine deep CCR tri-mix exploration and support dives, shark and large fish tagging, ROV operations in the eastern Mediterranean and other underwater observatory servicing. He was nominated recently to become the new head of the Mediterranean Sea Research Center of Israel (MERCI), a collaborative body that centralizes Israel's heavy-duty marine scientific operations and analytical capabilities.