July 31, 2024
Guest Speaker – Dr Owen R O’Shea, PhD
We were privileged to welcome Dr Owen O’Shea as guest speaker to this year’s Senior School Awards. The incredible stories of resilience, perseverance and self-belief were invaluable to listen to and we cannot thank Dr. O’Shea enough for sharing them with us. Truly inspiring.
“Dr. O’Shea is a marine conservation biologist and has spent the last 11 years living and working among the remote communities of the Family Islands in The Bahamas. His primary focus has been in the delivery of education, outreach and applied marine research programs to promote the value and significance of conserving our wild blue spaces.
He received his undergraduate degree in marine biology from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia in 2006 and subsequently gained a first class honours degree in 2007, studying the importance of cleaning interactions in coral reef fishes across multiple gradients within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. In 2013, Owen was awarded his doctorate from Murdoch University in Western Australia in a federally funded research program at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, assessing the ecological interactions of a multi-species stingray community within coral reef environments at Ningaloo Reef.
That same year, Owen took a post-doctoral research position at The Cape Eleuthera Institute’s Shark Research and Conservation Program in The Bahamas, leading a dedicated team of interns, technicians and graduate students in the delivery of conservation driven research programs related to the ecology and biology of sharks and rays. In 2014 he went on to develop the Batoid Research Group – an integrative ecosystem driven initiative that promoted rays as indicators for ecosystem health and therefore, conservation value. This was the largest regional research program at the time, and supported many dozens of graduate students, provided a syllabus for eleven consecutive teaching semesters at The Cape Eleuthera Island School, and formed the basis for a range of outreach programs including UN delegations from CARICOM countries.
In 2017 Owen went on and founded the Centre for Ocean Research and Education (CORE) in Gregory Town, Eleuthera and in just five years had exposed over 2000 students to the ‘front lines’ of marine conservation research with 85% hailing from the island communities in which he lived. These experiential educational and outreach initiatives came at no cost to students or the communities from which they came, and further supported a range of graduate students from all over the world including The Univerista di Padova in Italy, Wageningen University in The Netherlands, University of Tampa, the Smithsonian Institution and the universities of Essex and Exeter in the UK. Owen was able to raise over half a million US dollars from both traditional grants and philanthropic donations, further vindicating these collaborations with around 20 peer reviewed papers published in international science journals. Most importantly, he changed the way island communities regard their wild spaces and was awarded numerous accolades from the community in recognition for his work.
With around 60 published research articles, technical reports, book contributions and a host of documentary film making including BBC Blue Planet, ABC, NBC, Wired and National Geographic, Owen has dedicated his career to the conservation of our marine environment, and through the delivery of immersive, applied research programs has inspired many thousands of young people to take action in the preservation of these fragile ecosystems.
Currently, Owen lives and works on a private island in the Western Bahamas, leading an international team of multi-disciplinary scientists identifying genotypes of reef building corals that demonstrate an adaptive evolution to thermal resilience throughout the tropical Western Atlantic in one of the largest integrated coral restoration programs in the region. He is also serving his third term as Adjunct Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland.