Founder Story
Dr. Christine A. Ward-Paige, Founder
Dr. Chris Ward-Paige is a marine scientist, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of eOceans®.
She holds a PhD, MSc, and BSc and has spent more than two decades researching marine ecosystems, leading participatory science projects around the world, and working with researchers, communities, governments, and conservation organizations.
“I kept thinking: why are scientists spending so much of our time behind computers entering data, checking data, writing R code, analysing data and making reports? We spend enormous amounts of time and money producing evidence, then hand it over to publishers who can take years to decide what is worth publishing and when anyone gets to see it. By the time it finally appears, the world has changed and our evidence is already out of date.”
Over the years, scientists and consultants were spending huge amounts of their time getting data into shape rather than using it. Information was spread across spreadsheets, R, GIS, databases, and reports, with much of the same work repeated for every project.
That has a real cost. Projects take longer, clients pay for work that could be automated, and teams have less capacity to answer the next question or take on the next project.
eOceans was built to change that. It connects the work from study design and data collection through analysis, reporting, and sharing, so teams can spend less time managing data and more time doing the work their expertise is needed for.
The result is more work delivered, faster, with greater value from the data and people already being paid for.
Asking and answering bigger questions
Ward-Paige’s research career helps explain where that thinking came from. During her MSc, she found that sewage pollution was degrading coral reefs even when the nutrients were too diluted to detect in the surrounding water. Corals and sponges were absorbing those nutrients and effectively recording the pollution over time.
The science was compelling, but the response was not. Managers were reluctant to accept the evidence, while the reefs continued to decline.
“It was a wake-up call. Having the evidence wasn't enough if it couldn't get into the hands of the people making decisions.”
During her PhD and postdoctoral research, Ward-Paige turned her attention to sharks and rays and began exploring a different way of producing evidence. She built global participatory science projects including eShark, eManta, and the Great Fiji Shark Count, bringing together data from divers, fishers, researchers, and other ocean experts.
The results changed her view of what was possible.
“People were already out there observing the world. The opportunity was to make those observations useful at a much larger scale.”
But another problem became clear. Even successful projects remained largely separate, and valuable datasets could become locked in reports that were difficult to update or reuse.
That led to a much bigger idea: what if the same approach could connect observations, environmental conditions, human activities, and management information across any species, ecosystem, place, or time?
That idea became eOceans.
What began with sharks and rays has since been tested in lakes and is now expanding across ecosystems. The ambition is simple: make it possible to continuously turn observations into evidence that people can actually use.
“The world is changing continuously. Our evidence systems should be able to keep up.”
