Our Team

Ocean Exchange Board Member Team

Cathy J. Sakas

Co-Founder, Ocean Exchange

From her earliest memories Cathy’s unwavering passion has been Ocean. Fascinated throughout childhood with treasures found on beaches and in the surf she eventually channeled her passion into an academic and then a professional career of interpreting and translating ocean science.

Cathy holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Masters of Education in Science from Armstrong State University in Savannah.

Throughout her career Cathy interpreted ocean science to many different audiences in many different locations through different media. Her naturalist career is still active as she leads canoeing and kayaking wilderness expeditions into the Okefenokee Swamp and Everglades and to Georgia’s many gorgeous barrier islands. Her television career resulted in two Emmy Award winning nature series and a special documentary for Georgia Public Broadcasting. Additionally she hosted an award winning nature series of 66 shows for Turner South. Her most recent documentary with partner Mehmet Caglayan, also of Ocean Exchange, profiles multigenerational commercial fishing families of coastal Georgia and their ever shifting industry.

From October 1998 to her official retirement in January 2014 Cathy worked with NOAA Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary as an educator and scientific diver. Highlights of her career included piloting a one-person submersible called DeepWorker 2000 on multiple missions to explore Gray’s Reef and Florida Middle Grounds. She also spent nine days underwater as an Aquanaut working from Aquarius Undersea Laboratory with five other scientists to study changes on Conch Reef off of Key Largo.

Cathy is now a private consultant and a documentary film maker as well as an author of many true, albeit unusual stories from her career and adventures in remote wilderness areas.

As Co-Founder of Ocean Exchange, Cathy stays happily engaged in the global community by promoting solutions to all global issues connected by our planet’s greatest resource, Our Ocean.

Contact Us

Ocean Exchange invites you to learn more about Awards Program, our ecosystem and success of our award winners and participants. Together, we can chart a powerful course to help ensure the future of our oceans and the Blue Economy.

“Ocean Exchange has a platform to enable people with information that they need to know about the ocean and then to showcase new technologies that are on the forefront of really helping the ocean and the planet.”

“The quality of the content and the people who are involved with Ocean Exchange is all high end.”

“Besides funding, Ocean Exchange provides access to a wide area network of incredibly talented people in organizations that really do just want to help people.”

“Ocean Exchange is really about helping the little guys grow and in so doing, helping the big guys be better ocean citizens.”

“Ocean Exchange seems to be much more focused on bringing to light under-capitalized, wonderful new technology ideas. And it’s all about two-way access to this new technology and to the people who can help with the experience to grow that technology.”

“Ocean Exchange is a force multiplier to enable sustainable innovation.”

“Ocean Exchange is a global, novel innovation forum that has a greater ability to attract a broader range of impactful stakeholders than any other event that’s out there.”

“Unquestionably, one of Ocean Exchange’s primary strengths is how it brings together people from different paths. That makes its event a delegator experience as well as experience for an innovator or awards nominee.”

“Ocean Exchange is entirely different from any of the other organizations that I’m involved in. It is about sustainable innovation. I think it’s also very different in the extremely broad range of stakeholders that it involves.”

“There’s nothing better than going to an event or engaging with people so you walk away and say, ‘Wow!’”