Ph.D., CSci, CMarSci, FIMarEST

IMWBN Chair

Dr J. Reuben Shipway is the CEO and Founder of Naked Clam Limited, a pioneering aquaculture company that is developing the world’s first farming system for shipworms. Rebranded ‘naked clams’ for marketability and palatability in the seafood sector, shipworms are some of the fastest growing shellfish known and can sustainably convert waste wood into nutrient rich protein. With partnerships across academia and industry, Naked Clam Limited is advancing sustainable, scalable solutions to global food security challenges.

Prior to leading Naked Clam Limited, Shipway served as General Director for Partnerships at SHAMS – The General Organization for the Conservation of Coral Reefs and Turtles in the Red Sea – where he led initiatives to conserve iconic Red Sea ecosystems in line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. He is also a National Geographic Explorer and serves as an Editorial Board Member for the Royal Society’s Biology Letters.

Shipway was previously a Lecturer in Marine Biology at the University of Plymouth (UK), where his research focussed on the biology, biodiversity, ecology, physiology and taxonomy of wood-eating marine invertebrates. This included describing several new taxa, such as the rock-eating shipworm, Lithoredo, to advancing our understanding of how shipworms eat wood.

His work has been widely featured in international press, including the BBC, NYT, WaPo, etc., bringing cutting edge marine science to global audiences.

Ph.D.

IMWBN Deputy Chair

Dr Luísa M S Borges founded L3 Scientific Solutions in 2015, establishing a platform that promotes research collaboration, offers mentoring, and provides tailored workshops to support the next generation of scientists. Through L3, Borges has contributed to projects such as Meta-Mine – investigating the microbiome of marine xylotrophic bivalves (Teredinidae) to identify new lignocellulose-depolymerizing enzymes – and the Japanese Tsunami Marine Debris program, which documented shipworm diversity in wood originating from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. She has authored more than thirty peer-reviewed articles covering areas from biogeography to bioinformatics, reviewed articles for over twenty journals, and serves on the editorial boards of PLOS ONE and the International Journal of Genomics.

In 2012, Borges moved to Geesthacht, Germany, joining the Helmholtz Zentrum Geesthacht (now Helmholtz Zentrum Hereon) as a Guest Scientist. While raising a young family, she worked part-time on the Benthic Estuarine Barcode (BEstBarcode) project, led by the University of Minho, which developed massively parallel sequencing tools to monitor estuarine macrobenthic communities. During this time, she also began collaborating with US colleagues on the Japanese Tsunami Marine Debris initiative.

Previously, in 2009, Borges moved to Braga, Portugal, to contribute to the Lusitanian Marine Barcode of Life (LusoMarBol) project. There, she used DNA barcoding to study macrobenthic diversity along the Portuguese coast – including bivalves, gastropods, amphipods, and polychaetes – and applied mitochondrial and nuclear markers to investigate the phylogeny and phylogeography of teredinids. This work led to the discovery and description of a new cryptic species within the Lyrodus pedicellatus complex and to the development of FastaChar, a software program designed to describe cryptic species.

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