Prof. John R. Potter has a Joint Honours Maths and Physics degree from Bristol and a PhD. in Glaciology and Oceanography from Cambridge on Antarctic research, where he spent four summers and for which he was awarded the Polar Medal by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988. Prof. Potter then changed career to underwater acoustics, working on ASW for NATO in Italy. Sailing across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to San Diego, he then worked at Scripps Institution of Oceanography on Ambient Noise Imaging and marine mammal acoustics. In 1995 Prof. Potter sailed across the Pacific with his growing family and on to Singapore where he founded the Acoustic Research Laboratory (ARL) and co-founded the Tropical Marine Science Institute (TMSI) in NUS. John headed the ARL and was an Associate Director of the TMSI for 12 years. In 2004 he took a ‘Seabbatical’ year with his family, circumnavigating the Indian Ocean by sailboat on a sponsored voyage of research, public outreach, and education with the aim of drawing attention to our failed stewardship of the ocean. In 2007 he returned to Italy, first as a consultant and then as project leader at the NATO CMRE on underwater communication. He subsequently served as Principle Strategic Development Officer at CMRE before leaving in 2018 to work on his boat in New Zealand and sail. He is now a full Professor at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway working on Distributed Acoustic Sensing for ocean monitoring.