Ben Jackson

Ben is a student from the University of Southampton, the United Kingdom, currently pursuing a masters degree in Marine Biology. From a very young age, Ben was obsessed with any aspects of the natural world but was always drawn to the ocean specifically, spending hours snorkelling along the Dorset coastline followed by watching David Attenborough’s ‘Blue Planet’ on repeat.
With age, this obsession has turned into a passion for academia and understanding the biological functioning of marine organisms whilst also assessing the ecological challenges faced in oceanic habitats today. Whilst his masters investigates osteology and functional redundancy in Neotropical cichlids, Ben’s other passion has always been marine mammals — therefore the opportunity to research these creatures in their natural habitat in the birthplace of modern evolutionary theory (Galapagos) was an opportunity of a lifetime.
Ben is a qualified PADI dive master and revels in showing the wonders of the underwater world to other people - it is also a very useful tool for research, with his foundational years as a marine biologist being spent in Mexico working as a research diver on the coral reefs of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef investigating coral disease.