Dr. Heather Koldewey started working for the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in 1995, as a postdoctoral research
scientist, curator of London Zoo Aquarium, Head of Marine and Freshwater Conservation, and now as Senior Technical Advisor. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter, and was appointed a National Geographic Fellow in 2019, with a focus on solving ocean plastic pollution. She was science co-lead for their 2019 Sea to Source: Ganges expedition. Dr. Koldeway co-founded Project Seahorse in 1996, the world's leading authority on seahorses and early pioneer of community-based marine conservation; set up Net-Works, a multi-award winning project that has developed a novel community-based supply chain for discarded fishing nets that are recycled into carpet (recently spun out as social enterprise COAST-4C); and #OneLess, a systems change approach to building a more ocean-friendly society through working to make London the first capital city to stop using single-use plastic water bottles. She has also been involved in science and conservation in the Chagos Archipelago since 2008, now running the Bertarelli Foundation's Marine Science Program, an interdisciplinary research and conservation program for marine science and conservation in the Indian Ocean, involving over 100 researchers from 26 institutions and 10 countries.